Slither (2006)

James Gunn, let's level.

I think you're probably a pretty cool guy.  I thought Dawn of the Dead worked out really well, and you're obviously more legitly into horror films than Aja or Roth or uh I don't think there are any other memorable recent horror directors.  So, please take this review with all the possible love you can associate from it.

I don't really care one way or another if Gunn had actually not seen Night of the Creeps until he finished filming Slither.  I find it kind of hard to believe, if just for the fact that the edited version was shown on my local FOX and UPN stations ad nauseum during the 90's, to say nothing of the USA and TNT networks before they became bland holes where dramas go to die or get in the missionary position with Law and Order.  But let's assume that somehow he never watched it.  Here's the quote from Wikipedia which really bothered me:

However, Gunn has stated that David Cronenberg's Shivers and The Brood were the two biggest influences on the story in Slither, along with the manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito.

what.

I can accept Shivers was an influence, in the stupidest way possible.  I occasionally forget that the movie involved weird worm things, but the vague psycho-sexual angle, sure.  Whatever, it's honestly not a very good movie which is only mentioned because Cronenberg fans are tiresome auteur morons.  But The Brood?  There really wasn't even a hive mind in that film if one stopped to consider a few things.  I'm not going to get into Uzimaki, except to say I guess "inspiration" now means circling all of Ito's full page images in red pencil and writing "FUCK YEAH" on the margins.

I mention this first because Slither really doesn't seem to know what it ever wants to do.  One strong reason for believing Gunn is that Night of the Creeps is drastically more successful as an homage to horror than Slither.  The former seems completely at ease throwing around casual horror references and casual sadism, but Slither just won't stop winking at me, hoping me to acknowledge that it totally knows all about what scary is but any minute now a parameter is going to change.  That's not to say that Slither doesn't have amusing parts, but they're usually awkwardly appended in between plot advancement.  Stuff happens, Michael Rooker does something realistic which is sort of amusing I guess, then other stuff happens, so on.  You could have removed around 80% of the jokes and the movie would have happened the same way.  It also doesn't help that Creeps was effectively parodying both older horror and the same teen scream drek that was being produced around it.  Slither is purely backward looking, maybe afraid to offend the twin devils of mental sadism and twice-warmed over slashers that plagues the genre today.

And speaking of Michael Rooker, oof.  Maybe I'm alone in this, but what happened to him after Henry?  I guess one doesn't want to get typecast as a singular personification of mindless evil, but is "diluted as hell mixture of Bruce Campbell and Tom Atkins" really that much better?  Your horror comedy sort of has a problem when the most likeable character is the selfish and greedy mayor, and you cheer when the designated folksy symbol of order is about to die.  Then there's the female characters, of which James has two types that have shown up in all of his goddamned films.

1) Protagonista, who has no real personality aside from what is ascribed by other characters and occasionally does strong stuff to show that she is not really a weak woman.
2) Teenage Girl Filmed with Weird Sexual Angle, who is both normal and quirky and does strong stuff fairly regularly to show that she is not really a weak woman.
(oh yeah I guess there was a slut in Dawn of the Dead whoops)

I'm apparently in the minority as far as my feelings towards this film, as a majority of critics loved being hit over the head with OKAY IT IS TIME FOR A JOKE.  It makes sense in a way, Slither is that sort of horror movie that critics love, creative enough that critics can feel like they're seeing some big paradigm shift in the genre, while not weird enough that anyone is taken out of their comfort zone.  Slither does get stars for at least avoiding ever getting emotionally attached to its subjects and thus completely dropping the humor ball (sup Shaun of the Dead), but honestly, everything about the movie just feels conventional and safe within the context of horror.  You can occasionally see some attempts to really show how UNCHAINED FROM HOLLYWOOD HE TRULY IS with stuff like having kids or characters in the vein of harmless friendly supporting character getting killed, but that's predictable in its unpredictability.

(Spoilers about as far as a movie like this can really have spoilers)  The best example of this problem is at the end, where a SHEEPLE horror director would have had the possessed zombie people wake up after the slugs died.  But nope, they're apparently all dead.  I'm sure Gunn was really banking on this really upsetting people, but neither my girlfriend nor I really gave a shit, because at no point in the film was there anything that made us give a shit about this town.  Like the rest of the film, Gunn seemed more intent with shocking us with laughter or some other terrible buzzword phrase instead of considering what might make a film scary and funny -at the same time-.


Slither's not a straight up bad film in the level of alot of the stuff I talk about on here, but it was just such a monumental letdown, yet another in the line of false pretenders claiming to "revitalize" the horror comedy (though Slither was better than Hatchet, if we're ranking).  At some point we'll probably find someone willing to take on the subgenre without falling back on the conventions of years past, but until then, I'm just gonna wait for someone to thrill me.

DURR JRPGS

wow tim rogers what a ballsy post in saying that square enix is no longer the same company that made the snes final fantasies, and that it now panders to its tardbaby fanbase

I mean, you could say that after being rejected by 1up and absolutely no one responded to the YUUGAME or whatever that abomomomomination was called, you've gone back to the same awful word vomit klosterman/what you think hunter s. thompson sounds like after you read an eighth of fear and loathing soup, it's ironic that your topic is about pandering and fear of change, but whatever man you know?

time to visit an old friend

So, fun fact.  Literally half of my hit results are permutations of either "lisa foiles naked" or "lisa foiles terrible."  I'm sure that if I kept up my vitriol for obnoxious gaming figures to a semi-regular degree, I'd get more traffic, but hey, guess what, I don't want to be some smelly angry nerd feature like busy street or whatever.  

Still, circumstances have sort of forced me to talk about Lisa again.  She's borrowed into the second or third strata of being a girl on the internet, that being her twitter pic showing her in her bra next to her with a yoshi t-shirt (only a mathematician could calculate which picture gives her 15-year-old fans the bigger chubby).  Her Escapist feature is on hiatus due to I guess her moving to LA, which led to perhaps the most anti-introspective column imaginable.  Finally, she's also redesigned her terrible, terrible website (loadsavepoint dot florp), somehow making her existence even more pointless.

There's not too much to say about the pictures.  If Lisa wants to fan the fires of nerdery, that's fine.  Really, what bothers me is that her wall of designer video game shirts kind of made me realize that Lisa seems to equate a large part of her "legitness" as a gamer due to her constantly showing off video game related purchases. While it easy to say "well that's Lisa showing her rock-like intelligence," I've sort of noticed that this is becoming a more widespread phenomenon of people who lack actual gaming chops trying to compensate by showing off all their GAMEZ and swag.  Oh wait this actually isn't new at all, ha ha, you thought I was going to be some retro pissbaby!  Still, this is pretty awful when it comes to Lisa, since she's basically the poster child for what female gamers are seen as today: overcompensating nitwits who use a vague interest in geekdom as a launching point for easy fanbase love.   

I'm also kind of pissed about that dig-dug shirt she's wearing, because I refuse she played that game for any longer than five round, while I spent literally half of my miserable freshman year in high school trying to beat my roommate's insurmountable high score.  CAN YOU EVEN NAME THE RED GUYS IN THE GAME, LISA?  CAN YOUUUUUUUUUUUU

(also speaking of busystreet her flirting with the now single Spoony via twitter is pretty goddamned hilarious yet tragic)

Anyway, Lisa's last column for Kotaku is all about her moving to LA, which means (oh no) she has to rearrange her gaming setup.  After telling us that every gamer has a setup (yeah I have a pretty sick configuration of shit stuffed in a drawer until I want to play Persona or something), we get this pretty telling line:

Thank Thor I don't have to get rid of my games and systems; I'll eventually transport them down to SoCal to enjoy the smog with me – but not without trimming some fat. The games and memorabilia I've collected are a reflection of my personality, and the move gives me a chance to reevaluate what I should ditch and what should take center stage.

Jesus maybe I should have gone righteous retro.  Maybe she's joking, but who says stuff like this?  THIS STARFOX POSTER WILL MAKE FURRIES LIKE ME MORE AND IS MORE PROOF OF MY NON CASUAL GAMER STATUS, BUT THIS BAYONNETTA WALL-SCROLL WILL MAKE PEOPLE THINK I LIKE ANAL.  After this, in keeping with Lisa Foiles column traditions, the train of thought gets derailed as she talks about video games she wants to keep, along with jokes about playing Solitaire with real cards (that's almost crtl+alt+delete level humor, zomg), ending with a subtle twitter mention that, credit be given, was actually pretty slick, as opposed to tim roger's OH GOD PLEASE BRING MY SUBSCRIBER COUNT OVER 3000 grovelling.

I'd like to talk about Save Point, but honestly, look at this fucking thing.  Even by 2007 standards, this is just a mess.  Granted, the site has never gotten much traffic, so it's understandable that Lisa's mindset was "well just do some dumb cat videos and 200-word nerd pandering, maybe I'll get lucky and have an inexplicable flood of visitors."  She also removed her male friends' awful game reviews (thank god someone willing to do a negative review of Superman 64, what a team player), so I guess sorry guys she'll probably find some new hosts (I mean that in both the roommate sense and the parasitic sense) in LA, welcome to the irrelevant club, I'll save you some seats. :3

SEE YOU LATER SPACE HOEBAG

Radiant Historia (Nintendo DS)

Okay so this was a pretty rad RPG.  I'm not going to carefully discuss every stupid minutae of this game, because let's face it this is more about me mulling over the game to better understand it than finding the JIN SAY QUOI of the menu system (which I will say was amazingly well-done, aside from deciding to hide a character's skills in the stats section, or giving any real indication of how powerful said skills are though it's not like the game punishes you for using them in any way).  So, what made this game so rad?

1) Stocke.  Stocke Stocke Stocke.  In a modern era where RPG protagonists are either embarrassing pastiches of Shinji Ikari and John Wayne, tilting towards whichever extreme best suits some retarded storyline, Stocke is one of the very few RPG heroes I actively rooted for. How does he do it?

a) A personality capable of intelligent thought.  I think we can agree that most RPG main guys, despite their central role in the plot, tend to be pushed through things.  OH NO THE ORC KING HAS ATTACKED OUR VILLAGE QUICKLY YOU ARE THE LEGENDARY HERO.  While Stocke also has destiny thrust upon him, he reacts to the news with a "whatever okay let's fix this shit."  He considers ramifications, but also actually does things without needing player input.  I still kind of like Persona 3 a little more than Radiant Historia, but going back to the former took a fair bit of time getting used to my character being less a fleshed character of his own and more of a depressing simulacrum of what a lonely nerd would imagine a true high school experience to be like.

b) He's such a fun character.  Radiant Historia manages to avoid the "BUT THOU MUST" yes/no dichotomy that usually suffices for character development by plainly characterizing Stocke as an asshole that gets shit done.  I'm sure there's some hardcore RPG players that were mad they had no input in how the character they were controlling was going to react, but holy shit fuck these guys right they probably smell really bad.  It's fun to see an RPG, let alone a JRPG, where while all the other characters are going "WHY MUST WAR BE SO PAINFUL HOW CAN WE SURVIVE," the guy you're controlling responds with "jesus christ let's kill some bitches and be home in time for dinner."  It's a good thing too, because the game is so fucking chatty with its story (though people complaining loudly about this detail have clearly never played Golden Sun or its sequels, which featured 50% more talky and 300% less plot advancement per word GOD YOU'VE REPEATED THE SAME CONCEPT TWENTY TIMES DUDE LIGHTHOUSES STONES I GET IT CHRIST)

2) Other characters aren't so bad?  Honestly, it's like a 50/50 deal.  Some guys, like the starting healer sword guy, are pretty generic and lame, but Historia does get a special award for making the 9-year-old girl character genuinely likeable and not OH GOD DIE.  Which is pretty good, because she's also by far the best character in the entire game, thus allowing me to bypass the conundrum present in alot of RPGs where a really good character on paper is ruined by having a personality so wretched you can't bear to deal with them.  Yeah, fuck you too Ken.  But there's no characters I really actively disliked, and even the lame healer sword guy revealed some surprising sides if you bother with sidequests, so hurray for that.  Even better, the worst character in the game is also the one you'll see the least of, so you won't even have to worry about not using him in any point ever!

3) The battle system!  While I have alot of issues with the battle system, it's vaguely creative and is much more often fun rather than not, and occasionally is an utter blast to use.  Without getting into things, every battle has the enemies arranges on a 3x3 grid, usually, though not always, with each enemy taking up a single spot in the grid.  You have a regular attack, but generally you will be using MP-consuming skills (as there is almost never a point where you will run out of MP provided you don't play like a spaz, not to mention that I was  drowning in items by the end of the game).  Skills are not just magic, but also include abilities that either move the baddies around on the grid, or target specific sections of the grid regardless if there are enemies there or not.  The big trick with the game is using skills to bunch enemies together, culminating in one final nuke attack to deal massive damage to everyone you swept up in your combo.  Generally, when battles don't have any added issues, the system is simple and fun to use, especially as you get new party members with new ways to explode shit.  So, what are the issues?

The primacy of magic is probably the biggest problem I have with the game.  The position an enemy occupies on the vertical part of the grid plays a major role in the effect of physical attacks on both you and the enemy.  If an enemy is on the furthest column, any physical attack he gives will be severely reduced versus if he was on the front row, but any physical attack you make will also be horribly reduced.  But hey, guess what kind of attack is completely affected by distance?  Boom.  Alot of battles against things that I couldn't immediately kill with a first round combo usually resulted in me pushing them to the back row while whatever mages I had slowly ice spell'd him into oblivion.  It also doesn't help that generally most trash enemies attack purely physically, and even if they use spells, usually the best party members in the game follow a pattern of having terribad defense and physical attack, but godly magic offense and defense.  As a result, two of the three physical characters in the game are unbearably gimped, with the third being useful only for two moves that literally break the game in their power.  So, are there any problems with the magical characters?  Not really, except for the 

Randomly placed grid spanning bosses.  It's definitely a curious decision on the part of the game maker: "I've made a battle system that rewards strategic thinking over simply mashing the attack button, now let's add a ton of bosses that cannot actually be moved!"  Also, by ton of bosses, I actually mean recolors of the same fucking giant spider.    Battles with these spoiler not really bosses are easily the worst part of the game:  Suddenly, my game has transmuted into generic RPG turn-based combat where I hit and heal and hit and heal, which wouldn't even be so bad if the game was built for that sort of thing, but generally enemies tend to hit like trucks if you don't dispatch things quickly, so the fights tend to go hit heal revive revive hit revive get hit by random aoe fuck you spell get pissed restart game cheese fight by using limit break ripoff abilities to remove boss turns and amass giant combo to kill.

Finally, there's a pretty weird ass difficulty curve.  The first quarter of the game is pretty basic stuff, though featuring some tricky fights if you aren't properly leveled.  The second quarter is EASILY the hardest section of the game, where the game suddenly places you in battles against like six enemies at a time, all of whom are pretty good at murdering you while your own characters have basically learned nothing useful for the past ten levels, culminating in a boss fight that is nearly impossible to beat unless you break under pressure like me and realize that you need a character that you will never use again.  The last half of the game, however, gets progressively easier as you unlock the skills you should have had like eight hours ago and suddenly you're killing everything in a single round and bosses just cry to message boards about you.  The final boss especially is only a threat if you haven't learned that getting combos in battle drastically increases your damage.

4) A pretty good game length.  I finished Radiant Historia in about 30 hours.  Part of that length was based off me using faqs to locate sidequests, though I didn't complete them all (my reaction to the optional bosses was a "NO THANK YOU SIR").  I echo a complaint from another blogger critic (whose sidequest guide I gleefully used) that the game drags towards the middle, though by the end everything reaches a satisfactory pace.  Still, compared to the tactic of many rpgs in just forcing endless circles on you to reach some magical gameplay length mark (fuck you golden sun seriously), this was pretty damned good.

5) The ending was so great.  Especially the (spoiler not really) super secret ending you get if you complete certain sidequests, which I am not going to spoil because it is seriously worth getting and made me grin so goddamned hard.

DS Games no one cares about review medley

So I decided this weekend to try a bunch of DS games that I'd always heard about, but never actually played.  THE DRAMATIC RESULTS AS FOLLOWS:

Star Fox Command (got roughly four endings): At the risk of blowing my cred as a nerd who's willing to call out series other than Sonic, this actually wasn't a terrible game.  It's not actually good by any means, but it actually kind of impressed me that with all of the potential ways they could have fucked up a touch screen Star Fox, it came out just kind of clunky and dumb.

The big gimmick of the game is that the missions take place on a turned-based strategic map, where you move your ships around to attack enemy formations.  Pretty much every battle takes place on the open field range like that first robot boss in Star Fox 64, and the objective of almost every battle is finding the target enemy in a field of other enemies and blowing them up within a certain time limit.  Control isn't exactly awkward (the bottom screen and stylus is used to control the arwing, with buttons and circle-makin' doing barrel rolls and shit, all  buttons fire a lazer).  The only obnoxious parts are when you have to kill evil fast ace-type ships like star wolf, as while the game compensates regular trash for easier shooting, the aces still act like this is a game with human controls, and meanwhile I'm trying to remember which button does the loop and which on does the 180 degree turn (chance of success: none).

The other big thing of the game is the fact that you can choose your paths, which would be nice if the game had any sort of bridging mechanism between missions.  Instead, if you choose a plot branch that doesn't necessarily make sense, the game just tries to smash all the character motivations into some melodramatic space opera stew that really doesn't work too well. Still, at least two of the endings involves making Star Fox all depressed cause he can't get yiffy blue fox tail, so that's a plus.  VERDICT: WORTH CHEAP AS HELL

Batman: The Brave and the Bold (beaten): I beat this in 3 hours.  And I don't just mean beaten in the minimum amount of content beaten, I mean EVERY POSSIBLE THING.  It's a pretty big shame too, since this is a surprisingly awesome little game.  In keeping with the (also surprisingly awesome) show, the game is a stage select go beat some bads deal, with each stage featuring a different DC hero teaming up with Batman.  Each hero has a variety of powers, with some being a joy to control (Plasticman and of all things Aquaman), other being death incarnate but kind of lame to play (Green Arrow and Green Lantern), and others existing purely to tag in with specific platforming sections (Red Tornado why do you fucking exist).  Batman himself is perfectly fine, with tons of beatdown options, including items that you can buy and items you gain from completing stages, ranging from the useless to the utterly broken "belt sword" that is literally a red-colored Z-saber from the Mega Man X series. Control is incredibly fun, especially combat, which has sort of a Monster Tale attribute without having to feed Batman doggy biscuits every thirty seconds.

Again, while I don't think anyone likes filler, THREE HOURS.  FOR EVERYTHING.  The worst thing was that some stages started to repeat themselves in platforming.  I mean, come on, just steal some gimmicks from Mega Man 2 I won't tell anyone I swear.  It doesn't really help that gameplay is pretty easy peasy.  Even the optional challenge stages are generally simple if you remember that you have a invincibility frame roll that completely fucks over baddy AI.  VERDICT: WORTH REALLY CHEAP AS HELL

Monster House (beaten on hard mode because I am amazing):  Every game reviewer that bothered to play this game called it an homage to Smash TV, and they're half right..  I never watched the movie (DOOM HOUSE?), but the game itself is three kids going through a basically linear series of rooms shooting books.  The difference from Smash TV is that shooting is controlled by touching the touch screen, ala Geometry Wars for the DS.  Each kid has a vaguely different basic attack, with a straight shot, vaguely straight short-range rapid fire, and low-rate spread which sounds really good until you realize that enemies take either one hit to kill or a million.

This was actually a fun fucking game, though.  Granted, I love the arena style splatterfests, so I might be biased, but the gameplay actually felt somewhat balanced, which is sort of amazing for a film tie-in that wasn't lauded by manbabies as a game that CHANGES EVERYTHING.  The biggest problem with the game (aside from length, but no one can be surprised there) was that since your player character is a polygon eight-year-old rather than a straight sprite, determining a hitbox is an exercise in futility, making any enemy that shoots projectiles a doom train headed for your genitalia   VERDICT: seriously if you find a version of this game for more than five dollars you probably live in Dubai or something.

De Blob 2 (beaten, 100%): This game was like a box of Cheez-its.  Deliciously empty, with no effort except your attention span to complete.  Sadly, my attention for this game ran out when I beat it, so suffice to say that it's YET ANOTHER short but fun platformer, distinguishing itself with pretty boss art and sound design, and a control that is partly sonic and partly generic ninja game.  Special mention to the plot, which will probably be hilarious to you if you're twelve years old.  verdict whatever bro

The Legendary Starfy (world 4, apparently a million stages to go): For some reason, I had always seen this game as a spin-off to the Princess Peach game that set feminism back to the Industrial Age, but it's actually the first domestic release of an apparently crazy-popular Japanese series.  I can't really give a full review of it yet, but while it's still pretty easy as hell (especially bosses, which are literally incapable of giving me a problem so far), the graphics and awesome gameplay (essentially an underwater Kirby with shitloads of various minigames and optional content) are pretty spiffy.  Also, unlike virtually all of these other games, it doesn't show much signs of stopping any time soon.  WE'LL SEE.

Knights in the Nightmare (took one look at the second part of the tutorial and quietly filed away):  Who is the audience for this game?  Oh wait, that's easy: horrible gamer elitists that want to play obscure and difficult games to magnify their gamer dong.  Seriously, the concept of meshing needlessly complex SRPG mechanics and bullet-hell shooters is like a New Games Journalist dream, and a stupid fucking idea to everyone else.  Hay guys, check out my Roberta Williams adventure games that requires you to defeat an AI version of Daigo in Street Fighter IV whenever you want to pick something up!  Truly, I have turned this gaming world asunder.

unggggh.