Review: Left 4 Dead

Yo again, dudes. In a rather stunning twist of fate, I finished one of my most anticipated games of the year in one day, and now feel confident enough to review it.

Left 4 Dead is made by Valve Studios, creators of Half-Life, Team Fortress. Counterstrike, and Portal. Most, if not all of these games have been met with glowing reviews. And so far, Left 4 Dead seems to be heading down the same path.

Story-wise, there's absolutely nothing to talk about. There are 4 different maps, all shaped to look like different horror movies. They are, in order, hospital, deserted town, airport and farm. There's only one cutscene and almost no character development. I could finish each story in under an hour, which makes the entire game pretty damn short.

The one thing I have to mention is the extremely impressive friendly AI. 9 times out of 10, my AI companions were better teammates than anyone online.

The thing that everyone has been talking about is the game's impressive AI director, which spawns enemies at different points every playthrough. But the fact remains that I'm still playing through the same damn levels every time, just with enemies at different places.

The game is also pretty low on variety when it comes to zombies and weapons. There are five different "boss" infected. There's the Smoker, which can seize survivors with its extremely long tongue; the Hunter, which will leap on survivors and tear them apart; the Boomer, which will vomit on people and cause a horde of zombies to attack those in range and the Tank, a brick shithouse that will tear you the fuck apart before you can count shit two bricks.

And finally, there's the Witch, one of the scariest motherfucking zombies you will ever see. She's fast, deadly and will kill you in one hit. And the strange thing is that I'm pretty damn attracted to her.

There are only five weapons (Not counting grenades or machine guns), and three of those are upgrades of the other two. They get boring after a while, but they serve their purpose, just as they did in all of Valve's games.

Online play is alright, even though I'm still playing through the same four damn levels with checkpoints spread thin. But verses mode is a nice touch, allowing us to play as the boss infected, with the Tank spawning randomly.

I never really felt like this was a "Survival Horror" game, as everyone has been proudly claiming. The zombies can't take more than two bullets anywhere in their body, and they do nearly no damage to me. I was never really scared of anything in this game. My heart pounded a couple times when I heard the music change and a horde of zombies come swarming at me, all brandishing dessert forks. It's like the lead designer knew what a zombie horror movie was, and might have even seen posters for some, but he just can't grasp the concept. The only time I ever actually died was when a Tank pinned me up against a wall and kept pounding me before I could shoot back. So this simply wasn't a scary game. If it was headshots only, I would quite easily crap my pants every time I set off a car alarm.

Now that I bring that up, I have to ask something; if the zombies hunt by sound, why are they never attracted by the sound of GUNS? Seriously, I'll clear out a room standing from the doorframe, only to go in and find that three or four were standing not five feet from where I was firing. So the enemy AI is a little touchy at places.

Let me sum this up in three more marketable points. Neat, but repetitive. Cool, but limited. Unique, but linear.

I'm going to start using a different review system now. Instead of giving games x out of 10, I'm going to be listing how much I feel comfortable spend for it on opening day. So I'll give Left 4 Dead 50$ out of 60$.

Review of Gears of War 2

Welp, I can already tell November and December are going to be two extremely busy months. It seems like we're getting a new, exciting game every week. This week's exercise in manly grunting and weight-lifting was Gears of War 2.

My history with the Gears franchise has never been a strong one. I thought the first game was mediocre, and I really couldn't understand why people were giving it such glowing reviews. But people said that this time around there would be vast improvements in nearly every category. Teach me to listen to hype.

Looking back, I'm almost embarrassed at how deeply the hype claws sunk into me. I bought the Collector's edition and strategy guide, which totaled to over 100 dollars. I paid for it in advance throughout the year, so the strategy guide (Which I never had to even use) was the only thing I paid for.

But anyway, back to the review.

This game was... alright. That's all I can say; alright. The entire game is fairly good, but the individual parts of it bring it down.

The unique cover system is pretty much what makes the whole game tick, and it does so quite well. You can get into cover, jump over it, blindfire and so on. However, some of the controls feel delayed, especially the sprint button.

The aiming system also feels sticky. If an enemy gets behind you, then you're pretty much fucked for about 3 seconds. Attacks from behind are very, very cheap.

The plot is actually not that bad compared to Gears 1, which was simply a linear progression of stop-go shootouts with no real goal in sight except to detonate some bomb or something. But again, it's simply adequate; a big step over the original, but still only so-so.

The battlegrounds and where you fight are where this game suffers the most. There are only 5 levels in the entire game, broken up into 7 parts each. These sections take FOREVER to complete and just make you wonder when you're ever going to see a change in scenery. Especially when you're underground (Which is about 70% of the game, I might add) the environments are nearly the same everywhere, which makes it very confusing to navigate.

On the surface, things are a little better. In the bigger shootouts, I actually felt like I was in a huge, gigantic war against creatures that threatened my very existence.

But underground, everything just muddles together; one gunfight seems identical to the one before. It gets so goddamn repetitive.

But the acting... oh boy, this stuff made me want to throw up. John DiMaggio is great as the voice of Marcus, but he presents his lines worse than Ron Pearlman in Turok.

But the true champion of bad acting definitely Dominic Santiago. There's this pointless and shoehorned story about his love interest being captured by the Locust and blah blah blah. And when he actually meets his wife, I just gave up on him.

I honestly can't understand why so many people love this sequel so much over the original. Hmm... I have been hearing the multiplayer is vastly improved over the first game. Lemme go check.

Okay, it's a little better. Not by much, though. There are a few new maps, but nothing spectacular, all just variations of the same destroyed environment theme. The biggest (And perhaps only) thing I liked was Horde mode, where 5 players can face off against increasingly difficult waves of Locust. I've never even made it past the tenth wave. I hate to think what they do once you get up to the higher levels; probably replace all the monsters with velociraptors and give you a shotgun with no ammo.

I'm being overly mean; some of the shootouts are pretty fun and multiplayer isn't bad. Perhaps I'm just miffed because I spent so much unneeded money on it. But it's repetitive, badly voiced and holds very little replay value for me.

I give Gears of War 2 a 7/10.

I think I'm going to start renting games from now on, so I don't fall into these kinds of traps anymore.

BONUS REVIEW!

I downloaded the Call of Duty: World At War demo yesterday, and I'm a bit torn on it. On the one hand, I like the maps, the fact that you can drive tanks and such, and the World War 2 setting.

The reason I'm torn is because it rips nearly every single aspect off of Call of Duty 4's multiplayer. This would be fine if Infinity Ward was developing it, but Treyarch is (There's this weird system where Infinity Ward develops the even numbered sequels, and Treyarch develops the odd numbered ones). It looks amazing so far, but I'm probably not going to buy it; mainly on priniciple. A studio should put more work into making good games, instead of copying ones from earlier in the franchise.

Whatever, I'm done and this is probably longer than the Fallout review. And Left 4 Dead is coming out next week. Ugh...

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.

Review: Fallout 3

Warning: this review will go on for quite a long time, and cover many different broad subjects. Feel free to skim over parts; that is, if you want to be a complete douche.

Fallout 3 is developed by Bethesda, creators of Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls. The game takes place in 23-something or other in Washington DC and the surrounding area. Nuclear war has nearly wiped out humanity Perhaps not the most original concept, but this is made interesting by the fact that the war seems to have taken place in the 50s, because it's what the desolate world looks like. I think the trailer is a perfect example of this.

I try not to make a habit of reviewing anything until I've finished it. That's why I haven't told you the upcoming Watchmen movie will be awesome, even though I know it will be.

So I thought this review would be quite a long time in coming as soon as I passed the two hour mark. The reason being is that I expected to be in this game for no less than a week. I knew immediately that this was going to be a game that sucked up my free time like a vacuum cleaner with a pufferfish on the end, and suck it did.

I'm not a huge, huge fan of the RPG genre, and I hadn't even heard of the Fallout series before this. And I will admit to my shallowness by saying that the reason I first became interested in this game was because of this single picture:

Can I get a "Boom, Headshot?"

The excitement had been building to a fever pitch until four days ago, when I got to Gamestop at 10:00 in the morning to pick up my collector's edition copy of the game, complete with Vault-tec Lunchbox and Bobblehead.

And after four days of shooting at people, being shot at and subsequently dying, I can officially say that Fallout 3 met my feverishly high standards.

The game starts out with... well, your birth. Can you think of a better way to begin a great game? Here you choose your race, hair style, color, chin length, forehead size, eyebrow fluffiness and so on. The sheer amount of choices is staggering.

Soon (But not too soon) after your birth, your father (Voiced by Liam Neeson, who I think did terrific) escapes from the vault in which you were born, and it's up to you to find him.

In the first five or six hours of gameplay, I basically wandered around the Wasteland, until I got bored and decided to head into the core of DC. Then... I got my Caucasian female ass handed to me by Super Mutants. They all look like this scary motherfucker here:

The game plunged me into DC a little too early, I think. I really wasn't ready for the onslaught of creatures. But perhaps that was only because I wasn't playing the game right. Early on I was playing it like any conventional FPS. That is, running straight in with guns blazing and expecting to get back out alive and with all my ammo. This is what mainly got me killed.

But soon I came to grips with the unique combat system and actually began to feel refreshed by it. As you can see in the picture above, using the Vault-tec Assissted Targeting System (VATS), I could que up individual body parts, see the chance to hit and fire. This lead to much glee and dismemberment. However, sometimes the system can get hung up on rocks or other debris, when it was cleat that your gun wasn't aiming at anything other than the Raider with an AK.

I think the thing I like most about Fallout is the freedom and openness it gave me. I could choose my own path, skills, perks, dialogue and perhaps most important of all: fighting style.

I'm confronted with this situation frequently, so I'll use it as an example. Say I have a building in front of me filled with around six hostile Raiders that will shoot me on sight. I know their numbers, but I don't know their armaments. At any given time, there are about fifteen different ways I could deal with this situation. I could take my time and try to snipe them all from a distance. I could sneak around and try to perform silent kills to take them all out. Or, I could run in with a minigun, lactating testosterone, and try to kill them quickly before they take out their flamethrowers and burn me to a crisp. (Guess which one I picked)

There is also the aspect of "Karma," the system by which your interactions with characters is shown on your wrist. You can either choose to be a merciless, unstoppable badass devil who cares for no one but himself, or you can be a patron flower child, giving out alms to the poor and water for the thirsty. The game gives you bonuses for whatever side you choose.

I somehow ended up becoming a lesser Archangel, simply by disarming a couple bombs and giving out some water to beggers.

Of course, being evil has its advantages and disadvantages. I nearly armed the bomb I disarmed, which would have subsequently destroyed the town. At the last minute, I thought better of it and saved the town instead. By saving it, I used the town many, many times during the course of the game.

Fallout really made me care about the characters in it, even to the point of pulling out some real emotion that wasn't online-caused. I once help fix this election for a small-town mayor, who agreed to pay me after it was done. When it was over, he paid me with a measly 25 Bottlecaps (In-game money. And yes, they are actual bottlecaps.). Needless to say, I was pretty pissed and nearly shot him before thinking better of it.

I think the moment that I truly realized this isn't just an ordinary game was when I walked inside the ruins of Fairfax. It gave me a chill, not only because it's near where I live, it's also that I've walked along its streets before.

Fallout is an extremely easy game to get distracted in. I could be simply heading to a nearby radio station when I discover a town and decide to investigate further, finding out that they have a nasty problem with someone named the AntAgonizer, which leads to me proceeding to convince to give up her evil ways. After which, I find a town populated only by children, which subsequently sends me off to rescue three of their own, imprisoned by the motherfucking king of the fire ants.

Yes, this actually happened. I could not make this shit up.

I do have a couple complaints, though. The ending came out of fucking nowhere in the middle of a gunfight. I was still sitting in my chair waiting for the next quest to start until the credits started to roll. Many expletives followed.

Also, the amount of money I got and its worth in the game are both pitifully small. I feel like the design team was trying to emulate the current economy of the US, a attempt they unfortunately succeeded at. I don't get Bottlecaps off dead bodies, and instead I have to find bottlecaps in metal boxes and the like.

Wow, this is getting long... lemme wrap this up. Fallout is a game that sucked me in and refused to let me go until I paid it. It fills its niche beautifully, and I plan on replaying it to get all the mini-quests completed and get the "Evil Douche" achievement.

I give Fallout 10 headshots out of 10.

I'll leave you now with the opening cinematic for Left 4 Dead, which looks to be another game I'll be sinking my time into this November.

Review of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Yes, I do aplogize for not posting in quite a while. Nothing has really been happening as of late, except for the fact that I go back to school next week. Actually, I suppose that is pretty big, since I'll have access to the two things that fuel my writing: boredom and computers. It will eventually depend on the teachers on how much I update, though. It's always a lottery when it comes to getting new teachers. You can either get a real grouch, or you could get an awesome one like Mr. Evans. That dude was awesome.

But anyway, onto the review. I will be explaining the movie all the way through, because I really don't think any of you really care that much about the movie to get on my case. It starts out with an opening exposition about how China's emperor got a bit power hungry and decided to take over. He is cursed by an old woman and becomes a clay statue, along with the rest of his soldiers. Jump forward to 1945, and Brendan Fraser is having a strained marriage with some divy bitch who to the best of my knowledge wasn't in any of the previous movies. I didn't really care, but my dad seemed to, so I suppose it's a big deal to Mummy fans.

Anyway, turns out that Brendan's son has dug up another mummy, only this one isn't alive just yet. It needs the jewel of deus-ex-machina to be revived. Of course, the old guy turns out to be a spy and they accidentally end up reviving him.

Alright, moment number 1 that makes no sense. Apparently, this ninja chick (who is the daughter of the woman who killed the emperor the first time) has this magic dagger which is the only thing that can kill the emperor. When his casket is open, the ninja chick jumps in and stabs a skeleton, which turns out to be a decoy. If he could be killed while he was still in stone, why didn't you kill him beforehand instead of waiting this long? I mean, you had to have known where the tomb was. And don't worry, there will be many more moments that make no sense to come.

After that, they have a car/horse and buggy chase through the streets of chinatown. Now, here I went to get some popcorn, so I missed a bit, but when I got back, the gang are all in the Himalayans for some odd reason. Oh wait, the emperor has to put the stone in a fixture to shine a light telling him where to go.

Along the way, my IQ dropped about 30 points after listening to Brendan's son attempt to act. This guy is one of the worst actors I've ever seen. He tries to put the moves on ninja girl, and comes up with some of the worst lines ever.

"No, the reason you don't like me is because you don't like a woman who can knock you on your back!"
"Hey, the expression is kick my ass!"

Dear god, someone put me out of my misery.

So Brendan and the gang set up a defense perimeter around the stone tablet thing. There is some witty banter between Brendan and his son about which gun is better, the Thompson or the German M-40. This was funny because I often get into gun arguments online on call of duty 4.

So the emperor and newly appointed general (he was the guy who revived him) launch a full-scale assault on the shrine where the tablet is. And that means it's time for the 2nd moment that makes no sense. So far, the emperor has shown control over fire, water and air. He seems fairly indestructible. Bullets only penetrate his clay shell, which covers up his molten insides. So why didn't he just attack in the first place? Instead, he wastes about 20 soldiers only to step in at the last second and totally bitch-slap them all to hell.

Before he does however, Ninja Girl summons three yeti (I know, just go with it) to assist them. These things actually look pretty cool. Like werepyres, only with shorter snouts and no wings. So after the emperor FINALLY steps in and decides to take charge, showing the way to Shangri-La. He also stabs Brendan, who was protecting his son who set off an avalanch with dynamite. Yeah, nice idea there, braniac. This triggers an avalanch, prompting the emperor to do a corny Star Wars ripoff before letting it fall.

Brendan is in mortal peril, so the yeti take him down to Shangri-La, where the woman who killed the emperor is waiting, and heals him. Soon enough, the emperor busts in and steps in the water, emerging as a 3 headed dragon.

We're already up to the 3rd moment that makes no sense. Why would the emperor transform into a western style fire breathing dragon? Wouldn't an eastern dragon have been more apropriate? Lemme provide a couple pictures for compairison.

Chinese:

Western:

So why would he go as a Western instead of a Chinese dragon? Fuck it, I don't care. Let's move on.

So the emperor kidnaps Ninja Girl for no adequately explained reason (I guess he wanted the dagger, but wouldn't it be easier to just take the dagger instead of taking the girl?) and returns to raise his army.

Brendan and the gang travel to the desert just in time to watch Jet Li at work. His son does the stupidest thing posibly and breaks into the camp to rescue Ninja Girl, leaving the old woman to raise the army of the dead from under the Great Wall.

It's time for moment number 4! I don't even think there is a desert anywhere near the Great Wall, yet the entire climactic takes place there. And what's more, shouldn't the emperor's army be inside the wall? Continuity errors are all over the place here.

Isn't it odd how one thing strings into another? It's already time for no-sense moment number 5! Everyone is constantly saying that the emperor's army must not be allowed to succeed or all will be lost. But seriously, this makes no sense! The emperor's army is made out of clay, and a single pistol shot will take one down! Plus, it only numbers about 2,000 to 10,000, depending on which shot you're looking at. That would be incredibly easy for even the smallest millitary in the world to defeat, much less China.

So the climactic battle is on, as the dead are fighting the dead! And here's where the idiocy really starts ramping up. Moment number 6 is huge. The emperor is supposed to have control over all elements, yet he only fights with a sword. He even gets into a battle with the old woman and fights her sword to sword. He has control over metal, for christ's sake! He could have turned it around and shoved it into her heart! Plus, he never seems to really help his troops all that much.

Right about now, I'm drooling on the floor from the mass amounts of stupid being shoved down my throat, so I don't remember much. But I certainally remember one of the stupidest moments of all, moment number 7!

Alright, so backup in the battle comes in the form of a B-17 or similar. The gunner (Who is Brendan's brother from the first two movies, but I couldn't give a shit right now) drops a bomb that lands on a Jeep being driven by the general. But later, he attacks Ninja Girl and Brendan's wife. What the fuck!? The Jeep clearly explodes into a flaming ball of nothingness, but yet the general manages to escape with only minor facial burns! Oh my god, I'm getting retarted just thinking about it.

Lemme wrap this up before I forget how to type. Brendan kills Jet Li and saves that day. Woo-ho. As a quick side note, why did Jet Li get top billing, anyway? He's only in the movie for like, 20 minutes. The rest of the time, he's in his clay/molten rock form. And the movie gets in one final joke as Brendan's brother says that he'll be going to Peru, along with the caption: "Soon after, many mummies were found in Peru." The only part of this movie that was actually brilliant was the ending line. Hoo-rah.

To sum it up, TOTDE is the worst of the mummy films. It's at least on par with Journey, which I have to imagine Brendan was filming at the same time to not know what kind of crap he was working with. I would never spend 40 bucks on this monstrosity, EVER!

It gets a 6 out of 10. An unforgettable experience, at least if you count mental scarring unforgettable.

Review of The Dark Knight (Finally...)

Yep, I finally managed to beat, stab and maul my way into the theater to catch The Dark Knight at around 3:00. First things first; I didn't see it IMAX. Our theater is not equipped to run 3d simulations, and personally, I don't think it would make much of a difference. 3d will not make a shit movie better, or a terrific movie even more terrific. With that said, let's get onto the review.

The movie starts out... you know what? I can't seem to remember how the movie started. Well, I know there was a bank heist my some men in clown masks, but after that I just lost track of whatever was happening. The first 15 or 30 minutes are pretty damn boring. After the Joker comes in though, things get a move on a little quicker.

The J man intimidates a bunch of criminals into financing him to kill the Batman. Later he makes a video telling the city that he will kill a bunch of people unless the Batman takes off his mask and turns himself in. And that's how the movie continues.

I'm not going to try to deny that Heath Ledger's death played a big part in promoting this movie. Not that the viral-marketing at last year's Comic-Con didn't do anything, either. But this movie was hyped on beyond belief. Way too much, if you ask me. Iron Man was announced, a trailer was shown and people got excited. That was it. Dark Knight led people all around San Deigo to find the date of release and a picture of the Joker. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this didn't fill a lot of people's expectations, simply because their expectations were too fucking high!

Anyway, on to individual segments of the movie. The acting by Christian Bale was very good, but I really didn't like his constant growling at criminals and stuff like that. If he's trying to disguise his voice, that's fair enough, I suppose. It still got on my nerves though. Most of the rest of the characters were solid actors, but the actor who really stole the show was Heath Ledger, and I got to say that he really did a fantastic job as the Joker. I don't think many people could have pulled off this psychopath easily. The makeup was especially good; I don't know who came up for the more grungy looking Joker, but whoever he is, he's a frigging genius. He seriously creeped me out, and I just might go as him for Halloween this year. Two-Face/Harvey Dent was also freaky, seeing as he had the entire left side of his face practically burnt off. Though it would have been a bit better to give him a split personality, like in the comics.

The actions scenes were very good and varied. Maybe it's because I was sitting right in front of the screen (unlike I normally do), but the editing seemed too fast-paced for me to follow very well. Still, every explosion in the book is in here, and weather you like your action on a train, on a plane, or in a high-speed car chase, it's all in here.

The plot is one of the only parts where this movie slumps a bit. It goes a little something like this: Joker threatens city, Batman tries to stop him, fails, Joker blows something up, and a new plotline opens. Repeat as necessary. The new plotlines are usually varied and unique, but it does slow down the movie a bit in between action sequences and long bouts of dialogue.

Another complaint I have is that the Joker just seems invincible. He intimidates the mob, stabs a guy through the eye with a pencil (Eraser side, by the way), escapes from the prison way too easy and takes enough cracks to the head to knock Rocky on his ass. The focus on the movie is how he manages to intimidate a city to the point of anarchy in the streets while wearing clown makeup. He also changes Harvey Dent's mind a bit too quickly.

But overall, for all of my incredibly small nitpicks and gripes, this was a terrific movie. Hell, you don't even need to know who Batman is to enjoy this movie. Great acting, action scenes, and one certified badass as the main villian make this a must-see.

I give it a 10 out of 10. It's going to be nigh on impossible for them to top this one with a sequel.

Hentai and comics forever,
Kyouger.

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.

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.

Review of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

'Ello, G'uvner. It's not often I make two posts in a day; in fact, I've never done it at all. And if I do happen to do this strange thing, it usually means that I have something important to say. And I most certainly do in this case.



When Sweeney Todd came out in the theater, I'll admit that I wasn't too excited about it. I've never been a huge fan of musicals, what with the debacle that was High School Musical, so I failed to see it. But now reveling in the online world of Xbox Live, I happened to discover that it was available to rent for a mere 300 or so Microsoft points. That's about the equivalent of four dollars, easily rentable. And as time had passed, I had begun to hear very good things about the movie and decided to give it a whirl.

As I went in, pretty much all I knew was that there was this barber who kills people and has an oddly attractive assistant who helps him do... something. And he has a really cool chair that people slide down into a bottomless pit of death. But that's pretty much all I knew. Oh, and that Tim Burton directed it and Johnny Depp acted in it. First film that came to mind when I thought of the two (And pale-faced Johhny Depp) was Edward Scissorhands, a film I also enjoyed immensely. And how can anyone say that they've not seen or at least seen parts of A Nightmare Before Christmas?

Even as the opening credits started, I was aware that this was going to be a very bloody film. I'll make a note of this right now so I don't have to later. The R rating is there for a reason. Don't expect them to skimp on the blood in favor of harsh language or something like that. The worst thing I heard for sure was shit, and Mrs. Lovett may have said either 'bugger' or 'fucker,' I'm not exactly sure which. Again, if you have a younger sibling, don't let them see this movie. It's got more blood than a Jason flick, though it is few and far between, and the subject matter that it deals with is extremely dark.

Well, I'm four paragraphs in and I haven't even started about the plot yet. After the credits, Todd gets off a boat in jolly old early 1800s London and remembers the loss of his wife and daughter to an extremely cruel judge named Turpin (Played by Severas Snape! That was really cool to see), who banished him from the city so he could bang Todd's wife. After wandering the city for a short time, he comes back to his old shop, which is now owned by a downtrodden young women named Mrs. Lovett (Who I find very attracted to for a strange reason. Maybe it's the pale face, maybe it's the elegant dress which exposes half of her breasts) who makes meat pies. She relates to him that his wife is dead and Judge Turpin has his daughter locked away. Todd sets out to find her.

Later, he bests a ridiculous frenchman in a shaving contest who later comes to his shop to do... crap. I think that's about all I can do without giving away the major plot of the movie. Basically, I can tell you that Sweeney decides that everyone deserves to die and opens up shop while also opening peoples' throats.

As I walked away from the movie, I got about fifteen steps before I had to sit down and compose myself. The entire film was a dramatic thrill ride from start to finish. I was kept at the edge of my seat for so long, I failed to go to the bathroom once during the easily pauseable movie and relieve myself of the 24 ounce Pespi that I had consumed halfway through it.

I really don't know how to feel about Sweeney himself. Part of me thinks that he's simply a murdering psychopath, and part of me thinks he's a misguided soul whose heart was broken and simply needs revenge to complete his life. Perhaps this is why I felt such a connection to him as a character. All I'm saying is that you might not see me as an Akatsuki the next few cons I go to. A bit of hair dye, a bit of face paint, a barber's shirt..

Now I knew this was a musical, and since the captions failed to work that night, I probably missed half of the singing lines. Now this may or may not be a big issue to some people. For me, it wasn't much of a problem. More of an annoyance than anything. But I will say that about 85 percent of the dialogue is singing, and the rest is spoken. If this annoys you, remember that this is a musical, albeit the most dramatic and bloody musical outside of Shakespeare that I've ever seen and probably ever will.

The ending in particular was really profound and deserves mentioning. I've never been so deeply moved in a movie since I was 5 and Mufasa died. I really didn't want it to happen, and I'll be thinking about this for quite a while yet. Maybe even a story could come out of it; I don't know.

I really can't praise Johnny Depp and Tim Burton enough coming together to form a tremendous tag-team acting/directing duo the likes of which I've never seen. I really can't praise this movie enough. The acting was impeccable, the drama made me want to cry (Which is something I've never done in a movie, EVER), there was plenty of blood, and there were even a couple of funny parts, though you have to be in the mood for them to really laugh. I mean, come on. How many musicals have songs about cannibalism? Zero many, that's how many, man.

In summation, Sweeney Todd was a masterpiece of cinema. Well... Alright, it does have its problems relating to the mainstream audience. It's a musical that's not for kids. This will probably make peoples' heads explode, as these two things have always gone hand in hand together. So, it's not for everyone. If you're a gushing romantic, don't see this movie, because there will be more things than hearts bleeding in this movie. If you're a Ritalin pumping Rambo fan who can't go more than 10 seconds without seeing someone killed, don't see this movie. If you're both of these and need a true masterpiece to complete the triangle of insanity, then you have to see this film.

I'll give it 10 out of 10. I'll cherish this movie even as I grow old and gray. There's no doubt about that.

I'll end this review with a quote from Sweeney himself.
"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
and it's filled with people who are filled with shit.
And the vermin of the world inhabit it.
And it goes by the name of London."

Review of Iron Man

He was turned to steel, in the great...

Oh, there you are. Well, just got back from seeing Iron Man in the local theatre. It's not really important to the blog or my life, but it was pretty cool, so I think I'll tell you about it.

By the way, this may have some spoilers in it, but I'll try to keep them to a minumum.

The movie starts out with Tony Stark's convoy being ambushed in Afganistan. Then it cuts back to how we came to this senario; Tony's character being explained and introducing the Jericho missile system, which becomes a big part of the first half of the movie. I don't see why we had to start out with his capture and then move backwards. Doesn't make much sense to me.

Anyway, Stark is then called upon to build a Jericho for an anonymous Middle-Eastern dude that looks like the bastard child of Saddam and Osama. Obviously, this does not sit well with the gazillionare, but he has a piece of shrapnel stuck in his body that his captors are stopping from reaching his heart. But living in a cave all day does tend to get boring, so he designs a magnetic chest plate pacemaker thing that keeps the metal from killing him, hops in the first Iron Man suit and escapes, blowing up the missiles that said Middle-East dude bought from him.

Back in the good old US of 'do what the fuck we say or we'll be invading your country,' Tony now has access to good old fasioned American technology, so he goes about building the next Iron Man suit, the classic gold and hot-rod red we've come to know and love. He then goes off to destroy his weapons that the terrorists have, while looking bad-ass at the same time.

First impressions were very good. I don't know Robert Downing Jr. or any of his films, but he did seem to bring the role of Tony Stark, weapons mogul with a bank account so large you'd need both hands to count the number of digits in it to life. Something I like about Tony (And about most Marvel characters in general) is that he's... well, human. This is not to say that the Thing is going to be settling down with a white picket fence any time soon, just that he has human emotions and faults. He's a womanizer, a drunk, he's extremely cocky, he's late all the time, he gambles, and he has a knack for making people feel like douchebags around him.

Unfortunetely, most of the other characters are as flat as Safira's breasts. I could probably get the same feel for their characters by watching Python, any Jason film and Scream in a marathon. They just seem to have no personality to me. I've seen it before, and it kind of gets boring looking at the same stereotypes over and over again. Bald guy with beard=bad guy. Main love interest will eventually have to choose between letting her man die and killing the villian. Though I suppose it's alright since she didn't really make out with him at the end as they fly off into the sunset. I really wish movie directors would stop using these stereotypes. span>

Regardless of the other characters' lack of personality, the movie was very good overall. A couple of the action scenes were peppered with witty, actually funny dialouge, and although I want to stab the directors eyes out with a dessert fork for not using the Black Sabbath song for more than the fucking END CREDITS, this was a very enjoyable film.

If you're too young to enjoy Indiana Jones or too old to enjoy Speed Racer, then by all means, see this movie. You'll have a blast and you'll definitely remember it. I'd reccomend it to anyone who likes superhero movies or the last Transformers movie. I'd say it was as good, if not better than Transformers, and a hell of a lot better than Superman Returns.

I give the movie a 9/10. Almost everything is great, but the flatness of the supporting characters keeps me from giving it a perfect score.

Review of Devil May Cry 4

Hey guys. I was gone for a couple days, but I'm sure none of you noticed it. Oh well. Anyway, the reason I was gone most of today and yesterday was that I finally went out and bought DMC4. I just finished it today, so I figured I'd share my opinion with you guys.

(By the way, I've never played a DMC game before this, so forgive me if I'm sort of biased.)

The core part of gameplay is the combat, and I'm happy to say that it kept me very entertained throughout the game's ten hours. Both Nero and Dante have unique attacks which can be used to make some fucking SWEET combos. If you don't find something fun about launching an enemy up into the air and keeping it afloat with a cusion of bullets, then you seriously need to readjust your standards for entertainment. Then there's the 'style' part of combat, which pretty much has nothing to do with anything except getting you more points to level up later in the game. Basically, the more unique combos you do without getting hurt, the higher it goes and the higher your grade is at the end.

Nero's "Devil Bringer," as it is called, is his demonic right arm. I found this was a great thing to use and just fool around with. Plus, combined with some of the powerups in the game, it can produce some of the sweetest finisher moves in the game. More than once, I felt myself leaping up out of the couch, screaming "OH YEAH! YOU JUST GOT DROPKICKED, BIYATCH! SUCK IT!"

Yeah, I really do play video games that way.

As a small side note, there were some simply eye-popping tent-pitching scenes with DMC's trademark drop dead gorgeous girl, Gloria. Basically, she's there for wanking material. That's it. If I took a drink everytime her breasts defied the laws of physics, I'd easily have a dangerously high blood-alcohol level in about 45 seconds.

The weapons play a key role in the game. Nero is armed with a motercycle/sword called the Red Queen (Don't ask about the motercycle; you'd have to play the game to really understand the hilarity), a double-barreled six-shooter called the Blue Rose and the aformentioned Devil Bringer. Both are decent weapons, but Dante's arsenal takes the cake, with him sporting his staples of Ebony, Ivory, the Coyote-A and his skull sword (Okay, I forgot the name; sue me) and tons of new weapons, including Gigamesh, a spiked up glove and boot package similar to Beowulf in DMC3, and Lucifer, a freaky spider... thing that is attatched to Dante's back and fires large spikes into his enemies that he can explode.

Another weapon that I got a serious hard-on when using was the Pandora. It looks like a suitcase, but has supposedly 666 different weapon forms, all of which I assume were just as badass as the ones I used. You can use a bow that shoots explosive arrows, a tri-barreled bazooka, a lazer that looks like the Death Star's fucking sister and a gigantic... you know what? I don't even know how to describe it. It's that cool.

The combat was excellent, but the single gold star I stick on for it is immediately taken off for some monumentally retarted level design. There are two parts where you have to roll a gigantic spiked die to move a big representation of yourself a certian number of spaces across a board game. Honestly, this has to be one of the most idiotic puzzles I've ever seen in a game. There's not rhyme or reason, and as soon as you insert random chance into a game, all tactics go out the window.

Plus, there are some serious issues with the saving system. Say I just barely made it past mission 15, surviving by the skin of my teeth, realizing that there's no way I'll be able to do it again. When I save after I complete the level, it actually saves at the beginning of the previous mission, not at the beginning of mission 16. This is just poor planning. Honestly, how could this have passed through so many testers without being caught?

And this is the thing that ticks me off the most; when you complete the game (As I did) there is no option to go back and replay some of the previous levels without making a completely new profile. When it happened during the missions, I assumed it would go away once I beat it. When it didn't, I was pissed enough to toss my 360 controller through the TV.

This game has some seriously good points, mainly the combat, but I can hardly recommend it just for that. If you're a big DMC fan (And I mean 'get a hard on everytime you play a game' big) go ahead and buy it. If not, just rent it. You can finish it in two days, easily. I'm considering returning my copy back to Gamestop. There's no reason to play it anymore.

I give it a 7/10. It's a master of one trade: combat. And that's pretty much it.

I don't know if Taku's going to be finished with the next chapter, and I have no intentions of doing it, so the next chapter is currently on hiatus.

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.

Video Game Quick-hits.

Although I am very depressed that no one is reading (Or at least commenting) this, I suppose I should blog about something other than crappy Korean movies. I guess I'm going to be reviewing video games now. This is just my limited collection, so if you can suggest any 360 games, I'd be happy to oblige.

WARNING: NO FANBOY ZONE.

By 2nd favorite game is undoubtedly Halo 3. Halo 2 was just awesome, and H3 is an improvement on the first in every aspect. The multiplayer is much more refined, and the weapons are much more balanced than the first time around. the graphics have been given a great makeover, too. With all the achievements to unlock, and the unparralelled multiplayer, this is definitely one to fork out the 100$ for. And I say that because you will be dropping the fourty dollars for XBL immediately after you get this game. That is, if you don't lose the Ethernet cable first.

Next is Bioshock. Winner of god-knows how many Game of the Year awards, I think it deserved every one of them. The insanely spooky atmosphere gave me the creeps even after I turned the console off. I felt myself dreaming of Little Sisters and looking around the corner for Big Daddies for weeks after I finished this game. Every time I hear steel-toed clank on metal, I reach for the nearest wrench. Though it doesn't have any multiplayer to speak of, and DLC is pretty much nonexistant, it's still a great buy. Give 2k games your vote, and another 60 dollars. Trust me, they deserve it.

WARNING: DO NOT PLAY IF AFRAID OF INSOMNIA. AND GIANT DRILLS. AND CREEPY LITTLE GIRLS.

Probably my favorite single-player game on the list, Call of Duty 4 comes complete with everything any FPS fan could want. Though the storyline may be a bit worn thin (Nukes, Middle-East, blah, blah, blah), the interactivity gives you the chance to see the characters like no cheesy action movie can. The graphics are simply amazing, and the cover system is both innovative and frustrating. I say frustrating because die-hard Halo fans like me are used to running straight into a firefight, usually screaming "Ph34r m4h j(_)5t1c3!" But it does add a very unique style of gameplay that games like Army of Two can only try to replicate. Split-screen can be a little iffy, with most of the kills going to the person who gets the first shot in. LAN matches are great, or so I've heard. Break out the CC and shell out another 60; this is definitely a must-buy for any fan of the COD series or first person shooters in general.

The game I probably have the most fun with is Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Before the hate starts flying about how I should get Rock Band, lemme tell you this. One-hundred and sixty five dollars, used! I am not willing to shell out that kind of money when it's just me and my brother playing. I think it would be cool to buy just one instrument at a time, but that would kind of defeat the purpouse. Guitar Hero 3 is a very good game to pick up and play, but it certianally takes some skill to make it anywhere in this biz. Trust me kids, you will not be doing TTFAF on Expert anywhere in the next few weeks... or months... or years, if you suck. There aren't as many cult classics in this one (In addition, no ASX! >:O), but there are much more recognizable titles, like Mississippi Queen and Welcome to the Jungle. It may not be a good first 360 buy, with the obvious price tag of 90 dollars, but you will be sucked in by the peer pressure. Give in to it. As a side note, it is a very good idea to raise your medical coverage if you plan on playing regularly. You will be sent to the hospital many, many times.

Those are the four of my favorite games, and the only four I own. I'm off to play GH3 now. See ya.

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.