This is Level 2 reviews,I've started this blog as a place for me to share my thoughts on games both popular and unknown, games that are good, games that are bad, and games that will take you on a one way trip to the asylum super glued to a donkey's hind quarters screaming about hellfire and damnation. Please comment and subscribe!
Saturday, March 31, 2012
SO YOU CAUGHT ME. I'M A LIAR. But there is news. Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.
So, just a quick update. Looks like there's an updated version of Baldur's Gate being thrown together by a few of the blokes responsible for the original game. Now, those of you who associate Baldur's Gate with Bioware. Don't fret, Bioware is completely uninvolved so Baldur's Gate isn't going to be turned into a first person shooter or a button masher. It's nothing too substantial over the core game mind you, just very VERY slight graphical cleanup, and some improvements to the interface. They also made mention of adding a bit more recorded dialogue to the game, those of you who played the original might remember it being fairly text heavy, this is probably going to still be the case, but there will at least be a little more than before. Oh also, inexplicably, they're making it compatible with the iPad? I dunno what that's all about. But fingers crossed for an early release, (and enough updates to make it worth it)
Salvage (the thing no one could possibly do for this movie)
So I'm reviewing a movie. And I'll have you know I'm starting the writing process about half way through. It's a British horror film, about 2 of the least likeable people on the planet. And their attempt to survive the attacks of some kind of creature which (42 minutes in) I have yet to see. As such it's going to turn into a bit of a running commentary after a point, but regardless. Things started off honestly quite strong, there was this bit between a father and his daughter as they ride in a car, the father is divorced, and is driving his daughter to spend a weekend with her mother. The chemistry between the two characters is solid and you'll find yourself caring about what happens to these two. So then, moments later, we discard them. For two pieces of filth clinging to the un-wiped ass of the world. We're with the fathers wife, she clearly cheated on him, and we meet her sleeping with a man she doesn't know, rather than seeing her daughter. Her daughter, after discovering that her mother is still a whore, takes off. So we get, cheating slut of a mother, and the guy she was getting porked by. Turns out the guy is just as huge of a piece of crap, having a wife and two children of his own back home.
YOU MAY NOW ASK YOURSELF. "self, why should i care about these two? These are the type of people whose death I normally applaud in these films?" of course you might not use those specific words but hey. And you know what your self is gonna say? "shit abstract concept of consciousness, I have no idea! I don't like them either!". Anyways, before I diverge too far, I'd like to note my deepest condolences to the special effects team whose budget for blood effects allowed only for a couple bags of cheetos. I'm not kidding, the blood is bright vibrant orange. It's bizarre. When it's actually escaping from a wound it's red. Then when it's on someones face, it's like a melted down traffic cone. 50 minutes now by the way guys, the last 8 minutes have been nothing but the two cheating fucktards talking about how everything is everyone elses fault. I'd just like to say to the writers. When you want to write characters that people are going to care about? And be sympathetic towards? Maybe try and... I dunno, make them even register as human beings?
I think at this point, what's going on, is the director using the whole monster attack as a way to provide a backdrop for human drama. This is a great idea in most cases, The Walking Dead, for example, is all about the people, not the zombies, 28 Days Later was the same deal. But the reason it works for those examples, is that the characters have sensible motivations, you can sympathize with them, understand them, you even like them. But it doesn't work here. By the way. I finally saw the creature. I've never been more dumbfounded in my life. I'd also like to point out the amazing racket the fucking thing is making, it's bellowing like some sort of farm animal having it's back door violated, meanwhile it killed at least 3 people earlier without making even the slightest sound. Not a footstep, not a breath, nothing. And beyond this it doesn't appear to have any particular motivation, there's no rhyme or reason to who it's killing or how it's doing it. It's not killing to eat. It's not killing to survive, it's just killing people. I, this.... this movie is really stupid you guys.
Oh, while we're talking about massive and glaring inconsistencies, a character who was just killed, horribly, and bloody, wet tearing sound effects and all. Just ran up on the street, with nothing more than a small puncture wound in his side. One second he'll find it impossible to even stand on his own feet, then he'll be running. Now he's dead and the girl is flailing her arms around screaming. Fucking christ I don't even know if I can finish this. I don't normally get too bothered by things like monster motivations or plot holes, or liberal use of the whole deus ex machina thing. But this is getting absurd, it has the feel of a story a young child tells, when he's making the whole thing up on the spot. "Oh then! then the monster gets the man! Then the military gets the lady! But! But it turns out the man wasnt dead! he saves the girl!". I am so glad this pile of shit is only 75 minutes long, and we're at the 64 minute mark now. And the military is even inconsistent now! Previously they didn't hurt a soul unless they left their homes, now they just capped a little girl, who was hiding, in her home, for no reason. Get your shit together guys. I feel like you were tripping balls when you put this on paper. Mother is now talking to her daughter through the door of her home, and the camera angle makes it painfully obvious she is going to get dropped, and no one is going to feel bad about it. At all. Well, she didn't die, not yet at least. It was far dumber. She backed slowly into the dark trying to look scary then somehow, in one run, broke through the front door, which was solid wood by the way, she weighs prolly 140? Prolly would have been too smart to toss a lawn chair through the flimsy glass doors around back.
Oh by the way, the monster, now apparently wields a fire poker, and can be almost overpowered by a couple of pencil thin women. And it... has a flannel shirt... oh man. Alright. So what I just saw. Well there was one redeeming factor, which I'll get to in a minute. Let me just paint this scene for you. And PLEASE in the meantime, keep in mind, dozens of highly trained Black ops operatives were sent in to kill this thing, they have been torn to shreds, effortlessly, and thrown aside, bullets do not harm the beast, unless the highly trained operatives just can't aim for a shit and through hundreds of rounds haven't hit it once. So anyways. Mother gets grabbed by the beast through a door and pinned to it, it holds out the fire poker through the door so they can grab it. Daughter runs away, opens the front door, but almost immediately the creature is on her and has her pinned. Mother walks up behind it, and stabs it through the neck with a blunt fire poker. It's dead. I don't even. So anyways she pulls the poker out, turns her hands towards the sky and starts screaming, for no reason, again. And then the best part of the whole movie, Black ops comes out of the bushes, and blam. Mother. Drops. Dead. Anyways the pain is over. I think I'm going to go drink through the suffering.
YOU MAY NOW ASK YOURSELF. "self, why should i care about these two? These are the type of people whose death I normally applaud in these films?" of course you might not use those specific words but hey. And you know what your self is gonna say? "shit abstract concept of consciousness, I have no idea! I don't like them either!". Anyways, before I diverge too far, I'd like to note my deepest condolences to the special effects team whose budget for blood effects allowed only for a couple bags of cheetos. I'm not kidding, the blood is bright vibrant orange. It's bizarre. When it's actually escaping from a wound it's red. Then when it's on someones face, it's like a melted down traffic cone. 50 minutes now by the way guys, the last 8 minutes have been nothing but the two cheating fucktards talking about how everything is everyone elses fault. I'd just like to say to the writers. When you want to write characters that people are going to care about? And be sympathetic towards? Maybe try and... I dunno, make them even register as human beings?
I think at this point, what's going on, is the director using the whole monster attack as a way to provide a backdrop for human drama. This is a great idea in most cases, The Walking Dead, for example, is all about the people, not the zombies, 28 Days Later was the same deal. But the reason it works for those examples, is that the characters have sensible motivations, you can sympathize with them, understand them, you even like them. But it doesn't work here. By the way. I finally saw the creature. I've never been more dumbfounded in my life. I'd also like to point out the amazing racket the fucking thing is making, it's bellowing like some sort of farm animal having it's back door violated, meanwhile it killed at least 3 people earlier without making even the slightest sound. Not a footstep, not a breath, nothing. And beyond this it doesn't appear to have any particular motivation, there's no rhyme or reason to who it's killing or how it's doing it. It's not killing to eat. It's not killing to survive, it's just killing people. I, this.... this movie is really stupid you guys.
Oh, while we're talking about massive and glaring inconsistencies, a character who was just killed, horribly, and bloody, wet tearing sound effects and all. Just ran up on the street, with nothing more than a small puncture wound in his side. One second he'll find it impossible to even stand on his own feet, then he'll be running. Now he's dead and the girl is flailing her arms around screaming. Fucking christ I don't even know if I can finish this. I don't normally get too bothered by things like monster motivations or plot holes, or liberal use of the whole deus ex machina thing. But this is getting absurd, it has the feel of a story a young child tells, when he's making the whole thing up on the spot. "Oh then! then the monster gets the man! Then the military gets the lady! But! But it turns out the man wasnt dead! he saves the girl!". I am so glad this pile of shit is only 75 minutes long, and we're at the 64 minute mark now. And the military is even inconsistent now! Previously they didn't hurt a soul unless they left their homes, now they just capped a little girl, who was hiding, in her home, for no reason. Get your shit together guys. I feel like you were tripping balls when you put this on paper. Mother is now talking to her daughter through the door of her home, and the camera angle makes it painfully obvious she is going to get dropped, and no one is going to feel bad about it. At all. Well, she didn't die, not yet at least. It was far dumber. She backed slowly into the dark trying to look scary then somehow, in one run, broke through the front door, which was solid wood by the way, she weighs prolly 140? Prolly would have been too smart to toss a lawn chair through the flimsy glass doors around back.
Oh by the way, the monster, now apparently wields a fire poker, and can be almost overpowered by a couple of pencil thin women. And it... has a flannel shirt... oh man. Alright. So what I just saw. Well there was one redeeming factor, which I'll get to in a minute. Let me just paint this scene for you. And PLEASE in the meantime, keep in mind, dozens of highly trained Black ops operatives were sent in to kill this thing, they have been torn to shreds, effortlessly, and thrown aside, bullets do not harm the beast, unless the highly trained operatives just can't aim for a shit and through hundreds of rounds haven't hit it once. So anyways. Mother gets grabbed by the beast through a door and pinned to it, it holds out the fire poker through the door so they can grab it. Daughter runs away, opens the front door, but almost immediately the creature is on her and has her pinned. Mother walks up behind it, and stabs it through the neck with a blunt fire poker. It's dead. I don't even. So anyways she pulls the poker out, turns her hands towards the sky and starts screaming, for no reason, again. And then the best part of the whole movie, Black ops comes out of the bushes, and blam. Mother. Drops. Dead. Anyways the pain is over. I think I'm going to go drink through the suffering.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Oh Jesus, you guys, what do you want? (The Walking Dead season 2 finale, Mass Effect 3, and I'm sort of lazy)
I apologize but this is going to be more of an assorted bit of rambling on a couple of different subjects. School has absorbed more of my time than I expected this semester so I've had no real time to write, besides that I haven't even had time to play many games, and when I've had free time I feel like an idiot spending it replaying games I've already beaten time and again, not because I dislike replaying old games, just because it seems there are better things to do with what limited time I get. SO ANYWAYS. Number one is I've finally stopped putting it off and am now writing my novel. Thus far I have about 50 pages typed out, unedited of course but I'm fairly happy with all of it so far. I know what you're thinking, "no free time to write? How'd you write 50 pages then?" well I'll tell you, you observant perceptive bastard. For 2 days I just didn't really sleep. Not because I simply said, "I'm gonna stay up all night and write this." but because I got so absorbed in what I was doing that I neglected the passage of time and found myself staring blearily out at sunrise. So regardless, that's happening.
And now the rant section.
So I've been a pretty huge fan of "The Walking Dead" (I did not read the comic books) since it first aired. It was the thing that the zombie genre really needed after the influx of B-movies and just general crap that hollywood has been farting out to capitalize on the momentous increase in the genre's popularity. They focused on the human element, and the zombie apocalypse essentially formed a backdrop for this group of survivors and their struggles, it focused on how the apocalypse would test their humanity, how much they could take. The mistake so many make is focusing on the zombie part itself. That just gets boring. So as I sat there last Sunday, excitedly watching the season finale, I was really enjoying myself. *SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT BTW* Hell it even looked like they might kill off that turbo-cunt Andrea. Everything built up to it, she was cornered. Then the show took everything that made it so good, so wildly successful, and threw it out the window. But not before taking a dump on it. And we were left with one of the most over the top, stupid, nonsensical scenes I have seen in any show. Andrea gets saved. By a ninja. With 2 pet zombies. And a katana. Now I'm told, that this character "Michonne" is pivotal to the comic books, and yes I do get that this series is based on comics. But the thing is, they (the show) need to decide which approach they want. Do they want to use the comics as inspiration (which they have done so far) and then build around that foundation? Or do they want to go with the over the top often goofy style of a comic book? Which is not to say that the comic book style is a bad thing overall, but it just doesn't fit. And if they wanted to do that they should have been having crazy shootouts, and everyone in the group should have been a professional martial artist, rather than taking this really brutal honest approach to this circle of desperate people, and then randomly throwing a super hero into the mix. Also I really really feel like the writers just somehow know that I hate Andrea and her intense case of man face (and uncontrollable urges to convince everyone in the world to kill themselves) with a passion because I lost count of how many times they built up to her being killed only to pull the rug out from under me. Fucking Deus Ex Machina.
On to the next rant.
I fucking hate Bioware. There, I said it. In my eyes they are many millions of miles past the point of no return. I refuse to even buy Mass Effect 3. I've read about it. I know how it ends. I wouldn't pay for that if it were 5 dollars in the bargain bin. It's a piece of shit action game with a piece of shit story. Enough said. I'm just gonna keep pretending Bioware ceased to exist just after Dragon Age: Origins was released. But that isn't what this rant is about. This rant is about video game critics and how blatantly corrupt they are. You don't really need to look farther than metacritic (averages reviews from all different sources if you dont already know about it) to know something is wrong. The critic average is a 90. The player average? is a 3.5 out of 10 (on the pc version, xbox is something like 4.5, still real bad). So what's the deal? Are we not playing the same game? Or is it perhaps something else? Maybe EA is a huge company and bought them out? Or maybe the critics tend to be the same meat-heads that keep going out and buying COD after COD even though they know it's going to be exactly the same right down to the pixels on the guns (that's one definition of insanity by the way, in case you guys didnt know). And that's disheartening to me. Not that I've ever bought a game solely due to critic reviews, and you shouldn't either. If anyone ever told me they bought something just cause I gave it a good review I'd just see where all that wool was hiding and be on my way. But the thing is, every year the numbers seem more and more artificial, great games get slammed in reviews, generic trash pulls perfect 10's. Look at games like Rise of the Argonauts, personally I loved the game, critics almost universally slammed it, most frequently referencing "too much walking and talking" as their chief complaint. Basically, this isn't an action game, it's got too much smart stuff! We don't want it! It's got a 54 from critics, a very low score, and a 7.5 from players, (based on an admittedly small number of players) the only honest complaint I could level on the game is that it has some nasty technical issues. But the critics prolly weren't being bribed by Liquid Entertainment. Hell, recently I even discovered that back in the day, a certain Jeff Gerstmann, from over at Giantbomb.com (a great website with great critics, including Jeff, by the way, you should check it out) was fired from his position at gamespot.com for writing a bad review to a sponsor game (Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, I think it was). And if that doesn't speak volumes on the industry I don't know what does. Anyways I'll crank out the rest of my review for Deux Ex: Human Revolution either tonight or tomorrow night.
Alex Jenkins 2012
And now the rant section.
So I've been a pretty huge fan of "The Walking Dead" (I did not read the comic books) since it first aired. It was the thing that the zombie genre really needed after the influx of B-movies and just general crap that hollywood has been farting out to capitalize on the momentous increase in the genre's popularity. They focused on the human element, and the zombie apocalypse essentially formed a backdrop for this group of survivors and their struggles, it focused on how the apocalypse would test their humanity, how much they could take. The mistake so many make is focusing on the zombie part itself. That just gets boring. So as I sat there last Sunday, excitedly watching the season finale, I was really enjoying myself. *SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT BTW* Hell it even looked like they might kill off that turbo-cunt Andrea. Everything built up to it, she was cornered. Then the show took everything that made it so good, so wildly successful, and threw it out the window. But not before taking a dump on it. And we were left with one of the most over the top, stupid, nonsensical scenes I have seen in any show. Andrea gets saved. By a ninja. With 2 pet zombies. And a katana. Now I'm told, that this character "Michonne" is pivotal to the comic books, and yes I do get that this series is based on comics. But the thing is, they (the show) need to decide which approach they want. Do they want to use the comics as inspiration (which they have done so far) and then build around that foundation? Or do they want to go with the over the top often goofy style of a comic book? Which is not to say that the comic book style is a bad thing overall, but it just doesn't fit. And if they wanted to do that they should have been having crazy shootouts, and everyone in the group should have been a professional martial artist, rather than taking this really brutal honest approach to this circle of desperate people, and then randomly throwing a super hero into the mix. Also I really really feel like the writers just somehow know that I hate Andrea and her intense case of man face (and uncontrollable urges to convince everyone in the world to kill themselves) with a passion because I lost count of how many times they built up to her being killed only to pull the rug out from under me. Fucking Deus Ex Machina.
On to the next rant.
I fucking hate Bioware. There, I said it. In my eyes they are many millions of miles past the point of no return. I refuse to even buy Mass Effect 3. I've read about it. I know how it ends. I wouldn't pay for that if it were 5 dollars in the bargain bin. It's a piece of shit action game with a piece of shit story. Enough said. I'm just gonna keep pretending Bioware ceased to exist just after Dragon Age: Origins was released. But that isn't what this rant is about. This rant is about video game critics and how blatantly corrupt they are. You don't really need to look farther than metacritic (averages reviews from all different sources if you dont already know about it) to know something is wrong. The critic average is a 90. The player average? is a 3.5 out of 10 (on the pc version, xbox is something like 4.5, still real bad). So what's the deal? Are we not playing the same game? Or is it perhaps something else? Maybe EA is a huge company and bought them out? Or maybe the critics tend to be the same meat-heads that keep going out and buying COD after COD even though they know it's going to be exactly the same right down to the pixels on the guns (that's one definition of insanity by the way, in case you guys didnt know). And that's disheartening to me. Not that I've ever bought a game solely due to critic reviews, and you shouldn't either. If anyone ever told me they bought something just cause I gave it a good review I'd just see where all that wool was hiding and be on my way. But the thing is, every year the numbers seem more and more artificial, great games get slammed in reviews, generic trash pulls perfect 10's. Look at games like Rise of the Argonauts, personally I loved the game, critics almost universally slammed it, most frequently referencing "too much walking and talking" as their chief complaint. Basically, this isn't an action game, it's got too much smart stuff! We don't want it! It's got a 54 from critics, a very low score, and a 7.5 from players, (based on an admittedly small number of players) the only honest complaint I could level on the game is that it has some nasty technical issues. But the critics prolly weren't being bribed by Liquid Entertainment. Hell, recently I even discovered that back in the day, a certain Jeff Gerstmann, from over at Giantbomb.com (a great website with great critics, including Jeff, by the way, you should check it out) was fired from his position at gamespot.com for writing a bad review to a sponsor game (Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, I think it was). And if that doesn't speak volumes on the industry I don't know what does. Anyways I'll crank out the rest of my review for Deux Ex: Human Revolution either tonight or tomorrow night.
Alex Jenkins 2012
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