Noobz

A feature length advertisement about a group of people that go on a road trip to California to compete in a video game tournament. No, not the Wizard. Even worse. Noobz.

When I learned that this movie existed, I knew I’d be writing about it here if I watched it. I opened up notepad on my laptop in anticipation before starting it. Please don’t disappoint me. Oh rapture! What odium! The first five minutes is nothing but Xbox 360, Gears of War and Mountain Dew. Gee, I wonder who financed this… The thing that confuses me is that one of the main characters owns a MacBook which as we know has no place being in an advertisement for video games.

Also during this, douche bags are talking to other douche bags on the phone trying to organize a Gears of War match and before the movie even gets off the ground, I’m completely disengaged. Unfortunately we’re going to be centered around the dudebro culture for the duration. Why in the hell do these people have to exist? This is the single most obnoxious and narrow-minded group that plays games and the movie had to pick it for the main theme. That being said, it could have been a lot worse. They did tone it down significantly. I still literally had to hear the words ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ on a constant basis though.

Everything seems to take place in some kind of alternate universe where the only video game machine is the Xbox 360. At first I thought this was stupid, like every commercial I see where they obviously cherry-picked the people in it to create a scenario with unrealistic racial diversity. But then I thought. Isn't this actually what it’s like to be a dudebro? Only the Xbox and three shooter franchises for it exist. Isn't this technically an accurate depiction of these dumbfucks? Then one of them went to the game store where only more Xbox 360 games and accessories were stocked. Nope, it’s just shameless selective product placement. Nothing more. Still can’t explain that Apple laptop though.

Strangely the vast majority of the movie is not about video games which is really a downer when you see what else has to fill the void. Out of the four main characters, the closeted gay guy is more or less the only likable one. The dialogue is mind-numbingly boring and thoughtless. The jokes fall flat. This is actually really bizarre because often times there is a decent setup for a joke and then they botch the execution of the punchline. I've never been comically confused so many times in one sitting. Something will happen and then I’ll be wondering why I’m not laughing at it. Why the hell am I not laughing? That looked like it was going to be funny. It had potential. It’s just weird. Come to think of it, the whole movie is just a collection of seemingly unrelated and unrealistic events that all peter out and remain inconsequential to the… ‘plot.’  

There is also this side story involving the mullet guy at the mini-mart in Ghost World. He’s a washed up but rich arcade gamer who decides to reclaim his legacy by entering the same event in LA. (The Frogger competition, not the team match GoW thing.) It plays out exactly like any mass produced sports movie schlock involving Ben Stiller and/or Will Ferrell.

Adam Sessler is actually in this movie. He turns in one of the only two funny segments with his interview of the Black Assassins leader.

At some point the team goes to a strip club because… the movie poster might be considered slightly misleading if they didn't. But it’s one of those clubs for high school students where they only strip down to the underwear and don’t serve you alcohol… What do you mean they don’t have those? I’m not sure if I would think more or less of this movie if they actually showed boobs.

Why is this movie even called Noobz? The main characters in it are clearly ‘leet’ since they’re not only in a video game competition but also ranked highly in said competition. Oh yeah… the competition.

So at the end of the movie they finally try to bring everything back to the initial premise of the competition by actually having it. They play through several four on four team match-ups including one against their arch nemesis, Team Black Assassins, who they've never beaten previously. Why do they beat them now? Plot convenience. They didn't get better. They didn't exploit a weakness in the other team. They just beat them because they did. Woo…

You know, I haven’t really played Gears of War very much and never once online multiplayer but I do know that in general while playing a team match in a shooter, it’s very beneficial for teammates to stick together. Watching the game footage of the matches, I don’t think anyone did that. I expected a lot more plotting and tactics to be involved in a competition.

They go to the final match-up. It’s them against Team Pixies which is an all girl team. I don’t want to come off as sexist but… whatever, sure. It’s a fucking Xbox world. Remember what I said about cherry-picking earlier. The last three teams we see in the competition are the black team, the white guy team and the white girl team. They're all just token appearances. Equal representation is bullshit! Make it look real! 

The three game match is tied at one and in the last game all players are killed except for one on each team, the two who are incidentally dating. The guy gets up behind her and then… waits. Then she turns around and kills him. I don’t know why. Either he had a retarded brain moment or he didn't want to beat his new girlfriend. In a competition with real prize money, you do not show mercy to your opponent. I don’t care if they’re there because of Make-a-Wish Foundation. And in a relationship scenario, one of you is going to take the ‘asshole initiative’ anyway so it might as well be you getting some money out of it. If your relationship can’t handle that, your relationship is shit. Good job, fuckface. You came so far and in the end decided that your teammates meant nothing to you. A shitty ending to a shitty movie.

Silent Hill Downpour

Silent Hill is one of my favorite video game franchises next to Castlevania and Bioshock. (I haven't played Infinite yet so maybe I'm going out on a limb there.) It's just in general the best put together horror games in plot and atmosphere and music and... horror. That being said, there was a clear high point which will likely never be outmatched. That was Silent Hill 2 and 3. After that, the original development team disbanded and the developers since then have struggled to emulate such quality.

Downpour has its own identity which is good because every protagonist is supposed to experience Silent Hill in their own way. It's not some place that looks like this and has XYZ in it. It's like a Rorschach test or an acid trip; what you see depends on who you are. This is why Pyramid Head should be in only one game. He's a manifestation of James Sutherland's mental baggage so it doesn't make sense for him to exist anywhere else but in his mind. When he appears in Homecoming, it ruins everything that Silent Hill is. It makes it a stagnant/concrete place where Pyramid Head lives instead of a fluid place that takes shape to become your worst nightmare.
 
You are Murphy Pendleton, An Inmate locked up in a nearby prison for an unclear reason. While being transported in a van, the driver becomes distracted and you crash. You survive but so do several other inmates and one of the correctional officers on board. When you wake up, you find yourself alone in the forest near Silent Hill. It makes sense that the inmates took off but the CO not being there the second you wake up to hold you down until backup gets there is probably just plot convenience.


As the cashier rung me up when I bought this game, he gushed over how much he liked Downpour. He played through it two or three times and got the platinum trophy. He said that the game was more geared around running because combat was terrible. "Don't ALL the Silent Hills have terrible combat?" I chuckled unknowingly. NO! NO, THEY DON'T! NOT ANYMORE! Downpour has set a new precedent. Any weapons you may find are usually just destructible random objects which are generally weak and awkward to use. Not only does attacking with them lessen their damage and lifespan but blocking with them does as well. Some weapons don't block at all. Enemies take A LOT of hits without a good weapon. If a weapon breaks, your fists do nothing. The camera is always against you. Lock-on seems to face you the wrong way about as much as it does the right way. Enemies are much quicker than you and very effectively block and evade your attacks. If you ever get into it with more than one, you'd better forget that shit quick.

If you get a gun, you'll find that aiming it is extremely difficult. It has auto aim but the reticule shakes around so much that you might as well be firing with your eyes shut. And I'm pretty sure that while an enemy is charging you, they're immune to bullets. There are two different types of guns, handgun and shotgun. Naturally you'd want to have one of each if you find them but it's not that simple. For the most part you can only carry one weapon. No more than one melee weapon and it has to be in your hand. If you have a handgun equipped and pick up an axe, you put the gun away and hold the axe. But if you equip the gun again from your inventory, you discard the axe on the ground because for whatever reason you can never have a melee weapon in your inventory. Now if you still have the handgun equipped and try to pick up a shotgun, you end up discarding the handgun on the ground to hold the shotgun. Now what the hell is with that? You had room for the gun in your inventory a second ago. Why not now? If you try to pick up the handgun again while holding the shotgun, the shotgun automatically goes on your back/in your inventory and you hold the handgun. ??? Then if you equip the shotgun again, you discard the handgun on the floor again. So technically you can have two guns on your person but you have to have the handgun equipped at all times because if you switch, you throw it on the floor. That's pretty stupid. Just make it so you can have two guns in the inventory! You can tuck a handgun into your waistband. Accessing weapons shouldn't be some kind of horribly nonsensical puzzle. I really don't think they remembered to figure out this aspect.    

So I'm trying to get to the town by going through the caves. When I got to the train ride, I couldn't figure out how to start it. It's a puzzle of colored buttons which are also labeled with letters A-F. You have to enter a sequence based on a poem you find. I quickly noticed the colors crimson, emerald and bronze within the poem so I entered the corresponding buttons. Nothing happened. I then noticed that the colors also begin with the letters C, E and B which could easily correspond to the button letters A-F. I tried and nothing happened. Well, I'm out of ideas because if neither of those work, the puzzle is just faulty somehow. I opened a walkthrough and found the solution: Crimson, Emerald, Shadow, Bronze... Shadow? SHADOW? Shadow is NOT a color! Shadow doesn't equal grey any more than window equals blue. This is like if they said here's the code to a door lock; it's 6,1, Sea Cucumbers, 5. This puzzle can kiss my ass.

The train finally takes you to Silent Hill proper. So get out and wander around like a hobo until you find something that grabs your interest. Walking around, you'll find many impromptu destructible weapons like shovels, bricks, fire extinguishers and whatever. There's just a whole lot of shit laying around everywhere that you can pick up. It's difficult to tell the difference between a weapon or a plot item or side quest and mystery items. Whenever you see something unusual, you just have to pick it up to see if Murphy carries it in his hands as a weapon or it goes straight in the inventory like everything that's not a weapon. It's really annoying that you need to scrutinize every single thing you see and it could have been easily fixed. When the words 'Pick Up' come up on screen, just make them color coded depending on the category of the item you're next to. Green for health item. Red for weapon. Blue for plot item, etc.

It takes quite a while before you actually have an encounter with a monster. In fact it seems like there are a lot of big lulls in the monster threat. In the beginning of the game I kind of liked this because it accentuates the game's ambiance while generating an excruciating tension that just keeps building the more that nothing keeps happening. Every time you expect something to happen and it doesn't, it heightens your vigilance and makes you paranoid and jumpy wondering when it WILL happen. Every Silent Hill game has a memorable scare or event. The one I remember best in Downpour, beside the Hansel and Gretel play, happened pretty early in the game, just before the mine I think. As I walked along the boardwalk I saw a pair of legs getting dragged and disappearing behind a small building. Oh, I thought to myself, it's that tired old horror trope where a character investigates something extremely obvious and then finds that there's no determinable cause of the phenomenon. Then a coin flip decides if the character gets ambushed or not from behind. I rounded the corner expecting to see nothing but instead saw a screamer standing there over a body and staring at me. That's not supposed to happen, it makes too much logical sense. In that moment, my brain stopped. It was a bait and switch reliant upon the player being a jaded hororphile. Then a second screamer burst through a door from behind and latched onto my back. I was so surprised and distracted by the initial switch that I was actually surprised again when they added the regularly scheduled cliche ambush on top of it. Maybe I'm giving the designers too much credit but it doesn't diminish the effect at all.

As you explore, you scribble red marks and make notations on the town map you carry. In every game, you scribble out the broken doors and places you can't go so that you don't have to keep checking them because you've forgotten. Murphy however, thinks he has everything memorized and only scribbles out the BARRICADES AND GIANT OBVIOUS GAPING HOLES in the road. Everything else like buildings, fences, gates and people's yards surrounding said roads are left for you to guess about over and over again. His notations are pretty vague sometimes.
 
There are police cars patrolling around which I thought was weird because why would there be police officers going around business as usual in Silent Hill... aside from Cybil Bennett in the first game and the ones in Homecoming and the police woman that's actually currently chasing you in Downpour and the other Cybil Bennetts from the movie and Shattered Memories reboot if you want to count those. Huh... I guess there's a lot. You know, that's kind of weird. The franchise now has a running theme of police women as main characters and none of them are off duty or lost/confused like everyone else seems to be. They're all just trying to do their jobs. Anyway, it's not actually weird for there to be patrolling cars in Silent Hill in this case because Murphy is actively running from the cops so it makes sense that he'd see cops there. So the next objective is to stop the patrols. You do this by going into the police station and using the dispatcher to recall each unit. The actual police station is completely unusable for anything. It's a dilapidated building with no roof, a pit for a floor and it's completely gutted except for this one device on a table that controls the cop cars. This is both completely ridiculous and ingenious. A man going into a destroyed police station to use a machine inside to escape police cars that can't possibly exist is like a textbook example of a severe paranoid schizophrenic.

Then there's the puzzle that you have to do to stop the cars. This is the first side quest that you come across in the game. On a blackboard in the station are three alphanumerical sequences, (one for each car) but each one is missing a character and maybe has a smudged character. You're just supposed to enter the sequence and do trial and error for the characters that aren't quite clear. Well what happens when you go through every character and none of them work? You open up the fucking walkthrough again. FUN. For the code that I couldn't do, I found that one of the given characters, one that you're supposed to be able to read clearly is actually something else. The 8 was supposed to be a B. I looked closely at the "B" on the blackboard thinking it was just a stupid mistake I made when reading it but no. It doesn't look like anything but an 8. That's not fair. Two puzzles in a row were ruined for me because they gave me false information. It's like they're intentionally misleading me.

All around town there are other side quests you can do (if you can gather up enough evidence to figure out what the hell you're doing.) Some of them are really interesting, on par with a good Twilight Zone episode... okay, maybe more Tales from the Crypt than TZ. But none of them ever seem to have a satisfying resolution or reward at the end. It's always, I did all that for a couple of med kits? I used a couple of med kits to finish the quest. I went all over town collecting paintings to create a map to open a crypt. Why would I care about a crypt? What's the point? Oh, when I open one of the sarcophagi I get a tomahawk from it. Yay? It just doesn't make any sense. Why would I invest so much time and go so far out of my way to accomplish something completely inconsequential? It's not like I don't have other shit to do. I'm trying to escape Silent Hill and spend the least amount of time here as possible. If I'm doing a side quest, I expect to be compensated with something that will aide me significantly on my main quest. In Silent Hill 2 there was that safe that, if you could get it open, had like 40 bullets in it and there was that game show puzzle box in the hospital that held a huge cache of medical stuff. In Downpour you will spend five times more time and never get anything even close to those. Like I said, some of them reward you with entertainment value but really other than that, they're pointless, tantamount to stopping to solve a Rubik's cube you found in the gutter on your way to work. 

One of the quests is actually glitched. The objective is to find this homeless guy stuff that he asks you to get like food and a jacket. In exchange, he gives you maps of the subway stations that basically allow you to warp between places, saving you walking time. This would be great if the quest itself didn't offset the benefit with all the time it wastes and if the subway was really quick and simple to navigate and didn't also waste your time with how confusing it is. I got him the first two things. The third thing he wanted was a fishing rod. After thoroughly searching all of the places it was supposed to be and finding nothing, I did some internet research and found that if you pick up the rod before taking the quest, it disappears and you can't complete it. I didn't even remember picking it up that was so long ago. Not only that but I found later that all the subways were closed off again when I loaded the game after completing the first two requests. So all of that got me absolutely nothing. Thanks, idiots.  

There are about four areas in all which can be called levels. That doesn't sound like much but they're HUGE areas. In traditional Silent Hill gameplay, you play a level, the level turns to alternate Silent Hill then you play it some more and probably fight a boss then it turns back to normal. In downpour the alternate Silent Hill levels look pretty unique like some kind of nightmare prison designed by M. C. Escher. There are not really any bosses but instead extended running segments just like in Shattered Memories. You're running from a... uh... quantum singularity? And also like Shattered Memories there is the very real possibility of getting lost and running around in an endless loop. The last running segment in the game is by far the worst. You have to run through guillotines while the black hole is chasing you. You can't just run full speed ahead because you'll run into the blades and it hurts bad. So you end up standing there, waiting for the blade to drop and go back up while letting the singularity catch up and tear you a new asshole. And when it does, it makes everything slow-mo, throwing off your sense of timing. Also extricating yourself from it is annoyingly slow.

You know what's really the most annoying thing in this game? Accidental interaction with the environment, like climbing down a ladder or ducking underneath something or worse, balancing across a beam and then getting right back on, having to balance back to where you were and then back again. Just put a damn button prompt for all interactions. I realize that having a prompt interrupts the game a little but so does accidentally climbing up and down a ladder three times in a row. And in real life you don't just accidentally climb a random ladder that you happen to be in close proximity to. You have to make a conscious decision to do it. So have me press a button.

The camera is extremely buggy, often shooting up into the sky for no reason. The game lags a lot and the textures are always popping in and out. I'm no graphics expert but can't you just make the load screen a little longer if... you know... the game's not fucking done loading yet?

Downpour is sorely lacking in monster variety but I will say this, most of them are pretty freaky, especially the weeping bat. I think that stems from the fact that they're all humanoid in form but have exaggerated and twisted features about them. Their faces are messed up and they move weird. They play up the uncanny valley aspect nicely. I thought all the prisoner monsters were a lazy addition though and the design of the bogeyman sucked. It just reeks of Resident Evil. He looks exactly like Vector from Operation: Raccoon City.  

There are a couple of Easter egg references to past Silent Hill titles in Downpour. The jukebox and radio play the original Silent Hill theme but the biggest one is the fact that you can climb up a fire escape and enter... Henry Townsend's apartment from the 4th game. Doesn't make any sense since Henry lives in Ashfield, not Silent Hill. And no, you did not go through a portal, you clearly come in through the window. Now most might say, well it's just a pointless reference; don't read too much into it. But in a game where you play as an escaped prisoner, you crossed over into another game where the protagonist is trapped in his own home, also a prisoner. Then there's the fact that the antagonist of that game is also a murderer like Murphy. In both games there are prisons, orphanages and subways. There are definitely some big overlapping themes between Downpour and The Room... Wait, do Henry and Murphy look similar? 

(Obviously someone thinks so because I didn't make this comparison image.) Hell, they could be brothers. Fan theory time! It's funny because before I played Downpour, Henry was the video game character that looked the most like me. Now that I've seen Murphy he's pretty much a dead ringer clone of me in physical appearance. Even my wife looking over my shoulder as I played asked how I got into a video game. 

 
This is the best Silent Hill since The Room. I know for many fans that isn't saying much but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Thoughts after E3: WiiU

WiiU

Once upon a time I loved Nintendo games. When I think 'beloved nostalgic video game' the first games to come to mind are Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Pokemon Red and Link's Awakening. Those were the days. But then the next generation came along and suddenly there were three choices now: Xbox, Gamecube and PS2. I didn't really know where to go from there. I looked at the Nintendo Gamecube because Nintendo was all I'd ever known and it had been great so far. The console looked stupid, the controller looked stupid and there weren't any games that interested me. It's hard for me to know if at that point I grew out of Nintendo or Nintendo grew out of me. The continuation of my favorite games/franchises just didn't look appealing to me at all. Toon Link in Wind Waker looks like shit. Mario Sunshine is about washing things. For some reason, the fanboy parasite that had been implanted in my brain never flourished. I couldn't just buy a game simply because it had Mario or Link in it. Both of those games are fun... probably. But they look stupid/ugly so I don't want to play them. And that has been all I've thought about Nintendo since. The console looks stupid, the controller looks stupid and there aren't any games that interest me is exactly what I thought about the Gamecube, exactly what I thought about the Wii and exactly what I think about the WiiU.
 
Nintendo didn't do a big flashy press conference at E3 this year because they're idiots. They have a bad system launch with a weak line-up of games followed by mass confusion. Then a chance to set everyone straight arises with E3 and what do they do? Avoid the big stage. Yes, that will surely work things out. Good thinking, Nintendo. But I guess they didn't really have anything to show. They did some smaller Nintendo Direct thingies where they unveiled... a slough of underwhelming and predictable games everyone had already seen.
 
OH MY GOD! The WiiU is going to have Mario and Zelda on it? STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES! I guess I should just be impressed that it's going to get ANY games at all... even though it's not any time soon. You know what got people really excited? Megaman being confirmed in the new Super Smash Brothers about ten years too late. What's the matter? Did you finally run out of Mario characters so you have to resort to putting something of substance in now? This really shows how overrated and blown out of proportion SSB has become because people literally hang on Nintendo's every word when they're making a roster. Every time another character is confirmed, it generates as much if not more hype than if they announced a new game starring that character. It's just one big circle jerk and it's so pathetic that people shit themselves over this. I need to get a WiiU because Megaman is going to be on the roster of a game coming out in a year. Does that make any sense to you? Well it does if you're a retarded fanboy. 

Why does Megaman look like a dwarf toddler? Isn't Megaman a... man? His N64 model looked better than this... And they still don't have Simon Belmont. It's like there was some kind of renaissance where they went through all their characters, (Megaman is Capcom but whatever,) and made them all look like shit for every game then on. They've zeroed in on the uncanny valley. I seriously just hate their style now because they can't seem to make anything that doesn't look stupid, ugly, infantile, or possesses even a shred of dignity except for maybe Metroid... which they didn't show.

Back when I enjoyed playing Nintendo games THEY DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THIS! You can not tell me that this shit is meant for anyone mentally past the age of five. And if you are not absolutely sick of Mario by now, you are either too young to have gotten bored yet or you have a mental disorder.

Things that weren't Mario and Zelda included Bayonetta 2. A WiiU exclusive sequel that shouldn't exist to a game that was fucking stupid. The combat was top notch but everything else about it was fucking stupid. I know because I own it. The game sold bad and didn't make enough profit to spawn a sequel. Everything was exactly how it should be but then Nintendo decided for whatever reason, (probably because it's stupid and Bayonetta is repulsive,) that it was worth picking up.
 
You know what would have been interesting? Something actually new and refreshing made by Nintendo or just something unexpected. Nintendo unfortunately owns the rights to Fatal Frame now. They could theoretically make a Fatal Frame game where you use the stupid tablet controller as the viewfinder of the camera. Wouldn't that be something? No, it wouldn't because it's not Mario or Zelda.
 
I think I've finally figured out what Nintendo is doing and it kind of disturbs me. They're crippling themselves and it's on purpose. They're narrowing their scope to a critically small range to pinpoint a niche market of players... their own fans. Nintendo superfans. Yes, they're targeting people that are already brainwashed and loyal to their company. They cut out the rest of the potential market by not doing a press conference and they're pigeonholing their games by bailing out all of the third party developers and not focusing on any big new IPs. At this rate, the WiiU is just going to be a one trick pony Mario and Zelda box for their mindless fans that lack the capacity to care about anything else. If Sony's PS4 only had Infamous, God of War, Resistance, Little Big Planet, Uncharted and WipEout games, that would get pretty fucking stale and boring but it looks as thought that's what Nintendo is shooting for. 

Assuming Xbox One stays delusional, this generation is only going to be one and a half consoles: The WiiU with only Nintendo Games and the PS4 with literally EVERYTHING else. Their presence at E3 consisted entirely of remakes, sequels and rehashes. Nintendo is the new Apple, once great but now stagnant and bricking itself into a corner with its cult of slaves.

Thoughts after E3: Playstation 4

Playstation 4

Sony had a gigantic leg up in E3 in that they went after Microsoft's Chernobyl of a presentation and really that was all that they needed. They came out and said "We won't be doing any of that bullshit that Microsoft is doing" and everyone's like "I'll take ten PS4s, please." Other than that, the PS4 looks... okay... except that they'll be charging for online now. I think just for multiplayer. I'm not a big multiplayer guy so whatever. It's still stupid though. Why does it cost to play multiplayer on a console but it's free on a PC? Are console's just assholes? Probably.
 
For the longest time, Sony didn't say anything about the actual PS4 console, just the controller which I don't give a shit about. It's a controller. That's like if a car company was unveiling a new car and all they talked about was the fucking steering wheel. If this wasn't the video game apocalypse, the PS4 would probably be considered decent/okay but since the standards have been drastically lowered, people went ape shit fanatical over features that we've had forever. We just took them for granted until they were finally jeopardized by Microsoft. These are just simple things that Sony wouldn't have even mentioned if Microsoft hadn't made them a huge deal. But they DID make them a huge deal and suddenly those simple things became a pivotal selling point. Sony did say that the emphasis would be on games which people liked. Well no shit, it's a game console. But it's not like they brought out a game or added some kind of groundbreaking innovation that got everyone excited. They just weren't insufferable scumbags.
 
Microsoft: Our new system stabs you in the face when you pick up the controller.
 
Sony: Our new system DOESN'T stab you in the face when you pick up the controller.
 
Audience: *deafening cheers*
 
We're seriously all on board with Sony just for doing the same old and not raping us but also because they told Microsoft to go fuck themselves. And I have to say, good for them. I really missed the Sega/Nintendo slur campaigns of the 90's. No one really wants to rock the boat anymore but when your opponent digs a hole that deep and you know everyone hates them, how can you resist? Sony at E3 was exactly like the scene at the end of Oh Brother Where Art Thou where the governor campaign subplot is resolved. The new candidate goes on stage interrupting everyone's fun, says he's a member of a KKK lynch mob and proclaims that fun is now over. After he gets booed and yanked off stage, the incumbent takes the mic and says, "Wow, that guy's a real dick. Bring the fun back out. Fun for all!" After that, it's just in the bag. So there you go, the prize for least shitty-looking new console goes to the PS4... because they weren't insufferable scumbags.

Thoughts after E3: Xbox One

I've wanted to say something about all the next gen consoles just like I did for the last generation of consoles but I wanted to wait for E3 before I did it. After seeing Microsoft and Nintendo's hands, the coming E3 was something that I beheld with horror, a great juggernaut on the horizon. The destroyer of worlds. This is it, I thought. This is the end of video games. At least I have a giant backlog of games from a less shitty time, a simple time where consoles actually played games and didn't try to sell you Doritos. A time where you could own a game like you could own a movie or a car or a hammer. Oh, what we once had...

 

Xbox One

Does this really require any discussion at all? It's a cable box with the design language of the 1970's, only lacking the faux wood paneling. It costs the most out of the three consoles by $100. It's Kinect mandatory. It doesn't support used games. It has a DRM policy that requires it to have not only an internet connection but a paid subscription to Xbox LIVE or it locks you out. It watches you masturbate, reports you to HUAAC as a terrorist, rapes your dog and sets fire to your house. Yes, that's correct, It was designed by blind aliens that live in a cave. You would have to be completely fucking delusional to think people would want this.
 
Even after seeing what happened with Sim City's always online DRM disaster, Microsoft still thought it could pull off an entire console that does this. Perhaps it was too late to alter course at that point but it doesn't matter because you shouldn't have to learn this from example. Do some critical thinking and USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN. What is the point of requiring online checks? It's to make piracy more difficult. So who does it benefit? Ultimately no one. It can only be at best for the consumer not a hindrance and at worst, it makes the system unplayable. For the company that makes the system it makes less people want to buy from them. It's a feature that only has negative effects that outweigh whatever 'good' it was intended to do. There's a Confucius quote for this; "Never use a cannon to kill a fly." You can't stop piracy. In trying to kill the unkillable fly, you just destroy everything around it. If you have to stop piracy so bad, then don't make games, because that is the only way. No one will be playing them anyway.
 
The no used games thing is really all they need to say to get me to not care about the new Xbox. Probably around 80% of my games are used because new games have an overblown price tag and I don't believe in digital copies. They're trying to strip away every basic freedom that players have enjoyed since day one of the first home console. Imagine if in the next election, one of the candidates said "If I become president, I will abolish the constitution. There will be no freedom of speech, no right to a trial or any of those other things that the government and law enforcement find annoying or difficult to deal with." Would you vote for them?
 
No, you know what? These aren't basic rights of people that play video games, they're basic rights of consumers in general. Right now you can go into your public library and borrow any number of intellectual properties in every medium including movies, books and music and enjoy them for free. But woe betide anyone trying to pull that shit with a video game, our most time honored and sacred of art forms. A new video game costs 2-3 times more than a new movie which has a comparable budget. Game publishers like EA essentially don't want you to be able to own their products, making greedy corporations like the MPAA and RIAA look like Santa Claus by comparison. Like I said in the beginning, a game should be just as easy to buy, use, loan and sell as a hammer. It's not magical. It's not the Second Coming of Christ. It's just a fucking product like every other product in the world. This holier than thou bullshit that video games have needs to stop but it won't. Why? It's all because we, (and by 'we' I really mean all you dumbasses out there,) allow it to continue by preordering and buying their shit at day one for $60. Then you buy all the day one DLC for it. Four hours later you're trading it in for $2 toward the next over-priced and over-hyped piece of shit.
 
But even you dumbasses have a limit, a limit which was finally found by Microsoft. So congratulations to you. When Microsoft peddled the Xbox One at their reveal and at E3, you didn't stand up and cheer "Yes, Microsoft! Yes! Please sodomize me with your endless and extremely convoluted list of totalitarian rules detailing what I can and can't do with MY games that I purchased. I can't wait to have a device in my home straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel that watches and or listens to everything I say! And I love the added feature of needing to be connected to the internet for no good reason! It's so very useful and not at all a potential stumbling block!" Yes, good job, dumbasses. There may be hope for you yet.

Corpse Party

Corpse Party... What a great name. What the hell kind of game could it possibly be? Obviously from Japan. A Mario Party-like game with zombies? Or like one of those Imagine or Idol M@ster games where you dress up your zombie and teach them to sing by performing rhythm games? I could spend hours trying to guess but that would be moronic because I already know what it is. It's a horror game on the PSP that was localized from Japan recent-ish and only available on the Playstation Network for English speaking players. It's kind of a visual novel and it's kind of not. Most of the dialogue and action scenes are in visual novel form but you also control your character, walking around in real time as a sprite in a top-down view, making it look like a Final Fantasy title on the Super Nintendo. The game dialogue is still spoken in Japanese but the text is translated so it's just like watching something with subtitles.

Skelly tan is ready for her rehearsal!

It all starts with a group of highschool friends preforming a charm ritual which is common slice of life anime bullshit. They somehow botch the ritual and the lot of them gets spirited away to the legendary haunted elementary school which used to stand on the very spot of their own highschool. (Because I haven't had enough of walking around in haunted Japanese schools yet.) Heavenly Host Elementary just happens to be a nexus of overlapping dimensions which the students got scattered throughout. They're essentially in the same place but can't really interact with each other unless they're in the same space. So the goal is to somehow figure out why you're there, regroup with your friends and escape back to reality.

There are five chapters which you unlock as you go and it jumps around to different groups of students. I am really bad with names and faces in life and about twice as bad with names in a foreign language. Even now having played through the whole game about 1.5 times I can't recall with certainty a single character's name.


In the first half of the game you're stuck in pretty much the same area of the school which gets really monotonous. They really needed to dole out the new areas a little more evenly because they're pretty much all crammed into the second half of the game. They didn't even utilize the East wing to it's full potential. Like what the hell was up with the piano and the migrating marble bust?


So you explore looking for people and keys, solving simple puzzles and collecting... student IDs off of dead students you come across? The bodies are from several different schools from junior high and up. At first I thought this aspect was kind of weird like something only a serial killer would do but then I thought about it and realized that these are all missing persons with families. It's not like a serial killer's trophy, it's like grabbing someone's dog tags. Assuming you make it out alive, you have a list of all these missing people who you can confirm as dead. Then I thought about it some more and realized that that would be pointless because if you die in the school, all memory of you is erased from reality. So, no, I was right. It's like a serial killer trophy. What's even weirder is that on the game's title screen there's a catalog of all the IDs you've found with a picture of the body and a cause of death. Reminds me of Tyler Durden's "human sacrifice" wall except less... yeah...


You meet spirits, some of which want to kill you and you have to do something to appease them or just run from them to escape. Occasionally you'll have to make a decision that may affect the ending you get. It's pretty immediate and upfront about letting you know that you made the wrong choice by having someone die. Then it gives you the "wrong ending" game over screen. I don't know about other people but I TRY to get these because there are several different ones and they're interesting. But I think it's stupid that if you make a choice that gets someone killed, it results in a game over when the canon plot itself involves people in your party dying. So only specific people are aloud to die and at the prescribed time. What the hell is the difference? Why is it that when one person dies we have to start over but when another dies we just move on and try to forget? I should be able to finish the game with one person missing an eye and half their arm. That would be awesome. I think the only game I've ever played where you could get playable characters killed and then just keep playing on without them was Fire Emblem.

On the game's status screen you see character avatars in your current party appearing exactly like your typical JRPG and it shows "HP 30/30." This really confused me when I first saw it because it implies that your characters can sustain damage. It makes it look like you can fight enemies in the game. Well, you can't. As it turns out, during the entire game there are only two instances I've found where you can get injured versus get killed instantly, (which is the norm.) One is where there is hazardous stuff on the floor that hurts you if you walk on it. The other is your first encounter with a hostile ghost. So there you go, characters have hit points because... not really any reason. 

Way too often it seems that the game cheats you out of rendered images that you should be seeing when something is happening in the game. The screen turns black except for the dialogue box and it's suddenly reduced to a text game or a choose your own adventure book where you're literally just reading a description of what is going on. There is a time and place for books. If you're watching a subtitled kung-fu movie it is not okay for the screen to just go black during a fight scene and leave you reading a description with nothing else to see. It is a disservice to the medium. It's called a "visual novel" because it's fucking VISUAL. Every time this happens all I can think about afterwards is wow, that scene would have been a lot better with some actual illustrations or even just the sprites or even just ANYTHING but a blank screen!


As you progress, you notice that dialogue and exposition seem to be slowly nudging gameplay out of the door. Then you get to chapter five and find that it's a car door and gameplay has been officially shoved into the road and backed over a couple of times to make certain it's dead. You can't take two steps anymore without a fifty line conversation. Shut up. Shut up. Oh my God, SHUT UP! This is the problem with making it a hybrid puzzle/visual novel game. You see the puzzle part and naturally that's what you want to do because it's more engaging but they keep slapping your hands away and hiding it behind their back. No, no! Finish your incredibly thick and tedious dialogue first and maybe we'll let you lick the gameplay spatula later. Nearly the first hour of chapter five is talking with no significant break in between whatsoever.  



Playing with no walkthrough, I got the Groundhog Day ending which is obviously bad so I needed to change something to get the true ending of the game because I require validation for my efforts. But for the first time I didn't know what I did wrong because it wasn't made immediately evident like the other times. Well in short... everything. I needed to start over from the beginning of the chapter because my three separate saves didn't stretch back far enough to salvage it. Fantastic. On top of that, I need to experience about another hour of exposition. Find all the notes, talk to crazy dead bitch 1, get the statue to open the infirmary, listen to crazy dead bitch 2, meet crazy dead bitch 3, chant this many times, give her this and this but not these, go backwards through the maze, escape the building before time runs out. Holy shit. It's easier to swim to the moon than it is to get out of Heavenly Host. This place just has to be filled with the most pedantic and anal retentive ghosts ever. And ultimately when you think about it the whole reason anyone comes here is because they do the ritual wrong which in this case constituted repeating the chant the wrong number of times. That's it. That was enough to piss off the ghosts. Escaping is like going into the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle. If you blink funny, then you're fucking dead. 


During the last dialogue of the game in where we remember our dead peers who all died horribly and who's existence was completely erased from reality except in the memories of the survivors, one of those generic tie-in J-pop singles begins to play. You know, the ones they tend to play in romantic slice of life anime where the MC and the love interest have a moment and the writers scramble to finish the relationship development that they forgot to do over the next three minutes before stopping just short of any sort of resolution? One of those. Except they also seem to play them any time they can get away with too, including this time. Sappy upbeat J-pop! Good for graduations, weddings, fight scenes, and funerals! 

If I had made this game the end credits would have a blooper reel like in the first Silent Hill game and it would be set to Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party because it's just so obvious.

♫ I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go~

Do do do do do do do do do do do dooooo ♫

Calling

The strangely named 'Calling' is a first-person horror adventure game. While Silent Hill is a Japanese take on western/American horror, Calling is just straight up J-horror, drawing material from movies like The Grudge and One Missed Call. It has that one prominent but bizarre element of J-horror where technology is some kind of medium between the living world and the dead. That video you're not supposed to watch, that website you're not supposed to go on or that phone you're not supposed to answer because bad shit will go down if you do.

In Calling it's a website forum with the people on it connected in some way. They've all been spirited away to some Limbo region called the "mnemonic abyss." There are many locations in the abyss but the only way you can get around from one to another is teleporting with a cell phone that has absolutely no effect or animation aside from fading to black. The phone doesn't go with you so at each location, you need to ultimately find a phone and a cell number that corresponds with a location. 

The game is only on the Wii and it only supports the Wii remote... Goody. Going into Calling, it's hard to not know how bad the game is and here they are starting it with one foot in the grave by not allowing you to use an actual controller. You basically control the flashlight with your movement. If you're lucky, your view pans the direction the Wii remote cursor is aimed when at the edge of the screen. If you're not lucky, you're stuck looking at the ceiling or ramming straight ahead into a wall until you can quick-turn or waggle spasticly out of it like you're trying to fix a stuck roller-ball mouse.

Dead Space is a the golden standard of jump scare abuse. It delivers probably 95% of its "scary" this way. Hence why the games fail to be scary. I thought this was the lowest form of fear delivery in movies/games. But it turns out that it's not. Calling has lowered the limbo bar. On occasion, particularly when you unpause the game, something will flash or shoot across the screen like a scary face or... some kind up tumbleweed hairball, (I can't figure out what the hell it is!) Dead Space has one thing going for its jump scares and that is that Necromorphs jumping out at you actually pose a threat. This however is just random visual shit flying around in front of you which is tantamount to someone just out of sight dangling a grocery bag ghost in front of you with a fishing pole and going WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~! It's grade school haunted house quality and there is no context or reason for it to be happening. This is as cheap as it gets.

There are actually a few subtle ghosts in the game that you might not even notice if you're not looking for them. The head sticking out of the water in the bathtub was a good one. In the hospital, you can see pacing ghost feet underneath a curtain in one of the rooms. You're character will only say something about how a bed is stored in there when you try to interact. That really bothers me. You'll comment on the stupid broken vending machine or the state of a potted plant but not the ghost feet?

You play as four different characters who have different stories intertwining. I like how you can't crouch, run or quick-turn as the old woman. Actually I don't because those are the only tools I have to make gameplay almost tolerable. Other than that, it's just walk and waggle to shake off ghosts. There's a fear meter that changes color. You die when it gets to solid red which never happened to me. I only died in instant death scenarios.

The voice acting is terrible which is awesome. I'm serious when I say that. I love bad voice acting and I don't know why. The characters say all of their lines awkwardly slow and deliberate like they're reading them for the first time and they're scribbled in terrible handwriting. The great thing about Calling is that you'll get calls on your phone and you'll answer them by putting the Wii remote to your ear. Then you hear a spooky voice that sounds like your dad hamming it up at the punchline of his ghost story with a flashlight glowing under his chin. THE KILLER WAS IN THE BACK SEAT/UPSTAIRS/ME! Entertains me to no end. If you've ever played the first Echo Night game, it's very similar in voice acting quality... and graphics for that matter. Actually both of those games are similar in a lot of respects. In fact, right now you're probably a little confused about that screen cap, wondering if it's actually from Calling. The biggest difference between the two is that I thought Echo Night was awesome. 


There's a part when you first enter the school on the 4th floor where you get a creepy call from someone that says you have their phone and they're coming to get it. They call you back momentarily to say they're on the 1st floor. Then they call to say they're on the 2nd floor and then the third floor. Oh shit! They're coming! What do I do? When the call came again, presumably to say "Look behind you," I wasn't fast enough and the call went away. Then nothing happened. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to see where they were going with this but the weird thing was that by the way this sequence played out, it inadvertently gave the illusion that I actually stopped them from reaching me by failing to answer their call. It got me thinking, what if answering the phone actually WAS bad and it caused bad things to happen sometimes? You don't want to pick it up but at the same time you are compelled to pick it up to hear what happens next or maybe it's even mandatory for some puzzles. But you don't know if the call you're answering is a key to a puzzle or a prediction about the death of your friend.

Speaking of puzzles, there are hardly any. I played for about two hours before I saw anything that qualified as a puzzle. It's just a whole lot of wandering around, occasionally fending off ghosts, with rarely any clear objective or direction, almost waiting for shit to happen. You'll trigger events, (mostly jump scares,) and you'll often have to follow a ghost or a cat to the next whatever.

In some places you're flashlight goes out because the batteries died and you have to find some batteries or matches and light a candle so that you can see. Except you can still see fine, it's just a little darker. You can go about business as usual until you try to interact with things and then your character goes DUHHHHHHH, IT TOO DARK! EYES NO WORK! Well I can see fine, I don't know what YOU'RE problem is. Ignoring how stupid that is, there's also the fact that you should just be able to use your damn cell phone screen for light which would make the whole candle search pointless.

The no clear direction thing is particularly bad when you're in huge places like the hospital and school. You have four floors and keep looking in rooms, each one of them identical to the last one with identical furniture that's filled/covered with identical items arranged identically. They seriously modeled one of about a dozen different things and then copied each one 200 times and scattered them around. On top of that, everything looks grey and washed out. You have to look at the map every 15 seconds or you get confused. It's like the scrolling infinite background in a Hanna Barbera cartoon. There are many extraneous rooms with no purpose and almost every object that has a door is searchable and contains 1-8 separate compartments you can manually open and inspect and there's never anything to find in ANY OF THEM. I keep opening those stupid utility lockers only to find the exact same bucket, broom, dust pan and three rags posed in the exact same arrangement every single time.

Players need boundaries! Why the hell would they design it this way? It's like some kind of cruel joke, like a Where's Waldo book with no Waldo in it. This game would turn you loose in a 100 room mansion and tell you to go apeshit when only two of the rooms are actually pertinent to the progression of the game.

Almost all of the time, the only thing that you'll ever find inside anything is something scrawled in white kanji. I don't know about other English speaking people playing a game that's in English but I can't read kanji so it might as well be scribbles. Why couldn't they just translate it or even take it out? It makes me wonder if in the Japanese release of Dead Space they left "CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS" in English. Wouldn't that be a bitch? I bet they did.

Looking at a walkthrough on the internet, I found that a lot of the kanji is actually passwords. You see as you play, you can actually find keys pried out of a phone laying around with more unidentifiable characters on them. If you collect enough of them you can put them back in the phone and use them to enter some of these sequences in to unlock bonus stuff. That's nice... Except that I still can't fucking read Japanese. Did they just forget about this aspect of the game when they released it in North America?

Imagine for a second that there is no internet and no walkthroughs and you're an average American punishing yourself with Calling and wanting to unlock gallery stuff. Because the codes you have to enter have eight characters, the chances that you are missing one of those characters is very high. So to be able to enter any codes at all you need to find about 80% of the phone keys or you might as well have none of the phone keys. The keys themselves are super tiny and can be anywhere. Some of them even only show up in the dark. (I didn't even know you could turn off your light until around the end of the game.) Then you need the codes. The codes are also hidden all around too. And they're written in Japanese and they're not just numbers. They're actually all characters for zodiac animals. If you see one of these collections of squiggles and scratches which are often pixelated, you'll have to write it down and hope that what you wrote resembles what's on the keys because you have no idea what you're writing. Now what are the odds that all of these variables will line up correctly? You're not unlocking jack shit.  

For a game set in the mnemonic abyss with ghosts and teleportation phones, it mirrors the mundane of reality a little too closely. Think about if you went to a school at night when it's closed and no one's there. It would be dark and you'd need a flashlight. There wouldn't be any puzzles to solve. You could go in all the rooms and look in all the closets and all around you you'd find everyday items that are in no way interesting. That's basically what this is except sometimes there's a ghost. You're ultimately just wandering around in the dark in an excruciatingly ordinary and boring place with no secrets.

At the end of the school level, you get trapped in a room with three ghosts that are attacking you. You're supposed to look at this scribbled phone number on a desk and then call it on your phone to teleport away to the next area. They attack about every four seconds. In that amount of time you have to open up your phone, punch in the 10 digit number and hit send. (I hate calling phone numbers in this game as it is WITHOUT distraction because of how awkward and tedious it is.) If you don't accomplish this before they grab you, you have to fend them off and start over, because as we all know, mobile phones don't have the capability to not erase the number that you're putting in if you momentarily pause to think about it. That's like some kind of crazy sci-fi technology that we just haven't figured out yet like time travel or functioning home computer printers. And don't forget that you have to read and memorize the number before you can even attempt to do that. Just trying to LOOK at the number on the table can be impossible if the cursor gets stuck as it has a tendency to do. I tried to dial this number 15-20 times and I could not fucking do it. My thumb was not fast enough. It wasn't until I used both hands on the controller that I could finally do it. And here we see another fundamental flaw with the Wii remote.

At the end of the game, you get a bad ending and then you get the feeling that it was really short and yet took an eternity at the same time. When the title screen comes up after the credits, there's a new game+ option. Now what could this possibly mean in a game where you have no weapons, items or abilities. Well it means that you now have access to the bonus chapters and can experience the "full story." WELL HALE-FUCKING-LUJA! I just knuckled down and grinded my way through the most boring video game I've ever played in my life, (and I've played Borderlands,)  and now you're telling me that I didn't actually complete it? That was the fake game. You took a shitty game and removed significant parts from it and then made me play the fake game first with the bad ending instead of just putting the most complete game up front. This is like making someone eat 20 ice cream cones before you give them the actual ice cream. No one's going to stick around long enough to get the ice cream. If you had just given them the ice cream from square one, perhaps it's still mediocre ice cream, but they still had the best experience that it was possible to have and they hate you less. What kind of dumbass is going to go back for more after all that?

So after starting a new game plus and playing the first new chapter, I realized that this is actually significantly better than the regular game. You play as the one character that you saw before but never played as, Makoto. All of the areas you go to are interesting and small versus gigantic and empty/bland as hell. You also have a note book for phone numbers which you can pull out and read while dialing a number.  See, this is what I'm talking about. The game designers had a solution for a shitty problem and they purposefully left it out of the first playthrough because they're assholes. It's completely idiotic.

The story makes more sense and all around flows better. For the first time it actually feels like a game. You should have just played as this guy the whole time. But in general it's soul-crushing, mind-numbing and will suck the life out of you with its blandness. If video games were food, this one would be a STALE rice cake.