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.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Ok, to preface this entry I have to say I have not seen the original, which may or may not be a better movie.

One of my guilty pleasures is Keanu Reeves films, as bad as most of them are, so I popped the DVD into my player practically the moment I got my hands on it. Keanu is one of the most wooden actors I've ever seen, yet he makes up for it with his decisions in roles. How does this work? I don't really know, but the fact that he chooses terrible movies to associate himself with alone makes him awesome in my book.

The plot's super simple, so you really don't need a paragraph to explain...an alien orb lands on Earth in the middle of Central Park and the government sends scientists and a tenth of their forces to investigate. As the alien emerges and is on the brink of shaking hands with Jennifer Connely's character (a scientist. Like she could be a soldier...) he gets shot by a sniper three thousand yards away on a sky scrapers. I'm not sure which gun could reach with that level of accuracy, but I won't say there isn't one...movie logic states it's possible ninety-nine percent of the time, anyway. Then a behemoth of an alien robot struts out of the orb and disables every electronic thing in the park and pretty much gives the finger to humanity.

Skip forward a bit and we see that alien buddy has morphed into a human to better convey what the balls is about to happen. If you couldn't guess, they're here to save Earth by eliminating the plague that is humanity. Connely helps Klaatu (Keanu) to escape military captivity without the knowledge of his plans, and we get Children of Men's story mixed with some stereotypical Black-White cop duo cliche. I'm not trashing multi-racial teams, but every movie that features that pairing seems to do the "learn about each other's problems/life" crap while the bigger picture is tapping its toes to get a move on.

The big problem I had with this movie is it feels way too long for it's hour-and-forty minute mark. I mean, I've seen movies twenty minutes shorter that had characters you grew to like and wished you could see more of. Here you have six people you barely cared about, and they're constantly on the screen. Connely's character was boring, her stepson (Jaden Smith) was angsty and made decisions that a multiple personality disorder individual would acknowledge jarr, and the others were so unimportant that they could have been one character. For his ten or fifteen minutes on screen, John Cleese was excellent, and so was James Hong. In fact, Hong was the most believable character in the lot of them, and he was one of the Klaatu aliens!

Despite all of the trashing of it, this movie had some very nice special effects. Maybe they weren't exactly subtle or non-C.G.-looking, but they were cool to watch and one was actually kind of creepy. There is also one scene in the film that is supposed to add depth to the stepson character and in any other movie it would have been wonderful, yet it felt disjointed; however, it was still a touching moment that was sad in a way that anyone can sympathize.

I wish they had given this cast better material, because with Kathy Bates, Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connely, and Jaden Smith you really should do better! It's hardly worth renting, and definitely not worth buying, though I do suggest you grab it if you have Netflix or if it pops up on a movie channel.

S. Darko

I'm going to have to break my own rules here and post out of the Thursday slot, because I've just watched something so absolutely terrible that I cannot not write about it right now.

S. Darko, aka Samantha Darko, is a sequel to Donnie Darko: a cult hit that happens to be one of my favorite films of this decade. Now, I'll preface this whole review by describing a complicated facet of the "series" in a simple way...There's a ghostly apparition who says the world's going to end, and afterwards the titular character experiences crazy visions involving bubble-like paths extending from peoples' chests, among other things. In Donnie Darko this was handled extraordinarily well, with a well-crafted, scientific and pseudo-religious explanation that ultimately left much to the viewer to contemplate. S. Darko takes it one step backward...

S. Darko was -to put it crudely- a steaming pile of shit. Everything they did, minus casting decisions (which were all surprisingly good), was garbage riding the coattails of an infinitely better movie. Don't let my love of its predecessor lead you to believe I'm biased merely because of that. No, I gave this movie a fair chance, ignoring the shoddily put together beginning as well as the lack of any character development. I tried so hard to look at it as a standalone movie with loose connections to Donnie Darko-- you know, like a spinoff where a character goes off and has zany adventures; like Fraser did when he got his own show, or Joey (though I've never seen that show). S. Darko is more like if Claire's son Aaron from Lost got his own show where, after growing up, was kayaking on a river and ended up in a junkyard with no way to escape and there were Others there, as well as grey sludge (as opposed to black mist) that nobody fully knows what it is. The kicker: no questions are answered because no legitimately interesting situations/problems arise to spark your interest. That's a lot of little television references, but that's what this movie felt like. Honestly, I could find a better plot on an episode of Cheaters, and that would still feel less trashy than this film.

Story-wise, it's been seven years since Donnie Darko and Samantha, the youngest of the three Darko children, has run off with her buddy on a cross-country road trip to California. Car breaks down and Chuck Bass picks them up and takes them to a Podunk town where the citizens are all suspicious and on a manhunt for Nathan Scott, who is extremely P.T.S. syndrome. A meteorite crashes into a windmill, which mirrors the jet engine scene from the first, and then everything goes to Hell from there. Jasper Cullen buys the meteorite (and he's a complete geek) which leads to his eventual decline as an interesting character in the movie, and slowly the plot goes from "potential" to "why am I watching this?", though, I should warn you: when I say slowly I mean a velocity so fast that it appears stationary.
Oh, also the tag line, or even the freaking title should have been "how many times can we rip off and sodomize things from the previous installment?" Wait, "how many times can we kill, then bring back Samantha in ONE movie!?" works, too.

Anyway, I really do need to stop there. If given the time and means of sustenance, I believe I could rant on just how abysmal this movie is for days...if you paid to watch it, I'm sorry. If you haven't gone to see it yet, or are a hopeful fan of the awesome of Donnie Darko carrying over into a sequel: stay away, for the love of God, stay far away

The Game Plan

Well this is an odd addition to my list of horror and sci-fi films, isn't it?

The Game Plan is fantastic for modern-Disney, I must say. While it doesn't break away from the twenty-first century conventions for "humorous" situations, it does a darn good job at making you look past them. See, Disney really seems to have given up on writing good, new-ish stories; instead, they pump out sequels to movies that by all rights needed none or throw a new coat of paint over a classic film, meanwhile systematically ruining it with cheap slapstick jokes. If you couldn't tell, I'd normally rather watch eye surgery footage of the operation needed after watching new-Disney than the garbage they're selling to the masses.

I've deviated from the topic a bit, so now I'll return to what's important: The Game Plan. This movie is wonderful and charming. Not a new story, but a charming one which had my eyes a little watery in the last quarter of the film.

The standby plots for most kids' movies is a short list. You can have a family trip, a new pet, a long lost relative, or a school year, all of which will be filled with zany hijinks and one-liners so devoid of "dirty language," well, that they're unbelievable. Not only that, but the situations are so often entirely implausible, and the parents are either massive control-freaks or so goofy and incompetent it's a miracle they achieved adulthood and a massive salary. Whether this is some subtle prod at society or if it's merely some idealized vision of how life should be in their eyes...actually, what's most likely is some squeaky-clean way to make millions off of suggestible children and their never at home parents. Again I've gone off on a rant of why networks marketing to kids are my least liked.

This movie is about a star football player bachelor finds out via shock value that he has a daughter from a failed marriage when said little girl shows up at his pad. Of course, they cast Mr. Football with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, which I really found myself enjoying. I was never a "wrestling" fan, but some of those actors went on to do bigger things. Why, the list is...short. Dwayne, however, surprised me with this (along with a few of his other roles) and I'm now a big fan of his. His character is self-obsessed and cocky, inept at handling a seven or eight-year old daughter, though he finds in himself a side he never expected. From throwing aside his belief that he can only be a football player, abandoning his protective bubble of cool guy by playing along and encouraging his daughter's whims. It's a cute movie, and one that I would not feel bad purchasing in the very near future.

Summary: great movie, good cast, rarity among Disney's most recent additions to their library. Watch this if you're in a sentimental mood-- you won't regret it.

The Matrix

As you can probably tell, I've changed the updates to once a week. Thursday seems better than Mondays due to the fact you all are fully into the work-week schedule and not recovering from an end of the weekend blowout.

Anyway, The Matrix. When this movie came out, it was revolutionary in a special effects sense and told a tale that many became infatuated with. The premise is cool, I won't lie...the world we know is nothing more than an illusion developed and pumped electronically directly into our minds by intelligent machines growing us in tubes as a source of energy. Wow. Impressive and ambitious definitely. Then we find out that we created the machines and, over time, drove them to the superiority mindset because of our conceited idea that we were better and that everything should obey our will. The robots rose up to defend, ended up enslaving. Of course, this is all backstory introduced through canon spin-offs, but still.

The story kicks off with a gravity-defying fight and chase, then we are introduced to the main character Neo, aka Thomas Anderson. Geeky hacker who is searching for the mysterious Morpheus, and in doing so finds just how messed up the world has become. See, it's not 1999...it's 2999 or so, and the "modern" world is a program. The robots aren't cruel to their crops; their first world was a Utopia, but our inherent desire for chaos caused human minds to reject the program and subsequently die. So the robots recreated 1999 and let us at it. Everything's mental in The Matrix, and outside it's steampunk future. But, as you all guessed, there are ways to plug back into the program via a backdoor, eliminating all of the laws of the program.

This movie was every computer geek's blissful dream; it made programing, hacking, and that whole deal cool. The main characters were all savvy with terminology and with information discs stored aboard their ships could practically instantaneously learn all forms of martial arts, vehicle operation, and languages. Mind over matter and the acceptance that what is around you is, in fact, an illusion could allow for huge jumps, wall-running, etc. I loved the movie, even without the hacker bias. It was cool and the cast was excellent, even Keanu.

Over all, it was fun, entertaining, and full of pseudo-Buddhist messages. Highly recommended; however, stay far away from its sequels. Where the first was good, they were bad. The story developed into a Messiah tale that became preachy and convoluted, but not in a good Lost sort of way.

Bloodsuckers

What's with my fixation on reviewing horror movies, right? I like 'em, so bear with me.

Bloodsuckers is a weird movie. I mean, it's not a Wes Anderson weird, nor is it like Pink Floyd's The Wall, it's just weird. The premise is that humanity has been expanding its control into the vast reaches of space and, in doing so, have encountered lifeforms that can only be described as "vampires." I laughed when I saw the description on TV, but moments after I flipped to it mostly out of lack of anything else being on, I honestly starting liking the film.
It's one of the myriad of SciFi channel movies, but this one took its humble and, let's be honest, taboo backer-channel start and rolled with it. There's nothing that really makes it stand out in the movie world, yet it's got a charming quality that inspired me to give it some props here.

The setup is that with all of the vampires (and there are many different kinds) finding ways to attack and feed on the human colonists, the government has formed a branch of the military whose sole purpose is to fight back. We're not talking about full-force, guns blazing, large scale battles (though there was apparently a Vampire War preceding the events of the movie...) but small crews of soldiers the military would probably have kicked out otherwise. Basically this branch is comprised of zealous militia who take pleasure in wiping out vampires...the main characters being the prime examples.
*You've got the captain: stoic and an all-around good veteran who leads his crew like a dysfunctional family.
*There's the redneck guy whose family was butchered by vampires.
*An Asian lady who's reminiscent (note: blatant rip-off) of Pvt. Vasquez from Aliens- she and redneck are super loyal to the captain.
*A vampire who joined with humans to help them out. She's played by the same actress who portrayed Rayne in the second movie in that miserable series, giving her another chance to wear borderline bondage gear and pretend to drink blood.
*New guy. He's got a history with the military, and the only place that would take him in is this division...guess what: he's the main character.
*Villain vampire. Michael Ironside...enough said.

What makes this movie so entertaining is the fact that, while the actual story is drab and over-played, the entire package comes together to make an honestly enjoyable experience. You've got this amalgamation of Firefly (gold!), Nosferatu, and practically any conspiracy and betrayal movie, and where it should ultimately fall flat on its face, Bloodsuckers had me chuckling at some of the worse lines and worrying for the fate of characters when things began to look bad. I have to suggest this film to you all, I really do, because it was a lot of fun.

Assassin's Creed

Ubisoft is known for its quality games, and Assassin's Creed doesn't let them down. Well, mostly.

The good of this game makes up for a few slight issues I have with it, so I'll start with them. Altair, the protagonist of the game, is pretty cool. He's not a good man, technically, but his ideals are surprisingly noble- killing those who are responsible for greater evils is justifiable, if not required, in order to maintain a peaceful society. By joining this guild of assassins he's trying to protect the nation (what will become Israel) at the expense of his life of freedom, because the guild really ends up being militaristic and almost prison-like in order. So, the story's pretty good and the majority of the characters are figures from this age in history...very neat.

Free running and parkour are the core mechanics of the game, allowing for a fluidity of movement previously unseen in a large-name game. This allows for rapid movement with the simple and effective controls they give you: large effort/attention moves are done by holding the right trigger, whereas the more relaxed and inconspicuous moves are done without it; I have yet to find a game with a better setup, honestly. It takes a minute to get used to them, but in five to ten minutes you'll be leaping from rooftop to rooftop, eluding guards with ease, because you will probably be spending most of your time trying to escape the scene of a crime.

Combat is incredibly easy to handle. You attack with the X button, guard with the right trigger, and if you tap X while guarding when an enemy nearly hits you, you'll counter. The counters are flashy and usually involve instantly killing the enemy. Altair moves deliberately, wasting no time or energy with a dramatic flourish; instead he strikes ruthlessly, though the moves are sometimes serpentine and always morbidly fascinating. As you finish lesser missions such as helping out a citizen being pushed around by guards, you'll complete requirements to unlock the assassination missions, and if you do more than required you get health upgrades.

Now we get to the big problem with the game...as nice as the controls and over-all visual appeal are, the game is repetitive. There are four types of lesser missions: save the citizen, eavesdrop, quell propaganda, and help out a fellow assassin. You have to do more than a hundred by the end of the game, since there are three massive cities that you jump between as the story progresses. In order for it to remain fun, you've really got to make things insanely tough for yourself before even beginning the event. For instance I stepped in to help out an old woman from being hassled by four guards, threw a knife and killed one, ran around the corner to pick up a super guard (a Templar - crusader dudes), then spent minutes dodging their attacks and picking off one or two so that more arrived. By the time I decided to wrap things up I had to take out about 15 guards and the Templar, using -by choice- the little short sword/knife. That kind of mission can be made fun, but collecting enemy flags for a fellow assassin is ridiculous and impossible to spruce up.

That's it, though, the rest is great! This game is not worth buying new, but if you see it at a local used game store, such as Gamestop or whatever, for less than thirty dollars, grab it. You can always sell it back if it ends up becoming boring after completion.