Overthinking Terrible: Mothman (2010)

There's a rule in horror filmmaking that your creations should follow their self-made rules.  I'm not talking about the shit like "the last girl" or "the bad guy always gets up one last time" shit that we've seen interminably mocked in shit like Scream and Cabin in the Woods.  I'm referring to the notion that, when you've created something out of the ordinary, it's still bound by the rules set out for it.  This is the shit that has been around since mythology began, from the Hydra's regenerative capacity removed by fire to its necks, to vampire's lethal aversion to light, to Chester Cheetah being unable to remain in a state of uncoolness for over 4 seconds.  It is what allows us to retain an aura of believability and safety to monsters and demons.  Even if they're capable of feats that can awaken our greatest fears, they're still bound to some sort of physical or spiritual law.

I say this to preface the fact that I have never seen a movie with less respect and/or understanding of this requirement than Mothman, a Syfy Original not to be mistaken with the Mothman Prophesies, which was a ghost conspiracy theory with Richard Gere.  Instead of Gere, our primary star draw is Jewel Staite, who apparently was on Firefly and a bunch of other television shows I never bothered to watch, so all I can really say about her is that she looks about ten years older than the rest of the actors.  She and her friends accidentally offed a dude and covered it up ten years ago, which led to her leaving West Virginia, but now she's back as an important journalist...who is on assignment to cover the Mothman Festival in that town.  This triggers the appearance of our titular monster, who despite being described as a "relentless demon of evil who punishes those doing wrong," apparently was okay chilling for a decade waiting for one dumb broad to come back.

So, you ask, how does Mothman work?  Why, with the well known affinity of moths towards mirrors, he is able to poke himself out of any reflective surface to getcha!  I wish I was kidding!  The first death immediately nullifies any potential creepiness of the concept, where the reflective surface is the side of a metal mobile home.  Still, it might have been a sort of intriguing concept if not for the fact that the film makes it impossible to understand the limits of Mothman's power.  In one death, Mothman murders via a car's rear view mirror, but later on is flummoxed by not being able to fit through a 24-inch television screen.  In some cases, shattering the mirror slows down the monster, but in another part all that destroying the mirror does is have the shards magically come to life and stab into the person.  Sometimes Mothman is able to punch through a car, sometimes he can be batted away by a slender woman.  

The monster's motivations and weaknesses are similarly impossible to figure out.  We're told that the monster only punishes those that pervert justice, but in the film's "climax" scene, he's just flitting around killing random people at the fair, including cops (I'm not willing to believe this is social commentary, sorry).  In a flashback we're shown that he was responsible for a bridge collapse that killed three ne'erdowells, but it also killed a score of other people.*  So is Mothman just a dick?  As for weaknesses, who in the fuck even knows.  Sometimes guns are capable of scaring Mothman away, sometimes he doesn't give a shit, sometimes he's caught in an explosion and just walks away.  We're told Mothman is repelled by sunlight, despite the number of scenes before and after this where he's attacking in the middle of the day.

Perhaps the reason for this mess is that alot of the info for this comes from the stereotypical Crazy Old Man, played by Jerry Leggio.  Ignoring the fact that despite living in the town for most of their lives, none of the cast has ever even heard of COM, they still immediately rely on him for information.  One of the two inadvertently hilarious images of the film is the lead actress looking through his handbook on the Mothman, which is supposed to be full of creepy imagery but instead is nothing but vague scribblings of the sort seen in coloring books where someone refused to obey the lines.**  

I suppose I should warn of SPOILERS when saying that in a shocking twist, he's sort of on the side of Mothman because of the guilt he feels for his own crimes (leading him to put out his eyes because apparently you have to see the Mothman to die from him, though needless to say like every other rule that's ALSO proven wrong later on).  He gives the protagonists the means to "banish" the Mothman, but this turns out to actually summon him fulltime.  But then he also gives the heroine some knife that actually does kill the Mothman.  But then it turns out in one of the stupidest TWIZT endings even among Syfy Originals, the heroine is possessed maybe by the Mothman?  So was the COM a double agent? END SPOILERS BUT YOU SHOULD READ THEM ANYWAY

Of course, even if there was anything approaching internal logic, the movie would be fucking terrible.  One notable difference of Mothman from some other Syfy originals is that they actually were willing to show our monster man pretty early.  This isn't a good thing, since Mothman looks like a garbage bag with red flesh light eyes and $5 wal-mart monster hands.  The deaths are similarly boring, since all Mothman does is grab people and turn them into spilled chili or spill strawberry sauce on them.

Ultimately, I don't regret watching Mothman, since it's rare to see a movie this internally mindfucked.  I'm not going to shittalk the writers, since imdb revealed they're generally staff writers for television (including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), so the more likely story is meddling from on high, especially considering the climax is a fucking attack at a carnival, which is roughly half of the climaxes in Syfy originals.  But, jesus christ, what a mess.

*: It should be noted that the actual Mothman attack is just it swooping down at the victims in a convertible, so it's really unclear how this caused a bridge collapse.  No doubt Mirror Powers were involved, though.

**: the second inadvertantly hilarious scene is a shot of the heroine throwing her rear view mirror out of the car, to which he see Mothman sullenly waving its claws out of.  Truly, the high point of modern horror.

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.

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.

Overthinking Terrible: Aliens vs. Predator (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This opinion changed after the sixth time they did this.

A Film that Dares to Call Itself "The Thing" (2011) (spoilers because fuck this movie)

Fuck this fucking movie.

My gut knew it wasn't going to be pretty.  Especially when I found out the screenwriter was the same person that wrote (get ready) the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.  But did I know how ugly?  Did I have the slightest conception of the depths that it was going to slobber and fuck over my memories of the Carpenter version?  No.  I was like those Lovecraft protagonists (minus an authorial transference of casual racism), realizing something was wrong but that the breadth was far beyond my grasp, so at the end all I can do is laugh like Sam Neill at the end of In the Mouth of Madness.

Part of the problem can be traced to the whole boneheaded idea of trying to remake The Thing by doing a prequel of it.  In doing so, you've stepped into crazy murky waters, as you're ostensibly creating a new plot while having to sort of hug onto the original plot for protection, like a baby bear with worms.  Not at all surprising in retrospect, My Least Favorite Screenwriter in History handled this the same way he did with the Nightmare remake: Clumsily patch favorite scenes from the original to a shoddy original plot, then go completely off the rails with a wretched ending with enough plot holes to hide a universe destroying morphing race spaceship in.

I'll say one thing and one thing only, as it's the only reason this film got anything resembling positive reviews: it's competently made and acted in.  But hey so was the Nightmare remake, and honestly if you're giving any credence to horror films because of the quality of their effects then go the fuck away.  I guess I can also say that the only thing God I am Going to Punch You Screenwriter-San does right is that he also manages to avoid any romantic subplot, so kudos laced with rat poison for that.  Unfortunately, this leaves the plot.  The opening thirty minutes function exactly how you'd expect, for better or worse.  Spaceship found, alien excavated, science does some retarded shit, alien breaks out and ohhhh nooooo.  Since this was strictly paint by numbers plot wise, I was just sort of bored here.

Then we have the first major divergence from the original.  As you may or may not recall from Carpenter's version, the time period between when the crew first sees the alien in action to when they realize its full capabilities was relatively short.  Here, there's a 30 minute period of Dr. Ramona Flowers going "oh no guys something wrong" and all the dudes going "haw haw we're males."  It makes sense logically, but it's still boring as hell, as that time period is people just shuffling around grumbling at each other.  Then eventually the alien reappears and get ready for a descent into total incompetency.

Some of you are probably anticipating me bitching about the alien being quick.  Honestly, I don't fucking care if it's fast or not, especially as it was the same sort of awkward shambler that we saw in the Carpenter film, there probably would have been not a single moment of tension in the film.  What I do sort of care about is that the alien looks pretty fucking shitty.  The remake Things are generally a simpleton's version of what they remember the Thing from Carpenter's version to be mixed in with nixed Silent Hill designs: full of giant teeth and weird arms going everywhere and decidedly not really scary.  Everything is just clean looking and stupid, missing any of the nightmare unfamiliar murkiness of the original.

So we find out that the alien can mimic, and we settle back.  Finally, some of dat sweet paranoia that made Carpenter's version so goddamned good.  All the characters are in the room, and...wait, they already developed the test?  Okay.  And some guys just escaped, all right, lots of opportunity for potential infections to be developed and questioned later and wait they already revealed the Thing and now it's just an extended chase sequence and what the fuck is going on

Of the many things that pissed me off about this remake, it's this.  I think even Hawk's version had more time devoted to the quidessential feeling that nobody could trust each other, the isolation exemplified within Antarctica.  Instead, one gets the feeling that Holy Shit I'm So Goddamned Worthless at Everything Guy watched the Carpenter version and thought "boy, look at all these people talking, this is so boring, I'm gonna cut this stuff down to like fifteen minutes so I can get to what people really care about, why that ax was in the wall!"  You think I'm joking, right?

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we're doing it by autopsy, by examining very, very closely everything we know about the Norwegian camp and about the events that happened there from photos and video footage that’s recovered, from a visit to the base, the director, producer and I have gone through it countless times marking, you know, there’s a fire axe in the door, we have to account for that…we're having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”

— Eric Heisserer describing the process of creating a script that is consistent with the first film.^[17]

HOLY SHIT WHO FUCKING CARES.  THANK GOD MY IMAGINATION ISN'T ALLOWED TO CONCEPTUALIZE ANYTHING ANYMORE, WHOO 2011 SPRING BREAK HAND ME THAT GRENADE IT'S TIME FOR THE TRUE JAGERBOMB.  

So the remaining 30 minutes of the movie are literally just a space monster slasher.  It's not even a good slasher, but people running in rooms as a giant Thing monster also runs around in rooms and occasionally kills people and less occasionally recreates the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park.  Near the end, one of the monsters takes an ATV to get back to the mothership, and it says alot about the success of this movie that I was fully expecting a Space Mutiny style chase sequence to close things out.  But don't worry, instead we have an Alien ripoff where the lady is menaced by the Nilhilanth from Half-Life but then she shoots him in the weak point.  Then she walks out of the spaceship with her Not-MacReady while he is holding the flamethrower and then he puts the flamethrower in the truck and then the lady kills him because he is ACTUALLY THE THING AND IF HE IS THE THING WHY DID HE NOT KILL HER WHILE HE HAD THE FLAMETHROWER AND WAIT ARE THOSE CREDITS WHAT THE FLYING FUCK

oh

oh wait

so here's a helicopter guy and he's seeing the thing 

and there's the dog from wait wasn't that infected like at the start of the film why is it running out now and I guess that's the most FUCKING INEPT WAY YOU COULD DO A REACHAROUND TO THE ORIGINAL FILM GOOD JOB MR SCREENWRITER

In conclusion, this is what really galls me.  You have a screenwriter going "hurp durp gonna tie up all these loose ends," to aspects of the Carpenter version I don't really care about, while at the same time just creating obvious, ridiculous plot holes to tie other stuff together that I also don't really care about, all while leaving the quidessential themes of the previous films out to die in the Antarctic wilderness.  The Thing is a triumph of autism and boring fanboyism over imagination and creativity, so really just fuck this movie.

...One other thing.  For all the hubbub about how the screenwriter, director, and producer watched the film a million times, they seemed to miss something that would have allowed an ending that would be both creepy and an actually creative twist on something.  Re-watch the opening of the Carpenter version.  Do you notice something about one of the two Norwegians on the plane?  One of them is completely covered in clothes and never says anything, so the gender is indeterminate.  It would have been entirely possible to have Winstead return to camp, completely devoid of emotion, then get shot at by the last Norwegian, then see the dog, have them get into some convenient helicopter and as they pull out, she pulls the clothes around her.*

It's so goddamned obvious that I can't think of why you wouldn't do it and instead leave her for some indeterminate fate.

Unless.

No.  That's not possible.  It can't be.

No.  

No. 

"I, Eric Heisserer, Screenwriter Extraordinary, can see it now! Ramona Flowers and MacReady, the ultimate duo and...maybe something more ;)"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


*Edit: On watching the opening again, it's less clear whether the person on the left shows their face or not.  It's more likely that the one on the left was the one that was shot by the Americans, but with the constant film cuts, one could conceivably argue that the two switched positions, so that the "uncovered" face on the right seat threw the grenade and ran (with gun now in hand? WHATEVER) while the uncovered searched for it and was blown up.  It's awkward, but certainly makes more goddamned sense than anything in the remake.

Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The Nightmare on Elm Street remake was really goddamned bad.  This isn't surprising for anyone.  Perhaps due to that lack of surprise. I didn't really see any critics expend too much thought on the badness.  After all, it's a horror remake produced by Michael Bay's company, Platinum Dunes, which brought out flaccid remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th.  Literally no one is going to be swayed by anything said about a movie like this, a husk floating on an ocean of stupid teenage buying decisions.  And yet, there's some interesting kernals to glean from this film, which is a shining example of the present trend of modern, studio-backed horror films bringing absolutely nothing lasting to horror canon.

After finishing the movie, I took some time to watch various scenes from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. What's interesting about Craven's version is, for the most part, the scares are telegraphed fairly well in advance.  By this, I mean that while something scary might happen, generally it comes out of some sort of lead-up.  For example, take the death scene of Nancy's blonde friend from the start of the movie.  The earliest sense something is really wrong is when you see the garbage can lid roll from the fence and hit the ground.  There's a good two seconds of the lid rolling before it hits the ground.  Only then do we see Freddy, and not in some quick-cut closeup, but in the distance, a shadowy vision.  Of course, there are sudden jump scares (such as when Nancy runs into the Freddy hall-monitor), but for the most part, scares are delivered by the impact of the images, not simply by impact.

Guess what I'm trying to say about the remake!  Every single goddamned scare in the remake is some sort of lameass "ooooo things are sort of creepy when is the spooking happening huh huh huh NOWWWW BOOOOOOO VOLUME SO LOUD GONNA PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS."  If you're the kind of idiot that freaks out during "scary" video games (truth Amnesia is fucking garbage) and want some more of dat fear factor, then by all means rent this movie because there is not a single five-minutes scene without something like Freddy jumping out of a pipe or a little girl getting a monster face happening.  For gentle viewers that need something more than loud sounds to scare them, prepare to, at best, be gently amused as the movie does its best to imitate your high school's haunted house.  Nothing, of course, is going to stick with you.  I'm not even 24 hours from when I finished the film, and already all the scenes are sort of awkwardly merging and fading together, one after the other, with nothing valuable to remember a week from now aside from "god how do you manage to not include one affecting scene even 976-EVIL II managed that."

The plot is sort of the worst of both worlds as far as remakes are concerned, somehow both mechanically reproducing scenes from the original and adding unnecessary, stupid as fuck complications to the plot.  The first two-thirds of the film are basically the same as the original, save for the previously mentioned jump scares being fucking everywhere, and that Nancy's boyfriend is now a fat ugly Robert Patterson.  It was about at this point I said, "god, can they not do anything original in this movie aside from adding dream scares going no where?"

My girlfriend murmured, still watching the movie, "so you wish for them to alter the plot?"

"Sure, I mean it can't be any worse than what I'm already seeing."

"GRANTED"

"FUCK YOU WISHMASTER"

The film suddenly swerves into new territory at the last third of the film, and boy is it a total mess.  It is now revealed (spoilers I guess) that the remake wasn't happy with Freddy pre-demon biography being "creepy dude who did bad stuff to children."  No, in keeping with the Bay philosophy of leaving nothing to the imagination aside from the full extent of your slackjawed stupidity, it is agonizingly demonstrated that Freddy was in fact a total baby rapist.  The remake tries to trick you by implying at first that hey maybe Freddy was just an innocent victim of childhood overimagination but I can't imagine someone thinking there was a possibility of gray morality in a shitty horror remake, so that's given up like fifteen minutes after.

Of course after the interminable backstory parade the film can't come up with a cleverer way of dispatching Freddy than the "okay I will bring him out of the dream with the power of HUGZ" idea (which was by far the weakest concept in the entire original film), except now Fat Ugly James Patterson remains alive instead of being eaten by his bed.  I don't even know why they kept him alive because he is awful, except probably they couldn't figure out a way to make a blood puking mattress into a cheap scare.  Then ending jump scare because fuck this pissy earth.

Ultimately, I just want to talk about what happened with Freddy.

I don't really mind the new design.  After all, the iconic Freddy is substantially different from the original film's version, which was almost never seen in full light (presumably because the make up was bad, or Craven's reaction to not being able to make Krueger into a skull monster as he originally planned.  The voice, while hokey in its modulated deepness compared to Robert Englund, isn't bad.  The problem is that the remake apparently couldn't decide between the original, dread-filled Krueger and the later sequel's wacky, joking spouting Krueger, and thus decided that what was needed was a jerk Freddy who talks as much as the later iterations, but doesn't make jokes but just acts all weird and rapey.  In other words, they decided the best version of Freddy was the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 version.

Oh yes, the rapey.  So, from a strict perspective, I guess this isn't that surprising.  After all, Freddy has always been more lascivious than most other horror icons, "I'm your boyfriend now" and all that.  And yeah, Craven apparently wanted to make Freddy a child molester before cooler, more intelligent heads prevailed.  That doesn't change the fact that, like pretty much anything else in this movie, making Freddy into a rapist ruins everything good about the film series.  It also doesn't help that the only real ramifications of this change is now we have to have a scene where the main character sees pictures of herself being abused and then get changed into a weird fetish dress (which afterwards I realized was the same one used in Freddy's Dead so I don't even know anymore).  It's just some sort of rat dropping on top that in this hokey, ineptly filmed disaster we also have to get the feeling that the director thought he could even broach real life serious topics.

were it not that I have bad horror...

Overthinking Terrible: Woody Allen's Anything Else

Anything Else was so bad that it forced me to question whether I actually like anything Woody Allen has actually done.  This is partially because it's been years since I've seen a Woody Allen film, during that time when I actually paid attention to movie books and tried to keep pace with the hipster towards important films.  Anything Else, unlike the film's incompetent psychologist, peeled away my mental layers until I had to face uncomfortable truths, like David Mitchell in Peep Show:

"Did I really enjoy watching Annie Hall?  Or was I just bamboozled by what all those movie books said how he captured the New York lifestyle?  I don't even like New York.  Or do I say I like him because I'm afraid I'll sound like an anti-semite?  But I like Mel Brooks without hesitation!  Oh no, my series is getting increasingly darker and less humorous!"

Ultimately, I faced my demons and still laughed at Annie Hall clips on youtube ("why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?"), but my insecurity operated from the fact that Anything Else, unlike other modern Allen movies I've disliked such as Match Point, operates like some gibbering, half-formed clone of a classic Allen film.  All the elements are there: performer-based improvisional comedy, New York eccentricities, sly reference humor.  The problem is that Anything Else takes these concepts and reduces them to their lowest, lamest form, for reasons I'll get to at the end of this review.

The movie operates from the standpoint of Jerry Falk, played by Jason Biggs (yeah remember him?????).  He is a writer who you'll never actually care about.  His only recognizable trait is his total lack of backbone towards all the negative forces in his life, including his girlfriend, played by a visibly regretful Christina Ricci.  He is friends with a HILARIOUSLY idiosyncratic jew, played by Allen himself.  Jason Biggs bitches about stuff for the entire movie, his girlfriend doesn't have sex with him and then has affairs, he moves to California.  That's literally the movie.

Of course, the plot is never really the point of any Woody Allen comedy, but is merely there to set up a framework for funny dialogue and references, but there's almost nothing of the sort in this film.  The worst offenders are probably Jason Biggs's endless fourth-wall monologues to the audience.  Five minutes do not go by  without all action stopping so Biggs can walk around in the set, talking in a faux clever manner about all his issues like a Franzen/DeLillo character after four generations of imbreeding.  Biggs is obviously not equipped to portray this sort of humor, treating the scenes like he's guest-hosting Punk'd.  While Biggs' lack of talent is part of the problem, he's also completely miscast in Allen's suffering Jew.  The film demands someone that looks like they've been shit on their entire life, and nothing about Biggs suggests a total wimp.  Ironically, Biggs might have been a funnier presence if Allen had given his character more bite than the whipped puppy dog that just rolls around whining for tru luv.  That is to say, Biggs would have done better in portraying the original type of Allen protagonist rather than some weird version created by equal parts pressure to make a more teen friendly film and Allen's own obvious misogyny in viewing the "nice guy" archetype as a character people should root for.

Pretty much all the other actors have their humor wasted too.  Ricci is talented, but her portrayal of Allen's nightmares about a dominant feminine personality never quite works.  Throughout the film, we're implored to view her as some mysterious siren that is irresistible to men, but while she's certainly attractive, one never reaches the dichotomy based on the scenes we're given.  For example, after a disastrous attempt by Biggs to rekindle the relationship in a hotel room leads to a visit to the ER, we're treated to a scene where she's examined by a doctor while she's writhing around and flirting with him.  In addition for the scene lasting far too long for the minuscule amount of cuckold humor it produces, it's hard to see why her actions make her so alluring.  There's a sort of a difference between sirens and sluts, guys.  Ricci does her best, but Allen's direction was obviously determined to make her into a one-note hag who is responsible for all of the problems in the relationship, so eventually she acquiesces and evilly quips about how she had sex with another dude to know whether she could have orgasms again.

Allen's character is the best in the film, but that's not a hard hurdle to jump.  Allen plays a wacky, paranoid Jew who miserably teaches at a public school and stockpiles guns and supplies for the return of the Nazis.  It's an amusing enough character, but as the film progresses and Allen gets progressively more violent towards the world and hateful towards Ricci's character, the humor is soured.  Alot of film critics wanted more of Allen's character, which honestly makes me wonder if they understood Allen's films.  It'd be as if Walken's character in Annie Hall suddenly had 40 more minutes of screen time.

All this makes me wonder who the audience in this movie is supposed to be.  The ostensible answer is the teen market, but while that's certainly how the studios marketed it, it's harder to see that as Allen's intent.  Many of the references are clearly not intended for the kids (for god's sake, there's a reference to The Exterminating Angel), and while I guess if you squint really hard, you could call it a romantic comedy, it is a damn black one.  At the same time, the relationships and characters are so one-note that no mature mind is really going to be tickled by what is going on.  Do you see where I'm going with this?

No, it's not aliens.

Moreso than alot of directors, Allen's always used his films as pretenses to help him deal with whatever issues present in his life.  We'd get to see the director's neurosis laid bare, we'd laugh at the inner mind of a funny dude, everything was cool.  I'm not sure if the process started earlier than Anything Else, but this film is a pretty awkward glimpse into someone who still believes he is funny, but is only capable of nervous distaste for everything around him. In retrospect, this helps explain Match Point, which was at least capable of matching a dark tone with a dark subject matter. Woody Allen doesn't care about whether you found this movie funny, this is his ten million dollar therapy session and I guess you can watch but it's going to cost you.

And while that's interesting from a psychological standpoint, Anything Else is still a shitty fucking comedy.

Overthinking Terrible: Duke Nukem Forever('s Fans)

Duke Nukem Forever came out in Europe last week, and is set to drop in the NORTH AMERICA any moment now.  Two things have so far been found out:

1) Anyone objective playing this game pretty much hates it.  As someone who watched a let's play of it on youtube, I can tell you that these opinions are all correct.  Duke Nukem Forever is goddamned terrible.  I don't care about the graphics, but Duke Nukem 3d was an FPS that prided itself on exploration and well-executed item placement.  I'm still more of a giant Doom nerd, but Duke Nukem 3D was superior in the fact that discovering secrets was not just a matter of "hit spacebar in front of every wall and listen for opening doors."  So, now we have a game that is literally a bad joke of modern FPS shittery, with endless linear corridors, two-weapon limits, and best of all, REGENERATING HEALTH.  You could honestly get a far more legitimate Duke Nukem Experience by playing Painkiller (NOT Overdose, which now that I think about it is sort of the Duke Nukem Forever of Painkiller) again and yelling slurs at women whenever you reach a new arena.  But this post isn't about that.  It's about the fact that:

2) People are literally losing their minds over the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is a bad game.  Go on the reviews that are already up, go on youtube comments, go on any message board (save for the official DNF message board, you'll probably die of the stench) and read the furious, mind-altering screams of people that refuse to believe that the game might not be that fun.  People accusing the reviews of not being TRU FANS and only TRU FANS can understand what it means to always bet on the Duke, death squads downvoting and screeching against youtube comments who seem skeptical of the "capture the babe" multiplayer mode where you smack a woman on the behind to shut her up, and giant bro group therapy sessions of people telling each other how best to deal with duke haters.

Of course, this isn't by itself a big thing.  Every popular series has its fans that fan out like rabid dogs if an installment of the series gets less than a 9.0 on Gamespot.  But the thing is this:  Duke Nukem 3D was released on January 29, 1996.  The true horror may have dawned on you: there are people who are emotionally invested in the sequel to a fifteen-year-old game.  I have to ask: who are these people?  I believe there are probably two subtypes of these Duke fans, both representing alot of what's wrong with the gaming world.  One of these problems is natural and understandable, but the other represents a disturbing subfacet about life.

The first group are just kids that don't know any better.  I refer to recent gamers, aged roughly ten to sixteen, who fucking love video games.  They of course didn't play the DN3D when it first game out, though they might have downloaded it from GOG or downloaded a ROM of the N64 version.  It's just as possible they just watched a Let's Play of the original, or didn't even witness the game, just finding a masculine dude with shades who tells people to blow it out their ass to be omgroffle hilarious.  These are more likely the people telling the detractors to OMG SHUT UP .  As they likely never played the game, the only thing about Duke Nukem Forever that matters is how bawdy and boob-filled everything is.  As Gearbox took care to ensure that the only thing remaining from the original game was Duke's outdated-then humor, they are satisfied and don't understand people bewailing the FPS mechanics they've come to love.

I don't have a problem with this, really.  After all, I was as much a consumerist whore at 13 as any of these brats, getting into online arguments with people about how it was TOTALLY OKAY for Nintendo to fuck over people with fifteen versions of the gameboy and harsh censoring laws didn't matter glub glub glub.  I grew up pretty okay, and with any luck, a good number of these guys will soon outgrow their awful youtube meme videos and start actually thinking for themselves.  What's troublesome is that some in my generation clearly never figured things out.

Witness the second group.  The people that clearly played Duke Nukem 3D when it initially came out, and are STILL incapable of distinguishing what is good and what is shit.  Again, fifteen year difference means that even if you're being generous and assuming that alot of ten-year-olds were blasting pig cops, we now have twenty-five year old men going WELL I ENJOY THE GAME I GUESS I'M JUST A FREE MIND THAT LOVES WHAT HE LOVES ENJOY HATING EVERYTHING FOREVER HATER.  I'm a judgmental bastard, but I can tolerate most dumb things from people younger than me.  It's just that when people in my generation are trying to come up with complex sociological arguments why it's okay for them to really like what is for all intents the video game version of Nickleback that I just hate you all.  Yeah duders, even as someone who watched the game I acknowledge there's alot of wrong comments on the negative reviews, but at the end of the day you're still goddamned desperate not to admit that you've wasted years of your life anticipating what is surely a game that will be forgotten by everyone but yourselves and your gross comments.

I could keep going on, but I think this quote from the gearbox duke boards (topic: "People seem to be enjoying DNF a lot, despite being in the age of pompous critics.") pretty much encapsulates what I'm saying here:

So far ive spent 31 hours playing Duke since release here in the UK
My eyes are blurry , I feel lethargic , I have missed quite a few meals since its come out , Ive smoke LOADS and drunk I dont know how much coke all this and im 40 years old. 

I feel now at this very moment like I used to feel back playing D3D / Quake / Wolfenstein 3D all those years ago and I will say I AM LOVING EVERY SECOND OF THE GAME.

Is it D3D ? Nope no its not ... Is it a Duke Nukem game ?? Hell yeah it is and a great 1 at that.Ive finished the game on hard ( not yet tried insaine ) and im still having fun going back in game to replay levels and look for things ive missed ... not just ego items either , im having a load of fun just looking for little things I have not found yet like newpaper headlines and clipboards with bits and pieces written on them.

A closing anecdote/lesson: My father was once really into Wing Commander (even buying a mid-tier joystick for max killening), but his biggest love was the spin-off Privateer.  He and I played the shit out of that game, for all the problems there were it was just a perfect little sandbox spacesim.  So, three years later we were HYPE for Privateer 2: The Darkening.  Goddamned, my dad tried to like that game, playing through all of the exactly the same side missions and playing the impossible to actually play market.  Eventually, I just walked up to him and said, "Dad, this game is really terrible, isn't it?"

He looked at the screen (trying to pursue one of those GODDAMNED KIOWAN SKULLS), shugged, and nodded.

Nightmare Alley (2010)

I think one reason I really like anthology horror is that it's generally harder to screw up than your typical horror feature.  It's like a short story: all you have to do is introduce your characters, do some buildup, then get to the scares and/or gore and move on to another three-hit combo.  All the basics are laid out to you, just watched Creepshow or either of the Trilogy of Terror films and move on from there.  Of course, the ease one can film anthology horror really heightens my bad reaction when I see a bad example of the sub-genre.

Enter NIGHTMARE ALLEY.  The first worrisome sign is the fact that the film boasts seven scary tales, but it only seventy minutes.  Okay, I think.  It's a little on the short side, but that means more gore and doom per minute, right?  So here's the opening story, which I'm going to describe in detail for some important reasons.

We start with some homeless guy walking in a longcoat that kind of reminds me of The Hitchhiker, which is the last pleasant thought I'm going to have for the rest of the film.  We then cut to two punks (?, see picture below) discussing crazy stuff like moshpits and faggots and how they love to beat up everyone and fuck pussy also faggots suck maaaan.

Then the homeless guy appears next to them and offers them the newest issue of NIGHTMARE ALLEY in exchange for a cigarette.  The punk kids then proceed to denigrate butt rock some more, which for some reason enrages the homeless guy to the point that he pushes one of the kids to a wall and knifes him then pees on the corpse and I begin to really regret watching this on a lark.

The other punk guy, who ran, hides by a garbage dumpster, then proceeds to read the new issue of NIGHTMARE ALLEY.  We see that NIGHTMARE ALLEY is apparently one of those awful 90s indie comics that were drawn with color pencils and a severe lack of talent, and that it shows the punk READING THE COMIC AND THEN GETTING HIS HEAD CUT OFF and guess what happens next.

(also, note that the guy actually says "holy shit" as opposed to "huh," which really harms the presaging legitimacy of this comic)

You may be thinking: "wow, that was pretty dumb, but it's an opening story and I'm sure they get better."  Here's the thing: they don't.  The three-minute film about a killer bum and an evil comic book is easily the best thing this film had to offer.  The reason for this is pretty simple.  For a film where the stories are on average only ten minutes long, they somehow take forever for something to happen, and when it does happen, it's predictable and dumb.  Each story is introduced by a pale-faced guy in a top hat that I'm guessing is supposed to harken back to the Cryptkeeper, but the former's monologues are more along the line of "boy, that really sucked for that guy, our next story is about a guy who's about to have his life really suck."

Every story on here is basically the same awful garbage.  Sure, the plots are slightly different, but they all feature the hallmarks of terrible indie horror:

RPG dialogue:  By this, I mean that every line sounds less like it came out of a real human's mouth, and would be more at home in some 16-bit rpg's blue dialogue box scrolling across the screen.  It's got that stilted, poorly executed diction that is probably an equal result between the screenwriter being hopelessly incompetent and the actors either being too scared to adlib or having the worst improv skills imaginable.

All my friends are actors now:  Granted, this isn't always a bad thing, but it sure as hell is an issue for NIGHTMARE ALLEY, as every person in the film is either a fat, unappealing male or a fat, unappealing girls who want to look like Bettie Paige.  There is exactly one person in the film who isn't either horribly nervous or trying to get over their nervousness by yell-acting.

Nothing going Nowhere:  As I mentioned above, despite each story being around ten minutes, it's amazing how NIGHTMARE ALLEY manages to fuck up pacing so bad.  For fuck's sake, a majority of the stories have filler scenes, such as "guy talking to his cop buddy about nothing relevant whatsoever " or "girl fiddling with silverware for thirty seconds," "other guy walking through dollar general," and of course an endless plethora of cars going out of driveways, down roads, and then back to the same driveway.  On the other end, when you finally get to the scares, they're just as underwhelming.  I'm not saying that scares need to be some big budget feast, but if your story's climax is beyond the reach of your cash reserves, one either needs to rewrite the story or find an entertaining way to suggest things.  For example, say the climax to your "cowboy zombie" story involves zombies entering a town and devouring it, but you didn't get the permit to do the scene in time!  Some filmmakers would find intelligent ways to get the idea across that didn't scream WE'RE BROKE, such as merely showing the zombies approaching the town, or showing a spooky aftermath.  But NIGHTMARE ALLEY is beyond such pitiful conventional theories, and just pans across the skyline of some tourist ghost town while dubbing in burning noises and screams.  

Some internet reviewers have tried to defend the film under the premise of the fact that it's not taking itself seriously and uh the director clearly likes horror movies so leave it alone bro.  And really, it's not fun kicking around a production that never had a chance to begin with.  On the other hand, this was the first thing that came up when I looked for reviews on the movie, so I don't even know anymore what I'm dealing with.  I guess it's nice that the director is having fun with this sort of shit, and I would have enjoyed it more drunk out of my mind watching it with friends, but that's also the case with 12 Oz Mouse.  Is that what you want, NIGHTMARE ALLEY?  To be on the same level as 12 Oz. Mouse?

Actually, you probably shouldn't answer that question.

inspiration from search terms: Where are Kotaku Readers Going?

I haven't rapped too much about Kotaku, because really, what else is there to say?   I can't even really think of a clever "MAN COBRAB COMMANDOR MUST BE WORKING AT HAWKER MEDIA" joke because the reality is probably even more ridiculous and depressing.  Thousands of pages of pie graphs, consumer driven phases, and capitalist understanding from your Ayn Rand cyberpunk grandpa.  If there's been any upshot of this, it's that Kotaku's usually bountful crop of awful basement comments have been culled, presumably both from people leaving the site and the new article design doing everything to imply that it doesn't want to hear what you have to say short of implanting a soundbite of wailing Arab women every time the comment button is clicked.

I'm on the first page to the question of "where are Kotaku readers going?"  Honestly, who fucking cares?  Well, besides people whose job it is to latch your temporal lobes into a never ending parade of cool screenshots and gritty eyewitness maid cafe reports while assuring you that you're a class above those lame IGN nerds.  Of course, I'm sure those people already have Skynet monitoring traffic reports and aren't just helplessly asking google for assistance with their journey.  Or maybe they are.  Hi guys!  You should give Lisa more screentime and then imply that drinking mercury will give you the cutting edge at MvC3!

So, I have to assume that the question was from some guy who is scared that all his buddies on the "daily speakup" (I honestly don't even know what goes on there, I figured the terrible photo-shopped GAMER KULTURE picture on every one of those topics was some sort of reverse IQ test) and now doesn't know what to do.  Well, I mean besides going outside.  We can't have that, I mean what with Bulletstorm and Portal 2 coming out!  What's gonna be the next hilarious joke that you'll repeat approximately 20 times and then declare to be passe and pass judgment upon anyone who dares to use it?  THE WORLD IS PASSING YOU BY FUCKER NOW WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT FEAT. ALL AMERICAN REJECTS

The more I think about that search term, the more confusion grows.  I mean, half of the Internet is stupid nerds congregating to communities, and a good number of those cater to that hungry need for social acceptance above other nerds and pretending that they understand that life does not revolve around their stupid bullshit.  There is probably some concerted Facebook/general social media campaign to lure people away their betraying idols to join a site that REALLY cares and the worst thing is that so many of you are going to fall for it.  Why can't I help you?

(also, way to ruin my happiness at tim finally not having a big name column anymore by imploding at the exact same time, you fucks)