A double review! SC4 and NG2

I've decided to do something a little different and review two games in the same post to save time. The titles of those games are Soul Caliber 4 and Ninja Gaiden 2. Let's run down the things they have in common. They're both Japanese, have women in skanky outfits, use swords, and it is the main character's job to fight through as many of his fellow man or ninja as possible. But there the similarities end.

I'll keep the review for Soul Caliber short, since it can be summed up fairly quickly. It's a fighting game. Yeah, I know that; I knew that before I picked it up. There are numerous problems that keep it from being a good fighting game, like Mortal Kombat: Shoulin Monks. First off, you've got about fifteen different characters to start off with, each having a unique storyline that are exactly the same! You go through nearly the same enemies every time, all culminating in a boss which has twice as much health as you which you can still kick the shit out of if you hold the block button.

If each of these characters had their own storyline, I might hate this game less, but they don't. It's the same rooms over and over again, just with different characters. I mean, this could be forgiven if it wasn't only five rooms long. In MK:SM you only played as Lu Kang, but it was an open area with tons of different enemies to defeat. Soul Caliber could have done something like this, but decided to go the cheap way and put a couple random characters in front of you, add a boss that you could beat in ten minutes and pretend to call it a "story."

The gameplay is really where this game fails. Usually the purpose of a fighting game is supposed to be fast-paced action coupled with easy to understand controls. SC's controls are easy enough to understand, but the fact that the game boils down to a button masher detracts from the easiness of use. Plus, the game has about four combos for each character, each of which can be repeated over and over until you win a fight. This is not fun, people! I know that this is kind of what Soul Caliber is supposed to be like, but if a bit more work had gone into the story mode and refining the gameplay, this shitty game could have been turned out alright. As it stands, I doubt it's going to stay in our house for more than a couple months.

I give it a 4/10. Fighting game, yes. Good controls, storyline or gameplay. Definite NO.

Now, shifting gears to a game that is what Soul Caliber should have been but wasn't, Ninja Gaiden 2 is better in almost every way I can think of. The "story" (And I am putting air quotes around this for a reason) of the game revolves around the four Greater Fiends' ressurection and their quest to destroy mankind. This may sound interesting in fanfiction terms, but in a day and age that worships the story and is willing to look past a game's faults if it's well written, this falls flat of standards set by today's market. But relax, it's not all that important. The story does what it's supposed to in a Gaiden game, and that's drive the gamplay. Ryu's travels will take him to all kinds of places, from a gigantic airship (Which he BLOWS UP, by the way. Damn, Ryu is awesome) to the GATES OF HELL themselves.

The combos are fairly tough to pull off, but if you can practice with them enough, you'll be Izuna dropping those spider ninja in no time! Damn, I feel like such a nerd... Anyway, the game is fairly difficult, and the bosses are once again simply ridiculous. Especially the boss of the fourth level, Alexi. His moves are so fucking cheap that you can't even avoid most of them. He'll grab you, strike you with lightning and throw you down on the ground before you have a chance to heal. Plus, there's no way to go back and not use all your healing items because there's a boss coming up. But still, other than the bosses, the game can be mastered if you don't mind getting a few limbs bitten off along the way.

Speaking of severed limbs, there will be quite a lot of those body parts flying around in this game. Frankly, it makes it hard to tell if an enemy is dead or not. Some ninja will get their heads cut off with one strike, some will die if you chop off a leg, yet some will still not die if you chop of both of their arms and one leg. It gets very frustrating sometimes; I'll be doing combos on someone who's already dead (And the combo count will not stop, by the way) while another one crawling on the ground stabs me and blows up, taking about a quarter of my life with him.

Another thing that pisses on my chips is the camera. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a fixed camera, so long as the flood of monsters is controlled so you can see it wherever you are. But it seems that the camera was an afterthought in this game. Way too often am I backed up against a wall, blindly slashing at air because I can't see more than three feet in front of me. Plus, there is this boss battle at the end featuring two lava armadillos (I know, just go with it). The camera kept rapidly switching between the both of them like it couldn't figure out which it wanted to focus on, meaning that I died quite a lot through no fault of my own.

As one final complaint, the platforming sections of the game are quite oddly placed. You can fight through about thirty minutes of enemies and then get to a very oddly placed puzzle that really doesn't seem like it moves the game forward at all. The sections with overwhelming enemy fighting and platforming are separated by an almost audiable clunk. It doesn't mesh them together near as well as it could.

You may think that because of my bitching, I hate this game. It couldn't be further from the truth. I am doing what we in the buisiness call nitpicking. Trust me, I'm not some spectecale wearing model railroad enthusiast who can not function without absolute realism. Leaping eight times your own height, doing a five trillion hit combo on somebody when you cleanly sliced them in half in the cutscene and walking on lava are all fine, so long as it's in the name of good fun. I'll even accept that getting a six foot katana rammed through your torso (Again and again and again) is completely survivable, if a bit homoerotic. All these things are fine, so long as the game plays well. And I'm happy to say that it surpasses Soul Caliber and Devil May Cry 4 in every way I can think of at the moment.

I'll give it a 9/10 for unbelievable orgasmic awesomeness, coupled by a lousy camera and stupid puzzles.

Both of these games appeal to a niche audience, but Ninja Gaiden fills its niche so much better. It's good old hacky-slashy-maimy fun, whereas Soul Caliber is a slogfest that you just want to know when it will end.

My Zombie Plan: New to DA

I’ve said it before I don’t know how many times. The dead are going to rise, weather we want them to or not. So it’s essential to have a plan, even a flimsy one, in place before they do. Organize before they rise. Here's the link to my zombie plan on DA. I won't be submitting this to fanfiction, since I don't know where to put it under.

http://kyouger.deviantart.com/art/My-Zombie-Plan-93173957

Oh my god...

If you're actually hoping to win at this game, you might want to clear your schedule for...oh, say, about Christmas.

http://www.addictinggames.com/pandemic2.html

DAMN YOU, MADAGASCAR!

Seriously though, this game is hard. I've been playing it for about six hours and still haven't beaten it once. One time it came down to two countries, Greenland and Madagascar. I now wish to bomb both of those countries. You know the reason I keep coming back, even though this game routinely kicks my ass? It's addictive. And I mean crack cocaine addictive. How many other games let you strategically control a virus as it tries to infect humanity? Zero many, that's how many, man.

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.

Leaving

Small update, guys; I'll be leaving for today and most of the weekend. I'm going to a family reunion. So, don't bother messaging me or anything. Not that you would anyway. Summer's been kind of slow.

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.

My E3 thoughts

Hello everyone. If you know me well enough, you probably know that I love video games. So E3, the Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles is a pretty big deal for me. It sucks that I'll never be able to go, what with the restrictions on who gets in, but I can at least watch G4 and get all the inside scoops.

Let me recap what happened over the past two days. Microsoft got a jump on the competitors by debuting their press conference a day early, and shocking us with quite a few demos and conformations of changes to Xbox Live.

The next day, it was Sony and Nintendo's turn, each of them showing off new console peripherals and trailers for games. So who really won this competition? Personally, I think Microsoft took home the gold.

Microsoft showed several demos for up and coming titles like Fallout 3, Gears of War 2 and Resident Evil 5. Fable 2 I could pass on, personally. I can take or leave RPGs by Peter Molyneux. Plus, they showed some fantastic new updates to Xbox Live, including avatars, a partnership with Netflix, and several new games for XBL arcade, including a sequel to Galaga, Portal: Still Alive, and a South Park game that didn't have much screen time. But perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the announcement that Final Fantasy XIII would be arriving on the Xbox 360. I'm frankly shocked that something this huge didn't leak.

Nintendo's conference seemed to dawdle on for far too long. Most of the execs gave long winded speeches on improving the status of their games and seemed to be skating around the issue of actually getting to the games. And pretty much the only thing I saw that looked good was Animal Crossing for the Wii, which seemed pretty fun. In a later interview with G4, when asked why the conference focused more on casual gamers than the hardcore, one of the execs asked how they could be viewed like that with titles like Animal Crossing and (I swear I'm not kidding) Grand Theft Auto for the DS. I... I honestly don't know what to say to that, except that I rolled around in laughter for about five minutes after I heard it. Oh, and they had Shaun White promoting a snowboarding game. That was alright.

Sony's was just a bunch of lies and shameless evading. Probably the only thing that piqued my interest was a new trailer for God of War 3, the only reason I would consider getting a PS3, with so many other series jumping ship. Speaking of which, one of the speakers listed Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4 as their best sellers. MGS4 I can understand, but what he seemed to fail to comprehend was that GTA was selling more copies on the 360 than the PS3. Yeah, you're not fooling anyone. Plus, a lot of the conference was about promoting the PS3 online service, which is a load of bull. Everyone knows that Xbox Live is infinitely better, at only 50 dollars a year. It's not that much, seriously. They then went on to show one of the 2 demos of the night, Resistance 2, which actually looks okay. Then again, I said the same thing about Haze when I saw the trailer. Then Little Big Planet came on, which looks like it'll appeal to a lot of people, just not me.

I'm feeling in an organized mood, so let's break down the three things that make a conference good: Demos, New Announcements, and Interest.

Demos:
Microsoft: Came right out and showed several demos back to back, and got me hyped as hell for some of these games.
Nintendo: Had a couple of demos for Wii Sports 2, but nothing really spectacular.
Sony: Showed a kick-ass demo for Resistance 2 and a LBP/PowerPoint demo. You'd have to watch it to understand what I'm talking about.

New Announcements:
Microsoft: Had several new announcements about XBL and how it's going to work, plus the fact that Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour will be coming to the 360 first. But probably the biggest announcement was Final Fantasy 13, something that's certian to rifle some feathers in the coming months.
Nintendo: Um, a band game that you can't miss a note on, Animal Crossing and a Wii Sports sequel. A lot of these were rumors, so it was nice to see some conformation.
Sony: Showed a pretty nice trailer for God of War 3 at the end and a few updates to the online community. Not much to say.

Interest (Or hype):
Microsoft: Fallout looks fantastic, Gears looks very... erm... manly, Resident Evil looks freaky and Fable looks ehh. All in all, a good turnout.
Nintendo: Pretty much nothing. I mean, Animal Crossing? Come on! I would have loved to see a new Metroid or Zelda title grace the platform or even a trailer for a 2009 release.
Sony: God of War looks awesome, but other than that, nothing makes me want to sell my internal organs any more. A cheaper way is to wait about six months for whatever game to come out on 360.

What would I like to see from this E3? As I've said before, I'm a big shooter fan, so I was slightly disappointed when Microsoft didn't show anything about the upcoming sequel to Bioshock. So, I'd like to see more of that. Fallout 3 simply looks amazing. As Tod Howard said during an interview, "It's easy. You just cue up VATS, and it's as simple as selecting sniper rifle, head, fire. Bam!" That I'm really excited to see. Plus, the new fast-paced zombie shooter Left 4 Dead has got me hyped and a bit scared. I'm going to use it as a training simulator for the worst case scenario zombie outbreak.

This year's E3 looks to be pretty exciting. Most of the titles are going to be out before Christmas, which is also good. I'll keep you covered with any new information that I find out.

Hentai, video games and other nerd stuff forever,
Kyouger.

Review of Journey to the Center of the Earth

Yes, I'm not dead. Yes, I apologize for not posting anything but movie reviews and no new chapters for a few weeks. I don't know, but I just seem to have lost the flair and excitement that I had while writing during the off seasons.

So yeah. A little backstory before we begin. I wasn't extremely excited to see this movie, but with my brother's birthday coming up, we thought it only fair that we go see it before The Dark Knight puts a bat-boot up its ass and kicks it out of the theaters. I would have much rather have gone to see Hellboy 2, but oh well. We can't have everything.

The movie starts out with a kid named Sean coming to his uncle Trevor's house to stay the week or something for some reason. Sean brings a box filled with things that belonged to his father, along with a copy of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is full of markings his father made. They find out that one of his father's seismic probes has gone off in Iceland, so they set off to find what set it off. (No pun intended.)

While there they meet a mountain guide named Hannah who guides them to the probe. When they get there, a storm pops up and they're forced to dive into a cave which subsequently collapses shut, trapping them. They try to get out by going deeper in the cave when it turns out that blah blah blah, yeah we've all been here before.

I gotta say, this movie was a very big dissapointment. I don't even know where to begin.

First off, I'm not exactly sure who the target audience for this movie was supposed to be. In the trailer, it shows itself off as a new kind of Jurassic Park, with lots of action and T-rex fights, but it also tries to appeal to the scientific community as well with bits and pieces of useles knowlege thrown in for dramatic effect. It fails on both accounts.

It does have a couple of decent action scenes, but they're usually ten or fifteen minutes of downtime until another one starts. And as for the scientific factor... dear god, this movie failed.

I am a scientifically designed individual. This doesn't mean that I'm such a Darwin thumping indiviual that I'm not able to accept new theories. So for the moment, let's just say that a hollow pocket in the center of the earth is possible and by some freak anomoly is able to support life. So what do we get from about 100 million years of creatures evolving down here? A few overgrown venus fly traps, some overgrown pirhanas, some overgrown mushrooms, a single regular sized T-rex, and a few Loch Ness Monsters thrown in for good measure. One mark for lack of originality.

If you take a look back at how things have evolved in the past 40 million years, we should have a hell of a lot more original things for a hundred million years worth of evolution. So, another mark for lack of creativity and empty-headedness.

Let's compare this to a much better alternate-reality movie, Peter Jackson's King Kong. Both of these movies are fairly tied for improbablity, but King Kong pulls it off so much better, plain and simple. KK has many more original examples of how the things on the island evolved, even though it doesn't go into as much detail. A couple of V-rexes (Yes, they are different enough visually to warrant a change of name), a giant ape and a few hundred giant bats are much more believable than a single T-rex and a few plesiosaurs.

Plus, much of the science in this movie doens't even make any sense. There is this one part where the kid has to traverse a stepping stones of magnetic rocks. Magnetic rocks? Um, yeah... no, no, that's fine. We can roll with it. What's more, once he's on the other side, the compass continues to point towards where he wants to go, and not back from where the magnetic rocks are. For all the non-scientists that don't know how what I'm talking about, believe me when I say that this makes NO FUCKING SENSE! If it was just another cheesy action flick, I could forgive this, but this is a movie that actually tries to be scientific, and FAILS at it. A final mark against it for lack of scientific clarity.

If this movie were a little bit more clear as to who it was aimed at, it might actually have saved a little bit of face. As it is now, it's just a way to cash in on people looking for a scientific movie with some decent action.

Final verdict: 6/10. Not worth the 6 dollars. Take my word for it.

I would post some more, but it's getting really late and I'm tired. And don't worry, I'll most likely review Dark Knight on the day or the day after it comes out.

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.