Junebug

I've been pretty busy(shockingly) as of late. I've stumbled into this semi-lucrative flash website design gig, something that I would never of thought I'd be doing, and it's taken its toll on my patience on more than one occasion. But the good news is once I get it down it should be easy income with minimal hours and I can do it from anywhere as long as my partner in crime keeps them clients lined up.

Last night, although 30 minutes into Zardoz starring the great Sean Connery, I chose to start another movie that I got via Netflix called Junebug. This one intrigued me because it was about a fish out of water of sorts coming to meet her husband's Southern Family. And me being in sort of that position when I lived in Georgia decided it would be interesting to watch if for nothing else to see how closely it represented real people.

While not an exaggeration of southern culture, it had hints of stereotypes but, at no point was it mocking or misrepresenting anything and for that I am grateful. Some of the character arcs were a little too subtle, the brother's especially. The whole movie he's silent and angry except at the end when he tells his wife that he wants to try and have another baby out of the blue.

I don't feel like I really got to know these people other than the main character who was the least interesting of them all. And that is a shame. None of the Family really broke from their mold. I'm not sure if it was due to poor directing, casting or writing but what you see in the first five minutes is what you get for the rest of the film for the most part.

I don't think it was a bad movie, maybe a little slow, and maybe a little too dramatic at times, if it wasn't for Amy Adams' character the whole movie might have worn on me. But as it stands there's not a bad taste in my mouth.
6/10

Left 4 Dead 2

The anticipated and boycotted sequel to the zombie shooter by Valve Software Inc. is here. Well it's been here for awhile but I'm not just getting around to writing about it. This version isn't so much a sequel as it is a refining of a great game. I'm not entirely sure that they needed a straight sequel for this but I welcome any addition to a game that I thoroughly enjoyed last year, even at the 60$ ticket price.

New additions include shooting off crotches of zombies, melee weapons, spitters, jockeys, and chargers. Along with a new cast of survivors who are immune to infection.

The campaigns all flow together in a 20 chapters venture across the south. My favorite parts of the game are when Coach references how much he likes food. When you're in a the mall he says things like,"God please make the food court okay." At the dark carnival he says, "Cotton Candy: The King of Foods." and more, all awesome.

Charlie is a very cautious Left 4 Dead player, example, yesterday we completed the first chapter of an Expert Campaign on Realism and he had 40 zombie kills to my 130+ and Sean's 110+. I think he might just like to wander around the game like he's playing Myst.



Worth the money, coming out to around 30 bucks for me. I love it, want more of it.

9/10

The Road

The Road directed by John Hillcoat, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize winning novel is about a father and son combo traversing the United States of America in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I did read the novel sometime a couple years ago and I try really hard not to directly compare the two because they aren't the same medium. Similar to comparing paintings or photographs. One isn't necessarily better than the other, they're just different and have different strengths and weaknesses.

This film is a good example of adaptation done well. The overall tone remained, if not bleaker than how the book portrays the road. Feelings of suspense, urgency and shocking imagery popped out where the rich character narration of the book fell into the shadows.

They did make it more obvious that some sort of pollution apocalypse has plagued the earth. It wasn't clear exactly what was going on but there were earthquakes and landscape blowing up for no reason.

Not a lot happened and the pacing was slow, but it lends to the narrative the director is telling. If I were pushing a shopping cart down the road it would be slow, and I would be scared. The Man, was often faced with moral dilemmas. The Boy was there to help him maintain his humanity by helping people. The Man would oblige if only to save The Boy's innocence that he felt guilty for stealing.

All around them the world is falling down, from the trees to the sanity in people's brains. This film shows that in amidst the chaos of the end that a bond between father and son can be the strongest thing in the entire world.

8/10

Humpday

This is my first movie review post on this blog. I've written a handful of short reviews on Flixster but stopped using that Facebook application as of late because of its laggy malicious nature. I feel dirty using many of Facebook's applications and this one is no exception.

Humpday is a film written and directed by Lynn Shelton, who brought us such great hits as What the Funny and My Effortless Brilliance. Never heard of these films? Me either.

The story begins with square friend going to sleep with his wife when crazy old college friend comes banging on the door at 2 A.M. Crazy friend sleeps over and square friend is excited to see him but concerned about his square life style and how it will affect their friendship.

Cut to: They decide to make a gay porno, square friend proving that he's edgy and crazy friend proving that he's as edgy as people think he is. Neither will back down because men are irrationally competitive.

The one thing Lynn Shelton wants us to take from this film is that heterosexual men are incapable of sexual experimentation. We're scared of dildos never mind gay sex.

Before seeing this film I listened to a Podcast of her talking about this film and the interviewer asked something along the lines of, "Who do you think you this movie is made for?" Her response went something like, "Well, It's made for Straight Men but sadly I don't think many will be seeing it."

This I find to be extremely presumptuous. I went into watching this film in support of a local Seattle Indie filmmaker making her films with moderate success. After watching and digesting I've deduced that she's out of line in how she made her male characters look like complete buffoons because they're afraid of dildos, and sexually trapped in a box(pun intended). If a similar film was made by a man with female leads instead of male leads, she would most likely be the first in line to criticize a man appropriating a woman's voice and sexual nature.

Lynn Shelton, you aren't as hip or as progressive as you may think, no matter how many hookahs you smoke on camera.

I'm proud of myself because I got the embedded video to start where I wanted it to support my point, which is her blindly generalizing about men. I'm gonna make a film and talk about how women act crazy on their periods. See how that goes over.




Fuck you very much Lynn Shelton. You got a crazy look coming your way if I see you on the streets of 206.

Fight Night Round 3

Another 1000/1000 cheebs. It took me around 4 hours of play or so to complete this game, and what a 4 hours it was. Game play went as follows:

Hay-maker->Take Two Steps Back->One Step Forward->Hay-maker->Repeat

My record was 36-3, 36 K.O.s , 3 disqualifications(from kneeing crotches and elbowing faces when I knew I was going to lose.) Even on the easiest setting the IRL boxers in this game are sometimes unbeatable. They're just too fast, too strong and just bob and weave till you're so tired that you're punches are like a nice summer breeze.

Fight Night Round Three was the most repetitive game I've play in a long time. There was a money earning system, but there was nothing really worth buying after you play a few Pro-Matches. You leveled up by doing 1 of 3 mini-games. I only did the weight lifting and combo dummy as they were the only one's that improved your important stats. Both games were annoyingly tough and not fun, not fun at all. There was even a mini game in-between rounds that you'd use cue tips to slow bleeding of cuts. This involved me just rolling the control stick in a side to side motion, not really sure how to succeed but if you don't know how to succeed then you don't know how to fail either. And fail I did not.

With all this negative talk, there is something viscerally exciting about landing a bone crunching hook or uppercut on your opponent. Charlie would often come into the room as I was playing and be easily sucked in by the games glitz and glamour. But once you get past that the game is less complicated than Tetris.

And the babes were always welcome inbetween each round to get my B goin'.



3/10

Dead Space

When I first saw the box art for Dead Space I couldn't for the life of me see the image. It was like a magic eye or one of those optical illusions that trick your eyes into focusing on the wrong thing then make you feel stupid for not seeing the other half all along.

"A severed hand? Really?" Was the reaction that I had in my head. Not that after playing through the game almost three times makes that severed hand spontaneously gather some meaning. Despite my unnecessary confusion with said box art, I've enjoyed the game immensely.

While not a long game, this game has what seems to have been missing from the latest games I've played through: polish. Aside from tables sometimes adhere themselves to your torso like skirts, the game looks, feels, sounds, and controls almost perfectly. There's no enemy AI so everything is pretty much scripted; I.E. monster X drops down from the ceiling when you hit a certain trigger, every time, without fail. From that point they just rush and you swinging their blades for hands like there is no tomorrow. I've now played it 2 times back to back, albeit to mostly get the final achievements for another 'hundie' as its referred to in this household.

"Non-hundies are not the kind of hundies we need!"

The trickiest of the achievements are probably the gratuitous play this game through on the hardest setting:

Epic Tier 3 Engineer 150
Complete the game on the hardest difficulty setting

This isn't proving to be as difficult has I had anticipated. The joker on xbox360achievements.org acted like this was some sort of ridiculously hard mode. The truth is if you use your stasis and don't buy the guns that suck, I only bought and use the plasma cutter, pulse rifle and force gun, the only difference in the play through is that enemies take around one more round to kill and they take off WAY more health when they hit you. However, if you use your stasis generously getting his shouldn't be a problem.

The other hard achievement in the game is:

Don't get cocky, kid 10

Survive the ADS Cannon with over 50% shield strength remaining

This one is particularly hard because you start at 85% shields and there are so many asteroids flying at you that you can't see some of them at times because they're out of your field of view. This took me around 20 or so tries to finally do it. There are definitely some more forgiving scripts for this one and I think I finished it on one of the easier ones. My only tip is to only fire one of the cannons so you don't overheat that quickly and catch them asteroids early.

The story in this game is actually pretty good. I'm not one for space station shooter/horror type games but this is a shining example of a game that's done right.

Fallout 3

From the good graces of god(or Tyler), I was able to snag all the DLC from Fallout 3's Game of the Year Edition. I am now the proud owner(?) of a completed Fallout 3 icon. This is a moment of joy because up until this point I think my only legit completed game was Bionic Commando.(Eragon and Avatar: The Last Air Bender don't really count). The stress level at the 8621 house has lowered that much more since the crowning accoplishment.

The DLC I had mixed feelings about.

1. Operation Anchorage: In my head before playing it I envisioned a giant open battle field where you could infiltrate the Chinese bases and sabotage them from the inside, while still being able to collect your Sugar Bombs and munitions of various caliber.

However, as in real life war, the reality was much harsher than I was prepared for. You could not roam freely, in fact you couldn't even pick up any items and are forced to use a 10mm pistol(which I haven't used since I tore one from a dead Vault 101 security guard when I started the game). You were shuffled down a predetermined path from one achievement to the next, killing Chinese soldiers and the more annoying stealth snipers that looked like ninjas from some anime(never mind that ninjas are Japanese). And by the end I was not any closer to understanding how the wasteland came to be nor how it couldn't be avoided. Christ I was taking down tanks with my 10mm pistol. But maybe VATS wasn't invented until after the nuclear attack. 4/10

2. The Pitt: In my head I pictured the hero from Vault 101 able to roam around a dingier mall type setting with more open area, killing random slavers and meeting new friends on the way. A massive scowering mission to collect all 100 ignots from around the city.

I was tricked. While not as disappointing as its former DLC brethren, The Pitt was in the same vein but at least it was in current time and what you did there actually impacted the world. If that world is only accessible through a hand car in the mountains. I enjoyed the short arena and the outcome of the story mission. My only wish was to have the original open endedness of the game. 6/10

3. Point Lookout: After the first two were completed I had low expectations coming into this one. Similarly to the other it had a portal that loaded another area from which you were shuttled. But as soon as I looted my first hotel room and started on a bonus quest that wasn't achievement related that *gasp* actually gave me a named gun and a little understanding into the lore of the nuclear attack, I knew that this was the DLC that was worth it. Killing retarded hill billies and brewing up moonshine was mighty fun. The story quest was even sort of cool. It had a few twists and turns I didn't see coming. All in all, worth the price of admission(which for me was FREE). 9/10

4. Mothership Zeta: The final DLC in the bunch and not terribly unlike The Pitt in convention. But seeing as you're trapped in an alien space craft, the confined paths and such are more excusable. Nothing earth shattering in the story or game play of this one. If it was stretched out to a full game it would of been crappy but it was short so I'm more tolerant. Even if I had to reload the second half of it 3 times to get my Alien Archivist achievement. 6/10

5. Brotherhood of Steel: Last but certainly not least the Brotherhood of Steel DLC raised the level cap to 30 and removed the ending of the game so you were able to free roam with the main story completed.

The new perks that went along with the new 30 levels were mostly crap but I was able to grab up all those perks from upper teens that were good but not good enough at the time, so I'm at peace with Puppies and such.

The ending of the game made more sense due to all out attack on the Enclave, which hardly seemed defeated at the end of the original game. I'm not sure how you came out of the original story alive but you wake up after dying. That's fine. 9/10

Fallout 3 was excellent. Probably the best one player experience I've had in a game before. If they made a multi-player version, it would be that much sweeter.

Borderlands

Charlie and I bought Borderlands a few weeks ago and have been thoroughly playing through it. Originally Charlie and I went to Gamestop to use my 25$ gift card I got as a birthday gift. Only to find that they were sold out and the employee at our friendly Northgate Mall Gamestop proceeded to lecture us on how we needed to pre-order every game that's being released this holiday season. I'm pretty sure he said the word "pre-order" like 5+ times in the short duration of yelling at us.

First impressions of Borderlands were good. The graphics don't bother me like I thought they might. I'm not sold on the style as a whole, but bothered by it either. Gameplay can get a little tedious but its the good kind of tedious where you could get good loot if you just stick through it, a discipline honed through my countless hours of eq and wow. It's basically an rpg without a soul. There is no variety of gameplay it's go kill x, collect y. Not game of the year but not bad in any case. It's coop, although nothing but derivative, that is its saving grace. Charlie and myself will play anything that'll give us coop achievements and this is a shining example of our obsession. We finished this entire game in a matter of a week and a half, and by the entire game I do mean the full 1000 gamerscore that goes with it. we actually played through this game around 1 and 3/4. So I currently have another game on my completed list, but that will change the minute their DLC, which was anounced before the game was even release, come out. I'm beginning to feel cheated by DLC in that its yet to provide anything of substance, with the possible exception of Fallout 3's Point Lookout. All DLC means to me at this point is achievements that I'll miss because I don't want to pony up the 10-20 dollars to obtain them. Seriously though, if we're talking dollar per achievement point 60 for 1000 is a much better deal than 10-20 for 100-200. Get your head on straight Microsoft and quit being greedy fuckin' Guses.

We have since traded in the Borderlands to said crappy pre-order obsessed Gamestop toward the purchase of Left 4 Dead 2. Which should be a blast.

Marvel Ulimate Alliance 2

I'm shocked and awed that a sequel to a game that came out 2+ years ago, more if you count X-Men Legends games, could be such a disappointment.

Charlie and I are always on the look out for new Coop games(same box). So we decided it would be a good idea to go rent MUA:2 in order to grab up some achievements in tandem, rather than taking turns like we have for so many other games. This sort of worked. Charlie who is eternally player 2 to my player 1, was unable to save any progress he made in the game after we shut off the system initially. Which screwed him out of 100 or so achievements points in the end. We thought that it wouldn't be such a big deal cause we'd just run through it again and grab 'em up. But as we delved deeper into the pit that is MUA:2, we discovered that the length and mind numbingly boring game play and not to mention crappy character selection, made us not want to go back play it again. I even was feeling physically ill after one late night play through and needed to go sleep it off.

Fuck this game. It is so much worse than I expected having played all of the previous titles from this developer. Everything about this game is worse than the original, it even had more bugs. Charlie at one point was jumping and was stuck in the air like he was going up levels and couldn't come down, unless he switched characters and even then it still happened every time he jumped.

The character models look hideous. It's like someone intentionally found all the WORST artist renditions of each character and then model each character after them. Gambit and Hulk both look literally retarded.

The coup d'état is that I got less than 500GS for this piece of shit during my one and relatively thorough play-through. We even went back and grabbed a couple extra achievements from the first stage.

What a fail.

Halo 3: ODST; Naughty Naughty

This morning that pesky cleaning lady is here until 3pm, because we're sooo fucking dirty. Anyway I got up and loaded up ODST for the last non-Vidmaster achievement I had left.

Naughty Naughty
Killed 10 Engineers in the city at night, alone or with another ODST.
5
Acquired 10/13/2009

I just loaded up Mombasa Streets in a new easy game, with some skulls on for shits and giggles. Then just drove around on the looking for those damned Virgils. Took me about 30 minutes to get all ten and net a cool 5g, but more importantly 2 achievements from a complete game.

Spectral Force 3

I've been pounding through Spectral Force 3 as of late. This is a game that completely conventional when it comes to Japanese Strategy RPGs. It does nothing new and lots of people hate it, but they probably hate it because it's a strategy RPG not because its a terrible game. I had to go through 6+ hours of gameplay before I even earned my first 25g.

Today(or yesterday now) I earned 3 specific achievements.


Total Damage Dealt 10,000 or more total damage in a combo during a mission
25
Acquired 10/12/2009

I earned this achievement by doing Begina's(I call him Vagina with a B) Ultimate Special called "Crescent Strike." I just plopped it down on about 4 or 5 guys and let it go to town on them.


Max Combo Hits Dealt 100 hits or more in a combo during a mission
25
Acquired 10/12/2009

I obtained this through the same Special and situation as the 10,000 dmg achievement.


Total Enemies Defeated
Defeated 500 total enemies
25
Acquired 10/12/2009

I defeated 500 enemies about 16 hours into the game and past around the 4th "story" mission. Everyone who just plays through the game should be able to obtain this one with no problem at all.

Tomorrow I should have unlocked a few more of Spectral Force's characters and netting myself some sweet sweet gamerscore.

Until then...