The Terminator

What can I really say that hasn't been said a thousand times before? The Terminator is one of the most iconic movies of the last few decades.

Obviously, you've got Arnold playing the villain, which he does well, but the real lead roles are Michael Biehn and whatever Sarah Connor's actress' name is; I think it's Linda Hamilton. She might as well just change her name, because that's who everyone thinks of when they see her face.

Anyway, the plot is about a post-apocalyptic world divided into two factions man and machine. Man made the machines, machines learned to think, and we got bombed into oblivion. After the collapse of all governments and societies, one dude by the name of John Connor rallied humanity to battle the machines and their brain-computer Skynet and took back the world. That happens after the movie. What we get is Skynet sending back one of its elite troops (a robot who appears human) to kill John's mother before she conceived him. John gets wind of this plot, somehow, and sends back one of his closest companions to protect Sarah.

I laugh at the fact that, had Skynet not sent back a Terminator, Kyle wouldn't have arrived and -SPOILERS (Ha! Like you haven't seen the movie) - gotten Sarah pregnant with John.

See, what follows is a lot of chase scenes, blood, killing, and techno-political discussion. It's fun, and despite the movie's cheesiness, it's still a fantastic film. I mean, it's not T2, which is by far better, and dare I say one of the greatest movies in American cinema? As you can see, this review's short...there's just not a lot I can criticize, and a lot to praise, so just go out and buy this movie. It's definitely worth purchasing.

Warhammer 40,000: Winter Assault

My goal is to finish something before I review it for you. Due to the soon-to-be discussed nature of this game, I wouldn't be able to make the deadline if I decided to beat it before updating. I've played for 9-12 hours, so far, almost nonstop and I'm only about a third of the way through.

If you're not familiar with the series, then you and I are in the same boat. The intricacies of the plot that goes along with the tabletop model game is mind blowing if you try to absorb it all at once. But that's really not necessary to pick up this game. First off, it's an expansion to Dawn of War, which was an excellent game...second, it's one of the only real-time strategy games that has had me repeating levels due to failure after failure. I have not had to do that since I was twelve and first played Warcraft 2. This game is hard. It's not impossible, though I haven't tried out any difficulty above Normal. I won't.

On to the gameplay. It's a strategy game, so a lot of your time is spent micromanaging seperate units with their own varying statistics and specialties. Dawn of War game you a brief glance at the weak troops in a few of their missions, but once you can actually control them...they're more complicated, weaker, and over all some of the most obnoxious pixelated people I have ever dealt with. Your hero, of sorts, has his own troop, and they suck. Sure they can be amazing, but to make them so you have to spend time and precious resources to summon up his sidekicks. They are expensive and pretty quick to drop, so I typically let the hero buddy absorb bullets while my weak "Imperial Guard" soldiers fire off what has to be bean bags at the Orks with their nasty bloody axes and guns the size of panthers. By the end of every mission I've lost ninety percent of my forces and am struggling to push back the tide of superior enemies, and I honestly can hold my own in practically every RTS out there.

Your team (when playing as the good guys) is a pathetic United States National Guard-ish faction who are known for merely running and shooting, and then having those corpses turn into a barricade against tanks and the like. Maybe I exaggerated, but I've been told I'm not far off. I can't decide if the British company who created the series was taking a jab at America, or if they just felt like having a miserable group to make the other, more expensive faction models seem that much better. Regardless, the Guard is like a colony of ants up against spiders...scratch that: bears.

Anyway, the story for this expansion sucks. I'm not trashing the series as a whole, just this expansion. I know, I know, it's an RTS...how many variations of "build things and kill the other guys" can you come up with? Dawn of War made missions with the same objectives feel unique, though, and that game's story was intense, if simple. In each level you got story to accompany the build-kill format that was pretty cool and dark. It was all about the defense and reclamation of a besieged planet, and gradually became a fight against an impending resurrection of a demon that could lay waste to galaxies. It won't spoil anything in telling you that, as a whole, you win and lose at the same time.

Winter Assault shares no characters and the story is pretty much identical, only without any of the motivating forces of its predecessor. Your hero is dull, the enemies unnamed and generic, and then there is the whole brutal difficulty. I can't say I recommend this game to anyone but WH40k die-hard fans who also like getting their pc gamer egos crushed repeatedly.

Resident Evil: Outbreak

Sorry for the delay in posting. I'm way behind, but I've been really busy. And yeah, yeah, it's a Friday...

As I've written before, I love zombie stories, games, movies, and anything else that can be about the living dead. Resident Evil is wonderful, its sequels just as good, and so today I'm going to cover one of the debatably canon spin-offs: Outbreak.

This game is unique as far as Capcom's superpower series is concerned. While the setting is the same (Raccoon City), none of the characters are. Instead of getting a highly trained S.T.A.R.S member to play as, you have a large cast of regular Joes who have managed to avoid infection and are now working together to escape the city and all of its terrifying monstrosities. Also, instead of having one lump story, the game is divided into chapter-style levels.

What really makes this game so good in my opinion is how it's delivered. You have many characters to choose from, all of which share the story of the game, but each have different sidestories that change events and give you a different perspective of what's happening. Also, each have different stats, though that ultimately changes very little; flavor stuff mostly, yet some are really cool.

Everyone I've met has their favorite character (or two), and you are rewarded for sticking with them throughout the game. You see, because of the way the game is designed, chapters give you points for avoiding damage, how quickly you completed the level, items -key items, which I will cover shortly-, and how many of your team survived. THAT is another thing that is awesome about this game. You aren't forced to go it alone: you have two other characters to traverse the deadly locales. What's more is that the AI-controlled teammates don't feel like escort missions that litter other games; instead they play as slightly stupid, yet very helpful players. It's kind of like playing with somebody who's not quite used to the game, but knows the mechanics. What helps is there's a set of "talk" commands to relay distress or warnings, as well as an ad-lib button to hear some "conversations." Another apect of this will be covered later.

These guys and girls will protect you, heal you, gather ammo, etc. Their main function when I play is being a portable storage box. Since you're not Leon with a magical shrinking atache case, you can only hold four items, unless you play as Yoko (my favorite) with her bookbag. Your allies, too, have open spots that you can hand over story items and herbs, though you have to be careful, since they will use healing items and ammo...it's a risk you sometime have to take.

Back to the rewards system. There are key items and files scattered about levels that take up no space in your inventory, as well as character-specific key items that you can read while playing. Everyone has a different text when you read it as them, which is pretty cool and entertaining. There are also events you can witness if you hit a mark at a certain point, kill a super tough enemy before they're supposed to die (big mistake, usually), or have found a secret item. These events range from an extra cinematic for the items or speed run, to an entirely different and challenging new end-level boss, though sometimes they merely result in one of your teammates dying in an un-canon fashion...here's looking at you Yoko.

Now, these points add up as you complete levels and you have to be able to do something with them, right? Resident Evil 5 took a note from this system, in fact...there's a large shop in the menu screen. At the shop you can buy new costumes (everyone has at least one), high resolution portraits, cinematics, music, and new characters who are just re-skins who share a main character's story-- that being said, the characters do have different stats than their base's.

Stats are pretty simple, though there's no way outside of just messing around in levels to find them out...no listed place to see them in-game.

1) Health: How many hits your character can take

2) Strength: damage you do with melee weapons and how quickly, if at all, you can move items to barricade doors or brace a door from the bashing arms of zombies (yes, this was the first RE game where a door between you and zombies did not mean safety).

3) Accuracy: how much damage you do with firearms and, in Kevin's case, if you hold the ready position button for long enough to charge up and hit HARD.

4) Relationship: Some characters have conflicting personalities, so you have to earn trust and help them for them to reciprocate. I've actually had Kevin fall to his death because Mark refused to help me up a ledge. I didn't work at getting him to like me. Don't make the same mistake.

5) Resist: This is arguably the most important stat...it's how fast the T-Virus spreads throughout your system. This leads to...

You are infected, or perhaps your body is slowly losing its will to fight off the virus. If you open your inventory (which does NOT pause the game) you can see your heart rate (health) and a climbing percentage of infection. When that hits one hundred percent it's game over. Yoko, has miserable stats in every other field, but she has the absolute slowest rate of degeneration; Jim has the fastest...it's sad, but he kind of sucks at everything except being a whiny, yet amusing character. So, in essence, the levels are timed.

If you couldn't tell, I love this game despite its numerous small flaws which are associated with the good stuff I covered; however, none of the problems are game breaking. What you get is a classic-style Resident Evil game which focuses on the citizens rather than the heroes. It makes you re-examine those bullet fodder enemies from RE2 and 3...or, it did for me.