Felt (2014)

Throughout watching Felt, the indie quasi-horror by Jason Baker, a mental image came to mind.  Not of horrifying male oppression through the ages of history, nor of evil ball-breaking women committing their dutiful boyfriends and husbands to the gas chambers of cuckdom.  No, I thought about the cartoon image of those rabbit traps that are just a box held up by a jointed stick connect to rope.

By that, I mean I have no clue how to approach reviewing this film.  Everytime I tried to talk about it, I could feel that rope starting to draw taut.  They knew who I was, what I was.  I am the boogeyman male, potentially about to say something mean and insensitive about women's lives.  But if I praise it, then am I just parroting what the filmmakers were clearly going for, no longer thinking for myself but just trying to get feminist brownie?  No escape, I think, staring at the carrot.  No escape.

 I don't want to make this sound like a bad thing, as I strongly believe that one should expose their jaded critical bodies to constructs that don't comport to the critic's framework of a good thing.  It's the reason I occasionally play twine games even though my brain immediately starts screaming for a super shotgun the first time I click on lesbian vampire.  But it still makes me wonder if this movie was even remotely meant for someone like myself, aside from transforming me into a screencap that a radical feminist posts on their twitter feed.  In my defense, almost every critic seemed to have run into the same conundrum.  Reviews of Felt fall into two categories: "it's brilliant art that cannot be fully appreciated until you have subsumed the psychosexual intricacies of rape culture," or "THIS MOVIE BORING WANT SLEEP."

Felt revolves around the disjointed brain world of Amy (Amy Everson, whose performance, while dangerously twee at time, is probably the only aspect of the movie I can unreservedly recommend), working a dead-end job while hanging out with friends who are fairly problematic in their own right.  Something Bad happened to her prior to the film, and while it's never stated, the fact that a large section of the film's first half is devoted to her wandering around landscapes in costumes that are part whimsical and part inspired by every rapist in a 1980s crime film, complete with giant penis.  Indeed, in the traditional sense nothing at all happens in the first 40 minutes, instead going for that indie standby of people improv mumbling about topics the writers thought would be germane to impoverished hipsters (such as some girls fantasizing about the best ways to kill dudes, i mean that is a fantasy right *ulp*).

nope can't reckon what's gonna happen at the end of this here film

That isn't to say that some of the scenes aren't fun to watch, such as Amy's horrifying OKCupid date with a failed Owen Wilson vat clone that states that "roofies are the bar equivalent of Santa Claus," and her showing up to ruin a bearded hipster's nude photo shoot via grossly exaggerated felt sex organs.  And naturally that's horrible to say that scenes like that are fun to watch when they're essentially exploring the aspect of rape culture but they are funny in their darkness and it's better than watching her walk around the woods as the Penismonster and jesus christ this movie is just closing its jaws around my skull.

Eventually the film hatches a plot when Amy meets the film's One Decent Man, who talks to her like a person and gives comfort hugs without ulterior motives and does elaborate birthday celebrations and if you've ever seen anything like Felt you'll immediately know that the One Decent Man is also not really a good person.  AND if you saw the film's poster on Netflix you'll also immediately know where the plot is going to end up.  Therein sort of lies the film's biggest issue: once the film grants your wishes and moves on from straight mumblecore to something resembling a story, you discover that the story is so depressingly obvious about what the end result is going to be that you yearn for the good old days that were thirty minutes ago, when nothing happened and thus you never had to be hurt.

Films like Felt are why I'm glad I don't have any sort of rating system.  This is a movie that, by conventional standards is an absolute fucking mess, with an 80 minute running length that creates one of those time dilation fields that make it feel ten times as long.  Almost everyone in the film in the film is awful and there's rarely anything pleasing to look at, the film framed so even nudity is unsettling and makes me regret ever getting a boner.  But that's the point of this film, something that some reviewers seem to miss.  Alot of "feminist" horror films, from I Spit on Your Grave to Jennifer's Body to Teeth, are still squarely shot in the male gaze, so that although guys are getting hell of mutilated, you still get to see lady butts square up.  Felt is pretty dedicated to making you suffer for searching "BIG PLUMP ASSES LET ME SEE THEM" on google when you were sixteen.  I'm not entirely sure I agree, but at least it made me think?  Yeah, let's go with that.

can you begin to imagine who got the soundtrack to this fucking movie

also fuck whoever called this a slasher

Binary Domain (Sega, 2012)

so let's make a long story short:  if you like the idea of expansive violence towards robots, and can tolerate third-person shooters, then you're gonna fucking love binary domain

I'll be honest.  I fucking love killing robots, to the point that it's a nonsexual fetish for me.  Like most fetishes, this thing can be traced to my childhood.  I had seen roughly 20 hardcore violence horror films before I saw Batman: The Animated Series's "Heart of Steel" (THANKS DAD), but its violence has always stuck through to me.  For those that don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of Batman cartoons (shame on you), the two-parter episode revolved around a HAL facsimile who wanted before logic and order for Gotham and blah blah blah.

What's important is that the evil computer fashioned various duplicates of important citizens, all of whom attack Batman in the climatic confrontation and are gruesomely dispatched.  And by gruesomely I'm not exaggerating, the writers clearly relished getting around cartoon censorship by murdering robots instead of humans: the robots are exploded, violently electrocuted and then exploded, and in the case of a Marylin Monroebot (I wish I was joking), crushed under an elevator, but not before the force of the elevator cracks her neck to a 90 degree angle.

again, this was at a time when a bad guy actually getting a shot off with a (non-laser) gun was considered PUSHING THE LIMITS, so witnessing this on tv did a fair number on my brain.  I started to give extra credence to games that gave me unrestricted robogenocide, even if they were terrible.  I...I once tried to argue that the Terminator 2 arcade game was good.

The point is that like how SOCIALLY ENLIGHTENED game critics will slobber all over a browser clicken on texten game because half of the choices turn you into a transgendered lesbian, I feel like my own personal predilections hamper me from honestly reviewing a game that features more exploding-robot-heads-per-minute than any other.   But the fact that all the reviews I've seen on this game were either the troglodyte "GRAPHICS GOOD FUN" variety or some four-part attempt to talk about how "cyborg queer theory" factors into the game, I have to give this a go.

First off, the plot who cares about the plot.  Binary Domain is basically someone trying to mimic a hideo kojima plot while respecting the player enough to try to do it in five minutes or less cutscene chunks, which is to say it's a massive disaster but at least it's not a boring disaster like kojima's shit.  There's robots everywhere in futureland, you're part of some anti-advanced-robot multinational task force, and oh no someone is making robots that look like humans in neo-neo-tokyo.   Specifically, you're some awful american white dude archetype whose only defining character traits are that he REALLY hates robots and that he has yellow fever.  The supporting characters could have been more, but thanks to the game's laughably bad interaction system (more on that later), most of them are just somewhat creative nationalistic stereotypes, such as Hot Asian Sniper and Butch As Hell British Explosives Lady.  Except for Bo.

Jesus christ, Big Bo.  I found it sort of surreal that someone attempted to do a social justice positive critique of this game, because holy shit I'm sure there are more racist portrayals in video games but I'm having trouble at the moment because jesus look at that name BIG BO BIG BO BIG BO

he also has a permanent bugeye thanks to superior graphics

Big Bo is your second in command, and is probably the most fleshed out character in the game, existing as a mixture of that one horrible stereotype from Gears of War and Barracuda, a primary villain during Garth Ennis's Punisher run.  He is basically every sort of id tendency that a person who has never been around black people would think a black person would have.  He's so horrible, but also probably the only genuine source of humor, even if the source of that humor is straight up racism.  While every other character is trying to give lip service to the plot, Big Bo's contribution is WHOA BOSS THAT SHIT WAS CRAY or WHOA BOSS LOOK AT DEM YELLOW GALS.

But like I said, plot in a game like this doesn't matter, what matters is the gameplay and most of the time it delivers in a way I've only seen in a few games.

85% of non-boss encounters in this game work basically the same way: you and your two chosen comrades versus about eight to twelve robots that look like the soap sculptures with a million vertices from Will Smith's I, Robot.  First off, you tell your comrades to stay the fuck back because friendly AI is unbelievably useless and only good at stumbling into your gunsight while you're firing full auto and using up your limited supply of magical revive packs.  But once your idiot teammates are locked in the attic, the magic begins.

The big thing about Binary Domain's robots is that they feature actual "location based damage."  I know, 99% of the time when games use this word, it means "leg shots do less damage and headshots are lethal," but holy shit what you hit actually matters here.  Shoot a robo-leg enough times, and eventually it explodes so they crawl after you, terminator-like.  Shoot a robo-arm enough times, and it'll have to switch weapons to the OTHER arm!

But the head.  Oh, the head.

what you should be doing the entire game

If you destroy a robot's head, it'll suddenly turn its comrades, who in turn will instantly turn on this headless traitor.  I don't know if it's just me, but the joy of seeing seven other robots immediately stop shooting at you to awkwardly fire at decapatron never ever got old.  The best part is that headless robots will fight each other if there's none left, so most of my fights ended up in a sort of slap fight you'd see in a Tool video, sans 6 video filters.

Occasionally the game tries to "switch up" this winning formula, either by throwing you against some dumb bullet sponge miniboss or asinine vehicle section, but you're never pulled away from the essentials for too long.  It's also nice (and maybe a little sociopathic) to say that at no point does the game decide you have fought enough robots and now have to fight EVIL HUMAN BADDIES.

THIS IS YOUR GOD

The game also throws alot of bosses at you, and this games manages to finally break the "all bosses are boring bullet sponges that you shoot at then roll away from until they stop attacking" curse that a wizard placed on every third-person shooter.  So now only half the bosses are like that, but the other half are genuinely creative multi-stage struggles that are more akin to those white-knuckle "IT'S GONNA BE YOU OR ME ASSHOLE" battles from Smash TV.  The first major boss fight is versus a giant robot spider where you have to slowly whittle down its component parts all the while dodging a steadily increasing tempo of explosions, and it's genuinely one of the best boss fights I've ever experienced.  There's only one genuinely fucking awful boss in all of Binary Domain, and I'm sorry if you play this game based on my review and get to that fucker.

This might sound like faint praise, but I genuinely admire how the game simplifies everything that isn't shooting robots, so you can always go back to shooting robots.  There's a way to upgrade your stats and guns through purchasable nano things, but the game throws so much dosh at you that you never have to choose what to get, it's pathetically easy to min-max upgrades, and even if you're too lazy to do that, the bonuses provided are minimal to the effect on the game.  The guns themselves are either your massively overpowered assault rifle, your infinite ammo pistol that's surprisingly decent, and an assortment of forgettable firearms that you can use up and forget.  You have a trust system with your teammates, but I realized pretty much immediately that the key to maxing trust was just to blindly agree with whatever they asked, and once again the effect of trust has zero effect aside from plot shit (and what do we say to plot, kids).  There's some voice command option, but it's absolute shit so you'll turn it off immediately.  The collectibles are so negligible even I didn't feel obligated to look for them,

No, Binary Domain understands me.  It knows I hated all that decision-making and talking plot garbage from Bioware and "smart FPS games."   It gets that if you can't write a good plot, just make it dumb as possible, that cutscenes exist only to be ludicrous sci-fi watchwords, that when the endgame arrives with the expected twist parade, it should not take pride in its facile surprises and instead just throw a giant robot dog at me.  Binary Domain is good because when you shoot the clunky cylinder-shaped robot transport crafts while the robot is still attached, both the craft and robot will spin in the air a little bit before violently crashing into the earth, and there's nothing preventing you from doing this over and over again.

now take bo's hand, and enter a happier place

gamergate, lessons learned, and god you are stupid but maybe we can make you better

so it's 2015, and I think it's fair to say that gamergate, barring some miracle tumblr rupture that disgorges SECRETSJWTACTICS.WPD into the hands of little timmy, is a fucking joke.

Note, I'm not saying "dead."  Internet stats don't lie; people keep inexplicably joining the movement and retweeting idiot shit, but whatever momentum this movement had is dead.  The -one- actual victory gamergate could look back on with pride, Intel's pulling of revenue from gamasutra, was reversed months ago, and since then absolutely nothing has happened.  You can log onto their dumbass subreddit for proof of this:  any pretense of DEFEATING BAD ETHICS is gone, now it's just a million upvoted topics about "oh no this sjw is attacking one of our brothers, alert alert alert."  Oh yeah and you got the FTC to UPDATE THEIR FAQ ABOUT SITE REFERRALS.  I realize mike cernovich is too busy selling juice to explain administrative law to you, but this doesn't mean shit, and for any actual enforcement to go through will require alot of time and pain and will probably be defanged by powerful lobbies (yes, there are lobbies more powerful than the gawker/polygon cartel) so nothing is going to happen.

SQUAWK ETHICS IN GAME JOURNALISM

Simply put, you guys stared into the vagina abyss, and are now bizarro world tumblr.  and while this means the idiot dance will probably continue for awhile longer since all of your moves are now basically identical to people who use "cis-garbage" unironically, nothing is going to actually happen.  You guys wanted to be the big brain confounding its opponents with a variety of devilish tactics, instead you're the stupid gargoyle whose attack pattern is bashing its head into the wall over and over.

So, what's the point of this blog?  Am I just another pathetic white dude lording it over other pathetic white dudes?  Heavens no, because I'm here to actually offer advice to you idiots on how, the next time a golden opportunity to ruin the lives of self-important people comes up, you don't drop the ball so fucking badly.

ADVICE 1: PICK A BETTER TARGET

If there's one thing you shitheads need to figure out, it's this.  What am I talking about?  Consider a comparison between the Republicans of the mid 90's and today.  In the mid-90s, despite winning an explosive mid-term election under a united banner, almost nothing of real note came out in that time aside from a long-simmering hatred towards a certain political family.  The republican part of today is a fractured fucking mess, but still managed to destroy this midterm election and seems to be well on their way to destroy this country.  Do you what the difference was?

Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was a consummate genius when it came to controlling the mindset of the American public.  The dude banged a trashy intern and literally lied under oath, and yet managed to crawl out of this as someone that moderates and non-radical liberals adore, while feared by conservatives.  Barack Obama is absolutely fucking horrible at this controlling of the narrative, and thus is just simply hated by everyone around him.

the face that launched a thousand nerd tears

I'm sure that when eron "fuccboi" gronj's manifesto came out, you guys smelled blood in the water.  finally, you thought, a real scandal we can really sink our teeth into!!!!  in hindsight, of course, you dumbasses should have pulled back after the first recon-in-force forays into attacking zoe quinn.  Not because the scandal was actually completely bunk, of course, history is built on such false pretenses.  No, because Zoe Quinn, like Bill Clinton, is extremely adept at controlling a narrative.  Her first reply to the accusations was a masterful blend of victimization, hatred, and vague language.  Oh sure, the "we do not negotiate with terrorists" line was eyerolling to people that had followed the scandal from the start, but here is the thing that you stupid fucks don't seem to understand: that response was never meant for you.

You see, while you dumbasses were high-fiving themselves over wacky doritoes videos and finding zoe's horrifying nude pictures, zoe was quickly laying the groundwork for the dominant narrative that would appear in basically every mainstream media portrayal of gamergate from then until now.  I don't want to toot my horn, but I basically called this before gamergate was even coined.  And yet, even when it was clear that whatever emotional instability zoe had gave her tremendous abilities in terms of wrangling allies and making you look like idiots, you kept portraying her as public gamer enemy number 1, which is exactly what she wanted.

At this point Fortuna Virgo must have taken pity on you, because a golden opportunity was presented in the form of Leigh Alexander, who waddled onto the scene, tripped into several open cans of gasoline, impaled herself on a gate, and gasped out ",,,gamers."  And what did you do?  Inspiration struck!  You roughly wiped the gasoline from Leigh, and proceeded to use those rags as ammunition against Zoe, because NOW WE'VE GOT A NAME BOYS.

I can't emphasize what a bonehead move it was to continue focusing on zoe quinn and her ever expanding cabal of echo boxes instead of immediately turning onto Leigh.  Leigh is an earnest person that actually seems to care about video games, which means that if you readjusted your sights and terrorized her, she might have folded and then people would have actually taken notice.  Let's remember that gamasutra was the only website shoddy enough that advertisers actually pulled out of, but instead you decided that THE REAL ENEMY was gawker and vox media, which actually have stuff like money behind them and thus didn't fucking care about your dumb protests.

Of course, I can understand why this lateral move wasn't made, because gamergate was always a bloated, slow mess that couldn't actually adapt quickly.  This totally not obvious segue segues into my second point:

ADVICE TWO: PICK COMPETENT LEADERS

I sort of blame the 4chan ethos for this.  The anonymous army shit is great for small scale terror, but is terrible at the sort of long "message is the medium" operations.  Obviously, for something as glorious as gamergate, leaders were needed.  And holy shit, was nothing delivered.

I mean okay, you have Total Biscuit.  And InternetAristocrat can be funny mostly because he obviously doesn't give a brass fuck about any of this besides ruining people's lives.  Aside from that, though, the various spokesman personalities you've formed out of clay are just about the least interesting people on the internet.  And that's fucking -killing- you.

Part of the problem is that when you went searching for organization faces, the vast majority were already established anti-feminist youtube duders.  Before you open your fool mouth, the problem isn't the anti-feminist sentiment, it's that they're all PHENOMENALLY BORING to anyone that doesn't 100 percent buy into what they're saying.

it says alot about gamergate that even its idealized avatars look incredibly bullyable

Do you know why people are always talking about Feminist Frequency videos, but don't seem to care about those mundanematt or sargon of akkad videos you always post as a reply?  It's not the entrenched control that sjws have over the american mindset, it's because anita is really good at moving from one striking image to the next while showing human expressions, while your videos are a nasal voice talking for 45 minutes over the static image of a skull or some ASSyrian diety.  Or maybe you want to show them that guy that looks like an alternative future version of anton levay that never got over his school bullying, yeah that will work, it HAS to work.

I've never understood this, since the very essence of right-wing thought lends itself to an easy, populist speaking style.  It's the reason that right-wing radio and tv always gets more viewers: people like bill o'reilly and mike levin are accomplished at creating constant tension and interest with their voices.   Even if you disagree with what they say, it creates a sort of electric thrill to argue with them over the various noise boxes.  All I get from listening to the innumerable google hangout videos gamergate loves to post is "holy shit does anyone ever shut up how can anyone normal  ever listen to this" and the answer of course is that they don't.

the original dumb nerd

Obviously this isn't as easy a problem to fix, since it requires someone that actually understands how to talk to people that aren't fucking nerds and would have the testicular fortitude to tell other figureheads "shut the fuck up im taking over this monkeyhouse, otherwise we're gonna have ourselves a night of the long fedoras."  Still, this is needed, because of the third thing you guys need to figure out.

ADVICE THREE: DEMAND MORE FROM YOUR MASTERS

Oh, don't be so coy.  Look, it's not a big secret that gamergate is, to at least some degree, sponsored by certain rightist organizations.  It's just the same as how alot of left-wing interests latched onto and sponsored the tumblr version of gamergate.

It's not actually the same, though.  MSNBC and various left-wing stations frequently feature spokesmen from the anti-gamergate faction.  Fuck, anita was on colbert or daily show or something. What has the right done for you?  There's basically been zero discussion of it on right-wing radio or tv.  Breitbart assigned as your handler an unstable gay guy that wrote prior to all this about how pathetic gamers were and obviously still doesn't respect you, but all of you still lap it up because of your fundamental lack of self-respect (id go into this more but this post is already too long).  Simply put, and get ready because this might hurt your feelings, the companies you are dogmatically supporting view you as dogs, useful as a diversionary tactic and a way to terrorize leftists, but not giving a shit if your support costs you your job, family, or sanity.

Granted, gamergate isn't in the best position to ask for some sort of legitimacy token since, as discussed above, you guys haven't done much besides making random people fearing for their lives. but jesus, is it that hard to find some photogenic nerd that doesn't have a history of explicitly supporting rape to stumble onto fox news and talk about the harassment he's suffered from angry feminists, all i wanna do is just play some video games guys *pout*.



I don't know if anything will ever happen from this blog, especially since even with an actual leader, there's likely always going to be a contingent of sadsacks that, dare i say it, actually like the victimhood lifestyle.  But, a man that hates everything can dream.

Fist of the North Star (1995)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fist of the north star

Zoe Quinn, Turf Wars, and God You Are Stupid

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

i mean, COME ON DUDE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chernobyl Diaries

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chernobyl Diaries.

Drakengard 3

I had a dream a few nights ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Drakengard 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






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

That is seven minutes long!

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

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

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

Oh yeah!~

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

The old man smiles, and walks into the distance.