Jan 30, 2013

Video Game Reviews @ The Temple

Arkham City – This game is awesome, but it is exactly the game you imagine it to be. It has everything Arkham Asylum had, and more. Better fighting, better voice talent, better graphics, better environment, better everything. And I ate it up, I couldn’t get enough while playing it. Upon reflection, I’m not left with a lot. It’s a bit of an empty experience, because it just wasn’t as amazingly different as the first one was, compared to other action games. But I still had a blast playing it.

Uncharted 3 – The story here is actually much like Batman. The game is beautiful. There is not a thing wrong with it (well, melee combat is pretty awful, especially coming off Arkham City). The story telling, the acting, the animation, it’s all fantastic. But, Uncharted 2 was pretty damn fantastic. Is this better? Probably. There’s a couple scenes in here that are really stand out cinematic coolness. But Uncharted 2 was a huge step forward. This is a minor step from there. So I’m again left with “that was a lot of fun, but didn’t blow my mind”

Red Dead Revolution – Yeah, I’m that far behind. In my defense, I was halfway through this game a year and a half ago when I got my new computer. I kind of never made it back to the PS3 until the first two games dragged me in. So I finally put in the time to finish this. It is an awesome game. Again, kind of like the first two, it is a bit of a slight evolution. Really, it’s just GTA in the old west. But GTA is awesome and I haven’t played it for a few years, and the old west is awesome, and I’ve never played a really stand out western game. So this was awesome. Acting and story is all great. Combat is as lame as GTA games always are on analog sticks, but the slow mo mode makes it bearable. The other reason I hadn’t gotten back to this is because On The Media, those assholes, ruined the ending for me like a year ago. Kind of made it hard to get invested. But still a great game.

Heavy Rain – This game was great. I beat it in 3 sittings, the last one being an epic (for me) 6 hour session. I got it as a gift, but then went and bought a Move just to play with it. I’m not sure that was a super economical decision, but it was fun. Just using the minority report heads up display briefly with the FBI agent was worth it. Some of the icons are damn confusing, but I got used to it eventually. It’s still not nearly as natural as the controller I’ve been using for 10 years, but fun. Doing things like opening drawers and picking things up mimics the natural motion in really cool ways. It’s extraordinarily mundane sometimes (brushing teeth, cooking eggs), but it’s cool. Then again, it’s sometimes hard to tell what a given action is supposed to do. Does flip left mean I open the door, or grab the seatbelt? Well, fuck me I picked the wrong one and now I’m outside the car again. More than once I did the wrong thing because there was n0 information that told me which thing was which. The game is essentially a really good serial killer movie, except you get to act out all the parts. It’s like the Killing, except not super boring. There are quite a few problems, technical problems. There’s lots of overlapping models (people in walls), once a guy got frozen falling backward in the air, matrix style. Though the individual acting was good, it was plain that they didn’t record the lines together, the flow of a lot of conversations is off. That’s probably because the conversations can go so many ways depending on what you’ve done, but it’s still very stilted. I wanted to do the whole game without reloading. I think it’s structured that you can “lose” and that’s just how the story plays out, which is very cool. Twice in the middle I reloaded because the game was being crap. Once because I had no way to know that flip this way meant run away and leave the girl to die instead of save her. And once because the wand wasn’t responding. But that corrupted me, and I reloaded in the very end to beat the bad guy instead of getting beaten. That makes me feel kind of lame, but I wanted a halfway decent ending! I had already screwed up twice throughout and let bad things happen to two major characters. Overall, I had a blast with this, I’m actually considering running through it again just to see a different ending. The fact that so many things can happen so many ways. The way the story can do that is just awesome. But, I’m lazy, and it won’t happen. But just the fact that I considered it is saying something!

Resistance 3 – This is a pretty good, if fundamentally average, shooter. The guns are fun, a lot of fun. Old school game where you can carry 50 guns at once, that’s fun too. Playing a shooter on a controller is not fun, of course. The story is just whatever. There are some decent set pieces, but nothing super memorable. It’s got a nice variety of enemies, big, small, varied attacks, that’s all good. It seems like a completely acceptable shooter if you are into scifi shooters.

Hotline Miami – Pretty cool game. It’s a retro 80s thing. Pixel sprites, cool ass 8 bit music with an 80s flair. It’s a top down…. beatemup/shooter. You run around a small level, punching, slashing, or shooting bad guys until they are all dead. The plot is thin as thin can be, you are getting anonymous calls to go to some place for some mundane reason (deliver a package, meet a date), but you just kill everyone there. The controls are kind of annoying, it might actually be more suited for a controller. You move with WASD, and aim with the mouse. But you move so quick (and the enemies move even quicker) its often impossible to track with the mouse. So you do a lot of corner shooting so that you get the guy before he gets you. It’s pretty fun though. Massively bloody, though in a kind of cartoony pixelated way. But you are ripping heads off left and right. It’s short, I went through it in two sessions, but it was fun. That music was so cool too.

Dragon Age: Origins – Here I am way behind again. I have #2 too, but it’ll take me a while to get to that, I need a break. I actually didn’t think this was as good as everyone else in the world, I enjoyed it, but I got bored, a lot. I stopped playing it to play and beat every other game on this list. It’s just so freaking long, and not that captivating. It could be that I’ve changed, I used to love this classic RPG stuff. I loved KOTOR (and kind of KOTOR 2). I loved All first 4 elder scrolls (still haven’t played skyrim). I obviously loved the JRPGs growing up. So… why don’t I love this? I like it, the characters are pretty well developed, the fighting is done well, the world has an okay (kind of limited) amount of space and variety. The ability to make some different choices with people that can affect who is in your party is pretty cool. It just didn’t drag me in, for whatever reason, but it’s still very good. I had a lady character, which is basically unheard of for me, I figured I’d give it a shot. A lady elf mage, which was cool. Of course, then I made her romantic with another lady, for some reason I’m not quite modern enough to romance a dude as a lady, kind of silly. In the end, and I guess this is spoilers if you actually waited as long as me to play this game, I chose to be the one to kill the archdemon. Seemed more in character to me, for some reason. All the stuff in the epilogue based on what you did in the game is cool.Sadly, that means I can’t play as my character in the DLC, which I’ve just started. I tried starting a dwarf warrior character, but that was not fun. I think you really need a mage, two actually, in your group. Two fighters was a nightmare of poultice use and dying. The fighter abilities aren’t as fun to use either. So I booted that and created…. another lady human mage! But this one is blonde, so… totally different. The DLC was kind of bad, mostly due to bugs. Awakenings have a good extension of a story, but was ridiculously buggy: broken quests, crashes left and right, really annoying. It was good enough though. Then there’s a DLC for: playing as the darkspawn during the last battle, leilana’s history, a golem thing, and hunting down morrigan. The last battle one was cool. Leilana’s was boring. The last battle in the golem one is too hard, and I don’t have enough time to prepare in the hour long campaign, or patience to try enough tactics to win. And I didn’t even play the morrigan one because I didn’t let morrigan do her bad thing in Origins, so it’s silly to hunt her down, plus I’m super bored with this game.

Jan 28, 2013

Malaria (a short film)

Holy crap. I know I post a lot of things not everyone would be into, but this is honestly the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. The “animation” is just genius. The only thing that bummed me out is I don’t speak spanish (or maybe portuguese, he’s brazilian) so I had to read the subtitles, which meant I wasn’t appreciating the visuals. But still, awesome.

Jan 11, 2013

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

The Hobbit – Loved it. It’s not perfect by any means, and not as good as the LotR movies, which had a great deal more epic-ness to them. I don’t know why people think it’s too long, I was never bored. The characters are mostly great, the fighting is always great, the CGI is fantastic most of the time, with a couple pretty shitty exceptions. I’m thinking particularly when they are all standing on top of a little rock after being saved from something, it looked really lame. The only really bad thing about the movie was the humor. There was some charming subtle humor, and that was good. But there was MUCH more obnoxious, over-acted, over-the-top, corny humor. A lot of awful one liners and pathetic slapstick stuff, I really really didn’t like it. Oh, and Radagast was a completely waste of time (and the worst of the physical humor, what is he, dick van dyke?). But let’s not dwell on that, because the rest of it was awesome.

Wrath of the Titans – Not bad, not great. Better than the last one, definitely. The fighting is a bit more interesting, though still not that amazing. The CGI is way better, it’s pretty great throughout. With the GLARING exception of anytime the pegasus showed up. That honestly looked like college freshman level animation, it was really really bad. Nothing particularly memorable otherwise, but an okay movie.

The Bourne Legacy – I’ve never been a huge Bourne person. I like them fine, the quick style fighting is a welcome addition to the genre, but all the conspiracy/mystery stuff was boring and over wrought. So now we have a Bourne movie without all the mystery, just fighting. I’m kind of okay with that. It’s not as slick as the previous movies, to be sure. Probably that’s on purpose. In the end it’s a fine action movie, nothing wrong with it, but nothing super memorable either.

Brave – This is a very fun, very sweet, very pretty movie. If it was a Disney movie, I’d say it was one of the best in quite a while. It is not special, though, in the way Pixar movies have been. It didn’t have that extra magic that those moments in Up and Wall-E (and others) had. But it’s still very nice.

Ruby Sparks – This is a pretty cute movie. It’s painfully hip and cool, but otherwise very enjoyable. The conceit of it is pretty disturbing, and fortunately they are not afraid to push it to it’s logical extreme. Sadly they do puss out in the end with a completely non-sensical (and/or completely non-sustainable) ending. But everything else about the movie is pretty good.

Lawless – This seemed cool in the ads, but good lord was I bored. I just couldn’t give a shit about anything that happened in it. I’m getting the same feeling about Justified lately. Maybe I just can’t get into that southern gangster (20s or modern) style.

Backbeat – This is about the “5th Beatle” who isn’t the producer, but this guy Stu Sutcliffe who was with them in the very early days. I didn’t know any of this history, so that was cool. The acting isn’t very good, the accents are kind of awful. But the music is great. And seeing the story is cool.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Man, why does reality have to ruin great internet ideas? Besides giving us some axe-wielding action, which isn’t something we’ve really seen before, this movie brings absolutely nothing to the table. No story, no acting, no writing, and no non-axe action to care about. I have the book too, but I really don’t want to read it now.

The Amazing Spider-Man – I don’t know. Some parts of it are good. I agree with everyone, the quippy jumping kind of obnoxious spiderman is done much more true to the source in this one. Yes, Andrew Garfield is too cool to be a nerd, so that’s out of place. But he is at least a bit of a nerd in real life, so that helps. The movie does most of the things it is supposed to, but maybe I’m spiderman’d out, or maybe it’s just not compelling. I’m glad he’s around, I hope with everyone else he gets folded into the greater Marvel movie universe. That would be the movie’s largest contribution, probably.

Case de mi Padre – Holy shit. I absolutely always finish movies. Even if they are god awful, I finish them because I have a disease. But I didn’t finish this one. So bad, not funny, not anything. If it was in english and I could ignore it while I played a game, I might have let it play. But having to read the horribleness was just too much. Jeez.

Machine Gun Preacher – Eh, I guess this movie was fine. I guess it’s a true story about some deadbeat who turns his life around and becomes a preacher, then goes to africa to help some kids, and ends up killing some dudes (with a machine gun, I guess). If it wasn’t true, it’d be less interesting. But it’s done pretty well.

The New Daughter – This is a horror-ish movie where Kevin Costner moves to some house with his kids and crazy stuff starts happening. It’s a lot better than I thought it’d be. That’s probably giving it more credit than it would otherwise get, but it’s decent enough. It’s not really spooky or anything, but it has a little bit of thrills.

Indie Game: The movie – This is pretty cool. It’s neat to hear the backstory on these games that I’ve played. It also makes perfectly clear that some of these guys are raving assholes. The Super Meat Boy guy is pretty cool. The Braid guy is kind of a douche. The Fez guy seems like a horrendously obnoxious person. Hard to say, I guess, they could edit the worst moments here and the best moments here. I’ve been pretty obnoxious at times in my life, after all. Besides that, interesting to see some of the business & the behind the scenes.

Act of Valor – Jeez, this seemed like it would be totally bad ass, right? The baddest of assest moments were shown in the trailer. The thing where the guy shoots the guy and the guy catches the guy as he falls. That’s as cool as it gets, so don’t expect more. I guess they used real military guys, so the acting isn’t very good. But it’s not all their fault, some of the writing is pretty bad too. By the way, FPS was lame in Doom, it’s still lame, sorry.

Mirror Mirror – What the fuck, why is this good? Remember when the two Snow White trailers came out and one looked god awful and one looked pretty cool despite Kristen Stewart? What happened to that? The Huntsman movie was pretty crappy, and this movie is pretty fun! I mean, it’s not genius or anything, and Julia Roberts is mega-annoying. But at least she’s SUPPOSED to be annoying. And the visuals are fantastic, the story is fun, the heroine is sympathetic, and the humor is humorous. Huntsman was none of those things, and had barely any action to show instead. I’m confused.

Ted – It’s pretty funny. It’s true that the funniest parts of the movie are in the trailer. But there’s, let’s say, an equal number of just as funny parts throughout the rest of the movie. And them a bunch of kind of funny parts. It’s not laugh my balls off funny, I don’t need to see it again like a really hilarious movie. But it was certainly fun to watch.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World – Welllll, I guess it’s good. The problem is that it’s really stupid. Not just the fact that something is going to happen to the Earth that engulfs the entire planet in fire. I guess that’s possible, but I’m thinking of something that big hit us, there wouldn’t be much to light on fire, but maybe I’m wrong. No, the real stupid part is where the 25 year old falls in love with the 45 year old and they are perfect for each other. It’s sweet, I guess, but it just seems so dumb. If you accept the fact that you make a great couple for 2 weeks, cool. But pretending like you were always meant for each other when you couldn’t be more different is just goofy. I suppose I’m taking it all too seriously, but the end really did kind of cause involuntary guffaws. But, ignoring all that, it was fun to watch.

Trek Nation – Documentary made by Gene Roddenberry’s son, I thought it was pretty good. It’s true that Eugene (the son) is very annoying. He really should have ctrl+f’d “I wanted to learn what kind of man my dad was” and deleted all but one. I think that would have cut 10 minutes from the movie. But besides his awkward, most often unnecessary narration, the movie is cool. I didn’t know much about Roddenberry, so hearing it all was really neat. Probably nothing here for a non trekkie, but for me it was cool.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

The Hobbit – Loved it. It’s not perfect by any means, and not as good as the LotR movies, which had a great deal more epic-ness to them. I don’t know why people think it’s too long, I was never bored. The characters are mostly great, the fighting is always great, the CGI is fantastic most of the time, with a couple pretty shitty exceptions. I’m thinking particularly when they are all standing on top of a little rock after being saved from something, it looked really lame. The only really bad thing about the movie was the humor. There was some charming subtle humor, and that was good. But there was MUCH more obnoxious, over-acted, over-the-top, corny humor. A lot of awful one liners and pathetic slapstick stuff, I really really didn’t like it. Oh, and Radagast was a completely waste of time (and the worst of the physical humor, what is he, dick van dyke?). But let’s not dwell on that, because the rest of it was awesome.

Wrath of the Titans – Not bad, not great. Better than the last one, definitely. The fighting is a bit more interesting, though still not that amazing. The CGI is way better, it’s pretty great throughout. With the GLARING exception of anytime the pegasus showed up. That honestly looked like college freshman level animation, it was really really bad. Nothing particularly memorable otherwise, but an okay movie.

The Bourne Legacy – I’ve never been a huge Bourne person. I like them fine, the quick style fighting is a welcome addition to the genre, but all the conspiracy/mystery stuff was boring and over wrought. So now we have a Bourne movie without all the mystery, just fighting. I’m kind of okay with that. It’s not as slick as the previous movies, to be sure. Probably that’s on purpose. In the end it’s a fine action movie, nothing wrong with it, but nothing super memorable either.

Brave – This is a very fun, very sweet, very pretty movie. If it was a Disney movie, I’d say it was one of the best in quite a while. It is not special, though, in the way Pixar movies have been. It didn’t have that extra magic that those moments in Up and Wall-E (and others) had. But it’s still very nice.

Ruby Sparks – This is a pretty cute movie. It’s painfully hip and cool, but otherwise very enjoyable. The conceit of it is pretty disturbing, and fortunately they are not afraid to push it to it’s logical extreme. Sadly they do puss out in the end with a completely non-sensical (and/or completely non-sustainable) ending. But everything else about the movie is pretty good.

Lawless – This seemed cool in the ads, but good lord was I bored. I just couldn’t give a shit about anything that happened in it. I’m getting the same feeling about Justified lately. Maybe I just can’t get into that southern gangster (20s or modern) style.

Backbeat – This is about the “5th Beatle” who isn’t the producer, but this guy Stu Sutcliffe who was with them in the very early days. I didn’t know any of this history, so that was cool. The acting isn’t very good, the accents are kind of awful. But the music is great. And seeing the story is cool.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Man, why does reality have to ruin great internet ideas? Besides giving us some axe-wielding action, which isn’t something we’ve really seen before, this movie brings absolutely nothing to the table. No story, no acting, no writing, and no non-axe action to care about. I have the book too, but I really don’t want to read it now.

The Amazing Spider-Man – I don’t know. Some parts of it are good. I agree with everyone, the quippy jumping kind of obnoxious spiderman is done much more true to the source in this one. Yes, Andrew Garfield is too cool to be a nerd, so that’s out of place. But he is at least a bit of a nerd in real life, so that helps. The movie does most of the things it is supposed to, but maybe I’m spiderman’d out, or maybe it’s just not compelling. I’m glad he’s around, I hope with everyone else he gets folded into the greater Marvel movie universe. That would be the movie’s largest contribution, probably.

Case de mi Padre – Holy shit. I absolutely always finish movies. Even if they are god awful, I finish them because I have a disease. But I didn’t finish this one. So bad, not funny, not anything. If it was in english and I could ignore it while I played a game, I might have let it play. But having to read the horribleness was just too much. Jeez.

Machine Gun Preacher – Eh, I guess this movie was fine. I guess it’s a true story about some deadbeat who turns his life around and becomes a preacher, then goes to africa to help some kids, and ends up killing some dudes (with a machine gun, I guess). If it wasn’t true, it’d be less interesting. But it’s done pretty well.

The New Daughter – This is a horror-ish movie where Kevin Costner moves to some house with his kids and crazy stuff starts happening. It’s a lot better than I thought it’d be. That’s probably giving it more credit than it would otherwise get, but it’s decent enough. It’s not really spooky or anything, but it has a little bit of thrills.

Indie Game: The movie – This is pretty cool. It’s neat to hear the backstory on these games that I’ve played. It also makes perfectly clear that some of these guys are raving assholes. The Super Meat Boy guy is pretty cool. The Braid guy is kind of a douche. The Fez guy seems like a horrendously obnoxious person. Hard to say, I guess, they could edit the worst moments here and the best moments here. I’ve been pretty obnoxious at times in my life, after all. Besides that, interesting to see some of the business & the behind the scenes.

Act of Valor – Jeez, this seemed like it would be totally bad ass, right? The baddest of assest moments were shown in the trailer. The thing where the guy shoots the guy and the guy catches the guy as he falls. That’s as cool as it gets, so don’t expect more. I guess they used real military guys, so the acting isn’t very good. But it’s not all their fault, some of the writing is pretty bad too. By the way, FPS was lame in Doom, it’s still lame, sorry.

Mirror Mirror – What the fuck, why is this good? Remember when the two Snow White trailers came out and one looked god awful and one looked pretty cool despite Kristen Stewart? What happened to that? The Huntsman movie was pretty crappy, and this movie is pretty fun! I mean, it’s not genius or anything, and Julia Roberts is mega-annoying. But at least she’s SUPPOSED to be annoying. And the visuals are fantastic, the story is fun, the heroine is sympathetic, and the humor is humorous. Huntsman was none of those things, and had barely any action to show instead. I’m confused.

Ted – It’s pretty funny. It’s true that the funniest parts of the movie are in the trailer. But there’s, let’s say, an equal number of just as funny parts throughout the rest of the movie. And them a bunch of kind of funny parts. It’s not laugh my balls off funny, I don’t need to see it again like a really hilarious movie. But it was certainly fun to watch.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World – Welllll, I guess it’s good. The problem is that it’s really stupid. Not just the fact that something is going to happen to the Earth that engulfs the entire planet in fire. I guess that’s possible, but I’m thinking of something that big hit us, there wouldn’t be much to light on fire, but maybe I’m wrong. No, the real stupid part is where the 25 year old falls in love with the 45 year old and they are perfect for each other. It’s sweet, I guess, but it just seems so dumb. If you accept the fact that you make a great couple for 2 weeks, cool. But pretending like you were always meant for each other when you couldn’t be more different is just goofy. I suppose I’m taking it all too seriously, but the end really did kind of cause involuntary guffaws. But, ignoring all that, it was fun to watch.

Trek Nation – Documentary made by Gene Roddenberry’s son, I thought it was pretty good. It’s true that Eugene (the son) is very annoying. He really should have ctrl+f’d “I wanted to learn what kind of man my dad was” and deleted all but one. I think that would have cut 10 minutes from the movie. But besides his awkward, most often unnecessary narration, the movie is cool. I didn’t know much about Roddenberry, so hearing it all was really neat. Probably nothing here for a non trekkie, but for me it was cool.