Spider-man: Web of Shadows

What can I say? Spider-man is probably the best Marvel superhero...I mean, everyone knows about him, and practically everyone likes him! His powers are awesome, his villains interesting (mostly), and he's actually a fairly believable character...if you look past the whole superpowers part. The guy has real problems and moral dilemmas, as well as a general failure at social interaction. In other words, Spider-man is the everyday man's hero on a grand scale.

Getting to the review. Web of Shadows is a sandbox game, or an open world game, where you travel the city to stop crimes and see all the majesty of a scaled-down New York City in CG in complete freedom. In a sandbox game you are not limited to roped-off levels; instead, you're able to go from one side of the island to another and beat up people to your heart's content. There are story missions, which you activate by entering a glowing circle or talking to a hero/villain, but there are optional missions you can pick up and do in the meantime. Sure, you have to do missions in order, but there's so much you can do between them. What makes it better, you ask?

You are Spider-man. With web swinging, wall running, and massive agility you can basically zoom across New York and hand gangs, armored troops, and symbiotes their asses with effortless ease. Why? Because for all missions, optional and story, you gain experience points with which you can buy new additions to your moves. One might be an extra swing in your combo, the other might increase its damage.
What's better is that you have two forms: regular Spidey and Black Suit. The differences are mostly number of hits vs. physical damage to begin with, but after you supe up each suit, you'll find the Red Suit is a combo master with aerial proficiency, whereas the Black Suit utilizes symbiote tendrils and hits way harder.

The story's ok, so I won't go into it here; I'd rather you experience the story, but I will say there are multiple endings depending on if you make Red Suit (nice - hero) or Black Suit (aggressive - villainous) decisions. Ultimately only two decisions you make matter, but the game has subtle changes depending on what you do and which suit you really choose to play. Of course, you can switch between the two at any time with the press of a button (analog button), so don't worry about being limited to just one.

Overall, this game is actually really fun. It has its flaws, and if you're not a big fan of bright, colorful, nerdy series' you might want to stay away; however, if you want to play a nearly perfect sandbox game, put aside Grand Theft Auto IV and pick this up.

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.

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.