Princess Jellyfish

This is an anime about um… well… I’m not quite sure. It centers around this small boarding house in Japan that has for whatever reason attracted an ensemble of severely mentally ill/socially awkward women. They consider themselves a sisterhood and pretty much an island from normal society. All of them are in general, ugly, insane, worthless drains on society. (I believe one of them has a job.)

The main character is a teenage girl named Tsukimi who moved in recently. Being the main character means that she has to be grounded closer to the normal end of the spectrum than the others so that normal people watching the show can at least be in the general vicinity of common ground. (Like how in chick flicks, when the protagonist is supposed to be a nerd/dork or social outcast and they basically take a super hot actress, put glasses on her and make her run into poles occasionally and call it accurate.) She’s not actually ugly, her agoraphobia isn’t as severe and the only creepy quirk she has is her bizarre hardon for jellyfish. She’s completely obsessed with them. I guess she associates them with her dead mother who used to take her to the aquarium.

One night she meets a girl and brings her back to the apartment. (No, not like that, you pervert.) Turns out the girl is actually a dude in drag. Tsukimi freaks out because men aren’t allowed in the building. She tries to send him on his way but he keeps showing up at the doorstep from then on, always dressed in full drag, very fashionably and with makeup on. I guess the joke is that this guy is more attractive, fashionable and feminine than the rest of the female cast, not that the bar was set all that high. I mean, seriously, they look like a re-imagining of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids if they were female and Japanese.

I think what pisses me off most about the characters is that I can’t see their eyes. Occasionally in anime you’ll have maybe one megadork character with stupid spiral lens glasses that they never take off but this is three main characters whose eyes you never see. Oh and speaking of glasses, the one with glasses who looks like the teacher from SZS has about five lines in the whole show.

Mayaya always dresses in a track suit and gestures like Bruce Lee in a fighting stance. They actually make a reference to this in the slough of movie references in the intro. When I say she gestures like that, I mean she does it all the fucking time. It is literally her resting pose. She can’t just stand like a normal person. This is one of those things that people might be able to accept in anime but when you start trying to apply it to reality, you suddenly realize just how stupid it is. Have you ever run to school with toast in your mouth or held a popsicle in your mouth with no hands. Try it That shit get’s messy really fast, it starts to hurt from the cold and you look like a moron. Have you ever smiled at someone happily with your eyes closed? Try it. You’ll be booked as a sex offender by the end of the day. Now can you imagine going through your day-to-day routine in a constant Jeet Kune Do stance?

This would have been the part where I photoshopped several images of Bruce Lee in the same pose, going through his daily routine but I’m too lazy.

Anyway, the actual plot goes something like this. Kuronoske’s family is actually extremely wealthy. His dad and half brother are both stodgy local government officials. Needless to say, his crossdressing isn’t really appreciated all that well at home. That being said it actually surprised me that he got very little flak for his deviant behavior, especially being in a family of politicians. On top of that, he’s actually an illegitimate child. I don’t know what the media is like in Japan but in the US that shit would be flying all over the tabloids if word got out, possibly having a negative effect on your career so you’d want to keep a pretty short leash on Kuranosuke. But the worst he ever gets is groans and eyerolls. In a realistic scenario he probably would have been kicked to the curb the day he was born but again maybe it’s different in Japan with a collectivist society.

His brother Shu is sort of their father’s protege, straitlaced and boring as a contrast to Kuranosuke. One day at their immaculate mansion, he sees Tsukimi leaving and becomes interested in her. Kuranosuke seems to want to set them up and takes both of them to the aquarium. Tsukimi ends up crying when she sees the jellies and hugs Shu. He hugs back and then they sort of have a moment. Kuranosuke gets kind of jealous when he sees them. If you’re jealous then stop trying to set them up, you dumbass. At this point, you’re liable to think that there is some kind of love triangle forming or at least some bonding of some sort but no. Shu and Tsukimi barely interact for the rest of the show and Tsukimi and Kuranosuke never really get any further than they are this moment.

There’s nothing wrong with having platonic relationships but either have them or don’t have them. Don’t sort of allude to a more than friends relationship and then never follow up on it like you forgot you were doing it or something. The whole show is like that. They start doing something and then get distracted and never mention it again.

Shu’s part of a committee in talks deciding whether to approve a neighborhood refurbishing program which would include tearing down the shithole that all of those freaks live in and putting in something nice. The person heading the proposal for the committee is a young woman who it is implied is placed in that position as bait/sex appeal. She gets close to Shu, has a drink with him, puts roofies in his drink, brings his unconscious body to a hotel, gets in bed with him and takes a picture of them together in bed. They didn’t do anything but he doesn't know that. It’s a blackmail scheme to use as leverage to greenlight the project. (So this is what it takes to start a scandal in Japan.) This was seriously their game plan for the proposal from square one? Why didn’t they just propose it and see how it panned out and then maybe consider doing illegal shit if it fails and it’s really all that important to them. This might have made sense if they had established beforehand that Shu was very likely to kill the program but they didn’t. As far as I know, he had no strong opinions about it whatsoever so why do this?

Over the course of the show, this woman is holding this picture over his head to get him to basically do whatever she wants. She gets him to introduce her to his father and go out on mock dates with her. There’s really no mention of the program again. She just appears to be dicking around. On one of these mock dates he gets pissed and tells her off before leaving. She gets depressed and drunk dials him later that night with a slurred voice, passing out on the phone. He gets worried for some reason. (Oh no, that bitch that’s been constantly manipulating me and threatening to ruin my career might be in trouble. How terrible.) He shows up at her place and finds her on the sofa posed with a big bottle of pills. Unfortunately she’s not actually dead. Surprise, they’re vitamins! Funny joke! He slaps her in the face and leaves. Later, during a soliloquy, she reveals to the audience that she has a crush on him. Oh, you have a crush on him. My silly mistake. See for some reason I got the idea that you were just being a complete fucking psychopath. I’m glad you cleared that up for me.

How am I supposed to believe that she likes him? At what point did she indicate or express any fondness for him? When did he ever reciprocate similar feelings beside out of the fucking blue when he checked on her? This can be one or both of only two things: an accurate look into a serious psychological issue that she has and/or it’s the most shittly written relationship development I’ve ever seen. In fact, shittily written relationship development all around. If she actually likes him then she should show it by not blackmailing him. Her character had the potential to turn a corner by deleting the picture and relenting but she never even considers it. She comes down hard on him and doesn’t yield at any point. What is she even trying to accomplish? She never says anything about the program. She just seems to be acting like a sociopathic child torturing a puppy for thrills. Does she actually want a relationship with Shu now? Can you imagine what that would be like?

“So how did you two meet?”

“Funny story, see she drugged and kidnapped me and then took pictures to try and blackmail me. Now we’ve been together three years and she’s still trying to blackmail me.”

Red flags! Red flags everywhere!

At one point, a private eye gets hired to tail Shu to see what the hell’s going on with this lady and again you think, oh man, shit’s gonna go down now. And again you’d be wrong. It doesn’t.

Kuranosuke figures out about the proposal for the neighborhood refurbishing and tells the freaks. Then he makes a plan to collect money by selling their assets so that they can buy the building and save it from being bulldozed. He makes them all start going to the proposal meetings. He also gives them all makeovers so that they don’t give everyone eye cancer when they walk in the door. Even after the makeovers, you still can’t see their eyes.

They can’t scrape together all that much because they're unwilling to part with their shit. They set up a booth at a flea market and discover that Tsukimi’s homemade jellyfish doll becomes a hot item instantly. (I don’t know. It’s Japan.) They quickly begin mass producing them for their booth but once more we really never see where this leads. Maybe you could say that it’s a precursor for the part where Tsukimi and Kuranosuke team up to design a stupid-looking jellyfish dress which actually gets some notoriety at a big fashion show. But it ultimately has the same conclusion so who cares?  

One of the big problems with this show is that everyone is unrealistically accepting of their circumstances. There should have been a lot more tension than there was. Shu should have been torn between his blackmailer heading the restructuring proposal and his brother who is friends with the people that the project directly affects. Shu should also resent him in general for being the lovechild of his dad’s affair which ruined his parent’s marriage and gave him a phobia of women. Kuranosuke should have been put under pressure by his father to stop his cross-dressing antics from both intolerance and fear of it effecting his own career.

Nothing gets resolved at the end. Shu still thinks that he slept with an insane person. The freaks never figure out that Kuranosuke is a guy and don’t get over their aversion to men. Their scheme to raise money never accomplishes anything. Their successfully designed dress never accomplishes anything. The PI investigation never accomplishes anything. Tsukimi’s relationship with Shu or Kuranosuke never goes anywhere or does anything. The building owner tells the freaks that she won’t be selling so the place can’t be bulldozed anyway which essentially makes what little conflict they were able to establish, completely pointless.       

So the whole story can be pretty much be summarized like this: some people are kind of trying to demolish this building and the people that live there are kind of trying stop them and OH LOOK, A BIRD!

The story is so wishy washy and ill defined. No one ever just has a clear cut logical motive for their actions. No one follows through with anything. Nothing that happens has impact on anything else. Make Shu noticeably against the restructuring. Make the project leader blackmail him to get his support. Make her either a cutthroat business woman who doesn’t care or make her start to like him and then decide to stop blackmailing him. If she continues blackmailing him then make buying the building a feasible solution to save it. Then make Tsukimi’s stupid ugly jellyfish dress save the day. Good stories require a visible dilemma or a visible sense of conflict. That’s how you get people invested. That’s how you get people to care. That’s how you don’t leave everyone blueballed at the end, wondering if there was supposed to be a message to the story or even if it constitutes a story at all.  

Cave Johnson Quote

I hate posting so infrequently on my blogs but I don't have enough time or energy to not do that so here's a handwritten quote which I made for a class assignment. It's a quote by Cave Johnson from Portal 2 and Portal 2 is a video game so... there you go. It's the first time I've ever done something like this.

Patapon

The PSP sucks. Like Nintendo consoles since the dawn of the Gamecube, it has fostered nothing but a gaping void in its library where all of the good/interesting games should be. Practically half of its games seem to be Japan release only. It only has one joystick which essentially means every single 3D game is going to have a shitty camera in it. The battery power light sits under where my thumb sits on the button so I never see it change and then it just shuts off abruptly without warning. It’s a victim of Sony’s bullshit proprietary media conspiracy. If you want to have any reasonable amount of memory space on the damn thing, you have to spend upwards of $75 on a Memory Stick Duo Pro, (those memory cards that are used in… nothing else, maybe some kind of shitty Sony camera?) Nevermind that the PSP should have at least some built-in memory. It’s completely idiotic to have to buy a component separately that’s required for the device to function and at that price it’s almost like buying a second fucking PSP. Or you can just buy a Micro SD and put it in a Memory Stick adapter like I did for less than half the price. See, if Sony had a non astronomical price point for their presumably diamond-plated memory cards, I would have just bought one. Now since they left me no alternative they get none of my money because they are fucking greedy dumbasses. I mean they’re not even TRYING to be competitive with their prices. They’re just raping you straight in the eye.

All of that being said, HOLY FUCK DOES IT EMULATE! That is the ONLY reason and a damn good one to get a PSP. Because of the things it does that the company never intended it to do.

   

I finally got around to playing Patapon, not really knowing what to expect. It actually has the unique concept of being a rhythm real time strategy game. That’s weird. You control a tribe of little warrior guys called patapons by beating orders to them with a drum.

The most annoying aspect of this game is how fucking demanding it is on your attention. The volume has to be on. You need to be constantly engaged with the beat and giving orders to keep your combo going or you lose it and the amount of damage you do is greatly lessened until you can build it back up again. There’s no time to think or scratch your ass and there’s no pause button either. Even Guitar Hero has a pause. A big part of being a portable game is ease of access. In any other game I’ve played, I can find a nice spot in a level and put the PSP in sleep mode. Then when I come back, I can just pick up from there as if I never left. But Patapon doesn't play that shit. You need a solid uninterrupted block of time in the hyperbolic time chamber with no distractions. I have a wife, a two-year-old, a dog, school and a job. I can’t just tell it all to shut the fuck up because I’m trying to play Patapon.”

Whenever circumstances force me to put the game down, I usually just find myself quitting the level. I was mid battle and I just threw away my frenzy by stopping. If I put it in sleep and come back, I’ve lost all of my momentum and I’m just going to have to pick up the beat again and try to dig myself out of the shitty situation I created, (sometimes hopelessly) so what’s the point? Just start over again. All because of a momentary falter in my concentration.

The warriors are all blithering imbeciles. A single ordinary enemy melee guy can take out an entire unit of spear guys without taking a hit simply because spear guys are too retarded to use spears for close range or melee attacks. He’ll just stand there hacking away at them and they won’t lift a finger in self defense. It’s like in chess if you have a pawn and a knight next to each other. The pawn can attack the knight but the knight can’t do shit to the pawn until it backs up a couple of spaces. (Is that right? I’ve never played chess.)

Your infantry guys are just suicidal and are typically the first to die. Although half of the time they’re just used for blocking. The rangers hang out in the back, shooting arrows in a big arc over the rest of your guys. They’re last to die and also incapable of defending themselves at close range. They’re always falling in and out of range of the enemy and constantly have to move to set up again only to find that the enemy has since moved again and they must set up again elsewhere. God help you if all you have left is your rangers and they’re up against one last infantry guy who just strolls back and forth. These are the moments that you just want to put the game down and go get a drink or get on the internet while the rangers are dicking around but you can’t. You have to stay there and beat the fucking drum while two equally moronic parties scroll back and forth across the screen until chaos theory allows enough accidental arrow strikes to cause death. The only control you have over the situation is to just keep telling them to attack.

The horse guys do fuckall as far as I can tell so I never used them. I never even recruited any of the lumbering tank guys. My favorite though is the Megapons. They strut around with these sousaphone instruments and when they play them, it launches weird symbols or sounds that crash into the enemy. It looks like you’re hurling obscenities at them.

There are three types of levels; hunting, battle ground and boss. Hunting is easiest to survive. The objective is to just kill as much wild game as you can before they have a chance to run away. Infantry units are counter productive in these scenarios because they just chase animals away. Battles are the most fun because you’re just going through, mowing down fortified defenses and killing the evil bizzaro patapons. I really hated boss fights at first. Typically bosses telegraph their attacks to you by assuming a specific posture indicative of what they will do next. Maybe it’s about to slam the ground and you need everyone to jump back to evade it. Or maybe it’s best to just block whatever it is. What’s particularly annoying is that it takes four beats to input a command and then some for your guys to carry out the command, meaning there’s a humongous latency of four to six beats between each complete action your guys do. Way too often you don’t have enough time to finish the evade or block command before the attack hits you. You have to just follow the pace of the game’s beat regardless of how out of sync you may be with the boss. You might start putting in the attack command and then immediately see the boss assume his attack posture. Now just accept the fact that you’re going to get clobbered and can’t do anything about it because there’s not enough time to put in another command. Maybe if you act really quick, you can abandon your previous command and put in a new one but then you lose your combo which makes everything take longer. Either way it blows and there really isn’t much you can do about it except play extremely defensive/paranoid.

There are various things that you need to collect on certain levels like a catapult to attack a castle or a new command that lets you beat another level. On one level you need to call rain down from the sky to cross the scorching desert. And let me tell you about that fucking rain. You need it but they don’t tell you where you can get the command for it. You have to do the beat written on this random totem in a random level. Then you get the “Dom” drum which just means that you can use the X button to drum now. Then it teaches you the sequence to call rain which is “X,X,X,X,X” Seeing that written out makes absolutely no fucking sense in a musical scenario. Its like me telling you to sing that one song that goes “dun dun dun dunnnn dun dun dun dun dun dun dunnnn.” The beat in the game is always 4/4 time. (It’s kind of hard to waltz into battle.) There are five notes to activate rain or whatever power so you can sort of deduce that at least two of the notes in “X,X,X,X,X” are going to have to be eighth notes or offbeats. But that doesn’t really help much. Do you know how many different ways there are to shove five notes in a 4/4 measure? A lot. On top of that, you can only enter it while in a frenzy. So in order to try to enter it just once, you have to string together a ten measure combo prior. If you fail to start the rain, start over from the beginning and try a different way. But that’s only half of it. After you successfully get a frenzy and then enter the command correctly, you have to do a simon says minigame where you copy the beats on screen to build rain clouds. After that sequence, you automatically lose your frenzy because you don’t know when the regular in-game beat is going to start again so you miss it. Then finally it rains. You have to do this every time you want to use a juju. Gee, I don’t think this is as convoluted, annoying and cryptic as it could be. Do you think there’s any way we can do it while balancing spinning plates and walking on an invisible tightrope in a wind tunnel?  

I don’t feel like strategizing a lot of the time. If I come across something difficult, I’m probably more likely to just throw more guys at it than think about a strategy. That’s what General Ulysses S. Grant would do and he seems cool. sometimes you just need more powerful guys but there’s a limited number you can have of each type. You can’t make more powerful ones until you get rid of older shitty ones to clear space. I couldn’t figure out how to do this for a long time until I finally looked it up on the internet. You have to select the guy and press select to retire him. Select is clearly labeled on the screen as “Quit” AKA having nothing to do with it’s actual function. Except in that screenshot from the internet that I posted, it says "retire." Do I have a defective version of the game or something? No wonder I couldn't figure it out.

During levels, you can find weapons, shields, money and raw materials which are all typically dropped by stronger enemies. The problem is when you’re facing a horde of enemies and you kill one, you can’t get whatever it dropped until you clear the other enemies out of the way. Items disappear after a certain amount of time and that time is often too short so it will be gone by the time you get there. One of the stupidest cliches in video games is when shit disappears when you put it down or don’t pick it up in time. How many times have you accidentally thrown something on the ground in Harvest Moon instead of handing it to your girlfriend and then it vanishes into thin air? It’s such a fucking pointless mechanic and why would you even design it like that except to be an asshole? There should be one scenario where something is allowed to disappear: magic. Did a wizard magic that shield away to an alternate dimension? If the answer is no, then it needs to fucking stay on the ground until someone picks it up, like in reality.

Other than better equipment, the materials you find are basically what you use to upgrade your patapons. Each warrior type takes two specific object types and some money to create. The better the objects, the better the warrior but also the higher the cost, (and it goes up fast.) Money does not accumulate fast enough during the natural progression of the game so when I get to a certain spot that needs more warriors to get past, I end up having to grind for cash at the hunting grounds so I can make them. It actually gives you instructions on how to grind as a tip. This aspect could have been a lot less annoying if I could sell raw materials for cash but you can’t for some reason. You can’t sell your materials or even your old shitty equipment and as a result I have rare materials up the ass but I can’t do anything with them because I don’t have enough money to craft them.

There are some mini games where you can gamble, (or throw away in the toilet,) a material that you can’t use to win a better material that you can’t use. I’ve unlocked four of them and they all seem to be simon says type games. The one with the Bonbon tree, or whatever it is, is pretty easy. The xylophone in the rock baby’s toes; not so much. The biggest problem with it is that I can’t fucking hear it. The music is too overbearing and makes it nearly inaudible. I seriously have to turn the volume all the way up if I want any chance of picking up the xylophone tones. The metallurgy anvil one I tried once. Then I stopped because I didn’t feel like chucking away a bunch of rare shit just so I could learn the game well enough to be successful at it. For the cooking one, I was never even able to find whatever material they wanted so I was never able to play it. But rest assured, If I ever come across whatever apparently ultra rare material it requires, I’ll be first in line to piss it away on your undoubtedly contrite cooking minigame.        

Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil Six. SIX. It’s a real mystery to me what criteria a franchise title has to have in order to get an official number after its name instead of an R word like Requiem or Revelations. Out of eighty or so Resident Evil games, only six of them get numbers, counting RE Zero. Who the hell knows?

The first thing wrong with this game is that in order to start or even just continue your campaign, you have to navigate through an endless slew of title and option screens and can only start the game by pressing the action button no less than eleven times from the initial game bootup. Remember back when you played N64? (of course not, you were probably three tops) You flip the black switch to on and then you’re playing videogames. Today, trying to play a videogame on a console is an event. It takes like two to five minutes from cold boot before you can control a character on screen. RE6 makes you pick a campaign, then a character, then difficulty settings, online multiplayer settings. STOP TRYING TO MAKE RESIDENT EVIL A MULTIPLAYER GAME. Multiplayer isn’t just there but it’s default set to on so every time I turn on the game, I have to turn multiplayer back off again as well as verify everything else. I already told you I wanted this shit the way I wanted it when I started the campaign. Why do I have to reenter it every fucking time I come back? And why does it even take so long the first time?

The game has a bad habit of controlling certain segments of the game. You’ll lose the ability to aim your gun and more importantly, the ability to run. Leon walks so fucking slow and I don’t understand why the game is forcing me to experience this. This mostly happens in the first part of the game, the time you’re trying to learn the controls but you’re not allowed to learn them. You’re only allowed to learn how to shoot your gun right before you have to shoot it. And that’s no exaggeration because the game has no manual. No manual in the box, not even a little card with some button callouts, essentially communicates to me that the game makers don’t give a fuck.

Ordinary zombies can take several gunshots to the head before actually dying. This really pisses me off. The rule is shoot a zombie in the head, they die. It’s not hard. You can roundhouse kick the head clean off of a zombie’s shoulders but your handgun bullets are like paintballs. Or the other thing happens where you shoot off the head and then random tentacles or appendages grow out of the neck for no rhyme or reason and the zombie keeps coming, leaving you wondering what the fucking point of pulling off headshots is. Seriously, half the time shooting them in the knee is probably just as effective.  

You know what I really appreciated about Dead Space? Even while the ambushes were incredibly phoned in and obvious, (or at least so overused to the point of desensitization,) every time you came across a suspicious-looking corpse, which is probably just a necromorph playing dead in wait, you always had the option of taking potshots at it while it lays defenseless on the floor instead of walking past it. Then you laugh at it because you didn't fall for it’s ruse. RE6 will not let you kill a “sleeping” zombie. Not only that but it can’t even be hit by bullets. It’s like shooting at air or a hologram. Words can not describe how moronic and petty this is. I can see the zombie strategically placed in a choke point along my path. It’s obviously a trap but since I can’t shoot it, my only other option is to go up and wiggle my ass in it’s face until it attacks me. I’ll probably take a little bit of damage. Then I’ll kill it. Then I’ll be on my way to the next mandatory ambush. And in the end, the encounter isn't scary. It’s not surprising. It’s not even based on something that could realistically happen because of how controlled it is. It’s just handicapping you for being smart. It’s like the basket chase scene In Raiders of the Lost Ark where we think we are going to have a harrowing fight scene with a swordsman but Jones just shoots him instead, only the swordsman magically becomes immune to bullets for no good reason other than to force a fight scene. Good job, Capcom. You really got me good with that well played twist where the body is actually still alive. You totally forced me to not see it coming. Congrats.

There’s also a part in Leon’s scenario where you swim under water. (The swimming controls are awful.) There are suspended zombie bodies all around, some of which grab you. Again, you can’t avoid them, in fact you can’t even attack or defend yourself under water. You just have to wait for your partner to rescue you. Why in the hell can she do stuff but I can’t?

This is the only Resident Evil game, probably the only zombie game, I’ve ever played that actually depicts the chaos of a sudden zombie outbreak in a believable way, (for the most part.) You come across isolated groups of survivors or people just fleeing for their lives. Everything's on fire. Cars are crashing into things and exploding. Yes, you've seen all of this before but my point is that it’s all usually in cut scenes and is reduced to a mere movie. This is stuff that’s actively happening as you run around. It’s stuff you can interact with and stuff that can kill you if you’re not paying attention. I’m not sure why but the part where the missile explodes in the city and spreads a huge virus cloud is highly memorable. Driving slowly through the hazy streets in the armored personnel carrier around and over idling zombies somehow felt very real.

You can load three skills onto your character before continuing the game. They’re things like increase drop of specific ammo, increased damage resistance, increase damage to specific enemy and aim your fucking gun you fucking dumbass. Seriously, why do I have to spend points to buy that ability. Oh, the points… They’re experience points that come in the form of chess pieces of all things that you find in containers and dropped by dead enemies. Ignoring the fact that they’re chess pieces for some reason, I never understood this mechanic in general. You can FIND experience in a barrel. I understand getting experience from killing an enemy but then you technically have to pick up the chess piece in order to get the points. You can kill the enemy but get no EXPERIENCE until you pick up the random object it left behind. What sense does that make? Why don’t they just have the meter automatically go up when I kill something and not make me pick up irrelevant objects to manually initiate it?

For  the most part, quick time events and slow motion sequences were at least survivable. But there are always going to be ones that don’t make any fucking sense. During the bridge section in Chris’ story, there is a tank blocking the way on the other side. When you start to walk on the bridge, it shoots and the bridge starts to crumble under your feet. You need to crawl to safety but you can’t. Then you fall and die. I probably died about eight times on this part because I didn't know that pressing X makes you crawl faster. After that, you have to square off with the tank. You’re supposed to draw its fire for your partner to take it out. I poked my head around the corner and was greeted with an explosion in the face which landed me flat on my back, nearly killing me outright. Okay, I've drawn the tank’s fire. When I got up, I was surprised to see a smoldering tank hulk. What the hell even happened? That tank was smote from the sky Old Testament style. Did my partner just find a kinetic energy missile launcher laying around? I guess I’d have to play as him to figure it out.

The cover system is clunky and too damn finicky, even with the onscreen pictographs. Actually I can say that for most games with cover. I have WAY more control and am less likely to die if I just stand around a corner or crouch down behind a wall without actually attaching myself to it with the in-game cover mechanic.

Toward the end of Chris’ story, I stopped being able to pick up ammo for some reason. I don’t know why. Was everything I came across ammo for a gun that I failed to pick up somewhere and that’s why I couldn't get it? I ended up doing a lot of running and knifing. I only had a couple of green herbs and a few bullets left by the time I got to the final boss. I basically killed him 75% with the knife. It was a pain in the ass.

Probably the most incredible thing about RE6 is the campaigns. There are four. Each campaign has two characters which you can choose to play as, (the other one is your mandatory partner.) During the story, you’ll come across the characters from the other campaigns and they’ll help you or you’ll help them or they’ll fuck you over if they’re Ada Wong. After I finished Leon’s story, I started Chris’ story and was blown away when I found that it was completely different from Leon’s. It is no exaggeration to say that they feel like two separate games. Different story arc, different enemies, different part of the world, different weapons, different bosses and even a different HUD. The best thing about this is that you have the option of two totally different experiences. If you like classic slow braindead zombies in the city kind of like RE2, then play as Leon. If you like some light military TPS with the fast mutants that have RPGs and can drive vehicles similar to RE5, then play as Chris. If you like being aggravated, play as Jake. If you like being an asshole, play as Ada.

If you look at the hundreds of thousands of Resident Evil games that exist, proportionally I haven’t played that many. (I think about six by my count.) But out of those, this is definitely the most fun one. When you finish a campaign and then reminisce about all the stuff you did to beat the game, you realize just how fantastical the whole thing was. You crash land a plane in the city, crash land a helicopter in the city, exploded a giant mutant fish while sliding down a waterfall, survived a city bombing and a bus falling off of a cliff, explored Indiana Jones death trap catacombs under a church, fought the shapeshifting final boss from Parasite Eve on a train, the side of a skyscraper and then killed him with lightning from the sky. It doesn't feel like you just finished one game. It feels like you just finished five. If John Woo and Quentin Tarantino co directed a zombie movie, it would look like this. General consensus seems to be that it sucks but I had fun.

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.