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.

Max Payne 3

I don't want to talk about the gameplay in Max Payne 3.

It's not that I didn't like it, this is a game that made me mostly happy, and Rockstar's take on the third-person shooty shooty slowy slowy concept improved on the problems of Max Payne 2 in every way.  No, it's that every reviewer of this dumb game didn't just settle with "game fun many bullet bang bang" took the opportunity to pretend they were writing for fucking Pitchfork.  Every "serious" review of the game focused on the gameplay in some breathless superlative nonsense, something along the lines of "the bullets are percussion of heart and fury, physics shaking into a kaiju rock concert, the exit wounds never healing but understanding comes anyway."  Suffice to say that the most honest description of Max Payne 3's combat would be "Gears of War except everything has a quarter less health, also pills."

An aside: I've seen you assholes out there.  Yeah you, the ones that despite everything, still bitched about OH GOD NOT COVER MECHANICS MY PRECIOUS OLD SCHOOL ERODED BY THE CASUAL UNWASHED TIDES.  Just...stop.  Have you played the original Max Payne?  Do you remember how most fights eventually ended up in the early game?  That's right, just you and Mr. Pump Shotgun, hiding behind a doorway, your left hand mashing on the A and D button while the right occasionally clicked the left mouse button.  Granted, you could play the game like it was supposed to be played if you were some sort of autoaim mutant or were a savescummer willing to put up with the game's hilarious enemy aim RNG.  But unless you fit into those categories, we sure used that there cover, just without a button to help us out.  I don't even want to talk about Max Payne 2.  Okay, there's not really cover in that game.  That's because fights are either 1) hilarious slaughter fests thanks to the completely unbalanced nature of Max's bullet time, or 2) utterly frustrating pokefests when the enemy is a million floors above or below you and you can't hit them worth shit and godDAMN did that game not age well at all.  Max Payne 3's biggest gameplay sins are some big budget on rails sections that demonstrate that your reactions barely matter almost immediately, and a reallllly fucking obnoxious enemy type that takes a million bullets in the head to kill and also has a minigun and what the hell Rockstar.

I'm also not going to talk about multiplayer, because like every other shooter that isn't less than six months old, the whole experience these days is some sort of pseudo-intellectual indie game indictment of your average MOBA's laning phase.  Please consider funding my Kickstarter for 'You are a Creep," where your confused form lumbers across a field, occasionally trading shots with a slightly differently colored form until a cruel god (that has apparently been playing this game since it came out what the FUCK is wrong with you AssSlicer98) ambles by and puts you out of your misery.

No, what I want to talk about is something that apparently only I noticed: this incarnation of Max Payne is the most bummerdude I have ever seen in a video game.

I don't mean he's angsty, though he's naturally that too.  But there's plenty of video game characters that are mopey, staring sadly into the void and boo-hooing.  But I've never been thrust into the virtual self of a character that is so consistently DOWN on itself.  There is not a single five minute stretch in the game where Max is not saying something to the effect of "wow I'm such a shit dude I can't do anything bodyguard more like shoddyguard."

I get that Max Payne has had a rather hard knock life.  But this level of "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE THE SAD MAN" was never suggested in the first two games.  Max's personality in the first game was a wildly angry murderdude that occasionally had hallucinations about trying to navigate blood bridges.  His personality in the second game was slightly more complex; now he's a slightly less angry murderdude that treated his love interest like a sack of shit.  Max the Second is a little more philosophical, and the game is a little more explicit that Max has some Problems, but nothing at the end of that game suggests that ten years later Max's new dominant personality trait will be talking like Batman in "The Dark Knight Returns."

The worst part about all this is that Max gets progressively whinier about all this as the game progresses.  At the start of game, Max is just sort of surly and bitchy about his shittiness as a bodyguard.  And while certain events do not go Max's way as the game progresses, his dialogue doesn't really reflect any concern about the problems surrounding his situation.  Instead, it's more "I'm so old I'm so shit lucky old man how did I not die."  Which is a problem, because if we've learned anything from these games, it's that Max is an unstoppable murder god.  It's a silly complaint, but it's sort of weird to be playing a game about a dude that goes into room after room full of bad guys while only a bottle of Oxycontin to keep going, and having said dude act like he's Lester the Unlikely.

As far as I can tell, this is mostly Rockstar's attempt to deconstruct that nature of the American action hero that makes everything right.  "I suck" is Max Payne's new motto, but the runner up is "I am a dumb American dumb dumb."  The game demonstrates this by having Max turn into a complete retard when he wanders into a favela and is mugged by streetwise brown people and having the bad guys in the game yell out "YOU ARE A DUMB AMERICAN ACTION HERO MAX BUT BRUCE WILLIS IS NOT REAL" every fucking time they see him.  Okay, there's actually a little more subtext than that, but you'll forgive me if I'm bitter because in order to bring all that subtext in Rockstar removed pretty much any trace of the series's humor, rip in peace lords and ladies.  I'd like to complain more about that but considering what I saw of Rockstar's humor in GTA 4, perhaps it was for the best they just dumped anything funny about the Max Payne series in favor of more grit.

Ultimately, Max Payne 3 is a really good game in my book, because god knows frenetic shooter games that aren't also slobbering blowjobs to outdated FPS concepts are an almost extinct thing.  Especially towards the end, when the game starts to replace its dumb on rails sections for its more elegant cousin, the bad ass semi-scripted gunfight, there's just a nonstop amount of glorious violence.  It's just a shame that the stay in the game world is within the mind of the world's Gloomiest Gus.

also fuck the final boss fight

Don't Go in the Woods (2010)

DON'T.

Occasionally when watching movies, there's the moment when everything falls into place right at the end, when everything you've been sitting through finally makes sense.  In this movie's case, it was when the first two credits read "Directed/Written by Vincent D'Onofrio."  In case this name doesn't immediately launch your brain into reciting the SPOOKY REVEAL music from Saw, this was the directorial debut of the guy whose two big roles were Pvt. Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, and more important for professional haters like myself, perhaps the worst goddamned character in modern television, DETECTIVE ROBERT GOREN in Law and Order: Criminal Intent.



Don't Go in the Woods is billed as a HORROR MUSICAL, but it's honestly more like a full length music video that turns into the world least interesting slasher in the last 10 minutes.  The plot is that there's a band led by an Elijah Wood lookalike that goes into the woods to write some new music, they run into some boring hippie girls, and there's apparently a mysterious slasher though if you've seen a single modern horror film you can probably guess what the truth is.

The big thing about this movie is that the music does not fucking stop.  If you're a big fan of Bright Eyes type music, the kind that is endless acoustic guitars and too-clever-by-half lyric metaphors about love and pain, you'll probably like this movie.  I've been listening to The Paper Chase lately, so you can probably gauge how I reacted.  But here's the thing, as alluded to above: there is absolutely zero pace to the movie.

Oh, I know what you might be thinking: "great another boring horror purist that gets his panties in a wad if a female isn't brutalized at least every fifteen minutes."  And it's true, I do tend to get a little forgiving of a slasher's faults if it can at least maintain some sort of consistent body count during the film.  But experimentation is fine, if the non-dead space (hurr) at least has some sort of ostensible point.  Wolf Creek spent an hour following some tourists around in order to have you build a relationship with them before ripping their hearts out.  With Don't Go in the Woods, there's no apparent reason that the watcher is subjected to 70 minutes of terrible actors failing Kindergarten improv when they're not breaking out into musical numbers about feeeeeeeelinnnnnnngs.  Maybe D'Onofrio just hates movies

I also feel duty bound to state that if you're wanting to watch this movie to see some twee motherfuckers get graphically butchered, don't bother.  I'm not sure where the movie's $100,000 budget went, but it sure as fuck was not for SFX.  Despite the decision of giving the killer a sledgehammer as the signature weapon, the only gore you see are some severed body parts and bodies that could be charitably described as "not obviously rubber when examining them after being subjected to 80 minutes of music so maybe my brain is just totally dead."

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