First Impressions of the Summer's First Official Releases (and some older games that I never played)

Older games:

Stuntman: Ignition: Why does every vehicle control like a brick with propellers? Where's my tutorial? Sweet mother of God, How do I drive?! Oh, R2. Got it. What? I missed the first stunt because it was right in front of me and I thought it was going to make me lose? Thank God you were only $5.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit: I can wreck cars listening to Evans Blue. Plays well, sounds great, and... McLarens?! Veyrons?! Yup... I'm sold.

Need for Speed: Underground: Open world racing, but with out the car crashing fun of Hot Pursuit. Needs a custom soundtrack, but still fun.

Toy Story 3: ...why is this game so much fun?!

New:

Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes: Open world and new driving controls are a must for the game. Same Lego gameplay, but with new voice acting that seems underused. Some badly designed puzzles, though. Oh, and Superman is a dick.

Inversion: At first, I would say "not fun, and stale." By the time I realized I was playing for an hour and a half, I noticed that the gravity mechanic is interesting and fun, and the story is pretty good, if not deep. Feels like a Sci-Fi Army of Two which is not bad.

Lollipop Chainsaw: If I hear the following words one more time, I will kill someone: Vagina, pleasuring, masturbation, tits, whore, fucking whore, birthday, Jimmy Urine, and like. The only words that were on that list before: birthday and like.

Editorial: Unnecessary Roughness: Drawing the Line Between Character Development and Pain for Pain's Sake

Tomb Raider had an impressive showing at E3 this year. We got to see Lara get out of traps, fight, and almost get raped. Let me rephrase my first sentence: Tomb Raider had a seriously upsetting showing at E3 this year. But, the issue isn't as cut and dry as a previously viewed as tough as nails female hero being sexually assaulted as it seems. The issue goes deeper than is it necessary. It goes to "Is she the right character" territory.

Rape in the media isn't a new thing. It is, however, fairly new to the video game community. The first time I remember it being placed in a game was Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain. We meet our female protagonist, Madison, fighting off several attackers. One tosses her on a bed, and attempts to grab her legs. Throughout the fight, she is in her underwear, having just woken up. (Warning: The video is not suitable for all audiences). She wakes up, realizing that it was a dream. But, further interaction with the character shows that it may have been a memory as well. She cannot sleep in her apartment after having the dream. When kidnapped by a psychotic doctor, she's more panicked about being tied up than she is fighting her way out. She even is visibly uncomfortable when fully stripping for an informant in order to get information. If you made her fully strip... shame on you (I went for the lamp as soon as I could).

It molds her character and personality, but it doesn't mean she's weak. In fact, it helps the player understand her motivations, and makes her human. She is no longer just a video game character, but a person with a history. She even fights her attackers in a panicked, realistic way for someone with no training at all, attempting to strike the face, and using home objects as weapons.

Lara Croft doesn't have that much of a history from the first game. She is an explorer, and raids... well... tombs. She fights with her guns and acrobatic abilities. She is a hero in her old right, who didn't have to worry about guys trying to assault her, other than kill her. If anything, she had more to worry about from the development team than the bad guys in the game when it came to sex crimes.

New Lara Croft looks like a teenaged girl (17-18). She is constantly being bloodied in one way or another, whether it's the environment or baddies. She's supposedly human and vulnerable. She isn't the Lara Croft we know.

Does that mean the attack is needed? No. In fact, to me, it makes absolutely no sense at all. A guy tries to help her, then turns around and tries to rape her. There isn't any sort of anger, it's just him trying to rape her. The most important thing to understand about rape is that it's not the victim's fault The other thing is that it's not about sex, it's about control and violence. New Lara wasn't designed with sex in mind, at least not as much as the Old Lara.

Here's the clincher, though. Not only is New Lara not trained in any form of combat, and is faced with this horrifying event, her reaction is ridiculous. She kicks him in the groin, bites off his ear, shoots him repeatedly, in the groin, of course, and runs away as he chases her. Yes, rape is the most atrocious crime people can commit, some say worse than murder (which I'm inclined to agree with). Yes, kicking a guy in the groin has been suggested as a defense (though the knee joint works better).

But, even considering the event, this seems over the top. One, Lara is not thew character you want to reboot with this gritty of an event. Can you imagine if Mario had a reboot where Bowser was a serial killer and wore Peach's skin like a body suit? No, because that's not the audience Mario is aimed towards.

What makes it worse is that American audiences are okay with this, but we have yet to have a positive character who is homosexual. When Japan had a positive homosexual male character in a game (Persona 3), the character was changed to a straight bully in the American version, because a gay character would not be accepted. Rape and castration are fine, but a positive reinforcement that not all gay men are effeminate is not. This is the message we're sending our future generation.

The more footage I see of Tomb Raider, the more I know I'll pass. It's turning out to be less of a Tomb Raider game and more of Manhunt aka, the Happy Violent Murder Simulator. Heavy Rain did the character development right, by keeping it in grounds with both reality, and how the character acts. This comes off as an attention grabbing technique with a "quick fix" in order to keep the extreme rights groups in check. Which, when you think of it, is offensive in itself, as they see all feminists being angry and violent against men. I guess the moral of the story is, "Why stop at rape when we can offend everyone?"

Brain Junkfood: What's Wrong With This? 3: Singularity

Let me just put this out there from the start: Time travel plots are usually stupid, cliche, and laughable. Sure, you have The Terminator, which was awesome... then you think, If the T-800 is sent to kill Sarah Conner, shouldn't that be an indicator that he failed? Okay, so something could be said about the fact that he's not human, but if he could calculate the fucking trajectory of a speeding semi with a tank of liquid nitrogen, he should be able to do the math: Sarah Conner + having to go back in time to kill her in the future = failure. What's more is this: because the T-800 went back in time, she got pregnant. That may not have happened if the T-800 didn't go back in time.

...Wow. Now that I completely just ruined The Terminator for myself, I'm extra pissed that I have to talk about Singularity. What? You say it's a good game? Fuck you. This is about as good as a game as 300 was historically accurate. For starters, the game is a First Person Shooter about fighting Russians during the cold war, but takes place in modern times with monsters, and with portal/time travel elements. It's as if someone at Raven software said, "Wolfenstein was a flop, but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare wasn't. Let's take that, Portal, and the Terminator, and make that into a game. Hmm... needs more enemies. Let's throw in this obscure You Are Empty game that no one has heard of in their as well." There's three issues with that logic. First, You Are Empty flopped like a tuna in a net. Second, no one played it outside of me and Russians. Third, You Are Empty had something going for it: Giant Carnivorous Chickens!

Raven didn't steal everything, though, I'll give them that. In Singularity, the game is all about time manipulation. You can age things backwards and forwards, as well as time travel. This is actually a pretty interesting gimmick... buuut they used it in all of the wrong ways. You age boxes to get ammo, make platforms to jump on, or to stop spinning fans after slowing them down. This begs the question: If I can slow the fan down, why couldn't I just have stopped the fucking thing? It'd be a bit easier than pushing a rusted box in the blades. You can also age the bad guys, which makes the humans turn to ash, and the Smurf Zombies ("Zeks") explode.

Yeah, let's talk about designing bad guys here, real quick. Your main enemy is buff blue zombies. They're supposed to be mutates from the element (E99) on the island creating a time fluctuation that sends you to the past periodically, but makes everyone else into giant Smurfs. Some of them have heads coming out of their heads, too. The only way I know this is because I had to look it up. You see a two headed zombie, doing think, "Great Scott, Marty! You screwed up the Time Stream!" or do you think, "That's a freaky Siamese Twin monster!" Seriously, the design makes no sense, as there is no hint that the time stream is splitting, only changing. There's also the fact that some of the other enemies are only "slightly" changed. Exploding ticks that only look different because they glow? Doom 3 out did that!

Balance in the game is a little weird, too. Humans go down in a good amount of hits. Ticks, are usually too fast to hit if you don't try to slow them down, and can kill you in one hit. Zeks, the melee guys, are fast, strong, and take a full magazine of assault rifle bullets, or ten shotgun shells to kill. They're the guys you fight first. The enemies seriously get easier as you go on. That's like playing a warped edition of Street Fighter 4 where you fight Seth first, and end the game fighting Ghandi. But, just because the enemies get easier, doesn't mean the game does. No, they decide that swarming you from every direction at once isn't the only douchebag strategy. No, randomly not being affected by your powers though...

Yeah, on more than one occasion, I was told to slow a monster down. I hit him with the BALL OF SLOWNESS dead center. He moves normally. Make up your mind you schizophrenic shit monkey of a game.

But, that's not the part that breaks my brain. Far from it, in fact. The part that breaks my brain is the continuity. In the beginning of the game, you go back in time and save a scientist from falling into a pit of fire. That changes the entire future to him becoming an evil mastermind. You then go back in time again, to a few hours before you went back to save him, and shoot him in the face, sending him flying out the window. So, I shot him in the head, killing him before I had a chance to go back and save him from falling into a flaming death. Mission over, right?

No. Because I saved him from his burning hell on earth, even after I killed him before I could do that, he's still alive. Yes, they seriously either bent the rules of time, or forgot their own story. I even looked this up on their wikia page, and people never pointed this out. The fire you save him from in the beginning of the game is the same one he sets if you don't kill him in the middle. How can he set the fire if he's all ready dead!?

There's only one way to finish this review, and that's by talking about Kathryn. Look at this picture. Do you know what she's looking at? Apparently, she's looking at you. Yes, people in the future are walleyed. That, or the model designer took a flying leap in the middle of working on this game.

Talking about bad games is making my head hurt. But, next time, we have more than a bad game. We have a disappointment. A really, really big disappointment. Goichi, look at you. You've changed considerably. To a dumbass, if I may!

Horrid Horror Movie Review: Episode 50

here are so many Found Footage horror movies that should be on here. Paranormal Activity, Paranormal Entity, Death of a Ghost Hunter, Grave Encounters, Gacy House (those last two will be on here soon), the list is pretty endless. And, as far as they go, it is hard to find a good one, partly due to the fact that it's hard to be scared of something that does not exist, or doesn't act in the way people see in the movies.

I think that's why so many of these movies are about ghosts. There is a pretty deep debate on whether or not they are real. There are even TV shows on both sides. And, if you'd ask me years ago, I would've said that I was a skeptic. Now, I'm not exactly sure. I've seen my share of bizarre things, but I'm not going to say that every "haunted" place is real. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence I have seen was on the show, "Ghost Adventures." They caught a teddy bear moving in the Edinburgh vaults in such a way that I can't explain it.

This movie, though, try as it might, is nothing like that. If someone actually tried to tell me this movie was real, I'd have to shove them in an oven, turned off, and lock them in until they admitted their faults. Okay, maybe that's a little rash. Then again, you didn't have to watch Episode 50.

We start the movie with Episode 49 of "Paranormal Investigators," or "P.I." as all the hipsters call it. Our host, Jack, and his team of three people, Girl (Andi, I think), Jose (no, that's not a stereotype, but wait for it), and superstitious black guy, Damon, make their living debunking hauntings on their show. What they find in this episode is a faulty fuse box, rats (that we never see), and a "mess of paint cans that are open in the basement, next to a vent." Fresh out of the gate, and I have something to bitch about.

1: The paint cans were in a neatly made stack.
2: None of the were open.
3: They weren't near a vent, but a brick wall.
4: Even if they were in the basement, and covered in dry paint, I doubt they would be hallucinating. That would mean the paint on our walls would make us see things. The only way this would work is if I was eating lead paint, or if I was Hunter S. Thompson hiding his acid stash in Rustoleum. Not even four minutes, and my head is hurting.

As they tell the family this, they make it a point to call the husband names. I'm thinking it's probably because they came their after seeing a tape of him attempting to hit a ghost with a hammer, and instead "hitting" his wife. By "hitting," I mean missing completely, them putting a light coat of make up (sans swelling) around her eye to make the socket look "broken." By "broken," I mean like half of her face is a Halloween zombie costume, made at the last minute. This movie can't even make a bruise look real, how do think their ghosts are going to look?

Our team plans for the fiftieth episode by talking about meeting up with the owner of an abandoned mental asylum. I know, this sounds cliche all ready. Trust me, it gets worse. Much worse. They ask what the catch is, and the guy, who is dying of cancer, tells them... something? Seriously, it sounds like "Catechumen, catechumen, if you do, prove West Virginia. I know where I will burn for eternity." Once more, there are no subtitles for this movie. What the hell is so hard about either hiring actors who can speak, or subtitling. Figuring how many shows subtitle people who have a slight accent, but most people can understand them, it should be easy.

The catch, as it turns out, is they have to work with another group who researches the supernatural. What's the difference? Well, supernatural implies that the phenomena cannot be explained while paranormal means science can explain it. That's what the movie says at any rate. Let me check a big-ass dictionary. Ah! "Paranormal: beyond the range of scientifically known or recognizable phenomena: rare, unusual, supernatural." ...Son of a bitch, movie! That's the, what, tenth dumb thing you've done? I've lost count. Seriously, I know this is how a lot of skeptics see this, but the words mean the same fucking thing. Get over it, and find a new word. Like, oh, I don't know, unexplained phenomena.

The leader of the second group, I'll dub him Reverend Douchenodule, believes he is different from every other paranormal investigator, because he believes in God and "yes, even exorcisms." Upon hearing his high and mighty bullshit, my brain came to a screeching halt.Zak Bagans has called in several exorcists before, during, and after cases he's worked on, believing himself to be possessed a few times from cases. Ryan Buell, founder of the Paranormal Research Society, is Catholic, and even encourages prayer to help ward off malevolent hauntings. Hell, psychic Chip Coffey has stated that he believes "in God and the angels." Where are these atheist paranormal investigators that you're talking about?

He loses more credibility when he gets in a fight with Jose. He pushes Jose, which sets off his short fuse. Yes, because all Hispanics have a short fuse. Somehow, I feel the only book the writers read was "Stereotypes that Will Piss Everyone Off." Hell, even Reverend Dickpunch is a Southern Accent and a child molestation scandal short of being a complete stereotype. I know you maybe asking if that joke was needed, but, trust me, it was. Especially when you find out that he's dating his psychic, who has the personality and characteristics of a child. His voice also randomly gets James Earl Jones deep.

A deal is made: Jack sets up his cameras, and they share the footage with Arch-Bishop Lazyass. His group says a prayer for protection, while P.I. waits for their secret member: Kieron. Oh, sweet monkey farts in Charlie Sheen's hookah, Kieron, the Scottish psychic... who shows up in a kilt, and drunk. So, the writers read two books. They also read "How to Offend the Scottish." He also makes fun of Jose being afraid of bees that magically appear in one of the rooms. Does he make fun of Mathematicians for using logic, too?

The teams split up, Girl and Kieron going to the Bee Room, Jose staying in the TV Room, and Damon and Jack roam around aimlessly. Preacher Assbanger and Psych Girl go to find possible places to make out. And nothing happens for 45 minutes. Seriously, the only "interesting" thing that happens is Kieron and Girl getting EMP's from "the Nurse," while Jack is asking "the boy" for his name. Also, occasionally, we get glimpses of a ghost that walks like something from a Tool video.

Kieron gets scared away by... absolutely nothing. Girl still tries to communicate with the nurse, and eventually gets kidnapped by...

Is that a person in a...

The Joker?! She gets kidnapped and put through electroshock by a person wearing a Joker mask that was painted over. Sweet merciful crap, this movie's budget had to be worse than my tips to McDonald's staff members. Not only are the actors minimum wage workers, but so is the make-up artist.

Girl survives, and tries for half an hour to tell Jack that it was a ghost. He doesn't believe it, because "Ghosts don't exist, because that would mean HE exists." If you don't get it now, wait for it. This piece of dialogue stuck out, though:

Jack: She electroshocked you!
Girl: Yes, but she didn't kill me when she could have. She didn't kill me to tell us that she's the good guy.

Remember kids, if someone kidnaps you, hurts you, but doesn't kill you, they're good. Wait, I meant this!

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Good people don't kidnap you and torture you! For that matter, when they see the tape, they don't call the police. They bumble around for "hours." The only reason Girl researches the boy is because she has a "I'll show them" moment, and finds out that the boy ghost is actually the ghost of a killer who killed seven women to get locked up in order to kill the eighth so he could open the gates of Hell. Wait a minute.... WHAT?!


It's the fucking plot of Silent Hill 4: The Room! I... just... I can't do this anymore!

...

...

Okay, so theirs only a few minutes left in the movie. Seriously... most of it was them walking around, doing nothing. Reverend Donkyballs finds out that the portal of Hell is in the West Virginia Prison, and rushes over to it. Jack follows to tell him that it's stupid because God doesn't exist. He feels this way because he watched as his sister as set on fire, and God didn't save her. This is why Jack became a PI; to prove God isn't real. I suspect Jack's last name is Ass.

Jack follows His Holy Dumbfuck to a series of tunnels where he confronts a projection of the Gates of Hell on the wall, complete with a Devil who kills him... somehow. Jack grabs his cross, now believing in God. He runs towards the wall projection, and.. dies... somehow. By the way... this was completely found footage. Yet... there was no camera man that followed Jack or Father Dicknugget in the tunnels.  How did anyone get this footage from the imaginary camera man?

It doesn't matter, because this movie has no right to exist. More than a quarter of it is walking around, and there are no real scares, no build up, and no suspense. Oh, but there are stereotypes that would make a good case for racism in the US.

For now, this is the Windowkeeper, signing off to decipher the EVP from my bedroom.

"There's my stash! In the walls! Nixon!" What the... Thompson!

Horrid Horror Updates and Review Updates

I just restarted the HHMR's and already, I'm behind. "Sadly," I'm going to put The Human Centipede 2 on hold, but I will start doing the HHMR's again, once a month, soon. Quite possibly, this month. A few things have happened that have kept me from doing the reviews. First is the fact that my fiance is corpophobic, and doesn't want to watch a movie about forcing people to eat shit. Either do I, but, I suffer for my art. Second is the fact that I'm in school, and that, combined with a stressful move, and stress around the house, has sapped my energy... a lot.

Here's a run down:

1: I suffer depression, and I use this phrase way too often for my own liking. I know how it sounds, but I have been diagnosed (twice, now). Meds do not work for the type of depression I suffer. It stems from being bullied most of my life, and being convinced that I'm not as good as others think I am. This affects not just me, but my fiance, as well. This almost led to a breaking point, but we're working through it.

But, it's hard to work through it when I can't walk two steps without being bullied. I'm a 28 year old man, and I'm being treated like I'm a child-like pariah who can't tell fiction from reality. This pisses the both of us off to no end, obviously.

2: We found a mouse in our apartment, and decided to keep her. Over the past two weeks, while dealing with #1 and #3, our rat, Lucy, lost two boys and two  healthy girls from her litter, and several other rats, as well as Herman the Mouse died under bizarre circumstances. Yesterday, we went to the pet store and bought a rabbit.

This is Blue Sonata. She's a Blue Dutch with gray eyes, and a loving demeanor. She's helping us cope with the loss of our ratties (Athena, one of our oldest ones, and her last daughter Calypso being two of the biggest losses).

3: I just finished my Math exam. I hate math. I hate it with a fiery passion I reserve only for things that have wronged me. I'm sure math gave me PTSD at some point. This class didn't help. The most recent thing the teacher did was give us a review sheet for the final exam. One of the problems did not have enough information. It didn't matter, though, because that one wasn't on the exam. Margin of Error was, though, and that wasn't on the review sheet. It was also the only formula missing from the formula page of the test. So, now, I'm worried, because if I don't pass that class, I lose my financial aid. I don't think I did nearly as bad as I think, but it's still a worry.

I also start summer classes this Monday, with sculpture. And I cannot stand the professor teaching it, but he was the lesser of two evils.

I'm also going to review some up coming games. Here's a list:

Lego Batman 2
Spec Ops: the Line
Borderlands 2
Medal of Honor: Warfighter
Elite Sniper V2 (between big releases)
Inversion (between big releases)
Sleeping Dogs
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Farcry 3
Dishonored
Datura
Need for Speed Most Wanted
Men in Black: Alien Crisis (between big releases)

For shiggles, the up coming HHMR's (other than HC2)

Episode 50
Dreamaniac
Dead Space: Aftermath
Splintered
The Stuff
The Woman
WTF is this Month: Movies that are actually... good?
-Visible Secret
- Creepshow
- Pontypool
- Hellraiser: Inferno
Lance Henricksen Month:
- Hellraiser: Hellworld
- The Garden
- In The Spider's Web
- Dying God
Chop
Scar
Fear Island
Deep Red

These are in no order, but I am probably going to do Episode 50, Dreamaniac, and the Lance Henricksen month (yes, a review a week, hopefully). Stay tuned!