Outlast (2013)

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

It's because these games bore me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(spoilers for the rest of the review I guess)

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

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

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

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

On Bioshock Infinite and the FPS Weapon Limitations

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

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

it was a good way to die.

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

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

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

a typical halo gun value decision

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

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

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

pictured: a rare example of swapping done right

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

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

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

i luv sponges

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


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

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

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

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

a million dollar garbage bin

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

You're Next (2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Diablo 3: REAPER OF SOULZ

Previously, on Was Never a Fan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) First, I made a necromancer.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give an option to remove Loot 2.0.

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

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

Pacific Rim (2013)

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

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

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

well look that doesn't mean

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overthinking Terrible: Kingdoms of Amalur

Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

add to junk?  not in this town, fucko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pubic enemy number 1

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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