More Gaming Annoyances

Some more gaming vitriol. Enjoy!

#6 – People on TV playing games

Television never never gets gaming right. Any time characters on TV are gathered around playing games, they press every button possible in as short a space of time as you can imagine like some sort of spasticated monkey. There is no game on Earth that requires you to press that many buttons that quickly (well, maybe some mental Japanese one, but no game I’ve ever played.) I understand that they want to make a scene as exciting (or whatever) as possible, and having a person slumped on the sofa in their underwear, with empty Coke cans and crisp packets scattered about, barely moving their hands, like real gamers do, wouldn’t look all that great. But if you don’t take the time to do it right, don’t do it at all.

But please don’t have your character hammering the controller like a mentalist.

#7 – the cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid.

Metal Gear Solid is a stealthy game; sneaking around military bases, taking out guards, and uncovering massive (usually boring) secrets. Occasionally though, when stealth fails you, you have to run and hide. Sometimes however, there are no good hiding places. So what does Snake do? He whips out his trusty cardboard box, that’s what. Never mind that this whole charade feels completely out of place, it’s the physics of it I can’t wrap my head around. There’s no way Snake could fit in that tiny little thing. I don’t care how good a spy he is.

Also, it never worked as a hiding place. Not for me anyway. The guards always came round the corner, and lifted up the box, no matter how well concealed I was, and shot me to death because it’s pretty bloody obvious that there shouldn’t be some random cardboard box sitting about a military base.

However, it did work once when I was fighting a helicopter. Odd.

#8 – Post-Mega Drive Sonic games

They have all been awful. Even the ones I tried to pretend weren’t, like Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic Heroes. Sonic just doesn’t work in 3D. And they’ve added so many characters, it has become almost like a soap opera; there’s Big the (retarded) cat, Amy Rose (Sonic’s girlfriend apparently), as well as some shadowy government organisation called G.U.N. but worst of all is that they’ve changed Dr Robotnik’s name to Dr Eggman. That is sacrilege. I mean there's even a game where Sonic turns into a werewolf FFS.

Sorry, werehog.

Bring back the simple days of ‘Sonic wants to free his friends by running really fast.’ That was awesome in the 90’s, when every problem could be solved by running really fast.

Or so I’m told.

#9 – Giant spiders

I’m fairly certain that 1 in 3 new games released will have a giant spider in there somewhere. They’ve become the new zombies. Although unlike zombies, giant spiders freak me the fuck out. Seriously. After a battle with one in Skyrim my skin crawls for like ten minutes. They’ve been freaking me the fuck out since Abe’s Oddysee in 1998 and that game’s Paramites (more or less giant spiders) and no doubt will continue to do so for some time.

I mean just look at that! It’s horrible.

#10 – Movie tie-ins

Big blockbuster movies are big business. The games industry in an attempt to cash in on the hype fires out a licensed game with the same title. I’m not talking about your Arkham Asylum’s or even your Force Unleashed’s here; I mean rushed games that are released a month or so before the movie and hope to get people excited enough to buy them. Or get their parents too. Because most of these games are designed for kids who want to be Iron Man, or Harry Potter. I swear there has been one Harry Potter game churned out per film, and they always come down rapidly in price. Why? Well, because they’re god awful is why.

Although the exception to the rule is the actually far better than it has any right to be X-Men Origins: Wolverine game. Maybe the rule is terrible movie, great game.

Anyway, that's enough for now.

JC

Gaming Annoyances

Little list of gaming annoyances. I'm going to try and do a hundred. Enjoy!

#1 The oversimplification of Press Start

You’d think it was a hard thing to do. Pressing one button. I like the ‘Press Start’ prompt. It’s console gamings equivalent of ‘Insert Coin’ yet with so many recent games, you can more or less press any button to move to the next part of the menu. The start button is on the controller for a reason. SO PRESS IT WHEN ASKED. Don’t press A; don’t press X; press that lovely Start button. You wouldn’t try and insert a turnip into an arcade machine when it says ‘Insert Coin,’ so just press Start when the game tells you to.

#2 – Ridiculously good gamers that make your feel inferior

I like to think I’m an alright gamer. Not great, but good enough to hold my own online. Every so often though this thought is shattered, with a disheartening display where I get killed more often than Lemmings do if a sociopath were playing it. I hate good players. They are bastards, simply because they’re better than me. Often, after a particularly humiliating game, I’ve remarked to friends I’m playing with that I don’t feel that bad because I have a life outside of gaming whereas these super gaming robots do not. I never sound convincing because I always feel broken afterward. A broken man; angry, bitter and nursing a sore hand because I’ve “accidentally” punched the radiator.

#3 – Public Enemy No1 in Road Rash

The way this twat would always always catch up with you on the home stretch in any race in Road Rash no matter how many cars/cows/bushes you had knocked him into with your fists/baseball bat/chain. And the dick would always make me panic and I’d swerve violently to try and knock him off course, which inevitably caused me to come crashing off my bike once I hit a car/cow/bush.

And then I’d have to watch him swan off over the horizon to win the bastarding race.

And I’d finish 7^th.

#4 – Lag

Often used as an excuse to compensate for squinty shots and the like, lag is the bane of any online gamer. There is nothing more infuriating than sneaking round a corner to find your enemy facing the opposite direction to you and emptying what seem like an entire clip of deadening killerific bullets his way, only to have him turn around and shoot you.

Once.

With a spud gun.

And then, when you watch the kill cam it turns out you weren’t firing at him at all, but doing a little spinny dance hoping that you’d somehow break dance him to death. Once again, the radiator takes a beating.

#5 – Sonics impatience

“Fuck off, Sonic. I’d had to pee.”

Guilty Pleasure Movies

Recently, I had a discussion (albeit a drunken one) over whether or not you should feel bad that you like a certain type of song. I argued that you shouldn’t and put forward several suggestions deemed worthy of being ashamed of. Most of my suggestions were pop music. I posited that you should never feel bad for liking whatever songs or bands you like. With music, everything is fair game.

With films though; yeah, you should feel bad if you like awful ones.

And I do.

My guilty pleasure film, or rather franchise, is Resident Evil and all its sequels. I’ve seen and enjoyed them all, even though deep down…actually not even that deep down, I know that they’re terrible. In fact, the second one (Apocalypse) is probably one of the worst films I’ve seen, and perhaps one of the worst films of all time, and films 3 and 4 (Afterlife and Extinction) are just about passable. Yet I love the series.

Here are some of the problems with the series:

- It’s not very scary, which you’d think would be a pre-requisite of a horror film.
- Most of the acting is…not great.
- Despite being an ongoing franchise there is no coherency between films, besides “ARGH! ZOMBIES!”
- There is nothing original in them at all.
- Every scare is telegraphed a mile away taking away any shock value.

I should point out at this juncture that I’m not a rabid fanboy of the Resident Evil game series; I’ve played them and liked them but, as you may have guessed, I don’t really care that the movies don’t follow the games at all, which is why it isn’t on my list of problems. In fact, I quite like that they’ve taken the basic premise of the series (the T-virus) and ran with it in a completely different way to the games. In the films, there are nods to the games, most notably by adding in the game series’ most memorable monsters, such as the lickers, the Nemesis and the Executioner, as well as having characters who have been in the games (Leon and Clare Kennedy, Jill Valentine) but these are just recognisable elements of the franchise as a whole and not really anything else, like George Lucas sticking Chewbacca in Sith even though it’s beyond pointless.

However, I can’t help but love them. Milla Jovovich is a fantastic action movie babe, and eminently watchable in each film, even though all she has to do is look good and shoot guns which to be fair she does with aplomb. The villains ham it up a lot, and are a lot of fun because of it, especially Afterlife’s Albert Wesker. The series always has awesome final shots (the standout being the end of the first film, which pulls back through an entire decimated cityscape). The action, for the most part, is really quite good, notably the shootout in the ruins of Las Vegas in Afterlife. There are some really cool little touches, the laser grid moment for instance in the first film. And in possibly the franchises greatest moment there’s a point in the first movie where the heroine, Alice, kicks a zombie dog in the face. It’s enjoyably batshit bonkers, and is the epitome of brainless cinema.

And I bloody love it for that.

But I feel so bloody bad for doing so.

In fact, I'm fairly certain that I have a copy of the first film in my collection. I've never seen any opf these films in the cinema, but you can bet that the second the forthcoming fifth film in the series comes out, I'll damn well wait for the DVD. I should feel ashamed.*

*(...but I don't)

Cheers, JC

DVD REVIEW: A couple of quickies

Been watching quite a lot of films recently, trying to catch up on a lot of the films I missed at the cinema in 2011, so instead of in depth (ha!) reviews of each one, I thought I’d give you a quick mini review instead.

Enjoy!

Super 8

A loving homage to the movies of days-gone-by, this monster mystery caper is brought to life by engaging child actors, and a wholly convincing portrayal of a blossoming friendship/romance between the two child leads, as well as some great natural chemistry between all of the child stars. The slightly rushed final act can’t spoil the build up and intrigue of the majority of the film, even if it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

4 stars

Super

An irreverent take on the ‘ordinary bloke becomes a have-a-go (super)hero’ story, which despite brilliant performances from Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page, never truly becomes anything more than average. That is, until the final act when the film is infused with such pathos that it took me completely off guard, and I found myself incredibly emotionally engaged, but then wished that the whole movie had been just as good as the final half hour.

3 stars

Drive

A super cool mood piece, with Ryan Gosling in the role of Driver, a getaway driver for hire that gets caught up in a much bigger plot when he falls for his neighbour. Again, nothing new, but it’s the direction and music that sets it apart, nailing the 80’s neo noir thing it’s going for. And I defy you to find a film with a cooler cold open than this one.

4 stars

Kill List

Bit of an odd one this. As a straight up hitman movie it works for the majority of the running time, with the protagonist pulling off the tortured psycho with aplomb. But when the film takes a turn for the Wicker Man, it starts to lose focus under the weight of its ambition. Demands a rewatch once you see the ending though.

3 stars

Hanna

More of an arthouse movie than the expected assassin action thriller I was expecting. Solid turn from Saiorshe Ronan as the titular Hanna, but a muddled plot bogs down the voyage of (character) discovery. However, a three minute long tracking shot in the middle is a thing of beauty.

2 stars


Submarine

I wanted to love this, but come the end I’m afraid to say I was a bit bored. It seemed to be trying too hard to be as cool as possible, having an all knowing narrator, but comes off like an even smugger version of High Fidelity. Filled with mostly unsympathetic characters and crucially not that funny.

2 stars

Cheers

JC

CINEMA REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

The sequel to the 2009’s flawed but fun original blasts onto the screen with all the bravado and spectacle we’ve come to expect from this irreverent take on the great detective. This installment properly introduces Sherlock’s arch nemesis Moriarty as chief villain this time, instead of having him orchestrating things from the shadows as in the first film. Promising, right? I thought so too.

The problem this time round is the plot. While the first film’s plot wasn’t the greatest it was at least interesting (the villain apparently able to cheat death), the sequel’s is essentially Moriarty trying to profit from war by becoming head of the weapons companies. It’s basically Moriarty killing his way to the top of the corporate ladder. It’s not fun, it’s not really exciting and doesn’t ever mesh with the bloke-y laddish nature of this iteration of Sherlock Holmes. It’s a serious component in a silly movie, and as such feels tonally out of place with everything else, such as Holmes in drag. The first movie was silly and had fun with it; this one tries to be serious, and still be silly. But it doesn’t work. Case in point, the way Holmes ultimately beats Moriarty is by stealing his notebook and seizing all his money. Yawn. And when the thrust (and especially the climax) of your story isn’t interesting all the gun fights and fisticuffs can’t ever make up for it.

However, that’s not to say they don’t try, and some of the action sequences are great. I particularly liked the scene on the train, with the welcome return of mini flashbacks to show how Holmes has tweaked things to his advantage. I loved that the methodical nature that Holmes employs to his detective skills also applies to his fights, anticipating every possible outcome (again, another great holdover from the first), which is used to great effect in the final showdown with Moriarty. But chances are, by the time you see that (non)fight you’ll have lost interest in what’s going on. I know I had. The best (sort of) action scene is a spoken game of chess, which has more tension and intrigue than the previous 100 minutes before it, which says it all really.

I was planning on writing some big review on what I disliked about the film, but I can honestly say I didn’t dislike it however it just bored me for most of the running time. A lot of reviews are saying that you should just go along for the ride, and be secure in the knowledge that even if you don’t know what’s going on that Sherlock does. But if I’m bewildered about what exactly is going on throughout, all the enjoyment gets sucked out too.

So for me, the best recent Holmes is played by Mr Cumberbatch, and as for this movie…?

2 stars