Fist of the North Star (1995)

It's no secret that snarky reviewers love to rip open adaptations.  Certain awful people have built their entire internet empires on making wacky faces in between random scenes from Super Mario Brothers.  There's even fairly obvious tiers to these films based on how many reviews of them there are where someone goes WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA, MY PRESHIOUS NOSTALGIA (mug, mug).  At the top you have stuff like the aforementioned Mario and Street Fighter, films that virtually every internet review king has to talk about at some point.  Then you have the second tier, films like Double Dragon and the entire oeuvre of Uwe Boll, which get their fair share of in-depth outrage.  Finally you get relatively unknown films such as Wing Commander or King of Fighters, films that have avoided the brunt of scorn either because the source material isn't as readily familiar to 13-year-olds, or because the movies are just really kind of dumb and forgettable.

All this being said, it's kind of shocking and depressing that Fist of the North Star seems to be at the bottom of attention, since in addition to the film being far more insane and terribad than the vast majority of film adaptations,  it also implies that not enough people have watched/read the source material.  And that really sucks.  Because YOU WA SHOCK is about a million times better than whatever the hell you watch.

So in the mid-90s, Tony Randel, a guy who got his start directing Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (a cash-in sequel that was surprisingly good in that it at least recognized that all we wanted was more skinned people and more Cenobites) and Ticks (I make no apologies for loving this movie) decided it was time to broaden his horizons and go film...a direct to video adaptation of an anime that only hardcore nerds were really aware of at this point (unless you had like 500 dollars to burn on VHS tapes with 3 episodes apiece, ah the good old days).  Or maybe "decided" is the wrong word, because if you look at Randel's output in other films versus what we have here, it's obvious that regardless of the understanding Randel had towards the source material, he clearly didn't give a flying fuck about it.

There's almost always two scenes in video game film adaptations.  One is where it's made really really clear that the director doesn't care about the actual video game plot.  It's when you have Yoshi appear as a tiny ass dinosaur that looks sad all the time, or when Wing Commander first utters the words "Pilgrim."  The other scene is where it is made really really clear that video game plots are too complicated for people that haven't actually played the game.  It's when the film just expects people to understand that a giant fat black lady in red is supposed to be something else, or why anyone would ever be named Abobo.

Fist of the North Star is notable because not only does it consolidate its hatred of fanboys and confused neophytes into a single scene, it is literally the second scene in the movie.  So let's break this down.

After the standard "THE WORLD IS RUIN, HELLO 20XX," opening narration, we see Admiral Tolwyn Malcolm McDowell playing Ryuken sitting in some ruined dojo.  Shin (played by Costas Mandylor, who you might know better as EVIL DETECTIVE HOFFMAN GOD I HATE SAW) walks in, there's some awkward talk about DO YOU KNOW YOUR MISSION AS WELL AS I DO YES I DO YOU MUST DIE.  Then McDowell plays his trump card of "well I'm Fist of the North Star and you're Southern Cross WE CAN NEVER FIGHT," which is the point when one half of the audience is like um why.  But then Shin states:

"This is not a fight.  It's an execution."

So let's review.  Not only does the movie immediately start throwing weird minutiae about competing fighting systems, it also features Ryuken dying to a fucking revolver.  Wielded by Shin.  Maybe this is being a little too fanboyish, but holy shit way to completely subvert everything about Fist of the North Star immediately. It's like the title crawl of a Final Fantasy VII remake talking about how Sephiroth was once a respected US Senator until someone spilled radioactive coffee on his crotch, and now he's an angry robot that wants to pull down Space Station Mir.  

But hey, I thought.  So they completely threw away any credibility within six minutes.  What are we really here for?  PEOPLE EXPLODING!  And at first, the movie seems to comply.  After some opening bullshit about the plucky little civilian town with fresh water (this being 1995, this water is highly coveted because all the rain has become ACID RAIN that burns the skin away), we see Kenshiro (played by Gary Daniels) seeking refuge at a nice couple's home that is naturally attacked by raiders.  As a result:

Pretty great, right?  Well, good news:  this never happens again!  Instead, the rest of the fights are standard mid-90s american kick punch affairs, on a technical level slightly higher than when pink ranger did splits to beat up putties.  I don't know if Daniels demanded more realistic fights to show off his kickboxing skills or the sfx budget ran out or what.  While it's disappointing, that's not even the dumbest part of this film.

Remember how in the early episodes of Fist of the North Star Kenshiro constantly ran away from trouble and let civilians get tortured/raped because he didn't want to fight?  I don't either, but apparently some joker spliced together neon genesis evangeleon scenes into the tapes the screenwriter used to write the film, because I have no other explanation as to why, aside from that early fight, Kenshiro does jack shit for two-thirds of the film.  My best guess is that the writer felt that they needed some DRAMATIC CHARACTER GROWTH, but why?  Is there anyone in the conceivable target audience that would not have preferred just a linear series of Kenshiro punching people?  Or maybe it was a way to justify having Malcolm McDowell on the cast, since he randomly appears as visions, possesses little girls, and even reanimates as a zombie (I'm not even joking here), all to constantly tell Kenshiro to "STOP BEING A PUSSY BRO."

All that exhorting doesn't really come to much, as when the good guy village is raided by Shin's bad guy corps (who pilot those little mini asian taxis, which are only slightly more intimidating than the floor cleaners in space mutiny), Kenshiro just sort of peeks out from behind rocks with wacky asian teenager sidekick.  Finally, after like 90% of the village has been raped to death, Kenshiro decides to attack the bad guy camp because he really feels bad and realizes that Julia is alive after all or something.  

So it's action time, right?  The early sequence was just a taste of what to come?  No.  Instead, all the other fights are quidessential 90's low budget kung fu sequences, where nobody ever seems to get hurt, just flipped over and over.  Or slapped.  Ken slapping people.

One of the few things worth noting about this film is the hidden contest between the two main actors trying to top each other in how little they care about the film.  Both actors just have the same dead faced glare, to the point that in the final confrontation, Shin is wearing some sort of rubber butcher's smock for the sole reason of giving us a chance of telling them apart.  Also for some reason the final fight room is accented by refrigerators with Gatorade bottles and Ajax boxes, which I'd like to believe is a commentary on materialism but considering the design decisions in the rest of the movie I refuse to postulate.

No, what I want to finish this review talking about is really the only memorable aspect: 

Yes, that's Chris "chubbiest of the Penns" Penn.  In the movie, his name is "Jackel," but make no mistake, that's Jagi.  He's no longer Kenshiro's brother, but has the same delightful sociopathic attitude and the same protection from a previous Ken Punch.  

Say what you will about what led Chris to accept the role of being an evil guy wearing belts around his head, he is the only remotely fun thing about this movie.  While everyone else in the film shuffles through their lines and looks embarrassed, Chris Penn...also looks embarrassed, but he's still charismatic as fuck about playing an evil rapedude.  The only highlight of the movie is Penn's speech to the rest of the raiders, which ends with "LET'S KILL SOME PEOPLE, AND LET'S ENJOY IT."  Of course, for being the only source of joy in the film, how does he get offed?  No doubt by another AWESOME SFX ATTATATATATA HEAD EXPLOSION right?

no he tries to rape julia in a giant clock or something and she rips off his belts and his head explodes

fist of the north star

Zoe Quinn, Turf Wars, and God You Are Stupid

So you may or may not have heard about the latest BIG GAMING SCANDAL to hit the shores of hell in the past few days.  I mean, of course you have, and if you haven't well then go on one of the three websites that haven't gone into full lockdown mode and read it up.  The only new thing I can add to the debacle itself is that I'm surprised no one's mentioned this on Sad Beta Cuckold's million word epic:

i mean, COME ON DUDE.

But no, I'm not exactly interested in directly talking about this.  Who is exactly surprised that the person with extreme depression issues might also have some other emotional issues bundled in?  Or that game sites, using said person as a icon for discrimination in the game world (which is still a real thing, sorry nerds) because she was LOUD and FEISTY about that discrimination, are now slightly leery about reporting that she could be less than perfectly moral? Or that the nerd boyfriend exercised the well known axiom of "fool me twenty dozen times, better obsessively categorize all the ways I got humiliated?"  Zounds, ya fucks.  The only amusement I get from this whole ordeal is the sputtering rage that nerds have over the fact that even VIDEO GAMES are not safe from the concept of "woman using sex to acquire power."

The only truth that needs to be said about this is how boringly this is going to be resolved.  That is to say, like every other conflict in history that has involved two zealot factions, everyone loses except those who control the zealots.  Zoe Quinn isn't going to suffer.  She's already posted a vague blob thing about "not negotiating with terrorists" while everyone she's allied to get all their personal information hacked into.  No doubt she already has an exit strategy planned out with a guest column on Kotaku within a week.  It won't be a good column, but it doesn't have to be.   All that needs is the all important subtext: "you have defended me well, my disciples, but the war continues."  Zoe gets her game Steam Greenlit, and receives pity money for her vague game jam project, while her followers get angrier and less connected with any sort of reality.

Meanwhile, you have the Angry White Nerds, who are going to rail at the FEMINIST MAJORITY via hour long videos and screech about DMCA complaints that have no real relevance to their rabid viewership.  All that matters on these videos is how long you can ramble about the hypocriticality of women, no matter how possibly weird some of their theories could be.  This is the sort of community that, when someone posted on King Chublord Internet Aristocrat's video "hey i think your points are mostly good but why are you yelling about Phil Fish's dumb ass come on" the resulting reaction was almost entirely "FUCKING SJW EAT MY DICK SALT SALT SALT."  People claim that the hate and invective are for the sake of "protecting my video games and video game journalism integrity," but of course anyone with goddamned eyes could tell you those ships have sailed since fundamentally forever.  Let's be fucking clear here: social justice did not destroy the video game industry, the video game industry destroyed the video game industry.

No, the real purpose of these videos is the all-important subtext: "you have fought for me well, my disciples, but the war continues."  The alpha nerds keep getting more and more views for their videos (no doubt leading towards some sort of weird monetization scheme like the Dude Frequency Kickstarter thing) while the rest of the lonely nerds get angrier and pretty well guarantee they will never get a fuck.

Does no one else realize at this point that the most entrenched Gamergate and Anti-Gamergate folks are for all intents and purposes the same horrible shitheels?  Both sides can't exist without the other, since without the other posting scurrilous and insane gender theories, the first side can't post their own scurrilous and insane gender theories as a refutation.  We're not in hugboxes anymore, we're in a fucking inverse echo chamber that is just getting louder.  Neither side actually wants to talk, but keep eating the same stale talking points posted on 4chan/tumblr about how the other side is trying to ruin everything about anything while their own faction just wants to have fun and play some video games.  Trying to determine shit like whether Zoe made up her initial harassment charge against nerds or not is fucking impossible.  The truth is obviously somewhere out in the No Man's Land, but venture over the bunkers and you're immediately gonna get artillerized by a nonstop barrage of 75mm imgur albums, each shriller than the last, until finally you're forced to go "jesus christ all of you fucking suck."  Nothing is going to bridge the divide.  The volleys between outrage culture and apology culture are just gonna keep popping up at a faster and faster frequency, like a bad science fiction movie.  Then we finally immanentize the eschaton, and I wake up one morning and my laptop is wearing lipstick and ripping my dick off because I made a joke about how much I love big titties without appending a paragraph about how important the woman attached to big titties are.

The weirdest part of this stupid mess is that the Sad Beta Cuckold's stated purpose for looking like the biggest bitch on Frolix 8 was his hope that it would...someone bring together serious talk among game enthusiasts and social justice warriors about morality?  Are you joking?  Like either he's being disingenuous like everyone else in this fucking mess, or we've got someone whose relationship towards the internet is like Wile E. Coyote's relationship with boulders.

At any rate I'm already sick of talking about this tldr: everyone in the Zoe Quinn Saga could be loaded into a giant brazen bull and nothing of value would be lost

also im sorry there's no pictures here but GISing for anything related to this mess is a surefire ticket to madness

The Chernobyl Diaries

There's a fantasy I like to have about The Chernobyl Diaries. 

Once it was just a nice little script.  Some aspiring, slightly dopey screenwriter that had watched Stalker while drunk and realized, in perhaps the most influential moment of his life, "hey, nobody has done a slasher movie INSIDE Chernobyl!"  He sets to work, watching a Discovery Channel documentary about the disaster, googling "Geiger Counter Ghostbusters Sigourney Weaver nude," and trying to come up with an interesting hook for the killer before throwing his hands up in the air and jotting down "ATOMIC MUTANT."  Eventually, the script it finished.  It's not really good, but there's some decent scare scenes, a boobie or two, and enough gore for those indie horror fans.  The script is shipped around, but there's not alot of interest, and eventually the screenwriter is exhausted of the whole process, vowing not to bother another bored talent scout with his dumb script ever again.

Six months later, there's a call.  Three hours later, our hero is in a comfortable office, talking to some so and so executive from Warner Brothers.  He loves the script, and thinks there's a good chance that it could become a feature move.  The executive leans forward and smiles, his teeth filed to pointed ends.  "There's just a few changes we'd like to make," he says as his hand goes around his chair, grabbing an ax with the words "PG-13" carved into the handle.

---

Of course, this is almost certainly not even close to the truth.  I don't want to admit it, but there's probably a ready corps of shitty screenwriters that have no problems with pumping out PG-13 horror for the film off-season.  The screenwriter didn't see Stalker, but instead thought that abandoned amusement park scene from Call of Duty 4 was so cool.  And Chernobyl Diaries isn't the worst film in that gang, but it really exemplifies everything that makes me hate current commercial horror films.

The first thing to know about The Chernobyl Diaries is that you absolutely should not watch it for a "so bad it's good" feeling.  This is because, for a movie that can't even muster a 90-minute running time, it takes just about an hour until something actually happens.  Until then, you're forced to watch a bunch of cis-white scum college fucks bumbling around Ukraine at large, then Chernobyl under the pretense of an EXTREME TOUR.  Despite the insinuation in the title that this might be some awful found footage thing, the film can't even muster that aside from some WACKY HIJINKS in the opening credits and one spooky scene found on a blooooody handheld caaaaaaaaaaameraaaaa which, even by the basement standards of the found footage trashboat, is so disorganized and clunky it's a good thing we just got standard cinematography for this shitheap.

None of the characters are remotely likeable, of course.  There's the sensible brother and the wild brother, the boring blonde engaged to the sensible brother, the brunette that the wild brother wants to bang.  Eventually this CORE GROUP is met by the boring Russian tour guide who naturally dies first, and some European mishmash couple or something who fucking cares.

Even when they get to Chernobyl for their big tour, nothing happens for awhile.  They walk through some abandoned house and see the spooky amusement park, then someone sees something but it's nothing and JESUS HAS IT BEEN 55 MINUTES ALREADY THIS MOVIE JUST ZOOMING BY.  The baddies eventually attack, but since this is a PG-13 movie and nobody knows how to make scenes creepy anymore, it's just jump cuts and blood stains on the floor.  There's a scene where one of the ladies is abducted by the marauding mutant men, and not found until about 15 minutes later, where she's clearly in emotional shock but still wearing all her clothes.  It takes a very special kind of movie which manages to both be extremely gross and yet deny the viewer his prurient pound of flesh.  Good job, Chernobyl Diaries!

There's just one more thing I want to say about Chernobyl Diaries before I can never think about this shitty film again, a thing that really encapsulates everything that needs to be said about it.

When the Bore Crew rolls into Chernobyl, they stop at some river or lake for a breather.  There's a failed jump scare, then someone throws a piece of jerky into the water for some reason.  They leave, but the camera stays on the beef jerky, before being PULLED UNDER THE WATER.  Sad to say, this is probably the closest thing this movie comes to actually being...anything really.  So what's the payoff for this set up, you ask?

Later on after the monster dudes have revealed themselves, the survivors are running away from about three small dogs (don't fucking ask), and have to cross a 20 foot river via a rotting footbridge.  The first few people make it across, but then a rung in the bridge breaks!  Some one falls off into knee-deep water! But no, the terror isn't over, because some underpaid intern is in the water making splashing noises while the actor screams in terror over something we can't see!  Then he wades across in five seconds, only to reveal that his leg was slightly scratched.

The Chernobyl Diaries.

Drakengard 3

I had a dream a few nights ago.

I met an old man by a road I had frequently crossed as a child.  He was a kind man, wearing a bomber jacket with a sick dragon on the sleeve.  No, a cool looking dragon, not a physically sick dragon.  I approached him.  What do you want, old man.

Give me your fucked video games.  I blink, and am about to speak, but he interrupts.

No, not edgy.  I don't want your gritty reimaginings, your oh so wacky this girl's a slut but she kicks ass too XD, your boring anti-hero that murders innocent bystanders because of Tragic Event X.

Give me your fucked video games.  I try to speak again, but the dragon comes to life within the jacket, and cuts me off.

No, not surreal.  Too well written, too much symbolism: I read enough thank you, your video game will never compare and it saddens me to see it try.

Give me your fucked up video games.  I raise my hands, my voice a beautiful contralto.

No, not dark.  I fucking hate rainstorms and piano solos.  Why are you showing me that.  Jesus.

---

Fucked up video games are a rare thing.  They are the products of a creative process gone horribly wrong.  They are rarely, if ever, something that would be called "good" in the sense that an average player will actually enjoy playing it in the hopes of a stimulus/response model.  Indeed, good gameplay usually mars the process, allowing the player another avenue of enjoyment rather than "LOOK AT THIS RETARDED SHIT."  They lack any sort of internal consistency, usually consisting of the developer sticking in as much random cool concepts as humanly possible, regardless if any of it makes sense if you take even one step back from the endless sensory overload.  The rareness draws from the fact that very few video game people have genuine creativity, and even fewer have an inability to corral that creativity into manageable form, and even when that happens, most studios have the uncanny ability to kill that psychotic spark so it becomes merely edgy, or dark.

There's only a few real examples of beautiful disasters in games.  Killer 7.  Xenosaga.  Alot of the more recent Modern Warfare games, once you realize that they embody the fever dreams of a million right wing conspiracy theorist, rolled into a deceptive "press X to stab terrorist" pastry.

Of course, the true embodiment of the fucked up video game catastrophe is Drakengard.  Released in the early 2000s, it is a dark fantasy tale about horrible people doing horrible things.  Most of the horrible people are your comrades, defined by "pacts" with various magical creatures that give them great powers at the expense of some human attribute, like "aging," or "sight," or "your womb."  The main character is a humongous asshole whose sister wants to bang him, and forms a pact with a dragon, depriving him of his voice.  Bad things ensue.

I played part of the game in college, but at the time did not make it very far.  The reason for this is that you could charitably describe the gameplay as "Dynasty Warriors 0.2."  Your guy runs around and murders hundreds of dudes in the exact same way.  Sometimes you get on the dragon and shoot fire at those dudes before random bullshit ranged enemies force you to stop using the dragon.  Repeat this for 20 hours.  Hi, I'm Drakengard.

As a result, you're forced to acknowledge everything else in a desperate attempt to justify the money you spent on the game.  In this regard, Drakengard does not disappoint.  The game's plotline was the product of a bunch of different people that clearly had wildly varying ideas of what the ultimate theme was supposed to be, so it's impossible to predict what the hell the game was going to throw your way next, unless your prediction is just "something bad."  This is especially true of the endings, which all fuck your hero over in various hilarious ways, especially the final one, which I won't spoil because your obnoxious hardcore nerd gamer friend probably sent you a youtube video of it five years ago.  It's unfortunate that the Western release of the game cut out the most surreal and 3dgy aspects of the game (such as your boring blind paladin actually being a HUGE PEDO), but honestly, the game we got was still insane enough to get a massive cult following.  This spawned the direct sequels of Drakengard 2, featuring the same awful gameplay and a far less ridiculous story, and Nier, which I haven't played so NO SPOILERS DICK BREATH.

Enter Drakengard 3.

You play the nerd boy fantasy magical girl Zero, a gal with a low cut outfit, uncomfortable fuck me heels, and a mysterious flower in her eye.  Her objective is to kill her five sisters, helpfully named Five through One, with the help of Mikhail, the childlike reincarnation of your previous dragon that was mortally wounded in the prior fight with your sista sistahs.  Unlike the hero of Drakengard, Zero can talk, and talk, and talk, usually about how much she hates everything and how she wants to fuck something.  Mikhail (whose english voice actor was so fucking bad that I had to install the Japanese voice pack) acts as her wacky foil.  Additional wacky foils are found as you murder each sister, in the form of the sisters' male disciples, all of which have one bizarre sexual hangup after another.

As you might assume from this brief summary, Drakengard 3 really really wants to return to old screwed up ways of the original, but one can tell that the various CRAZY TWISTS that happen through the story are less the result of the director and producer just making up shit as it goes along, and more a careful, deliberate attempt to make a game that's just messed up doooooooood!!!  Put another way, if Drakengard was the strange antihero that came out of nowhere and warped the minds of a bunch of nerds, then Drakengard 3 is the shadowy SQUARESOFT organization attempting to genetically engineer a superior version of the original duder.  Unfortunately, as any cheetos encrusted otaku can tell you, the vat-grown mutant clone of a hero might be able to put up a fight, but ultimately it's just gonna melt into a big hunk of goo and bones.

So this, I ask the beings on high:  what made Drakengard 3 melt?

The good news is that the game finally has workable gameplay!  Sort of!  Controls are definitely more responsive and fluid, and there are actual combos and weapon combinations!  You can use a sword, spear, chakram, or PUNCHFIST, and different weapons within each subset have different moves and attributes, so it's actually fun to experiment.  Dragon flying is better, and feels less like being the world's shittiest World War I pilot and more like Star Panzer Dragoon Fox 0.8.  Ranged enemies remain fucking horrible to deal with, and now you have lots more giant monster enemies whose combat patterns consist of "do obvious telegraphed attack, take ten second break."  If you ever get in trouble, you have INTONER MODE, which Drakengard 3's "oh shit" button, where you have ten seconds to mash on all the buttons and do big damage to all the bads around you.  There's a shit ton of boss fights, but mostly boil down to either 1) fighting a giant monster by headbutting them with a dragon until they reveal their weak spot, or 2) fighting an evil woman by cheesing them with whatever overpowered weapon you have at the time.

The biggest issue, gameplay wise, is that despite having enough time to release ~$30 DOLLARS~ worth of DLC, Square-Enix clearly didn't have enough time to release a game that was actually optimized for console.  It's been awhile since I've seen a full-price game with the array of technical problems that Drakengard 3 boasts.  Bizarre game glitches?  Framerate that drags down to the single digits if something more than a swung sword happens?  Cripplingly long loading screens after every major fight?  WE GOT THEM ALL.

There's a bevy of other issues, mostly related to the game's obviously slashed development time, but what really matters here is the story.

As stated above, the developers of Drakengard 3 really wanted to replicate the surreal, car-accident magic that was Drakengard.  And for a little while, it almost works.  The characters are almost entirely horrible, if not right malevolent, people, and there's enough death and destruction of innocents to make me smile.  A little.  There's also a shitload of my favorite meaningless video game feature, "bad guys screaming about how you're gonna wreck their butts."  I was hopeful, I admit it.

But after awhile, you start to realize that what you saw in the opening hours is pretty much all you're going to get.  Zero whines and verbally abuses her dragon, the soldiers yell about how unstoppable you are, a big monster appears and you whine about how much you want to kill it and leave this area.  A large part that made the original Drakengard was a glorious mindfuck in that it subverted your expectations of what the game was going to do next, plot wise.  Drakengard 3 plays a fairly pleasing tone at the start, but aside from a slight wrinkle in how it explains the differing endings, it's all painfully predictable.  Even when the game does a BIG TWIST, it's the sort of twist where you shrug and go "gasp, yeah, I guess."

A good example for this is the disciples.  Each of the four sisters has a male disciple that joins you once you murder them.  Gameplay-wise, they're supposed to be combat helpers, but I am not exaggerating when I think they killed one enemy during the entire playthrough.  So really they exist as an endless source of banter during the game, and at first they're pretty funny.  There's the innocent-looking boy that wants to murder everything, the old perverted guy with a big wang, the pretty boy that's an obnoxious awful idiot, and the good natured dude who also happens to be a complete and total masochist.  This leads to some decent exchanges at first, but ultimately they're so one-note in their motivations and reactions that you just roll your eyes when the boy says for the 500th time that he loves the look of gore on a decapitated head, or the old man says that Zero needs to bathe in the healing light of his cock.  The only character that remains amusing by the end of the game is the masochist, and while yeah it's partially because the Japanese VA's "unnnngh" sound whenever someone threatens to stomp his dick is hilarious, it's also because he reveals other character traits throughout the game besides "I like being hurt," which places him heads and shoulders about the other talking fetishbags in this game.

The diminished returns get worse once you beat the game for the first time, and alternative plot paths start to open up.  The downer alternative endings of Drakengard were the best part of the game, and while the designers clearly wanted to emulate that, the way that they're done is just so limp and unappealing that I had staked all my hopes on the final ending.  The game knew this, of course, forcing me to find all the weapons and suffer through what can only be described as the "Drakengard 3 anime-style beach filler episode" in order to unlock this path.

I'm going to describe this path.  Needless to say, ***big spoilers for both Drakengard 1 and 3***






The true final boss for Drakengard 1 was a two minute rhythm section where you had to nullify white and dark rings of energy coming at you from a lady statue with like colored rings from your dragon.  Needless to say, of course Drakengard 3's true final boss is also a rhythm section/lady statue!

That is seven minutes long!

Which forces you to hit a shit-ton of rings in a half second window of time!

And the camera is constantly obscuring your dragon and/or the lady statue, so you're utterly reliant on a laggy, unintuitive rhythm!

That's bad, because if you fuck up EVEN ONCE, you get to restart things all over again, including the simplistic three minute opening section that you won't have trouble with after passing it the first time, but will still force you to pay attention and boy will your eyeballs and hands hurt!!!!

Oh yeah!~

I forgot to mention that once you manage to get past all of this, the screen fades to black, and there's three more timed prompts you have to hit which have no rhythm market at all, including a final one WHILE YOUR DRAGON IS TALKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is me at age 14, little did i know i had perfectly anticipated my reaction to this fucking boss fight

The designers no doubt believed they were making a WACKY STATEMENT about the nature of super hard final bosses.  We live in a world of broadband internet and youtube, and so it was so no big surprise a user on Nico Nico immediately released a video that demonstrated each time you needed to hit the button.  With all that in mind, I still feel the need to say "fuck you, that was horrible."  There's nothing iconoclastic about testing your player's patience so far that even the proudest man is forced to get online to figure out how to cope with your bullshit rhythm mechanics.

So what is the TWIZTED reward for this?  For all intents and purposes, this:

I had expected some big cursory "SCREW YOU PLAYER" ending in the form of everyone dying a horrible death like the previous Drakengards, but no, it was basically "yay you saved everyone it's the ULTIMATE HAPPY ENDING ^_______^"  In a sense, it took an entire game to set up the payoff, but Drakengard 3 finally subverted how a vidya game should work, and destroyed everyone's expectations and hopes in the most smug, pug-pissy way possible.

---

Congrats, Drakengard 3.  You're a fucked up game after all.

The old man smiles, and walks into the distance.

Outlast (2013)

At this point in my blog, you may have noticed that a large portion of my cultural interests lie within the spheres of horror movies and vidja gaems.  Perhaps you, the random lurker, wonder why I don't talk about that cross-pollination of horror video game, especially considering that the demand for these titles has exploded in recent years.

It's because these games bore me.

Horror movies rarely, if ever, scare me.  I watch them for imagination, because they're a hotbed for new directorial talent, and boobies.  Horror games rarely tend to have these elements, and focus themselves squarely on the element of GET SCARED.  I'm probably too blase for my own good, but even the apparently TERRIFYING top tier titles like Amnesia were just a boring slog to me.  It doesn't help that the current crop of horror games deny the player any real means of fighting back, ostensibly because this heightens the tension, though any intelligent person could probably guess that it's alot easier for an indie firm to design a game when you don't need to have a balanced combat system.

Still, every so often I want to believe that a hyped horror game might have an effect on me beyond eyerolls and exasperated sighs.  Enter Outlast.

The framework for a million and one jump scares is that you're a journalist who gets a HOT TIP about a creepy sanitarium.  The gimmick for a million and one jump scares is that you have a camera which, provided you have enough battery life, can utilize night vision.  The reason for a million and one jump scares is because we love the scare cam lets plays, right????

Like every other modern horror game, Outlast operates in three different levels.  First, you have the exploration, when you're wandering a spooky area, soaking in ambiance and waiting for a spookum to jump out at you.  Second, you have the scripted "oh no he's after me" section, where a spookum wants to get ya and the only way to escape is by pressing spacebar over ten different desks and open windows!!!  Finally, you have the "find dumb shit" section.

You know this one, right?  Where you enter LAUNDRY ROOM C, and there's a door that won't open because the power is fluctuating?  And the only way to get out is to find the 3 circuit breakers/3 keys/3 light switches?  And while you're stumbling around down all these generic halls, there's a big bad that sometimes appears (STRING CRESCENDO) and you have to hide in a locker/closet/sewer pipe until he gets tired and leaves, unless you're too slow and then you spend two minutes running away, maybe getting hit but that's okay because regenerating health?  Yeah, you know this one.

To be fair, the first two modes on Outlast are decent, relatively speaking.  Unlike the turgid and opening-drawer-obsession of Amnesia, the exploration in Outlast is streamlined.  Almost every jump scare is hilariously telegraphed (OH A NARROW PASSAGEWAY I HAVE TO SCOOT THROUGH NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN HERE), and the settings are either dirty metal place or less dirty wooden place (with computers), but you generally know where you need to go and I didn't glitch through a wall, so okay.  Spooky chase mode is at least superficially engaging, by which I mean if you really shut down your brain the experience of pushing 'W' until you run into a thing you need to context-sensitive action over, it's fun for about four times, which is thankfully the number of times the designers put this in.

But the last part?  Christ.  I hated looking for the three buttons in Amnesia, the 45 papers in Slenderman 1-3341, and I still fucking hate it in Outlast.  The big issue is that unless you're some playing to the crowd scarecam baby, these sections are never scary, but always annoying.  Unless you're lucky, finding the trigger mechanisms to be able to leave the monster maze is a boring trial and error.  But oh no, the monster has found you!  What you can do in these situation is like the world's worst Choose Your Own Adventure Book.

You can hide in a locker.  The monster man might lumber in the room, utter one of three threatening lines about "gutting you you pig piggy man."  Early on, he might leave, despite him clearly following you to the room.  Later in the game, he might check the other locker in the room, then get tired and go back to his predetermined patrol routes.  If you're up against a BOSS MONSTER, he'll check both lockers, which means...

You can get hit.  The screen gets red and blurry, but as long as you don't get hit one or two times (depending on the ferocity of your worthy opponent), you can just ignore things, run away, and hopefully find another fucking locker to hide in.  Or....

You can just leave the patrol area.  Most the crazy house scavenger hunts have a starting "safe" area, where you can go but the psycho can't.  Call it not respecting the game's tone if you like, but I quickly learned the fastest way to get through these areas was running straight for the the objective regardless where the enemy was, taking the inevitable stab, then running back to the starting area and rolling your eyes when the psychotic murderer stares at you for five seconds, then shrugs his shoulders and lumbers back.  Repeat x2.

To be clear: I hated this game, but I hated it much less than other horror games I've slogged through.  The camera gimmick is mostly played well, and encourages exploration so you can stay topped off on batteries.  More noteworthy is that the crazy people stalking you are occasionally interesting and written well.

(spoilers for the rest of the review I guess)

The promotional materials for the game said that the backgrounds of the inmates were actually inspired by real psychological cases.  That sounds like bullshit, but some of the encounters are sort of engaging, at least beyond the typical "oh it's a guy and he wants to murder me, okay."  You're going to run into nude Russian twins that are remarkably calm and sarcastic about their desire to eat your liver.  There's a former corporate executive that talks about the invisible hand of capitalism while running around with giant scissors.  Your closest thing to an ally is a guy who was denied fingerpainting therapy, developed a religious obsession, and now draws directions on the wall with blood.  It's not exactly good writing, but for most of the game I could tolerate the shit gameplay to see what the next crazy could be.

So it's a fucking shame that the final act of the game is so mind-melting stupid.  Eventually you discover, in true Resident Evil fashion, that asylum houses a GIANT TECHNO LAB.  What is in the lab is the thing that all the inmates fear, the "Walrider," something that I guess was meant to sound German and intimidating but instead always made me think of something out of a Christian children's programming cartoon, about a magical guy that rides on walls with a magic skateboard and helps prevent masturbation by 11-year-olds.

So in this game that was previously about a guy exploring a hellish asylum filled with murder and madness, what is the Walrider?  It is a nanomachine ghost cloud spawned by the bad dreams of a six-year-old psychic boy.  To say I was a little nonplussed that the eventual payoff for all the crapass gameplay I went through was "Hideaki Anno's Metal Gear Ghostbusters" is a fair observation.

I'm probably not going to get the DLC for this game.

On Bioshock Infinite and the FPS Weapon Limitations

For awhile, I considered writing a review of Bioshock Infinite.  The game is shit, but honestly I wondered if there was any point in my saying it's shit.  A crapton of game journos have written million-word screeds about how the game is bad and how every traditional game review site should feel bad for loving Elizabeth.  I try to not cover topics that have been beaten to death, so I shrugged and assumed the zero people reading this blog would assume that I hated the game.

But I was talking with a friend about the game a few days ago, and I realized that for all the plethora of hate that people have plied on Levine's artgame baby, most of them barely covered or just straight up ignored the thing that absolutely pissed me off the most about Bioshock Infinite: The Two Weapon Limit.  Or rather, the most horribly implemented Two Weapon Limit ever implemented.

it was a good way to die.

FPS wasn't always like this.  I remember playing Doom as a kid, and giddily hitting the 1 through 7 keys to check out all the ways to murder monsters.  The early FPS existed as a non-stop murder fest, where you learned the best weapon for the best situation, switching from one to another with gleeful efficiency.  There was a downside, of course: unless the game flooded you with monsters, generally about halfway through any FPS you became a walking nonstop armory, using your best weapons on trash because otherwise you weren't going to be able to pick up that ammo.  Games like Half-Life became an obsessive compulsive nightmare for me, since I couldn't handle not having full ammo on every gun, but also couldn't handle leaving VALUABLE AMMO behind.

Still, things were good for awhile.  Then came HALO.

I should be clear:  Halo deserves hate for directly leading to what I had to deal with in Bioshock Infinite, but ironically Halo, despite being the first game to go "you can pick this gun, but then you can't use this one," was probably the best one to use this system.  Why was this?  Simply put, the developers designed the weapons to naturally induce players to experiment, while never frustrating them with a shitty weapon combo situation.

a typical halo gun value decision

A big part of this was that all the weapons in Halo can be divided into two fields: human weapons and alien weapons.  Human weapons were a little more effective than those of the aliens, but since you were fighting on an alien planet, finding extra ammo for these weapons was always slightly spotty.  The upside (and this is important) was that human weapons also had a deep ammo capacity for the most part; the assault rifle held something like 780 bullets max.  On the other hand, alien weapons were weaker and ran out of their ammo quickly, but there was almost always a new or slightly used plasma gun to pick up when you needed to finish over stragglers from a large engagement.

The level and weapon design worked together to encourage players to experiment, while never forcing them to abandon a favorite weapon for too long.  When I see people play Halo, they tend to stick with a favored human weapon, while using the second slot for a backup alien weapon.  If there was a situation where a specific weapon was REALLY important to use (such as the FUCKING LIBRARY) the game usually threw more than one of that specific weapon to make sure you would pick it up.  You'd be forced to abandon one weapon or another from your generic arsenal, but unless you were playing at the hardest difficulty, usually the experience didn't detract from whatever enjoyment you were feeling.

Since Halo, the FPS has been pretty split between giving the player all the goddamned weapons he wants, and imposing some sort of a limit.  The best of the latter, like FEAR, try to make up for the loss of total player choice with some sort of strategic depth, giving enough ammo depth and drops that you can use the weapons you like while encouraging the spotty use of other weapons at appropriate situations.  In addition, such games usually tried to make it so regardless of the weapon combinations you held, you would be able to handle yourself in any situation provided you had the gamer skills to adapt.

pictured: a rare example of swapping done right

So here's Bioshock Infinite, a game that cost ONE HUNDRED MILLION to develop.  How does it handle weapons, at least on hard mode?  JESUS FUCKING CHRIST IT'S SO BAD.

So first, you only get two weapons at a time.  I don't know why this is a thing, especially since there's about a dozen weapons total.  Oh wait actually I do, because they wanted people to use all the PLASMIDS VIGORS, despite the fact that there was literally two good combat plasmids and the rest are pretty much dumb trash that only exist to prolong any engagement.

So the two weapon thing wouldn't be so bad, except for some reason despite all the money, everyone thought that what players wanted was weapons with the fucking wimpiest ammo capacities I have ever seen.  I was agape when, about two hours into the game, I opened a garbage can and saw "AMMO FULL" for machine gun ammo.  The machine gun that had about 180 bullets total in it.  WHAT THE FUCK, I said, HOW IS THAT FULL?  Elizabeth chuckles, slipping her hand into the waistband of her frock: Sorry Booker, I can't find any ammo right now....

i luv sponges

Every weapon is like this.  That is to say, on hard mode, any gun you have will go from maxed out to completely empty in 1.5 firefights.  It doesn't help that ammo pickups are usually completely pathetic, and I have never played an FPS that loves to throw boring bullet sponge enemies to the degree that Bioshock Infinite does.  Memo to FPS designers of the future: no one likes to fight the bad guy that requires you to hold down the fire button for ten seconds, especially when said bad guy is appearing every three minutes.  The only saving grace is that you at least are able to hold onto ammo for guns you aren't carrying anymore, so after a few more battles you'll maybe be able to use the guns you like again with full capacity!!!


I know what the game is trying to do, of course.  The combat specialists wanted to foster a TOTAL BATTLE EXPERIENCE, where the player is forced to use every weapon and spell at his/her disposal to get through the battle, like we're in a Cowboy Bebop toot a toot toot.  Of course, this is a fucking failure for a few reasons:

1) It's STUPID AS SHIT to force a player to switch their weapons out all the time.  Players develop attachments towards certain guns, and making me drop the carbine I'm making MLG360 headshots in the middle of a battle so I can pick up the garbage grenade launcher isn't fun, it's a fucking drag.

2) It's especially STUPID AS SHIT to do this when the game lets you upgrade your weapons.  Usually weapon upgrades would mean you can customize your absolute favorite weapons to really cause some carnage on the battlefield.  However, since in Bioshock Infinite you'll never get to hold onto a given gun more than a quarter of time, you're instead forced to budget your money to slightly upgrade every goddamned gun in the game.  Naturally, the upgrades also include ammo capacity, so you're gonna have to wait even longer before you start doing more damage.  As a result, the Bioshock Infinite game experience is less of being a MURDER KING MAXIMUS, and more like a guy with 12 half-filled Supersoakers against a bunch of cannon-fodder and a sentient raincoat.

3) Most importantly, even on hard, despite all this shit, combat is PISS EASY.  Aside from GHOOOOOOST MOOOOOOM, every fight in the game is a cold piece of cornbread, where you shoot a bunch of guys in the head (MUSIC SWELL) and then spend the next two minutes wandering from body to body in the hopes you can hold onto your weapon just a little bit longer, because otherwise you're gonna have to pick up that shotgun and we don't want that do we??

a million dollar garbage bin

I guess that's all I want to say.  I'd probably still hate Bioshock Infinite if they hadn't dropped the ball so spectacularly on one of the most core concepts of the FPS genre, but with it, it makes me want to die that this is the game we're supposed to love.

You're Next (2013)

You're Next is the first movie I've seen that feels like a modern incarnation of the modern slasher.  I know that sounds either retarded or aintitcoolnews level over-laudatory, but hear me out.  Every slasher film I've seen in the past decade can be placed into two neat little categories:

1) The always gory, occasionally emotionally punishing painfest where the focus lays less on a body county or cheap rubber masks and more on how many shots of a crying girl being stalked can be inserted into a 100-minute running time.
2) The dogmatically slavish to form "old school" slasher film, which usually plods around like Halloween was released a year ago except that's plenty of time to make winking "ha ha slashers" jokes at the audience while usually completely failing to be even remotely good.

What I liked about You're Next is that it feel like a natural evolution of the slasher, without rubbing the audience's nose in WHOA MODERNITY 9/11 NO ONE IS SAFE ANYMORE that enormous retards like Eli Roth think represent interesting horror theories.  That isn't to say there isn't a relevant theme (that being an outsider being confronted with the easy opulence of the rich), but it's subtle and you can enjoy the movie without even having to pay attention to the director's BIG IMPORTANT POINT.  

The plot is simple enough: qt girl goes with schulmphy dude to meet his rich parents, who are having big family gathering, home invasion occurs, twists, etc.  The bloodless character development goes for about thirty minutes, which does a good job in setting up stereotypes and preconceptions that are (usually) shaped and changed throughout the movies.  The family members are rich and wallowing in various degrees of self-interest, but thankfully it's not another lazy "blah blah rich bad one percent kill all bankers" garbo tour.   The director, Adam Wingard, had a background in mumblecore films, and while I FUCKING HATE THOSE MOVIES JESUS CHRIST it actually is a benefit to You're Next, since the interminable dialogue that is set before us at the start is prefixed on the notion that we will not have to suffer through it for the entirety of the film.  Stuff WILL happen.

And happen it does.  Once the eventual throwdown occurs, the large amount of people gathered at the house means that the plot is a nonstop killbath (gore, for better or worse, is fairly muted).  The twists, once the initial one is realized, are fairly standard and predictable for a veteran horror nerd, but I've at least ascended past watching horror for gasps, I just want a stable follow through.

(I guess I should say SPOILERS here, so if you want to remain pure just assume that I really liked the film)

The big surprise of the film for me was the resilience and likability of the prerequisite "final girl."  I had read the reviews that spoiled that she was tougher than most, and had read that to mean that she was in the vein of final girls that magically GETS TUFF in the final act, which is to say she throws an axe at the bad man or something useless like that.

In actuality, her behavior is "cathartic horror movie veteran soothing."  For the first time I can remember in a long while, when the bad man is knocked down, the heroine actually goes to town on him, viciously stabbing him to death.  It feels weird to cheer for stuff like this, but after 20+ years of seeing the knocked out clown murdermonster just being left to chill in an unsupervised room, it's nice to see good old american LOGIC being applied in this situation.  The explanation for her sudden shift into survival mode strains credulity a tad, but honestly I've been so fucking sick of "the invincible rapist invader king" trope that seeing some sadistic murderers getting dropped in effectiveness from "merchants of fear and suffering" to "slightly more dangerous than the robbers from Home Alone"  warmed my hateful little heart.

Ti West is also immediately murdered, which is pretty good catharsis from sitting through his segment from V/H/S.

So yes, You're Next is a genuinely good horror movie and it's a bizarre shame that good'uns like this and Trick 'R Treat spend years in distribution hell while fucking World War Z get a million screen showing before immediately getting incinerated in the DVD bins.


PS: this film also gets the "Was Never A Fan" award for Best Use of Student Loan Debt in Black Humor.  Congrats!

Diablo 3: REAPER OF SOULZ

Previously, on Was Never a Fan:

"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."

Prior to Reaper of Souls coming out, I made a joke to some friends that "HAW HAW HAW I AIN'T GONNA BUY THAT DUMB XPAC BECAUSE I WOULD BE PAYING BLIZZ THREE DIGITS MONEY HAHAHA AM I RIGHT???"  They all chuckled because they knew as well as I did that despite the fact that Diablo 3 was probably the most shitty disappointing thing I played in years, I was still going to get the expansion because it was Diablo.  All I could do was grab my ankles and hope that something had been done since my Witch Doctor was lying in a sand gutter, riddled with tiny mosquito bullets.

Here's the amazing thing.  Reaper of Souls is not terrible.  In fact, it is genuinely good.  The reason for this is that unlike every stupid game I've played recently, RoS actually recognizes the shortcomings of its platform and embraces the essential stupidity of the loot hunt.

The story is IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR STORY IS DIABLO 3.  The only thing that deserves to be said about Act V is that the final map, which is a return to the Pandemonium Fortress.  You might remember it as the staging area in Act IV of Diablo 2, but now it's a full dungeon.  A dungeon that was modelled on The Arcane Sanctuary.  If you played Diablo 2, that sound you hear is your soul screaming in agony.  For those that aren't hip to the lingo, the Arcane Sanctuary was 5000 miles of single lane monster traffic, three out of four possible paths going absolutely nowhere, grey and tiley and a background of black because SPACE or something.

So, on the positive side, they removed the three dead end paths for Panda Fortress 2.0.  On the negative side:

• They added some delightful portal/door things that randomly turn on and freeze you in place for a good five seconds for no other reason than Blizzard somehow felt that the core Diablo concept of "run constantly unless you're killing monsters" needed to be shaken up.  
• The monster placement is 95% "two monsters that randomly pop up and will follow you to the goddamned ends of the earth so you better waste your time and kill them :D"
• The colorization is gray on gray on gray.  Also lightning flashes i think.

The story mode is pretty dumb.  But that's okay, because Blizzard did something I've rarely seen any game company do: they recognized their base game was total shit.  

I can't overemphasize how fucking happy I am that the Auction House is completely dead.  In it's place, Reaper of Soulz now has Loot 2.0, which at its core is "stat distribution on drops is now heavily weighted to the present class you are playing, also legendaries are not fucking impossible to find."  The faustian tradeoff of this fucking item bonanza is that unless someone is in your party when a legendary drops, it is bound to your account.  Alot of reddit fags are bitchy about this, and while I miss my days of Diablo 2 wheeling and dealing, I don't really have a problem with Diablo 3 being far more single-player oriented.  Well actually I do, but it's not for that reason.  Dot dot dot.

To explain why I'm mostly okay with the Reaper of Souls method of the loot grind, one has to look at the average experience of whenever I started a new ladder season on Diablo 2.  

1) First, I made a necromancer.  

2) I'd grind that necromancer to Hell difficulty.  Depending on my drops, I'd either be able to start slowly plinking away at Act 1, or spend several hours on Nightmare killing Mephisto until my resistances weren't at -400.

3) Eventually I'd be able to sort of farm bosses.  Since I always start off with a summon-based Necro, my farming speed would be entirely dependent on how cooperative my skeletons were being.  Farm Den of Evil, Farm Prindleskin, Farm Baal, Farm Andariel, Farm Mephisto.  Repeat hours upon hours of painfully slow killing.  Hoard a bunch of gems and trade on B.Net or trading boards for chump change equipment upgrades so I could murder Baal a half-second faster.

4) Usually from some garbage mob I offhandedly smacked, would fall The Item.  A socketed ethereal Herald of Zakarum.  The 40% damage/15% IAS jewel.  I wander into the market, brandishing it.  I spy the merchant with the Ber and Jah Rune.  The offer is made.

5) Regardless of whatever else I have, with Enigma my killing speed goes up a threefold.  Now I can farm in earnest, racking up rare item after rare item.  Eventually I'm able to build up enough material wealth to start fitting a second character.  He wanders out into the world, bankrolled by my necromancer.  Life is good.  Empty, but good.

Here's the thing.  Not even discussing the trading, which was always risky regardless of whatever board you used (or god help you, WUG WUW), most characters you played were dependent on just a few items in order to play effectively.  If you didn't have those items, playing Diablo 2 on Hell Difficulty was just a fucking boring disaster.  And you almost always had to trade, since even if you found a decent item for your class, it had to be something that fit your build, since until the twilight years of the game, there was no respeccing.  On some ladders, I found the rare items I needed to put together an Enigma in a few weeks.  One ladder took me several months.

To put things another way, Diablo 2 resembles an old-time slot machine.  One day you may get the jackpot, but generally the gameplay experience was KACHUNK KACHUNK whoo whoo whoo *FAILURE*.  Of course, this was superior to the vanilla Diablo 3 experience, which was a slot machine that electrocuted you every time you touched the lever, and deposited chips which required a doctorate thesis in order to determine their true value.

By comparison, Reaper of Souls is a pachinko machine.  By that I mean that while the ultimate goal remains the jackpot, there's alot more going on between the time you're a fresh-eared welp and when you're basically able to kill anything by blinking. And while alot of the sturm and drang is ultimately empty, it's still entertaining and distracting, and that's all I want in my Diabolololo.

A large part of the appeal is the more noticeable powering up of your character.  The fact that items are now heavily weighted to roll for what your character could conceivably want means that, at least starting out, you will regularly find items that, little by emasculating little, raise your damage and survivability.  You'll get alot of legendary items, and while most are bland stat sticks, some have neat little effects that you can play with.  Finally, being able to respec your character's skills is actually interesting!  My witch doctor throughout the course of the game has transmogrified from a poison-based aoe nuker to a quasi pet/close ranged fire tank to a sit on my hands and watch some dots babyman to the promised land of full pets being able to murder anything better than I could ever accomplish by myself.  You can also actually reroll a single stat of any item, which I'm sure makes purists scream in agony but finally makes the thin stab of pain when the set helm you've spent 10 hours farming for has a key stat roll of exactly the lowest number possible much more bearable.  Difficulty levels have also been evened out to an absurd degree, culminating in Inferno being replaced with TORMENT, which is subdivided into six different strata, each progressively tougher than the last but also with better item drops.

Grinding is also less of a fucking soul destroying task from the Vanilla days, when loot runs were doing the boss monster of the last Act you're able to handle on Inferno mode over and over and over.  Now we have Adventure Mode, where your characters goes on bite-sized quests around the game maps, the completion of five of these quests giving you a loot box which contains RIFT KEYZ (and other stupid things).  KEYZ are used to open Nephilim Rifts, which are randomized maps filled with randomized enemy selections.  Kill enough enemies, and a big bad boss appears.  Kill him, you can get BLOOD SHARDZ, which are used to gamble for specific pieces of armor.  It's a tidy little ecosystem, and one that lets the player engage in bite-sized pieces of joy.

So where am I going to complain?  There are still lots of problems, though most seem to at least be recognized by Blizzard as the game is progressing and patches get shit out.  Alot of legendaries are still crap, but there's a gradual move away from that, and there's always going to be best in slot items, and there's always going to be garbage legendaries that exist purely to be destroyed.  Early on, certain Rifts were like a I Am Legend Simulator in terms of monster density, but that's been mostly fixed.  Hell, Blizzard even removed the Pandamonium Fortress map from the possible rift map pool.

No, my big issue is simple.  Think back to my description of the Diablo 2 Farm Journey.  There, when you had your god character, you farmed to be able to gear out new adventure dudes and dudettes.  However, Reaper of Souls presents a big fucking problem here.  Loot 2.0, while great when you're building a character, is not so great when that character is built, since 75% of all drops are designed for your character.  Put another way, when you're in the ultimate Torment level and killing everything without a problems, you are for all intents basically done with that character unless for whatever surreal reason you're wanting to make another character in the same class.  I'm almost-not-quite at that level, but it's sort of depressing me that once I reach that level, my options are:

A) Be like those weird streamers that still farm at the highest level so they can possible get a new version of the best in slot item that already have with +4 more vitality
B) Roll a new character and start the grind nightmare all over again.

Blizzard obviously recognizes this problem and is planning to reintroduce ladders where everyone starts from scratch, but this seems pretty goddamned silly, to say the least.  So this is where the dumb nerd with zero game design experience suggest something that, for whatever reason, I have not seen anyone else offer:

Give an option to remove Loot 2.0.

By this I mean making it so any legendary that drops (aside from those set and class-specific items) can roll any stat combination.  This would result in alot of the same retarded garbage that I had to wade through in vanilla D3, and that's the point.  This would be something that only completely pimped out characters would use and get any sort of farming efficiency out of, giving them a chance to find that powerful item to stick on a new character so they wouldn't waste ten hours in the kiddy pool before graduating to Torment school.

It's weird to say it, but I actually have high hopes for Reaper of Souls.  If anything, Blizzard actually seems to have figured out the Élan vital of loot grinds, and while it's fucking absurd that it took a hundred dollars to get there, at least we're there.

Pacific Rim (2013)

Here's a leading question.  Do you remember Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

More than likely, probably not.  There was Jude Law, right?  It was a steampunk thing?  If you're really canny, you might remember the trivia that it was the first fully greenscreened film.  I remember every nerd ten years ago was so hot to watch it based off the trailer that made it look like some sort of awesome Nazi Robot fighting airplanes unnngh film, but when watching it on opening night it was just so many ppl talking and the Nazi Robots had like 10 whole minutes.  Critics loved it, but I can't remember another big-budget science fiction film that dried up so quickly in the public remembrance.  I sure as hell completely forgot about the film until I watched the first ten minutes of Pacific Rim.  Hearing our bland white man narrator say "back in the day there was the RIM, and then MONSTERS" had me suddenly forced back into the uncomfortable theater seat, my mind decaying as I worried about my freshman year of college and wondered when the fuck Halle Berry was going to show up.

Oh, sure.  Just because there's CGI and big budgets you think there's some sort of

well look that doesn't mean

okay, this is a little unfair.  After all, Sky Captain relied alot on star power to bring people to the theaters, while the only people I recognized in Pacific Rim were the also-ran actors that nerds point at and say "hey, it's that guy!"  Hey, it's Ron Perlman as a steampunk!  Hey, it's Charlie Day being Charlie Kelly!  Hey, it's Idris Elba looking more uncomfortable as the tough but fair military commander than he did when that white girl was trying to suck his dick in Obsessed!  Seriously, I know I often remark on actors looking not too happy to be playing a particular role, but holy shit Ser Elba does not look happy in this movie.  They can't all be Prometheus, champ.  Suck it up.

So Pacific Rim is Guillermo Del Toro's big nerd epic, the culmination of a billion internet shits jizzing over every SUPERMAN VS THE TERMINATOR fan film released on Youtube.  It's Godzillas vs the Megazord, it's an American Neon Genesis Evangelion (though not too American because we need that international box office papuh), it's the celebration of special effects uber alles.  And yes, the effects are really nice, spectacular even, but I'm in an age where spectacular shit is goddamned everywhere and I'd be alot happier with a plot that didn't lurch around like a drunk guy in a kaiju suit.

Much like how Sky Captain tried to blanket itself from criticism with the concept that its inherent problems were because it was supposed to be like a OLD TIMEY RADIO SERIAL, alot of defenders of Pacific Rim have fallen back on the concept that "it's like Voltron maaaaaan, did you get mad at Voltron?"  And of course I didn't, because I was like six years old and didn't understand anything, except that I hated those smug assholes in Voltron and wanted Planet Doom to kill everything.  I understand that, when the robot finally draws out its sword after ineffectually punching the monster, it's not a plot hole, it's a wacky home-age.

But here's the thing.  The vast majority of the film's influences were episodic things.  The plotlines of these shows were distracting loops, where the heroes have to defeat some prime bad, and the series finale (if there even is one, thanks G-Force) is just sort of the final culmination.  Pacific Rim doesn't feel like an episode of an awesome cartoon, it feels like one of those awful edited movie versions of an awesome cartoon.  You know, where the pilot episode and series finale are awkwardly spliced together with random scenes from other episodes, maybe some exclusive scenes of characters catching up the audience with shit that was happening off screen?  These movies were terrible because episodic kid shows aren't designed to have plot arcs that can sustain a two hour running length.  And look, here's Pacific Rim. 

I can't really hate on this movie, but that's mostly due to the fact that, aside from the visuals, they made everything so bland that it's hard to react to anything.  The dialogue is usually merely clunky (there should be a law against people saying "power move"), the only noteworthy moment when Idris Elba is forced on stage to deliver a "final showdown" speech that really demonstrates why people should give more credit to Independence Day.  Characters are pretty much separated by accents, including the sole female character, who was clearly designed to be a strong feminist symbol by having zero identifiable personality traits aside from the fact that she suffered a Trauma and now is going to Get Over It.  

I doubt Pacific Rim will be as forgotten as Sky Captain was, if just for the fact that the Internet has evolved fandom into such a self-serving mess that nothing nerd related will ever be forgotten by shrill idiots.  But everything about that movie is already fading into the pop-culture aether in my mind, and I'm totally okay with that.

Overthinking Terrible: Kingdoms of Amalur

Ugh.

I tried playing this game once before, but it was at a good time in my life, and that's the worst frame of mind when playing Kingdom of Amalur.  No, you need to be incredibly depressed, worn down, just utterly destroyed to put up with the utter bullshit this game throws at you.  So when I had to deal with one of the worst periods of my life, I knew just the game to play.

The plot of was written by R.A. Salvatore, a dude primarily known for having his dumb fantasy shit clogging the shelves at every used bookstore I've visited.   You're a dude in the middle of some epic war between the mortal races (humans and sexy elves) and the Tuatha Fae, who are evil and have sinister glowing red swords.  The Tuatha are evil perversions of regular Fae, who are plant/human hybrids (not in a cool way like roots growing out of your dick, but like someone painted your face green and glued cardboard flower petals to your shoulders) and basically do nothing the entire game.  The obligatory boring variable that distinguishes this turgid BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL is that apparently everyone has a predestined fate except you, because your dumbass got kilt but was brought back by the WELL OF SOULS (just don't fucking ask).  Needless to say, since this is R.A. Salvatore and not Philip K. Dick, the sole way this plot device is used is your FATELESS HERO blunders into scenarios constantly and changes someone's bad fate to a happy fate.

I don't even want to talk about the sexxxy fanservice elf.

Kingdoms of Amalur was originally designed as an MMO, and it really shows.  In between the long stretches of actual plot advancement, you will run into a million yellow exclamation points denoting various side missions.  There's the big boi "faction missions" which feature your character stumbling into such ORIGINAL groups as a MERCENARY COMPANY, a SCHOOL FOR MAGES, and A THIEVES GUILD, each time going up the corporate ladder faster than a CEO's nephew and saving your incompetent coworkers from certain death.  There's the multiquest location missions which usually involve going into three caves to fight monsters and find a thing, maybe culminating in killing a boss.  There's regular missions which usually involve you going into one cave to find a thing.  There's also tasks, which are repeatable missions, which if you make the mistake of accepting lead to you picking up things that rapidly fill up your inventory for the purpose of getting money, which becomes a total non-issue about five hours into the game.

And let me tell you, inventory space is sacred in Amalur.  Almost everything you pick up takes up a single inventory space.  You get about 100 such spaces which wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't make it so you tripped over a chest every five meters.  You can send items to the trashbox, but it's a blow to whatever fun this game has that you have to manage your inventory every two minutes to dump out the 34 azurite longswords you just picked up.  While it's true that alot of modern rpgs still latch on to this stupid mechanic, at least I could console command ~player.modav carryweightfuvefuckingmillion in most of them

There are other aspects compounding the inventory problem.  If you decide to throw out a bunch of useless potions (oh boy a 10 second minute boost to my fire resistance), the game simply compensates by having those same useless potions appear in every subsequent chest you loot, usually until you have like 11 or 12 of every stupid flavor.  And why yes, the game does manage potion stacks in groups of 10, how did you guess? If you accept quests, you'll tend to gain a bunch of stupid quest items that of course count towards your inventory total, and you can never destroy them no matter how much you want to.  Even better, some of those same items don't actually go away when you finish the quest, so you'll always remember that time someone gave me a useless ring for killing some kobolds.

add to junk?  not in this town, fucko

In between quests, there's...not much to really do in Amalur.  Exploration is pretty dull, especially since the game drills into you early on that any cave or dungeon you see is gonna have a quest attached to it, and believe me you do NOT want to run through any of these dungeons again.  For the sheer amount of precious lifeforce that Amalur demands from you (70 hours, jesus CHRIST), the excitement coming from new discoveries dries up in about five hours.  I'm not a big fan of The Elder Scrolls series, but it succeeds at driving the player forward, always promising one new diversion if you just walk a little further.  The biggest diversion in Amalur is listening to NPCs.

It's frankly terrifying how many voiced lines they stuffed into Amalur.  You will run into at least a half-dozen named dipshits in every vague settlement, and they all have shit to say.  The problem is that most of the shit is the most extraneous boring garbage imaginable.  Every, and I mean EVERY, voiced NPC will have a dialogue option about the area they're living in.  I made a point to actually listen to these both as a fuck-you to the inexorable march of time and because I felt bad for the intern that was obviously tasked with writing all of this horrible crap.  God knows, I would have had a nervous breakdown after my hundredth variation on how qt elf girl feels about Generic Mining Hellhole #342.  After awhile, it was the most hypnotizing and comforting part of this shit game: the knowledge that wherever I went, someone would be there jabbering about their hometown and how "it's got it's bad'uns, but overahl it's a good lot, just wish the giant spiders would go away."  When you play a 80-hour game that requires only a working pulse to beat, you gotta latch onto something.

Despite the fact that everyone admitted that the plot and characterization for this ROLE PLAYING GAME was shit, alot of people still liked the game.  Why?  Generally it came down to graphics and the actually fighting gameplay.  I'll agree that the graphics weren't bad, to the extent that I didn't really notice them one way or another as I stumbled through the game's pre-defined paths.  But gameplay?  No.  All of the people that praised the combat as "incredibly fun combo-based excitement" are either insane or have never played a brawler in their lives.

or they could be a no-talent GAME JOURNALIST RETARD SHITBABY, whatever.

An important part of any third-person combat game is the concept of evasion.  Evading enemy attacks serves a dual purpose: it allows you to to, via player reaction, dodge attacks and thus preserve health; more importantly, it lets you feel like some kung-fu badass.  An important point of any sort of game like KoA is determining how forgiving your evasion options are.  Most of the time, the general rule is that you should be able to evade most attacks unless your character is attempting some sort of ultra dangerous heavy combo, because if you're gonna wield some massive axe you shouldn't really be able to instantly get out of the way right?  A decent player should be able to avoid most damage, and if you get hit, you smack your forehead, darn I shoulda seen that coming, better luck next time me.

Kingdoms of Amalur does not care about such things.  It's completely true that there are very impressive combos in this game.  The problem with this is that once you are a certain point into said combos, you are LOCKED IN SON, and good fucking luck if a monster feels like attacking you.  Every move that isn't the basic "hit button once" attack has at least a second of dead air where you cannot fucking dodge or move cancel or anything.  This is especially a problem because, at least in the hard difficultly, monsters are constantly harassing you with attacks.  These attacks would be easily dodgable if your dumbass avatar wasn't doing a rendition of Swan Lake with his chakrams on some barrels and I AM HITTING THE LEFT SHOULDER BUTTON FUCKING ROLL YOU SACK OF SHIT FUCKING ROLL ROLL ROLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.  Maybe it's unfair to expect crisp control from a multi-million dollar studio's first game, but jesus, Devil May Cry 3 had like 14 different combat systems that were all amazing, I don't think anyone would have cared if Curt Schilling just ripped one of them off like he did Rhode Island daaaaaaaaaaamn son.

Here's a prime example.  The threat level of enemies is based entirely how quickly they close distance and how often they attacked.  The evil that struck the greatest fear into my heart was not the generic demon monsters or the flakey elf Tuatha, but wolves.  Wolves have a single attack: they run at you, and then dive at you.  There are ALWAYS multiple wolves, and they tended to run at me one after the other.  Amalur's targetting is really fucking shitty, so I usually ended up attacking the wolf that already attacked, so a realistic impression of my hero would be a man bathed in the blood of demons and cruel lords, with several hundred comical wolf-sized holes throughout my body.

pubic enemy number 1

This surreal gameplay oversight completely takes away from any sort of real skill (haha video game skill), forcing you as the player to either plink at enemies with your basic moves or just suck it up and expect to get knocked around every time you want to feel like a badass.  If Kingdoms of Amalur was a difficult game, this would be an incredibly frustrating experience.  Many "goddamnits" would be uttered, controllers would be jerked and screamed at.  It would be shit, but there would still be the barest semblence of being invested in what is happening in Boring Fantasy Land.

Of course, this isn't the case.  Even on the top difficulty, Amalur quickly stops trying to challenge in any sense of the word.  I'm not even talking about the whole crafting issue mentioned in every review, though it's utterly true that spending 15 minutes at a forge will yield you the most boring armor with the most broken stats.  I'm actually okay with that, since it's not like Skyrim didn't have the same issue except that game took 3 hours of your life away so you could craft your god armor and stop pretending to give a shit about its garbage combat.  No, even with self-found armor, the game just completely fails to draw in any sort of interest.

The big problem is that every class has some sort of boring means to ignore the game's shitty combat system.  The rogue can stealth out and OHKO problem enemies because of the stupid amount of crit damage naturally begotten.  The warrior has an ability that straight up gives super armor so you can accomplish all your dumbass combos.  The mage has a heal and spells that are so goddamned broken that it's hilarious.  Hybrid classes are even worse, since now you get TWICE the broken abilities.  I primarily played the rogue/mage class, which in later levels gave me the perk of having my mana refill whenever I landed a critical hit, so battles were a choose your own adventure of zero tension or reward.  This isn't even accounting for the Devil Trigger Reckoning Mode, which makes any combat scenario completely null and void, takes like 3 battles to refill, and can just be refilled via USEABLE ITEMS ARE YOU JOKING.

As a result of all this, Amalur couldn't even muster a shriek of dismay or hatred more than a few times.  When the wolves commenced their strafing run, I'd just roll my eyes and mutter under my breath.

Ugh.