Dishonored (2012) vs. Hotline Miami (2012): Masks

I've noticed alot of my reviews tend to open with a discussion of some sort as to way people criticize and write about disposable junk like video games and nerd media.  This is a bad habit, and I hope to change it, but this review is going to do the same thing.  That because I have been agonizing for a few days on how to approach my feelings about Dishonored and Hotline Miami.  And I came up with something, but it's embarrassing because it's the sort of thing you'd imagine reading on a Gamespot review.

Still, it struck me as weird that there were two games launched within a month of each other that featured a basically silent main character who wore a mask.  I then thought a little more, and realized something:  both masks basically are a perfect description of the game they inhabit.  (I guess I should say this review has some fairly minor spoilers for both games)

In Dishonored, the main character, the bodyguard/assassin/formless lump of person Corvo gets to wear this mask.  It's totally, sick man.  It's like a robot skull that makes little hissing and whirring noises as it opens up, there's a zoom function, so sleek and polished and intricately designed and goddamn pointless.  Everything about this mask, and about Dishonored in general, basically screams "high design for idiots that don't actually understand what that means."

I don't want to make it sound like I hate Dishonored.  It's a fun game.  But so many people have treated this game with the same reverent, breathless adulation that they've done with other games of this type.  By "this type," I'm referring to games like Bioshock and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, fun games that are for all intents corridor shooters that, since they featured distracting ancillary elements like COLLECTING MONEY FOR UPGRADES or MORAL CHOICES or PLOTS SLIGHTLY BETTER THAN TOTAL GARBAGE are heralded as examples of the direction that video games should be heading.  Frankly, that sounds horrifying.

The big thing about Dishonored is the whole shebang about choice.  Everyone in this game talks to you about it in between sucking your dick for being Maximum Murder Machine Numero Uno.  But what's choice?  You can choose to kill people which will lead to ramifications of slightly more uninteresting zombie enemies in later levels, or not kill them which will lead to I don't really know because my non lethal playthrough ended because it's so goddamned boring.  While the violent killface option allows you to teleport around stabbing dudes in the neck and slowing time to drop like five mines in front of a guard, nonlethal gives you the option of A) trying to sneak around which is a bad idea since stealth mechanics in this game are indecipherable, B) shooting a SLEEP DART, or C) sneaking behind them to noogie them (to sleep).*

thank god I can tell the creepy 14-going-on-40 princess where she can sleep

Oh yeah, and every mission also gives you some MORAL SIDEQUESTS that are either (surprise) "kill someone or spare them"  and the assassination targets all have non-lethal means of getting rid of them that the game treats as some huge puzzle but are embarrassingly obvious.

To be fair, gameplay is fun (when you're king murder man).  The main power you have, Blink, lets you basically pretend you're Nightcrawler.  There's other murder powers, but generally I just spent my ADAM Rune Points to get more agility based powers so I could explore everything.  Because for the first half of the game, I just checked every area.  The problem is that this got kind of dumb.  Levels are gorgeous, but they all follow the same pattern of huge open areas that have a few strategically placed windows and ledges leading to rooms with money (which I had no idea what to do with by the end of the game) or game lore.

Sorry Ma'am, my need for novels about whale oil production is too strong

Jesus christ this game loves lore.  The whole setting is basically steampunk English which no doubt is thrilling to most idiots, but the game just won't leave you alone with generic background information.  There's books, audio devices, like a million lines of dialogue from NPCs, and a magic talking heart that has an additional million lines of dialogue when you point it at those NPCs.  The writing isn't awful by game standards, at that level of pretty good fanfiction where the author thinks that more words means more smart, and there isn't a single skeezy "Rape for Emotional Impact" moment.

Ultimately, everything in Dishonored is just kind of vapidly pretty, existing in a vacuum of game design where if you just throw a bunch of random, not even necessarily connected, gameplay elements in a series of hallways with moderately concealed ducts, you can come out with a GOTY which everyone (except those that have only been exposed to garbage entertainment) is going to forget within six months.

So then there's Hotline Miami.  Here, your character just wear a bunch of random rubber animal masks.  There's nothing sleek or hip about them; the main character just sort of slips one over his head each mission, and if he's killed, the mask flies off.  And yet, I'm certain I'm going to be fondly remember this game for years.

I'm going to forego the breathless love that every reviewer seems compelled to blather on about the gameplay.  What's important about Hotline Miami is that it knows what it wants to do, and doesn't throw distracting balls of yarn in pursuit of that goal.  You go into buildings, you fight the Russian Mafia with a melee or ranged weapons, gore just explodes everywhere.  There's a combo and scoring system that is sort of fun to play with (though a particular mask utterly breaks this), but really the lack of distractions (especially when said gameplay isn't some fucking platform retro reacharound) is sort of refreshing.  Honestly, the very fact that Hotline Miami foregoes any sort of awkward LOOK GUYS IT'S RETRO VIDYA GAEM REFERENCES puts it on my "this is good" list.*

One thing I will note is that I really REALLY appreciate the designers just shuttling me to my destination.  In a universe where "hub world" seems to be a requirement for every video game, it's nice to see one where I'm not having to wander around empty streets trying to find HIDDEN COLLECTABLES before getting to the actual storyline section.

The story also follows this lack of padding.  Some people may bitch about the fact that the story elements are not really completely resolved in the game, but who cares when everything is so lean and mean?  It was a breath of fresh air when I tentatively clicked on the newspaper clipping on my table after the first murder mission and it was just a twenty-five wordstory about my murder mission.  The overarching mystery about why you're going around hurting people is interesting enough to stand on its own without a bunch of unnecessary fleshing out.  The narrative flow is amazing, a series of short, almost film-like vignettes that both entice the player into its world while also (and this is something that 90% of indie art games fail at) functioning as a playable game.

One aspect that fascinates me about Hotline Miami is the sheer passivity of the protagonist.  For the most part, your character doesn't seem to have a reason for murdering people, simply following the orders of an answering machine.  People love the morality systems of Bioware games and Dishonored because you can choose to impose your morality systems on that of the main character, but I honestly much preferred the cruelty of Hotline Miami.  When you beat the first boss battle of the game, he is laying on the floor in pain.  I walked up to him, half expecting some bullshit SPARE/LIVE choice.  But no, there's only one button, and that feels like actual realism.

Also, the music.  It's a combination of embarrassment/happiness to see nerds raving about the game soundtrack.  Embarrassment because while the tracks are good, there's way better examples of that musical genre out there.  On the other hand, it's nice to see a game with new musical avenues, as opposed to the current game music meta of dum metal/tepid classical/ironic 40s.  Ever since I've played the game, I've tried to think of another game that had a single noise/no wave track.  Needless to say, I'm stumped.

No, what makes Hotline Miami's soundtrack so goddamned good is how well it ties into itself and the game.  It's akin to the soundtracks in Silent Hill 2 and Persona 3, each track feeding into each other, calling reference to other sounds, while perfectly representing whatever situation you're in.  Despite the fact that multiple artists composed the soundtrack, there's a perfect uniformity of theme.  Each song perfectly encapsulates the level you're in.  I don't mean this in terms of setting, but in how the rhythm and progression matches the layout of the levels, what types of enemies you face, whether you'll be methodically hunting down bads with a golf club or getting into a running gunfight with masses of assholes.  I can't even remember a single song from Dishonored except for the godawful vocalized closing credits, which compares with Symphony of the Night's "I Am The Wind" for sheer volume of embarrassment after a HITTIN BUTTONS hard fought victory.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you paid sixty dollars to jump through morality windows, but don't want to spend ten (or five with the inevitable Steam sale) dollars to taste the ultimate in digitized bloody hopelessness, then you should probably kill yourself.

But be discreet about it.

*: there is a Nintendo in the protagonist's apartment, but without spoiling, I'd argue there's actually an interesting thematic reason behind that.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Why do I watch all these stupid fucking remakes?  Is it because I am incapable of discussing actual substantive films (for example, just saw Pi and all I can really think of saying is "just watch this movie you dumb fuckheads")?  Was it a subconscious reaction to the free champion rotation in League of Legends this week having the BARBARIAN KING that literally nobody seems to know how to play?  Do I like ruining my friend's Netflix account tracking with garbage films?

First off, though, let's be clear.  Conan the Barbarian is not a remake of the 1980's Conan the Barbarian. Really, the two films have almost nothing in common aside from the fact that they both take place in a fantasy world and have a big strong amoral dude named Conan killing other weaker dudes.  But it's still a remake, in fact a remake of another Arnold Schwarzenegger film:

Commando.

I know this might sound a little kooky, but hear me out.  Both films feature the aspect of the hero chasing after an object important to them (John Matrix's daughter, Conan's sword).  The object of importance is held by a collection of bad guy archetypes for that time in place (in the 80s you have the Jew, Black Men, and Gay Person in a Chainmail Vest, in the Hyborian Age, you have the Fat Jew, the Larger Black Men, Gay Shirtless Person, and Seductive Woman).  The film is largely constructed around the hero going through predetermined stages and slaying all the bosses until finally coming up to the Prime Bad.

The ostinsible plot of the movie is Conan seeking revenge against the bad guy from Avatar, who with his band of ethnic misfits razed Conan's childhood village and now wants to rule the world with a magic skull helmet that a necromancer made in his eighth grade crafts class.  For some reason, to do this he needs the blood of the last descendant of the necromancer (who is a hot grrl), so he can lock her away in the Dark World and Conan needs to find the Master Sword.  Of course, like Commando, none of this actually matters.  It's also strangely complex, especially since the original Conan was just "arnold wants to beat up a snake cult."  It's as though the filmmakers decided that they really needed to lure the neckbeards that actually read the Conan stories and damn anyone that just wants to see some swordfightin'.

The biggest problem with this is that the person playing Conan, Jason Momoa, cannot sustain this narrative flow worth a fuck.  One of the hidden great things about the original Conan was that the director of that film was fully cognizant that Arnold was not at the point where he could successfully spout catchphrases, so his greatest duties in that film are looking intimidating, wielding a sword, and being around naked women.

Jason Momoa's prior roles to this were playing that crazy dude on a Stargate spinoff and being a barbarian king in Game of Thrones, boffing the lady that people draw an insane amount of porn of.  It's clear the director saw him as a perfect fit for the new Conan, and he does look appropriately intimidating.  The problem is that he has alot of dialogue in Conan, and every single time he talks it's like he's reading off a cue card.

For example, early in the film, Conan finds himself in a jail run by the fat one-eyed jew.  Conan breaks out and tries to menace him into giving information about the Avatar guy's plot, saying "tellmewatiwant won'tkillu."  Naturally he spills the beans, so Conan hauls him outside and sticks the prison key into his mouth and kicks him towards the angry prisoners.  Fifth-grade screenwriter Jimmy then has the jailer say BUT YOU SAID YOU WOULDN'T KILL ME, to which Conan states "mmmbutdintsay wuntkillu."  It's where I fully realized I was just watching Commando, and that this movie was a terrible mistake.

So I guess the biggest difference from Commando is that Conan gets a nordic lady friend as opposed to a platonic Negress buddy.  Conan rescues her from the magic smart people city that is attacked by evil but she runs away but is pursued by a group of baddies culminating in a clumsy chase sequence.  Naturally she's a super independent lady because 1) she doesn't dress like a slut unlike every other female character in this film and 2) she constantly refers to the fact that she's a super independent lady.  So naturally she spends the entire movie either kidnapped, getting seduced by Conan's omega-level PUA strats, or the classic "helping in a fight by killing a single monster."

Speaking of fights, there's alot of them in this movie, and all of them are pretty pointless.  There's Rose McGowan dressed as a slut witch (I don't know why you would try to make Rose McGowan ugly, but this movie certainly puts forth the effort) summoning sand monsters that somehow die after you stab them three times.  There's a pirate boarding party led by the giant black guy and archer lady from the beginning of the film, both of whom have zero lines and die almost instantly.  There's my three-second triumph over hypothetical guilt where I missed five minutes of the movie so I could watch my friend fight stuff in Guild Wars 2.

The final pointless fight, occurring when the tuff grrl gets kidnapped and Conan needs to rescue her, deserves more attention because it really symbolizes everything dumb and forgettable about this film.

So, near the start of the film, when Conan was captured by the aforementioned Jew Jailer, he met some thief guy who says COME MEET ME IN THE CITY OF THIEVES IF YOU NEED HELP BRO.  About 70 or so minutes later, for reasons I can't remember if they even exists, Conan goes to the literal City of Thieves where he meets the thief in the first bar he goes to.  They then proceed to the Avatar Guy's Doom Castle, because I guess that's where she is.  They sneak in via the sewers or something, and eventually come up through a pool in the center a giant multi-level prison area manned by Avatar Guy's final lieutenant, a shirtless cannibal guy whose lines are HA HA HA and ARRRRGH.  But then there's a twist because Conan and the thief have to also fight a GIANT OCTOPUS MONSTER.  And by that I mean Conan has to fight it, because the thief's entire contribution to this scene is running around and screaming COOOONAAAHAAAAN over and fucking over again and meanwhile the cgi is goddamned awful and nothing in the fight choreography makes sense.  After like five minutes of this the lieutenant is dead and fed to the octopus, so Conan and thief make their way to the throne room/balcony where it is revealed that the girl is not even in the castle, but in the nearby mountain cave which is shaped like a skull.  Jesus Christ.  And no, the thief guy isn't even seen again after this.

The final scenes of the film have naturally no surprises, except for the kind of annoying screenwriting trend where it is revealed that the Avatar Guy, who previously explained his origins via a sad story about his wife being unjustly murdered for being a witch, actually reveals that "no that was a lie she was evil and so am I, haw haw haw."  All bad is murdered, climatic kiss, whatever.

I don't really hate Conan the Barbarian, but it's just such a forgettable movie for the amount of money and talent thrown into it.  No attempt was broached to make something interesting or coherent, just endless pandering to fans with minimum breast shots and cgi just there because.

verdict: just watch Commando again

samuel kite ate my copy of fallout 3

I've been playing lots of Fallout 3.  I actually had tried it once before, but it crashed on my computer despite my attempts to get around its well known issues with multicore processors.  This time, however, I realized that my workaround failed because I had altered the property files on my giant hard drive, not realizing that the game installed itself on both that drive and my SSD.  Hilarious, Bethesda.  It's a fun game, but not something I really felt worthwhile talking about.

But then I checked actionbutton, and glory be, here is Samuel Kite talking about how much he hates Fallout 3 and Skyrim, even more than he hated Kingdoms of Amalur under the auspices of a review of Dungeon Defenders.  I say "under the auspices" because literally less than 1% of the review is actually about Dungeon Defenders, and the remaining 99% is "god I hate modern video games."  It also, despite being written in June, had exactly one comment (that I couldn't access because maybe they're moving servers).

Maybe it was because of that one comment, but I did something I rarely do for actionbutton articles: I read the entire goddamned thing. Well, the entire thing minus the opening five or so paragraphs talking about the cultural exegesis of game design or something that maybe Ray Kurzweil could translate. And you know what?  It made me think a little.  I mean Kite is a terrible writer, but congrats dude, you compelled me to think for about an hour whether I was actually enjoying Fallout 3 or just being tricked by evil game overlords, ala some fat dude with his over a crystal ball as I kill my three hundredth raider.  The answer is that of course I was being tricked, but...

--

Now you may have clicked my link and gone "oh hell no I am not reading all this."  Don't worry, because since this is an article inspired by NEW GAMES JOURNALISM, the points actually presented can be distilled to about a hundred words.  Here's the fivescore for this review:

"I enjoyed older games where I genuinely roleplayed.  However, as gaming has changed into a widespread cultural phenomenon, the notion of gaming, especially rpgs, has become soulless repetitive tasks without a complicated system because it's easier to make money from these.    Skyrim and Fallout are bad because they are particularly emblematic of this problem, going into an infinite series of rooms where you have a chance of getting junk that really doesn't matter.  Instead, please look at Axis and Allies for an example of good games, otherwise we are becoming social media in everything we do, and this is very scary.  vibio gaems." SO.

So the biggest problem I had with this review was his argument that Kingdoms of Amalur was a better role playing game than whatever Bethesda has pumped out (though still shitty, of course).  His reason for this was: "KoAR is exhilarating to run through. It’s a large world but when you head for the horizon and push the sprint button to start trucking, you don’t feel like frustrated like you won’t get where you want to go before you’re bored–you feel excited. Exploring is interesting. Perception of movement speed is a real thing."

When I was growing up in Arkansas, my house had like ten acres of relative wilderness, full of hills and trees and even a stream.  I used to come up with lots of stories and adventures around these things.  My soul died awhile ago so that no longer exists, but I remember enough to say that anyone who thinks that Kingdoms of Amalur was "exhilarating to run through" compared to Fallout 3 is either full of bullshit or lived in a Bioshock style bathysphere until they went to college. His reason (I think) is that the main character in Amalur moves his legs really fast, even if it's just an illusion, and that means that it seems fun.

Really?  This is why "serious" video game criticism is such a gigantic joke.  It's like if Cahiers du Cinema wrote an article on how Patch Adams was a better film than Ms. Doubtfire due to the steadily receeding hairline of Robin Williams providing a simalcrum of empathy with all the balding manchildren of the world.  But I'm digressing, and unlike certain people, I consider this a bad writing habit.

--

To be clear, his criticisms of Fallout 3's hollowness aren't wrong.  I felt a sense of shame at his pointing out how incredibly dumb the endless amount of checking every Metal Box, Box of Ammunition, and Medical Box is and how antithetical it is to actual gameplay.    Alot of modern video games have fallen onto this bizarre idea of having a billion little containers in their open world, 1% of which containing stuff actually useful  in your journeys and the rest being utter bullshit items that flaccidly attempt to convey the illusion that a society existed, or once existed, in this random gas station.  Fallout 3 at least has the forethought to make most of the dumb items components in random crafted items, or the means to make money in repeatable quests, but it's still incredibly empty.

On the other hand, isn't that pretty much how all video games are?  Kite really liked Left 4 Dead, and I do too, but what's the meaty substance of that game?  That is to say, aren't these hordes of zombies basically existing in the same distracting, meaningless roles of Fallout 3's containers?  I open a Metal Box and find a piece of scrap metal, I shoot a zombie and watch it explode, maybe with three other people watching in an attempt to create a sense of community.  Kite doesn't even mention V.A.T.S., which is sort of strange since it's the most perfect parody of our facile attempts to "control" video game action ever created.  Video games are by definition stimulus-response, and attacking Fallout 3 and alot of other modern games because they're a little more honest and cynical about their attempts to addict you makes you seem less like being "a shrieker of terrifying holy truths" (an actual quote, jesus christ) and more like an old man who doesn't want to admit that video games have and always will be at their core a gigantic con.

Or maybe he thinks that.  I can't tell, because despite what some people will try to tell you, writing like this isn't stream of consciousness, it's a sirocco of fearfulness, specifically the fear of having genuine opinions about things as opposed to coy blase whining about everything.

While thinking about all this, I loaded up Fallout 3 to explore a little more of Washington DC.  It's easily the worst area of the game, since it's filled with obnoxious Super Mutants that take a million hits to kill for little reward.  Also, rather than just letting you just walk around the streets and admire the landmarks, almost every intersection has unpassable debris, forcing you to use the subway, which is a linear series of the same three rooms filled with zombies and more Super Mutants.  Eventually, I figured out how to reach the destination I was trying to find to turn in a quest reward, and while I was trying to find the entrance, some guy with a loudspeaker started yelling at me about worms and the sun influencing John 3:16.  I wandered into an alley, where suddenly everything exploded and I died.  I tried the other end, where some random guy was hiding from the same dude, and telling me he couldn't move because he would blow up the alley.  Thanks to my incredible charisma (6 out of 10), I convinced him to run into the alley and talk to him.  Both people promptly exploded.

I still like Fallout 3.

Overthinking Terrible: Aliens vs. Predator (2009)

Aliens vs. Predator, released by Sega and Rocksteady in 2009, is the literal embodiment of disappointment.  It's hard to understand how the developers took what was a pretty basic and nonshitty formula from the past games in the series, and then somehow manage to fuck up each faction's scenario in completely different ways.  So let's go at this from each campaign, from relative best to absolute worst.

ALIEN:  This is the best character to play as, bar none.  You get to crawl on anything you want, and while the control is pretty fucking weird to get used to (sometimes you just automatically transition, sometimes you have to press the middle mouse button or you're just grinding your carapace on the intersection), it's fun.  The game's best bits, gameplay wise, are when it's you versus six marines in a wide open area, with them steadily freaking out as you take out lights and slowly wittle down their forces, performing various stealth kills, then scrambling away before an organized response can be made.  It also helps that, unlike the original AvP, there's some effort to orientate the character as opposed to your viewpoint going absolutely berserk the moment you climbed on a wall.

Some areas are better designed for this than others; one of the many hallmarks of the fact that Sega and Rocksteady clearly Just Didn't Care about this game is that the main areas are recycled among each campaign, and no, there was not much effort made to have something for every race to enjoy.  So for every spooky parking garage where you can hide under a walkway and feel like badass prime, there's an outdoor area where you will be seen no matter what, and your own hope is that the terrible AI gets stuck behind a turret, which happened to me no less than three times.

This sounds pretty fun, right?  No doubt, and you'll start to feel pretty good about yourself about an hour into the game.  Guess how long this campaign is!

That's right, just about the time games designed for the NORMALS would be kicking things into high gear, you fight some Predators (which demonstrate how fucking awful melee combat is in this game, more on that later), and then a SUPER PREDATOR that demands the strategy of kiting around the boss arena for ten minutes and goddamn don't even try to fight him, dude is like Rugal from KoF in his ability to ruin you in a second flat.  Then the game ends.

Let me put this another way: the most fun campaign in the game is easily, easily the shortest.  It's even weirder when you consider the fact that there were plenty more settings to recycle from the other campaigns.    Did they run out of time to put three marines in each room?  Was there a bug where climbing up a room in the giant pyramid crashed your game and reset your bank account to zero?  I don't understand.

MARINE: Okay so this is easier to understand.  The first two thirds of the game are you versus roughly three to seven aliens at a time, occasionally accented by lame jump scares that would make Doom 3 embarrassed (true story: doom 3 is the only horror video game that ever scared me thanks to a part where a ceiling tile fell onto a desk).  At first this was pretty challenging, as I was having to kite aliens who were faster than me and fairly decent at climbing around walls to flank me.  Then, in a moment of desperation as an alien was about to claw me to death, I hit the middle mouse button.  My wimpy pistol flung out, disrupting the alien strike.  What.

To say the least, the Marine campaign got alot easier when I discovered that I had a spammable move that not only knocked away baddies, but also interrupted ANY ATTACK.  Suddenly, I was no longer vaguely worried, but just but on my Benny Hill techno mix (feat. XRAPTOR DEUS) and proceeded to turn into some sort of schoolyard bully against all xenomorphs everywhere.  By the end I was sort of embarrassed, especially thanks to the plethora of audio diary pickups that consist of the development staff trying and failing to immerse you in the MASSIVE THREAT that the aliens represent on a metaphysical scale.  The best audio logs are those where the aliens are attacking, since they were clearly to cheap to dub in sound effects, so you just get some guy going "oh no they're coming through the walls auuuugh" in total silence.  I never thought I'd say it, but I miss the retarded chubby british dude from AvP 2000.

But then suddenly, the game decides that aliens are no longer fun to massacre, and we get COMBAT ANDROIDS.  If you raised your eyebrow at the notion at gun fights in an aliens vs predator game, rest assured, so did the person assigned to integrate it, because goddamn is it fucking awful.  Let's break this down:

• Combat androids are so fucking annoying to kill.  See, because they're androids, they don't care if you shoot them in the head.  It just comes right off, and yet they still seem fully capable of murdering you in half a second on hard mode.  Torso shots are similarly useless.  The game helpfully suggests SHOOT THEIR LIMBS ROOKIE, which means you have to shoot them in the legs, but this makes them fall down, usually behind cover, so now you have to dart back and forth to the side shooting the other leg because of course the android is still happy to kill you and aggggh.
• Did I mention how easy it is to die?  Androids either have the accuracy of your average saturday morning cartoon evil minion or a Navy SEAL who was just told that his target ate his girlfriend's breasts on a plate made out of orphans' bones.  If it's the latter, expect to reload that checkpoint.  
• Now, I know what you're thinking:  why not just use cover yourself?  That would be a good idea except, unlike the androids, your character has a religious problem with crouching.  Let that sit in your brain for a second: in a fps released in 2009 with traditional gunfights, YOU COULD NOT CROUCH.  In my first fight with an android, there was a piece of debris directly between me and the android, leading me to mashing on my keyboard desperately trying to find the GET IN COVER GODDAMNIT button, all the while the android slowly whittling my health down while constantly getting into cover himself.  I'd say this was an example of AI mocking me, but:
• There is no AI, and this is the only reason I was able to finish the marine section.  Well, that and the incredibly overpowered sniper rifle/carbine, which had a handy scope highlighting any baddies.  As a result, alot of fights consisted of running to the other side of the room, then waiting for an android to peek out of cover, shooting him once, waiting for him to peek out of cover again, so on and god this game is fucking garbage.

This culminates in the final boss fight where you fight Bishop Weyland who is actually an android or something??  It doesn't matter because he has a shotgun that can kill you from any distance with a single shot, and if you're like me, the game checkpointed right after the prior fight with CLOAKING androids so you have to spend a minute refilling health and ammo just so you can get splattered again.  My eventual winning strategy was kiting him around two columns so his AI would glitch out and he'd take the long way around to get at me.  ARE YOU STARTING TO NOTICE A PATTERN WITH FINAL BOSSES?

PREDATOR:  Ughhhh.  So in the original AvP, as I vaguely recall, the Predator's entire arsenal was either energy based (the shoulder cannon, plasma pistol, stealth, and medicomp) or limited in use (speargun and disc).  Thus, the fun of playing the predator was learning to use the best weapon at the best time, with it being impossible to simple use the same attack over and over.

You can probably guess what I'm about to say about how they handled the Predator in this game.  The theme here is "incremental upgrades, each stupidly better than the last."  You initially start off with just your melee (which is incredibly awful, akin to playing rock paper scissors with hands that have been stung by a hundred hornets) and shoulder launcher (also awful, using about a third of your energy if you fully charge it).  So in the beginning, things were pretty tough.  I'd have to sneak up, engage cloak at the last minute since I had to save energy, sneak up behind, have the marine freak out FOR NO GODDAMNED REASON, re-engage cloak and run like a baby, so on and so forth.

It was about the fourth time this happened that I noticed something disturbing.  I had forgotten to turn off cloak, and yet my suit's power was exactly the same.  That's right, I could cloak as long as I wanted.  Suddenly, the game opened up, or rather, for the next half of the campaign I just ran as fast I could through the various corridors I had seen two times already.  Jesus, this fucking game.

Eventually I ran into the throwing discs, which were clunky as shit to use, but could knock down enemies so whatever.  Then I ran into the spears.  In the original, spears were hell of powerful, but also took you out of cloak and were limited in numbers.  Thankfully, the developers of AvP 2009 were like "waaah pooopy" so both of those unfortunate drawback were removed.  I guess it was sort of cathartic to be able to waste the combat androids so easily after the Marine campaign, but it was also pretty pathetic that my predator was closer to some hyper steroid quill rat from diablo 2 than a literal embodiment of mankind's uncomfortable place at the top of the food chain.

Then I ran into the final boss, yet another fucking PREDALIEN, and beat him by (get ready) kiting him around and using proximity mines (which I never used before because they depleted energy, but the developers got around this issue by making your energy infinite in the boss arena).

So that's the game.  There's multiplayer, but I have no doubt that the single person still playing it now is some horrible techno-mutant that will upload his consciousness into my body the moment I join a server.  Everything in single player is just so dumb and lazy and poorly thought out, I can't think of a single idea that wasn't run into the ground so hard that any semblence of "neat" was extinguished.

A good example of this comes in the middle of the Marine campaign.  Eventually you come across an alien hive with all the bizarre organic structure that the movies have never explained.  Going through a corridor, I came across a MIGHTY SUSPICIOUS looking part of the wall.  I've seen Aliens about 20 times, so I immediately knew that it was an alien and opened fire.  What I didn't notice that doing so awoke another alien much closer to me.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Maybe this game wasn't total shit!

This opinion changed after the sixth time they did this.

DIABLO 3: THE REVIEW OF ALL TIMES (spoilers oh no)

I hate writing reviews for well-known stuff.  It's more fun to present opinions on stuff that hasn't been analyzed to death in endless circlejerks.  In Diablo 3's case, I'll make an exception because I believe my mind has two qualities that are generally mutually exclusive:

1) I am an intelligent, analytical human being.
2) I really really liked Diablo 2.

hey did you check kotaku no because I'm at a gamestop launch party

Alot of things have been endlessly mentioned in criticism of Diablo 3, so who fucking cares about that stuff.  Yes, the graphics are like hot topic brand Vaseline rubbed all over my monitor, my attempt to play through the entire campaign with the music on instead of Drive Like Jehu was an exercise in amazingly bad judgment,  latency is really good at making me never want to play hardcore, etc., etc.  I don't give a shit about the opening day problems, since as I am a normal human being these days I logged on at 6 AM and had no problems aside from achievements not working for a few hours, so whatever.  All I can take from that is that gamers are the most obnoxiously entitled fuckheads in history.

My ultimate verdict of Diablo 3, after getting through Nightmare and watching people play through inferno, would be "fairly tragic."  We have a game that was designed by people that either didn't really understand the full appeal of Diablo 2, or, unfortunately far more likely, are very cynically astute in how dumb gamers operate.

The biggest defense I've seen towards attacks on Diablo 3 are WELL REMEMBER DIABLO 2 VANILLA THAT WAS REALLY BAD TOO.  And they're right, Diablo 2 prior to Lord of Destruction was a complete mess of broken builds and limited item availability.  But here's a problem: Lord of Destruction came out already, but Blizzard apparently thinks you'll never remember that.  We are back at square one, with no charms, runewords, synergies, jewels, so on and so forth.  It's not like these concepts didn't work for LoD, so why the hell are they not in the base game?

I gave this guy sixty dollars

I find it hard to understand why there's so much brain-melting bellyaching over launch day outages, but nothing over the fact that Jay Wilson was either too fucking stupid to come up with any improvements to Diablo so he decided to just sweep LoD under a rug, or so dismissive of you and me that he knew that even after ten years, he could release a game missing a shitload of features the previous Diablo had and it would still be a huge critical success.  Fuck, were the launch day outages planned deliberately for this reason?  I've already muted Diablo 3's music, may as well put on Requiem For a Dream and get carted off to a place where they will inject enough sodium pentathol into my diseased brain that I can treat Diablo 2 as a new game.

And while vanilla D2 had some serious fucking problems, it was at least a massive departure from the original Diablo.  Diablo 3's only gameplay differences from Diablo 2 are that we now have a horrible "link skill damage to weapon damage" system and now there are blinky lights to show you were attacks are coming.  I'm sure it sounded great in Wilson's head: "Now I don't have to worry about people placing a million points in a single skill, you can compare all the skills along a single horizontal line!" The problem is, as has already been found out LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER RELEASE, is that this tends to mean that the only attributes that really matter are your vitality, added damage bonuses, and the attribute for your class that adds bigger numbers to your DPS.  Which means you get shit like this.  And then shit like the comments, where a bunch of mongs go ARE YOU IN INFERNO DIDN'T THINK SO THOUGH THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NO RELEVANCE TO WHAT IS BEING SAID.

coming soon, skynet automatically arranges your bids by greatest contribution to the doomsday clock!

The upside to this is that if the numbers are right, and rares generally severely outclass legendaries, the real money auction house is going to be completely insane with overlapping markets of people wanting the maxx dps yellows intersecting with the dopey people wanting the pretty unique items, both constantly running into each other until value has no meaning and Blizzard has to shut down the markets at least once a week, like a wall street computer contemplating the ultimate fate of mankind.

Of course, the problem is that the fact remains that uniques, especially worthwhile uniques, are clearly going to exist either for people willing to spend money or the really lucky, so remember those rare but still numerous moments of Diablo 2 when a Ber rune dropped from a zombie or an Ethereal Herald of Zakarum was just chilling in a barrel?  Yeah, expect a closer experience to when you were running The Pit 1500 times and your biggest drop was a 4os Colossus Blade.  That is to say, item hunting is going to be less about the visceral thrill of finding brand name items and instead looking for items that are not hype, but mathematically really strongth.  I'll probably stockholm syndrome myself into dealing with this, but still, what a terrible fucking idea.

Of course, maybe I'll be pleasantly wrong, and Blizzard will realize "oh shit we just made this game into a dumber World of Warcraft let's make these impossible to find rare items sexily worth it."

hahaha

Other things of amusing note:

Blizzard didn't even bother to make a complete game, setting wise.  Sure, Act 1 and 4 are unique, but Act 2 is literally the same progression of settings as it was in Diablo 2.  Hey here's a desert city, here's some deserts, here's some mysterious tombs, here's a hub area to mysterious arcane ruins that run in entirely right angles.  They even added a killer bug tunnel, though to be fair, it is not nearly as obnoxious as the Maggot Lair was (did you feel a chill down your back as I typed that out, I did, let's bundle up closer).  The only real difference is that they removed the palace in place of (get ready) MORE SEWER LEVELS *confetti*.

remember me moohahaha

Act III is thankfully not cribbing from swampworld 64, but is instead just shamelessly rips from Act IV and V of Diablo 2.  They only new environment there were square tower floors which were fun until the dozenth iteration of it and you're just like "okay great I get it blizzard you made a new map idea here's a milkbone."

I'd also like to talk about the story.  Diablo 2's was not good literature, but at least there was a theme: failure and weakness.  You are basically always one step behind from stopping the destruction of mankind, Marius basically is a giant weakling unable to do anything despite having the chance to do so.  It's a downcast, simple story helped by the bleak, ugly visuals.

Compare this to Diablo 3, which has no real theme aside from "you are a giant retard badass."  The reason bad stuff happens in Diablo 3 is not because the Prime Evils are just a little faster than you, it's because they left a plate of cookies outside of town and you decided to eat them while all your friends are killed.  There is a  really important distinction between your character failing because of external factors rather than because he or she is incapable of making good decisions while constantly walking into stupidly obvious traps, and Chris Metzen has a six-figure salary because he cannot understand that.  Meanwhile, Marius has been replaced by a young girl with really weird breast physics, and in the classic new Blizzard style, everything is super pretty and ultimately meaningless during cutscenes.

If there's anything I genuinely like in Diablo 3, it's boss monster modifiers.  Baddy packs suddenly have alot of scary ways to kill you, as opposed to the Diablo 2 model of "nothing matters except lightning enchanted."  On the other hand, monsters themselves feel far less creative in their base abilities, especially by the end.  Sneaky coordination like Oblivion Knights casting Iron Maiden on you while you're busy killing their melee buddies is gone, as are the OH FUCK baddies such as Gloams which made Baal running terrifying for summonmancers.  Speaking of Baal running, there's zero areas of the game where enemies lineup changes for each game.  There was a certain anticipation during a run if you were going to get the configuration that favored your class, or if you were going to have to chug pots like a giant baby while running from those exploding skeleton dolls.  Now every area has the same monsters every single time, and while boss modifiers kind of alleviate this, it's not a complete equivalent exchange.

I'm still on the fence about character abilities.  I've been mostly playing the Witch Doctor despite my realization early on that there is no straight up viable summoner class, and while there's lots of neat abilities, even in pre-Inferno it's becoming obvious that some abilities are just incontrovertibly awful compared to others.  With the Witch Doctor, you are literally shooting yourself in the dick if you don't take the escape skill and the damage leech skill, and since you have those, you may as well take two other cooldown abilities so you can have the massive mana regen skill and then oh boy thousands of combinations!!!  This hopefully won't be such an issue with balance patches and, more importantly, the slow influx of godlike items allowing for more experimental builds, but I think if this review represents anything, it's the guarded hope of things being better no thanks to the actual developers.

So ultimately I have this game, and I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it and the expansions.  I'm not proud of this.  Actually, I'm really not proud of this.  But really, the first step of living a true life is accepting our bullshit tendencies towards self-destruction, so who cares?  I've got a boring 1000 DPS dagger to find before my journey will complete, and I can shoot myself in the head without any regrets.

Shoot Many Robots

First of all.

I think I've made the same observation before, but I'd really like to find the patient zero reviewer of this game that came up with the idea that Shoot Many Robots is like Metal Slug with multiplayer.  It's really an amazing hallmark of the game journalism landscape that literally every goddamned review I've read of this game is that same stupid idea, which just makes one wonder if any game reviewers actually played Metal Slug beyond just credit feeding past the first three stages of any of the games, or maybe just played the GBA version.  Or maybe it's something else that I can't think of because my brain pretty much froze at the concept that a game like this is JUST LIKE METAL SLUG.

Look, I understand you're lazy, and it might be hard to explain run and gun shooters to an audience of mongs that depend on arbitrary numbers to determine their cud-chewing opinions.  But saying Shoot Many Robots is like Metal Slug is like saying Castlevania is just like Mega Man.  Like, you're in stages, the A button makes you jump, and B button is what you use to kill your enemies.  Sometimes those enemies have different attack patterns, and there's platforms that might confuse you!

But here's the big thing:  there is already a sub-category of games that are about a million times closer to Shoot Many Robots than the Metal Slug series, and are probably played more anyway!  What I refer to are the literal fuckton of dumb shooter flash games.  You've probably played one, either on Kongregate or Armorgames or (if you're a 12-year-old babby) Newgrounds.  It's always the same shit, where you control your cool gun guy via WASD, and your mouse controls aiming, a little crosshairs roaming around while your cool gun guy's torso twists around in various disability check inducing manners in order to follow that gunsight.

Shoot Many Robots is basically that game, except ten dollars, a grinding mechanic, and marginal multiplayer.  But since I'm a complete idiot for the aforementioned dumb flash games, I sort of like it!

--

The thing that gets me the most about Shoot Many Robots's gameplay is the way turning works.  Basically, where your crosshair/cursor is determines where your guy is actually facing.  If you move in the opposite direction, your dude does a weird little backwards shuffle that will quickly result in you getting overrun.  I realize that the alternative would probably remove whatever challenge the game has, but I still find myself getting swarmed every so often because I tend to follow the path of the bullets than some teeny tiny red crosshair, especially because the game loves randomly zooming and panning, hurting my old man eyes and making me realize I will never be an MLG Pro Diablo 3 player.  Even worse is that the aiming, apparently due to it being originally for console, is imperfect at following the mouse.  Instead there's about 12 pre-defined directions the gun will fire in, being determined by where the cursor is closest.  This isn't a big deal most of the time since you're facing an endless stream of horizontal terror, but when the game throws out floating turrets and shit your only hope at a quick and non-embarrassing victory is jumping into the air and...shooting at them horizontally.

The core gameplay is thus:  two types of stages, one sort of side-scrolling with killer robots, one arena style overwhelm battels with waves of enemies.  There's a combo meter that reminds me of the shitty fucking combo meter from Metal Slug 4 which determine the amount of game money you make.  Game money is what allows you to buy equipment, which is the game's big selling point.  To be fair, there is a ton of pretty clothes and guns in the game with a ton of varied effects, but it falls into the same pits that pretty much any game with adjustable, level-restricted equipment* falls into:

1) You outlevel 95% of the equipment, and thus have no reason to ever get it or play with it to any meaningful degree, and
2) Of the 5% of that equipment remaining for the max level, 4% is completely useless compared to the remaining 1%.  The game doesn't even try to hide which are the best pieces, since they're the ones that are a million times more expensive than everything else.  Good thing there's a cash shop (unggggh)!

Maps are either recycled about a million times or they're so goddamned similar that I got confused.  There's about 4 types of enemies which are reskinned occasionally to hurt you a little more and take a few more gunshots.  You will never ever really need the secondary weapons that require ammo (I still use the ice beam I got near the start of the game, and have no regrets).  There are EXACTLY two bosses, which is really stupid in a genre that arguably depends more on quality boss fights than any other genre.

And yet, I still sort of like it.

A large part of this is because, while the game is mindless mush, it's still vaguely fun in a world where you can't even really find competent run and gun games anymore, and sometimes you don't want to 1cc Metal Slug X for the three dozeneth time or try to find the hidden meaning of Rush N' Attack.  Stuff blows up good, the idea of being able to punch back bullets is fun, and my brain is dumb enough to get a release of endorphin whenever a cool new gun drops for me.  There's so much wrong with this game, but for the most part I worry about breaking the fragile egg because look do you see any other eggs you dumb cock?  I'm aware of my being an indie apologist, but whatever, consistency is for dumb teenagers.

--

There's one thing I cannot logically argue myself around, though:  the fucking online multiplayer functionality.  It is 2012, how in the fuck does this game not have a lobby system of any sort?  If you want to play online with people, you are limited to playing with Steam Budz, or Quick Match.  What is Quick Match?  Most of the time, something you click that after five minutes of waiting, shunts you back to the menu screen.  If you're lucky enough to get in a game, you have an equal chance of the following:

1) Having everyone leave the game immediately
2) Going to a stage that you are way way too strong for while your teammates are severely underequipped, forcing you to hang back like a protective baby bear because the Shoot Many Robots community is fucking shit at these sorts of games
3) The opposite experience, where you end up hanging out with max level super equipped death dealers in an endgame level where it would take five minutes for you to kill anything, resulting in you getting tons of XP and superior equipment that you won't be able to equip until you reach max level.

I reached the level cap of 50 without playing a single game where I didn't feel I was either completely wasting my time or being a complete waste for my team.  Of course, this could have been solved by creating an open lobby system where you could start games on the stage you were designed to be on and other people could join up too, but I guess that would have required effort.  So now we have a game where you are either the powerleveller or the powerlevelled.