Sunday, April 12, 2015

Furious 7

Last night, Steve and I went to see Furious 7 (part of the Fast and Furious franchise) because it’s Furious 7. I mean, besides Vin Diesel, they brought in The Rock and Jason Statham? Duh. And as a bonus to everyone else, they had Djimon Hansou. And as a special bonus to me, they had Tony Jaa, because they know exactly what I love.

Previews were for Spectre (James Bond, with significant lines in the trailer, and no action. At first I was all ‘Mass Effect’, but no), Mad Max: Fury Road (the trailer was two and a half minutes long, and had more flipping and exploding cars than the entire Fast and Furious movies. How? I don’t know. It seems impossible. I just know that every single car seemed to flip and explode. Maybe it had something to do with the post-apocalypse spikes that seemed to be on every one), Ted 2 (which seemed like a movie I would go to until I actually saw the trailer. Now I’m having second thoughts. It seems almost Ron Burgandy-ish, in that it’ll probably be funny, but only got made because the first was successful) and Straight Outta Compton (which I’d probably catch on Netflix if I was big into rap. I’m not).

The movie starts with Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham, and let me just say what a perfect villain name Deckard Shaw is for Jason Statham) standing next to an unconscious Owen Shaw (the villain from the previous movie) in a hospital room and vowing revenge. It then follows Shaw out of the hospital, which has been nearly reduced to splinters, as if Shaw had fought his entire way up there through the entire hospital staff, possibly with his brother on his shoulders (his brother having survived a fiery plane crash on the world’s longest runway in Fast Six).

From there, the movie slows down a bit, to do some heavy handed dialogue about family from Mia (Jordana Brewster) before she’s shuffled off for most of the movie to make way for more characters. Letty has some flashbacks to her pre-amnesia days, so she leaves to find herself, Shaw kills Han in a car crash that was shown at the end of Fast 6 and the middle of Tokyo Drift, and then the plot is on, from the Caucases Mountains (parachuting cars) to Dubai (jumping cars between buildings) to LA (all out warfare with helicopters and drones, with the LAPD apparently none-the-wiser).

The movie continues some much beloved traditions: A never ending supply of chargers for Dom to wreck after popping the front wheels of the ground; introducing a female UFC champion for Michele Rodriguez to beat in a fist fight (this time it’s Rhonda Rousey, last time it was Gina Carano); Paul Walker winning a fist fight he has no business winning (against Tony Jaa this time. I mean, come on); and enough car stunts to make me laugh myself silly.

The music is again by Brian Tyler, whom I thoroughly enjoy, although I doubt I can acquire the score since it’s more of a Soundtrack movie (ie lots of hip hop, not lots of strings). The humour is still there, the stunts are bigger than ever, and there’s a fist fight on a door sliding down several staircases. This is most definitely a theatre movie.


One last note. The ending of the movie is more poignant than usual. Most Fast and Furious movies I leave giddy and smiling at the ridiculousness of it all. This had that amount of ridiculousness, but the way they touched on Paul Walker’s death was a little bittersweet, but very touching. I have to admit I had a small lump in my throat when the credits rolled.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Year of the Movie

According to the one website I visit about this kind of stuff, Hollywood has had an absolutely terrible year. Not as in movies (those were okay), but as in the amount of money it made. Movies raked in 5% less than 2013, meaning movies are at an end, it’s all over, burn down Hollywood, let’s go watch plays now until we die.

Well, or not. Never mind that 2013 was a record-breaking year at the box office; because 2014 didn’t match it, it’s all doom and gloom. For my money, it’s because 2014 didn’t have much in the way of great movies everyone looked forward to. Captain America was about the only one, with the hype train starting late for Guardians of the Galaxy. Transformers as well, to a lesser extent, although fatigue has started to set in for that franchise. It still made robotic truckloads of money, but less than previous installments.

Instead of predicting doom and gloom, I think we need to look forward, which is why I’m declaring 2015 to be the year of the movie. Avengers and Star Wars will do that to any year. Having them released within 8 months of each other? Mind blown. Let’s get started.

Taken 3: Liam Neeson is back! Neesoning his way across America this time? Who cares? Will he ever stop Neesoning? I hope not!

Blackhat: It has Chris Hemsworth in it. Ie. It might be worth seeing. It’s listed as a thriller, so I’ll keep my eye on it.

American Sniper: It’s been getting some Oscar heat, so I probably won’t see it. The Oscars and I have agreed to disagree on just about everything except for special effects.

Mortdecai: Ah hah hah hah. No.

Jupiter Ascending: Sci-Fi with Channing Tatum wearing elf ears? Um, probably. It got bumped from last summer to be dumped in February, which means it’s probably not that great, which means I’ll probably love it.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Not on your life.

Kingsman The Secret Service: Only if it’s playing in here.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2: I haven’t seen the first one, so I’ll probably skip this one.

The Transporter Legacy: They’re rebooting The Transporter? I’m in. Waaaaaaaaay in.

Chappie: Comedy about a robot? Sure, why not. I’ll byte.

The Coup: I have no idea what this is about, but it’s listed as action.

The Gunman: Action-thriller. I’m on the fence when those two words come up. Action sounds good. Thriller does not.

Insurgent: Nope.

Get Hard: Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart? It’ll be the can’t miss comedy of the year that inevitably misses. I’ll pass. For now.

Furious 7: I’m in. I’m so in. And bringing everyone I can with me.

The Moon and the Sun: Action Fantasy Adventure. I dunno. I’ll keep my eye on it.

Run All Night: Liam Neeson is back! Neesoning his way across … wait, why does this seem familiar? Who cares? Liam Neeson!

Avengers Age of Ultron: I’m in, because I’m that guy that props up Hollywood studios who make movies like this. You can all blame me, but I like them.


Spy: Maybe?

Tomorrowland: I dunno.

San Andreas: Action Drama has an even worse reputation than Action thriller. I’m out.

Jurassic World: Yes, duh.

The Transporter Legacy: Wait, when is this being released? Either way, I’m in.

Ted 2: Ted was so enjoyable, I might have to see this one.

Terminator Genysis: Can’t spell. Don’t care.

Ant-Man: Sure, why not? It’s Marvel. The last time we doubted, we got Guardians of the Galaxy.

Pan: eh, no.

Pixels: Maybe? It’ll probably be the first Adam Sandler flick I’ve ever seen in theatres, but it also has video games in it. So torn.

Selfless: I think I’ll have to gather more information before I make up my mind.

Fantasic 4: Another reboot? Sure, why not.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: Another remake? Uh, I think I’ll wait to pass judgement.

Masterminds: It has funny people in it. But so did Tower Heist, so I’m not so sure about it.

Hitman Agent 47. Is this a sequel to the 2007 non-hit? Like Punisher: War Zone was a sequel to The Punisher? Out of all of those movies, I’ve seen one and thought it was boring. Probable pass.

London Has Fallen: Awesomely-named Secret Service Agent Mike Banning is back! And kicking ass in foreign countries! I’m in!

The Jungle Book: huh. No.

The Last Witch Hunter: The last time I saw witch hunting, it was awesome. This one has Vin Diesel.

Scouts vs Zombies: Probably not.

Spectre: James Bond? Say no more.

The Hunger Games Mockingjay 2: Having successfully skipped the previous 3 instalments, I’ll pass.

Star Wars The Force Awakens: This is why Hollywood was put on Earth. I’m so happy I could cry. Or pee. Or leak other bodily fluids.

Kung Fu Panda 3: Wait, you mean the movie year didn’t end with Star Wars? And you keep giving us presents? This is the best year ever!

Mission Impossible 5: Tom Cruise is back! And Tom Cruising his way across … alright, I don’t care. I just hope he runs, and fights, and fights, and runs, and maybe chases stuff too.


So that’s the year in movies. If we take a look back at this in one year’s time, and the box office has made even less than last year, then we can officially panic.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Game-ageddon

In case you didn’t know (and I’m betting that’s most of you), this fall we were hit with Game-ageddon. No, it’s not the end of video games (a fate worse than death), nor was it the end of the world brought about by video games (not a bad way to go). It was that we saw the release of such good games in such a narrow timeframe that it might herald the end of the world. Or something like that.

The last time we had such a good period for games was probably 2011, when we had Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, RIFT, Deus Ex: Human revolution, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. If you want to read more of those, I wrote a column about the magnificent three year span when we had awesome RPG’s rolling out every two months or so.

This fall we had four games. Well, there were more, but I’m not going to count Assassin’s Creed: Unity or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare because those franchises put out games every fall. I’ll just note that Unity is so buggy they had to offer a free game to apologize (in return for the buyers not suing Ubisoft). And Advanced Warfare is selling less than its predecessors. It’s the first Call of Duty game I bought, because one of the reviewers said it’s like playing through an action game, which sound like my kind of jam.


Game-ageddon got a prelude on October 14, with the landing of Borderlands: The Presequel. You might be wondering what that word is. Well, it’s for a game that take place before the sequel. Borderlands came along and was pretty good, and then Borderlands 2 came along and kicked ass, so that was cool. But what do you call a game that takes place in between? Borderlands 1.5? Well, no. See, Borderlands The Presequel was made based on the Borderlands 2 engine, so they didn’t really want to associate it with Borderlands 1. Or maybe they just wanted to associate it more with Borderlands 2. Regardless, they invented a word and slapped it on their title, which is pretty standard for their sense of humor.

The Presequel takes place at an indeterminate time in the five years between Borderlands and Borderlands 2. Borderlands 2 had a fantastic villain named Handsome Jack, and like all good prequels, the Presequel tells the tale of how he started as a hero and fell from grace. Mostly through violence and Douchebaggery.

Being built on the Borderlands 2 engine, the Presequel plays mostly like its predecessor that comes afterwards (prequel timelines are weird), with a few notable differences. Firstly, new game = new classes. Which is good and bad. It’s nice to try out new things, but I had played the first two games as Roland and Axton, both of whom had turrets to deploy. No turrets in this one, although one PC, Wilhelm, has deployable drones. However, I chose to play as Athena, because she has a shield that absorbs damage (which is a nice “oh crap” button) and then can hurl it at her attackers (so defense and damage at once). It’s usable more frequently than the turret for Axton, but I kept on forgetting to use it except when I really needed to. I suppose I’ll have to work on that.

Secondly, I had to worry about oxygen. Both because I was hyperventilating in real life, but also because it’s a mechanic in the game. The moon most of the game takes place on has no atmosphere. Soon after I landed, I got a oxygen kit, aka an O2 kit, aka an Oz kit (the game was made by 2K Australia, so some inside humor there. Also, most of the voice actors use Australian accents, which I seldom hear in video games). The Oz kit held enough oxygen for a minute or two. Refilling it could be done inside any building with an atmosphere, or any oxygen creating machine outside (they put up house-sized domes that refill the Oz kit), or by circles on the ground where oxygen is produced naturally (the circles are fairly common, but only a meter or so in diameter) or by oxygen capsules that are dropped by enemies or found in any number of containers I broke open. Oxygen depletes steadily over time, but can also be used to butt-stomp people.

Butt-stomping is a result of the third change: Gravity. Gravity on the moon is lower, allowing jumping to go much higher and further. By crouching in midair, I could rocket to the ground, using up some oxygen and damaging any enemy who had the misfortune to be beneath me. Thus, the butt-stomp. Oxygen could also be used to double-jump, which was kind of annoying, actually. In most games, double-jumping would get you twice as high as normal. In this game, double-jumps sent me no higher, and only a little further than usual. Needed for some puzzles, but not necessarily the greatest use of a common mechanic.

Fourthly, there’s a new element to kill all the enemies with: Cryo. Has the chance to freeze enemies solid, which I’ve seen before in Mass Effect by using the Cryo ammo power. Pretty much the exact same thing. Still, not a bad thing. If I have a Cryo nova shield, when it’s depleted, it send out a cryo explosion, freezing all the enemies that have been beating on me, and letting me escape. So that was useful, until I found a better shield.

Finally, the Presequel introduces lasers to the game. They’re an entirely new ammo type (like shotguns, or sniper rifles), but they can mimic other ammo types. I had one laser gun that was like a pistol. Another one was like a shotgun, which was incredibly fun, and which I kept for quite a while. Lasers also set enemies on fire, but only when there’s atmosphere present (Fire needs oxygen to burn. Thus concludes Grade 1 science).

Other than that, things are more-or-less the same as Borderlands 2. Run around and shoot things in a darkly humorous manner, with smatterings of lighter humor scattered about. Some characters cameo from previous games, some people have hilarious dialogue, some people have quests. Go shoot stuff! Only this time, go butt-stomp stuff.


The next salvo in Game-ageddon hit like an atom bomb. Not in the literal sense, but in the figurative sense, and also in the virtual sense. Warlords of Draenor landed on Thursday, November 13. During the wee hours of the morning, it was fine, but by the evening, Blizzard’s flagship had been hit with a massive DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service). This had a bit of a knock-on effect. The DDoS attack caused huge lag. To combat this, Blizzard lowered caps on its servers, reducing the amount of players able to log on at once, and thereby increasing the number of people who were waiting in line to play. Combining this with a large increase in the number of players wanting to play, plus the number of players who hadn’t played in a while (years, in some cases) returning, and queues reached into the thousands. People on heavily populated servers had to wait 12 hours or more to play.

I could only play late in the evenings, when I was out of sync with the rest of the server due to time zones (I play on an EST server while living on Mountain time). I took Friday off and ended up having to play SWTOR most of the time. Saturday I was lucky and managed to play most of the day (I logged on after a maintenance patch before almost everybody else). Sunday I got to play a bit, but I logged off to watch football. As soon as I logged off, I hopped back in the queue, because I knew it would take a while. It did. After 6 hours, I was back in. Anyway, things settled down on Monday after Blizzard did some technical wizardry, and there have only been brief queues on heavily populated servers ever since. Blizzard apologized and gave everyone five free days of gametime. Some entitled brats thought it wasn’t enough, but most of us were pleasantly surprised, as Blizzard was under absolutely no obligation to do that. Good PR for a great company.

Warlords of Draenor itself is incredibly impressive. Blizzard really stepped it up. We had to wait 14 months with no content at all, so we were getting antsy, and our expectations were sky high. Blizzard delivered. I wasn’t sure what I was blown away by more: the graphics, the music, or the gameplay. All of it’s tremendous.

The big mechanic this time around is a player’s Garrison. A lot of MMORPG’s have player housing, but Blizzard did it their way. Harkening back to the original RTS’s, we get to build up our garrisons. We get a town hall and a building or two to start off with. As we do quests throughout the expansion, we’re occasionally rewarded with garrison resourses, which can be spent on leveling up our garrisons. At level two, we can put down more buildings. Level three, even more. Not only that, but we can level up each of our building too. Currently, I have a level three garrison with a level three barracks, jewelcrafter (because I’m a jewelcrafter, and it pays to double up professions with profession buildings) and alchemical building (ditto), a level two salvage yard and inn, and a level one stable. I could swap in and out several different buildings, should I choose (although I’d have to have the resources to build them, and then the time to level them up). I also have access to a mine, herb garden, and fishing shack, which decreases my dependence on other players for the materials for my professions, and answers the prayers of players world-wide.

The story for Warlords of Draenor is that Garrosh Hellscream, the villain of the previous expansion, escaped from his trail and through a complicated set of timey-wimey shenanigans, wound up on an alternate universe version of Draenor some time ago. He convinced the orcs there to invade our Azeroth, we got wind of it, and now we’ve counter-invaded (or something like that) to shut down Garrosh’s forces, although it seems he’s ceded leadership to someone else.

So, we run around this AU-Draenor, meeting people who should be dead, and killing people who die much later, or don’t die at all, and you know what? Alternate Universes are much easier to understand if we just pretend this is a brand new world that we don’t know anything about.

I leveled up to the level cap – 100 – and it didn’t take that long and wasn’t that hard, but it was incredibly fun. Questing generally did away with the “go here, kill some x” types of quests, although they did pop up occasionally. Most of the “kill large numbers of x” were limited to optional encounters that aren’t even listed as quests. They pop up if I’m in the area and reward a large amount of experience and some gold. Solid rewards for tedious activities. If they’re not your cup of tea, you can skip them.

While running around Draenor (there is no flying so we were generally on foot or on mounts that couldn’t fly), I met up with a few NPC’s whom I help, and who thought I was pretty awesome (because I am. In real life too), and because I was commanding the local garrison, they decided to work for me. They became my followers, whom I could send out on missions from a table in my town hall. These missions reward all sorts of things, and take place in real time, so players can send their followers on missions and then log out for the night. The next morning, there the rewards are. Followers can also level up if they get sent on enough missions, and have a cap of 100. Past that, they also have a quality similar to gear players have. Green for uncommon, blue for rare, purple for epic. Epic followers aren’t statistically better than uncommon ones, but they can do more things, so they can be sent on a wider variety of missions. Acquiring as many followers as possible (20 or 25 active at one time) and then sending them all on missions is a nifty minigame that gives players who don’t really have anything else to do at the level cap something to do. Don’t want to raid or do dungeons? Manage your followers. It’s not for everyone, but man, is it addicting.

Besides that, it’s all the little things that make Warlords of Draenor awesome. Quest rewards have a small chance to be better than expected (ie an ilevel 550 mace might actually wind up being a 570 mace, or rarely, a 580 mace, giving me more head-bashing power). At a burial ground, a wolf was staring at a gravestone; you can interact with him, but he doesn’t acknowledge you; and I was made heartbreakingly aware of the bond between orcs and their wolves. Building outposts (a microgarrison) gave me the power to call down an artillery strike in one specific zone. Little treasures all over. Stumbling upon a massive creature that decided I should die, and me eventually winning a hard-fought battle that may have left me sweaty and panting in real life. Climbing into an Iron Star and rolling over the many enemies on my way to the quest objective. Watching an NPC grow up throughout the entire expansion, from zone to zone, and wondering if she’ll have the worst case of survivor’s guilt ever.

Everything involved makes Warlords of Draenor the finest expansion for World of Warcraft. Blizzard went out and made the best thing they could. No wonder it took so long.


Merely five days after Warlords of Draenor landed and left chaos in its wake, Dragon Age: Inquisition was released. If there’s a reason why I don’t have more than one level 100 character in World of Warcraft right now, that reason would be Inquisition.

Dragon Age 2 wasn’t a bad game, but if you listen to some fans who played the game, it murdered their mother and gave their dog cancer. To me, it was a good game with a fatal flaw (recycled environments. It quickly got old, poking through the same nooks and crannies in the same houses, or the same caves, over and over again).

Still, because of the fan backlash against it, and against the ending of Mass Effect 3, and against Star Wars: The Old Republic (it didn’t have a lot of end-game content at first, and it went free-to-play), many people think that Bioware has a lot to make up for. And that Inquisition should be the game to make up for it.

Me, I’m of a different mind. I think that Bioware consistently make good games with great characters and story. I look forward to everything they have to make, because they hit so many of my sweet spots.

Anyway, getting into Inquisition took some time. First, it’s because customizing my playable character took a while. There’s a lot to do. Which way do my ears point? What color are my inner irises? My outer irises? How noticeable is my double-chin? What voice do I want? (They have the game fully voiced by American and British male and female voice actors). They seem to have taken customization to the extreme, which means getting the perfect character takes a while. Getting one I could live with and watch for hundreds of hours took a bit less time.

The second obstacle getting to the game was that it felt different. Every left-click was the swing of my weapon, which made the game seem more like The Elder Scrolls than Dragon Age. And of course, they changed the interface again, so I had to get used to that. It wasn’t until I was past the introduction and well into the first area that I started to feel I had a good handle on how to play the game.

The game itself is huge. It’s not truly open world, but they plunked me down in vast, open areas that very well could have been open world, for how large and frankly, filled they were. The first area after the intro is The Hinterlands. The first quest objective is a quick jaunt West of where I was put down, but I found myself halfway across the map, heading East, and wondering what the hell just happened. I call this the “Skyrim” problem, because that happened to me too many times while playing that game. It happens a lot playing this one as well. It’s almost as if Bioware looked as Skyrim and said “Yeah, we can make that too.”

The story follows an explosion at a peace conference between Mages and Templars for the war that was kicked off in Dragon Age 2. What or who caused the explosion, and can we stop the breach in the sky it left in the explosions wake that happens to be raining demons? That would be nice.

It wouldn’t take too long to play through the whole story. Maybe as long as the previous games. 25 to 30 hours or so. But Inquisition packs in so much more. There are tons of sidequests, and even more doodads to collect. Each zone has a number of shiny shards that eventually open up a temple that gave me magic resistances of different types. Each zone has pieces of a mosaic. Each zone has areas to be discovered, and landmarks to find. Across all the zones, I could find bottles of alcohol that each had brief, often funny descriptions.

Should I so choose, I could go and hunt all 10 dragons in the game. So I went and killed all 10 dragons, and all the fights were pretty tough unless I outleveled them by a bunch. I could do all the personal quests of all the companions (by Bioware tradition, back and bantering better than ever). Some where pretty personal, and some were just generic “go here and kill stuff” quests. Most companions had both the former and the latter.

Currency in this game is treated differently than before. Instead of having silver and gold, there’s only gold. In previous games, I’d be lucky to end up with over 100 gold by the time the game ended. I ended my time in Inquisition with over 100,000 gold. Of course, I was supposed to spend it in stores, but I rarely do that in any Dragon Age game. It’s too easy to find something better by killing stuff. However, in this game, it’s also easier to go ahead and make stuff.

Crafting is a minigame unto itself. Once I found a recipe, I could craft it with different material types, either cloth, leather, or metal. Each type of material had different properties. Iron might give me +1 strength, whereas Onyx might give me +1 constitution. I could decide what I wanted on the piece I was making. Not only that, but the stats they give depend on the slot they’re put into. Iron might give me +1 strength in a utility slot, but it might give me +10% chance to stun enemies if put in an offensive slot. Not only that, but all types come in three different tiers. Iron is a tier 1 metal. Sunstone is a tier 2 level, and thus would give more stats than Iron; maybe +1.5 strength. Silverite is a tier 3 metal, and gives the best stats (well, almost the best stats; killing dragons nets tier 4 materials, but since there’s a limited number of dragons, there’s a limited number of tier four materials). Not only that, but recipes are divided into tiers as well, with tier 3 recipes allowing more materials than previous tiers. For instance, a tier 3 sword might allow 18 metal in the utility slot (with silverite, that could give me a +36 strength!) but a tier 1 sword might limit me to 10 (with iron, giving me only +10 strength). Not only that, but weapons and armors can be added onto in basic ways. Armors can have arms and legs added onto them, and weapons can have different grips, pommels, hafts, and staff blades added onto them, depending on if they have that specific slot open or not. All in all, find the right recipe, and I can make some incredibly powerful gear. Of course, it takes a ton of resources, which is another thing I will be scouring the landscape to find.

But crafting doesn’t end with weapons and armor. No, I can craft potions as well. Potions are important because there’s very little other healing in this game. There’s only one healing spell, and it can’t be used that often. So healing potions are needed. I could only carry eight at once (later, 12 with a perk), so I couldn’t really explore dangerous places that long without returning to a camp, at which point my healing potions were refilled automatically, and for free. All other potions cost herbs of some sort. So herbs can be used to refill potions, but if I was willing to spend a lot of herbs at once (yes, I was), I could upgrade the potions too. So the healing potions healed for more, and the rejuvenation potions (heals a bit at a time for a while) healed for more, longer, and with the final upgrade, also healed my companions as well. I also had access to tonics (resistance to specific schools of magic) and grenades (Fire damage, confusion, healing for my companions and I, a jar of bees), all of which could be upgraded with various types and amounts of herbs. So again, I spent quite a bit of the game scouring the landscape.

Companions are back and better than ever. Well, as good as ever. I spent so much time in the game world that it seemed like I spent less time, proportionally, just having conversations with them compared to previous games. Anyway, Varric returns from Dragon Age 2, although he looks different. A different engine will do that. Everyone who comes back looks a little different, but that’s not a bad thing. It takes a while to get used to, but then it’s fine. In fact, it’s pretty good. These graphics for people are probably the best I’ve seen in a video game, outside of cutscenes. Besides that, the graphics for everything else are very good as well. There’s some occasional pop-in for long distances, but most of that’s taken care of by the admittedly long loading times for each area. However, the areas are big enough that I didn’t go bouncing back and forth between them, reducing the amount of times I saw loading screens.

Talent trees are similar to Dragon Age 2, with more branching and joining than the straight lines of Dragon Age: Origins. Leveling up, I couldn’t choose attributes, though. I couldn’t increase my strength or constitution, which took a bit of getting used to. Stats could be increased by gear, or by passive talents. Passive talents generally always provide a benefit, or provide a benefit in conjunction with another talent or ability. For instance, a passive talent might increase the amount of guard a warrior can have. It might also increase the warrior’s constitution by 3. So I had to make a careful decision between active talents (to have more buttons to push) and passive talents (to boost my stats). Having too many buttons to push doesn’t turn into a problem, because I was limited to 8 at the most. Which is actually kind of annoying, because I really liked more than 8.

Guard is a new type of thing. Warriors can use one or two abilities that give them guard. Guard must be whittled down before it starts to affect the warriors health, so it’s sort of like extra health for warriors. Mages can cast barriers, which are effectively the same thing, except that barriers can be cast on the whole group (it’s basically anyone who’s standing on the ground where the mage casts it) and they decay slowly over time. Guard stays up until it’s beaten to pieces by enemies, or the warrior returns to camp. So I liked the abilities that gave me guard, or extra guard, because they kept me alive with the scarcity of healing.

I think I’ve touched on most of the things in the game, so let me bury the lede a bit and say that Bioware’s done a masterful job with this game. Everything about it is fantastic. I could pick nits, but there are very few. This isn’t a perfect game, but it’s probably as close as I’ll ever play.


Game-Ageddon had its final barrage on December 2nd. Technically, Shadows of Revan actually released on December 9th, but active subscribers who pre-ordered got it December 2nd, so you can bet I was there when the ball dropped.

SWTOR has a different view on expansions than World of Warcraft. WoW takes expansions as an opportunity to revamp things. Maybe not change things completely, but to add in significant differences than previous gameplay. Thus, garrisons and huge changes to professions.

SWTOR’s view is essentially “More of the same”. They give us more story, higher levels, and increased crafting. Level caps are 60, crew skills go up to 500 (from 450), and we played through two new planets, Rishi and Yavin 4 (the one that had the rebel base in the original Star Wars).

The story continues on from the prelude built up from the flashpoints (essentially, dungeons) introduced during the patches that came in the summer and fall. We follow the villain’s machinations through Rishi, then finally confront him or her on Yavin 4. There are a few twists near the end, but that’s about it for story.

The rest of the content is filled with thankfully (daily) repeatable quests. These quests provide a majority of the XP as we do them two or three times. My first character I leveled through the expansion has already done the flashpoints, so I was able to go directly to Rishi at level 55. I went through there and then onto Yavin, and beat the final boss, and was only about halfway through level 59. Call me crazy (actually, don’t. Call me by my real name) but it seems to me that expansions should have enough content to hit the max level. I think I’m just used to World of Warcraft, though, because I didn’t hit level 50 during the main game story, and I didn’t hit 55 during Rise of the Hutt Cartel’s story. I’ve always had to go back and do daily or weekly quests to hit the level cap, which is a bit frustrating, but by no means a deal breaker.

The second character I leveled through hadn’t done the flashpoints, so I did them as Solo missions. Because these flashpoints are so important to the story, Bioware implemented a system whereby a droid will accompany solo players for these types of things, and either do damage, heal, or tank. Sometimes all three. I was in good hands with this droid, and got through all four flashpoints and surrounding story in a few hours. I was halfway through level 56 when I was done and went to Rishi. And it still wasn’t enough. After beating the final boss, I was almost level 60, but not quite. I had to beat the final boss again (as part of a weekly quest) to hit the level cap.

Luckily, by that time, Bioware had implemented another small change: removing skill training costs. My first time through, I started with around 700,000 credits and ended with 300,000 (and that was before I hit level 60. Luckily, I hit it after they had removed the costs). My second time through, I started with around 250,000 and wound up with about 1.5 million. So there are a lot of credits to be had, which is nice, because I have the feeling I’m going to need a bunch to level up all my crew skills. I have 10 more characters at level 55, and they all need to be leveled up and geared out, and the best way of doing that is leveling up the crew skills on all of them and crafting the best gear I can. Which means lots and lots of credits on the auction house, buying the mats I need. So I’m pretty thankful they removed skill costs.

The only problem with that is that there goes one of the credit sinks in the game. Credits sinks are important to control the economy, but I’m not sure how important that is due to free-to-play and preferred players having a currency cap. Subscribers have none, so I can rake in all I want. In WoW, it might be more important to have gold sinks because everyone playing can have as much gold as they can acquire.

Anyway, the other major change is that of disciplines. They’ve removed the talent tree for each spec and replaced it with a talent path called a Discipline. Every few levels, we get the choice of one of a few options from a pool. Occasionally, we can choose from a new pool. I don’t like it that much (I enjoy getting new talent points every level), but I think Bioware came to the same conclusion that Blizzard did when they revamped talent trees for Mists of Pandaria. Each expansion adds levels, which add more complexity to talent trees. Soon, players are finding unique ways to bend the system beyond what it was meant to do, and get unfair advantages, and then all the rest of the players follow suit or risk getting left in the dust. Limiting choices is drastic, but necessary.

In conclusion, Shadows of Revan isn’t quite the game-changer that Warlords of Draenor is. It didn’t try to be, but I can’t quite give it full marks for hitting a mediocre target. Sure, it’s fine, but nothing spectacular.


Anyway, that was an overly long post on Game-ageddon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear the end of the world in the distance, and I want to get one more character to the level cap before I go to the great big digital distribution system in the sky.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

John Wick

Instead of going to see John Wick, Bill and I went to see Big Hero 6. So I should probably head this as: 

Big Hero 6

Ha, just kidding (although based on reviews and previews, I would not be averse to Big Hero 6, but only in about 6 months once I've downloaded it can see it from the comfort of my chair in my room in my house, where I won't have to go outside in winter).

As I've told a few people, John Wick is the story of how Keanu Reeves solves his problems with violence. Usually guns, but occasionally savage beatings as well. Maybe a few stabbings thrown in there too, just for variety. While the joke would be to use one word to describe this movie, and that word would be "Whoa", the actual word used to describe this movie is "Cool." Maybe not "Cool!" like The Raid (or its sequel) but "Cool."

They do some really good action in this movie. It's not the amazingly over-the-top stuff I've seen in a few other movies, but it's still quite an adrenaline rush. Which isn't quite the surprise it could be, since this movie was directed by stunt people. As if they just took a look at their careers and said "Yeah, let's put as much of that on film as we can." Which I guess means shootouts in a wide variety of locales (homes, clubs, parking lots, churches).

I like a lot of the little stuff they did in the movie. One of the running gags is that John Wick (Reeves) is retired, but still knows everybody in the business. "John." "Clarence. Why don't you take the night off?" "Thanks." Or "Harry." "John." "Sorry about your [spoiler]." "Thanks." Everywhere he goes, he knows the people there, as if all contracts killers know all the other contract killers, and they all go to exclusive clubs who only cater to contract killers (oh yeah, and no one's allowed to do any contract killing at the exclusive clubs, despite the fact they are filled to the brim with people who are hired to kill, and whose only job is, in fact, to kill).

Also, all of these characters are played by "That Guys", so that was fun. Theon Greyjoy shows up from Game of Thrones as a prick, so he has to be careful not to be typecast. Ian McShane is the proprietor of a hotel, where Lance Reddick is the receptionist. You'll know him from everything. Clarke Peters plays another guest, and I know him from Person of Interest. Bridget Moynahan has a small role. Dean "the Vulture" Winters drops by from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Willem Dafoe has a supporting Role. John Leguizamo shows up near the beginning. Bridget Regan is a bartender when she's not on White Collar. Adrianne Palicki is here as a hit-woman, and you may know her from Friday NightLights, or GI Joe: Retaliation, or from several stories about how hard the new Wonder Woman show will tank (it will tank so hard it never made it to air).

Anyway, they also throw in some other things. There's a cleaning crew that shows up, and is paid in gold coins, which is apparently the currency in this weird, assassin underground where everyone knows your name.

The only thing I didn't like about the movie, other than the slow beginning, is the name. John Wick. Is there any full name movie that you'd want to see? Evan and I had a conversation about this. John Wick. John Carter. Jack Reacher. They'd all be better off as single name movies. Wick. Carter (or Carter of Mars). Reacher. If we didn't have 20 years of good feelings for it, would you see a movie called Forrest Gump only based on its title? Stallone seems to have acknowledged this early, with Rocky, but then he went ahead and called one Rocky Balboa, which, in a vacuum, I would not see. Mind you, I didn't see it in real life either, so there's that.


So, complaints aside, it's a good, solid movie, filled with action and violence. Just the way I like it. I'd rate it as a theatre movie.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Zombie Column: Vancouver Edition

Last weekend, I returned to Vancouver to continue the quest Evan and I had to see every movie ever. Okay, that's a lie. I had a family vacation on Vancouver Island for a week, and when that was done, I hung around in Van City for a few days so Evan and I could catch up on the latest blockbusters we had both missed. We caught Guardians of the Galaxy on Wednesday night, then on Friday we drove to a theatre and saw The Expendables 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hercules, and 22 Jump Street. Yes, we got back home at a quarter to one in the morning. Yes, it was worth it. Throughout my visit, we also watched Sabotage on VoD, the first half of Blitz (it was too boring to continue) then switched to watch Superhero movie. I also watched the first season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Evan worked on Thursday, and I didn't have anything else to do), and on Thursday evening, we went to an improv comedy show instead of a movie, because I've never gone to a real one before, and I can always catch up on movies with the interwebz.

Previews were actually pretty varied. We saw a few twice, but we also saw many that were way out there. The Judge, The Equalizer, Swearnet: The Movie, Dr. Cabbie, the Maze Runner, The Boxtrolls, Dracula Untold, Interstellar, The Interview, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water, Big Hero 6 (and if your wondering why these kids movies are showing up as previews for the movies we saw ... we are too).
So, here are a few paragraphs on each, hopefully with enough funny to get you to stick around. Or not, whatever. Feel free to skip to the movie you want to see me write about.

Guardians of the Galaxy

A lot of people questioned why Marvel was making Guardians of the Galaxy, considering its weird premise and limited readership. I'm not quite sure why they questioned it, though; it's Marvel. They have quality writers putting good material together, and they pick underrated directors who always do good work. All of the MCU movies have been big or massive hits.

The movie starts with Peter Quill as a young boy, who gets abducted by aliens right after his mother passes away. From there, he grows into a thief. A pretty good one, actually, who can think on his feet and get himself (and his friends) out or jams repeatedly throughout the movie. Anyway, he steals the wrong thing, which gets Gamora on his trail to steal the thing back. Also, he has a bounty on his head, for which Rocket and his partner Groot track him down. They all track him down at once, for which they are arrested and tossed in jail, where they meet Drax, and the story goes from there.

It's from Marvel, so the writing's good, and it's far funnier than I would have thought (mind you, the director is James Gunn, who did Slither, a well-regarded horror/comedy that starred Nathan Fillion, which is probably why he shows up in the credits of Guardians as "Monstrous Convict"). The action's great, and the music is ... 80's. Let's just leave it at that, and call it a theatre movie. Actually, let's call it up there with The Avengers as one of the best Marvel Movies, and one of the best movies I've seen.

The Expendables 3

Whooooooo! More old guys exploding things, punching things, shooting things, kicking things, driving things through other things, and pile-driving things. Also, for some reason, talking about things. Uh, not quite what I bargained for, but alright.

The main plot of the movie is that Barney Ross (Stallone) discovers his old partner (an original Expendable) Stonebanks (Gibson) is now an arms dealer. Barney thought he'd killed him awhile ago, but nope, he's still a live and now a rich dirtbag. The CIA hires Barney to get Stonebanks (but take him to The Hague for war crimes, so he can't just bomb Stonebanks from afar). He figures going after Stonebanks personally is a suicide mission, and doesn't want to drag the rest of his team down with him, so he fires them all and goes to his friend (Grammar) to hire a bunch of skilled but slightly suicidal new kids for the mission. Anyway, things go sideways, the old team shows up, and small country's army gets blown up at the end, because we'd all wondered if they could actually take on an army or not (yes. the answer is yes).

The worst thing about this movie is that there's not enough action, which would normally be a mortal sin in a movie like this. There's an action scene for the cold open, and an action scene after the title screen (which is unusual, since almost all movies have exposition after the title screen), and then the climax is about half an hour of really good action. But the middle of the movie is almost devoid of any action at all, which should be unforgivable. However, about halfway through, Antonio Banderas joins the team and really brings the funny. He makes up for the lack of action (Evan didn't think so), and so I'm grading this movie as a theatre movie.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the story of a brave, hard-working, ridiculously hot fluff-piece reporter who's fired for telling her producer that there are Mutant Turtles fighting crime. They're only teenagers, but they're ninjas. I'd fire her too. Okay, I wouldn't; she's Megan Fox.

This movie is often referred to as Michael Bay's TMNT, despite the fact that Jonathan Liebesman directed it. Bay only produces it. I mean, Bay also produced a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it was only known as that piece of crap that no one watched, not Michael Bay's Piece of Crap that No One Watched.

Still, this could be a Michael Bay movie. The action is pretty good, the CGI is (mostly) good, the music’s good, the humour’s there. I also liked how they mixed it up a bit from previous movies. Usually, Raphael’s all angsty, goes off by himself, and gets kidnapped (in TMNT – from 2007 – it’s his angst that leads to Leo getting kidnapped instead, but still … angst). This time, Raph’s still angsty, but it’s the other three that get captured, and he has to go rescue them. It also gives a nice reason for why Raph’s angsty.

This is during the last half of the movie, which is pretty much all action. The first half of the movie, not so much. Still, it’s not a long movie, so there’s not huge swaths of movie where no action happens (looking at you, Expendables). And then, of course, there’s the elevator scene, in which brothers act like brothers. All in all, I rank this as a theatre movie.

Hercules

Hercules is a movie in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Hercules. I feel like that’s all you need to know.

Just kidding (well, not really, but I’m going to write more anyhow). The movie opens with Herc performing his labours. It cuts to a young guy (Herc’s nephew), who’s narrating the labours while telling a group of bandits not to mess with Herc, being the son of Zeus and all that. The bandits don’t listen (as bandits are wont to do. I have this same problem in video games. Do they not see the massive sword/axe/gun strapped to my back?) and so Herc and his team (hidden from view) take out the bandits. They collect their reward (turns out they’re mercenaries; nothing really supernatural going on) and take a night to revel when a princess stops by to hire them to defend her father’s land, Thrace.

The travel to Thrace and discover that there are no soldiers, because they have already been sent off to fight (and be red-shirted by) a nearby warlord. So Herc and his team train up the remaining villagers. Anyway, there are fights, and training montages, and a twist, and more fights, because this is a movie with The Rock (stupid Faster).

I was a little more into this movie because the military aspects are mirroring a book I’m reading, about a group of futuristic space marines marooned on a death planet. As their equipment fails or runs out of ammo, they have to rely on gear they can scrounge, and the associated tactics, which usually means going Roman with shields, swords, and pikes. And of course, also teaching the friendly natives these tactics. So it was interesting to see that in a movie, even if they left out important details like where their supply train was, or how the hell a giant tent showed up for them to camp in if it was only soldiers marching with only their swords and shields. Still, theatre movie, because I’m not going to rate a Hercules movie starring The Rock as any lower.

22 Jump Street

22 Jump St is almost exactly like 21 Jump Street (the previous movie, not the TV show), a fact that is lampshaded several times. Also lampshaded is the fact that sequels are only made to suck up money (both the precinct and the movie itself have much larger budgets). Still, all the self-deprecating meta-references can’t stop from making this a very funny movie.

As the previous movie hinted at, this time around, Schmidt and Jenko go to college (Whooooo! College!) to party, and to investigate a new drug that also causes death called WHYPHY, because kids these days mix up their drugs and their internet connections, or something. Also, get off my lawn!

While at college, Schmidt meets a nice girl that knows one of the victims of WHYPHY, and Jenko gets to be good friends with the quarterback, which causes friction when he wants to spend more time with the QB than with Schmidt. It’s treated like a relationship, because this is just one of the many jokes in the Jump Street arsenal.

They have many more jokes. I was chuckling through the entire movie, and laughing uproariously at times. The best parts are another drug tripping scene (these ones take place entirely within the subconscious) and an incredibly uncomfortable meal between Schmidt and Ice Cube where Ice Cube flies off the handle, which segues nicely into the next scene of Jenko finding out why it was so uncomfortable, then laughing like a maniac while running around the police station and high-fiving everyone. Channing Tatum puts so much exuberance into these performances it’s impossible not to like them.

So I’m calling it a Theatre movie. There’s not a whole lot of action, but the humour crammed into every corner makes up for it.

Sabotage

We saw sabotage on VoD. It's about a group of DEA agents led by Ahnold who plan on stealing $10 million during a drug bust on a large cartel mansion. They actually have a decent plan. The find the pallet of money (because that's how cartels get money, right?), put it in baggies and tie it to a thin rope, which they then flush down a toilet to retrieve later when they exit via the sewers. Too bad the money's not there. Someone stole it! Oh noes!

Under a black cloud of suspicion (for what? They blew up the money they didn't steal, leaving no evidence they were doing anything wrong except for being financial pyromanics. Which I guess is evidence of doing wrong), the team is investigated for 6 months, but nothing happens. They are eventually put back in the field, but before they can do any ops, someone starts picking them off one by one.

So the movie is essentially a whodunit, with a few action scenes thrown in. It's like Contraband that way. There's not a whole lot, unless your into unnecessary and brief nudity (some at the beginning, once in the middle, because apparently people that own pools do laps in the buff, as neighbours dropping by is unknown in this universe). I did like the tactics, though, because I always give bonus points for military realism. Still, nothing to elevate this film above a cheap DVD rating, and enough action and innovative camera work to keep it from dropping down.

Blitz

We watched Blitz because it had Jason Statham on the cover, playing a cowboy cop, and that's usually a great premise, but this movie is about a serial killer targeting cops in London, and there's almost no action at all, and what little of it is mainly just short burst of violence, and we got about halfway through before we turned it off and watched Superhero movie instead.

Superhero Movie

Contrary to other "Movie" movies, this is not by Seltzer and Friedberg; it's written by the other four writers of Scary Movie, who decided that the former duo shouldn't be the only ones to hock shallow parodies on an unsuspecting audience.

This movie parodies the original Sam Raimi Spider-man, right down to the opening about chasing a bus and the narration (that's only used at the beginning) about it all starting with a girl. Then we cut to our Peter Parker substitute who inexplicably has a Harry Potter haircut. There's also his black best friend, Kevin Hart, a Mary-Jane stand in (though this one is blond), and the villain, who's played by the guy that did Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmour, and will thus forever more be known as Shooter McGavin (sorry). Brent Spiner pops up as Shooter's right-hand ... scientist (I guess) and Leslie Nielson gets the coveted Uncle Ben roll (he lives in this one. Oh, spoiler alert).

Anyway, I give this movie a DVD quality rating. I mean, it's probably at the top of the DVD-rating movies, but it doesn't have enough to push it to a Blu-Ray. It's got enough humour, but the budget keeps it down (the sets look a little cheap, and the special effects are slim to none, even if they get a nice floating chair at the end). Still it's got enough laughs that you may want to check it out at some point. Just keep in mind that like all (well, most) parodies, there's going to be toilet and vulgar jokes made, although there are enough minor jokes slipped in that made me giggle.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a star vehicle for Andy Samberg. He'd left Saturday Night Live, he made some music, and a TV executive thought he'd make a great leading role for a sitcom. And then they thought of a premise, so we get a sitcom set in a precinct (quite a bit different than Castle, but what can you do?)

Samberg plays Detective Jake Peralta, a manchild who's nonetheless a great detective. His main character arc throughout the season is to grow up (a little) as well as some later-developing feelings for ...

Detective Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero), a fellow detective. She's quite competitive with Jake, and ambitious to boot, which is normally a bad thing (usually plays up the stereotype of a career woman), but this time it's done quite well, because she's desperately looking for a mentor, and thinks she's found it in the form of ...

Captain Ray Holt (Andre Braugher), an older, black, gay captain who's only dream was to get his own squad. Of course, being gay and black while joining the force in the 80's made this quite difficult, but he overcame it. He also appears to have no emotions, but uses sarcasm quite effectively to cut Jake down to size when he's getting a bit too arrogant or childish. He's brought into the station as the new captain at the beginning of the first episode to replace the "anything goes" old captain who let Jake get away with way too much. Holt arc is to get Jake to gradually shape up, as well as to loosen up (slightly).

Detective Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) is Jake's best friend and occasional partner. He's competent in his own way, but earnest and usually a bit of a buffoon. Truglio plays him to perfection. His arc involves a romance to a fellow foodie, while also getting past his infatuation with ...

Detective Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), who also doesn't have any feelings. In fact, she could easily be mistaken for an attractive man with breasts. No emotions, likes actions movies and fast foods, doesn't care for romantic notions and will tell you about it. Gruff but friendly as well. Her arc is about developing some occasional feelings, and she even enjoys hanging out with Charles once he's over her.

There's also Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), a civilian secretary and one of Jake's oldest friends. She doesn't have much of an arc (She's lazy and doesn't improve) and I didn't like her much because she's super smug and has the annoying habit of also being right. There was one episode later in the season where she and Jake go apartment hunting (he has a crippling addiction to spending money on awesome-but-unnecessary things) and she gives off awesome big-sister vibes, but then the next episode it's back to smug and right.

They're all watched over by Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) who's worked with Holt before and knows how great the Captain will be. He's essentially Terry Crews as a cop, only he's got two small daughters and a wife, and is this scared to go out into the fields for fear of what'll happen to his family if he dies. His arc is him getting over that.

There are also a couple of minor characters, but those are the main ones. The main plot for most episodes is not a crime, or catching criminals, but the interaction of the characters in the station (or away from it, for that matter). And they do that very, very well. If this were a movie, I would absolutely give it a theatre rating. So go watch it.

Improv Sports

I have never had the chance to go see live improv, except for that time I saw some high school improv teams when I was, like, 11. So I guess I have never seen professional live improv. On Thursday, Evan and I wandered down to Gainesville Island and took in an evening of improve at the Vancouver Theatre Sports League, or whatever it’s called.

There were two shows there. The early show was called Trip Improviser (and sponsored by Trip Adviser) and the action was mostly short skits with audience suggestions about where they had been. Quite funny, with a break in the middle just as things were going on a bit too long.

The second show was later and called The Ultimate Improv Championship, because things were about to go down for mixed verbal arts, or something. Two teams would each have 25 minutes to act out scenes, whether they wanted to do one or several. The first team was called “Tapped Out”, and did a variety of scenes essentially using Freeze to transition from one to another. A lot of call-backs, wildly hilarious humour, all done by three very good professionals. Great fun.

The second team was called “Dan Goes to Camp” and was a 25 minute scene about Dan going to a Magic camp (audience suggestion). It wasn’t quite as good as the first team, so Tapped Out won the night, and will presumably defend their title the following week. I’d definitely do it again. It’s not quite as funny as what you can see on TV, but those are edited down from four hours of material, and this was live. Were it a movie, it’d get a Theatre (sports) Rating from me.


All in all, a fun time was had by us. Many theatre quality movies, which was certainly a step up from last time. Maybe by the time we do it again next year, my brain will have recovered.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Zombie Column: Trans4mers

Last night, Bill, Ty, and I went to see Transformers: Age of Extinction, because we do not have enough Michael Bay in our lives. I mean, I suppose Bill and Ty may have had different reasons, but I was greatly missing the Bayhem.

Trailers for the movie were Dumb and Dumber To (no thanks), Mockingjay part 1 (featuring what I've been informed of is an evil Peeta. By the way, this is a universe in which people have names like Peeta and Katniss, instead of normal names like Cade Yaeger. Okay, bad example. Nevertheless, pass. I guess I'm just not as interested in young adults killing each other amidst love triangles as other people. I'm more interested in cars going so fast they cause explosions. Also, robot dinosaurs), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (yes. Absolutely), Guardians of the Galaxy ("Aaaaah-aah-aaaaaah-aah-aaaaahm ... hooked on this trailer." and going to see this movie) and Herculues ("I! AM! SEEING THIS!"), the latter three of which are coming out this summer, so that's all kinds of awesome.

Transformers opens up with a slightly different take on the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs - it was robots, because they're always coming here and messing up Earth, and the Autobots have to save it in the present day. That is the plot in every Transformers movie. Sometime in the past, Transformers come (100 years ago, 17000 years ago, 50 years ago), then the problems started back then suddenly emerge today. It's weird how that works out, and how none of the movies seem to be aware that robots are constantly interfering in our history except for the one instance in the movie that forms the backstory for the plot.

Anyway, we also get to introduced to Cade Yaeger (A giant robot? No), an inventor who's inventions are constantly breaking down. For my money, he's actually pretty good, managing to fit voice recognition into just about everything he does, even if they don't work as they're supposed to. He looks after (and is looked after by) his daughter Tessa, who'll be graduating from high school soon. Cade's business partner/employee is Lucas, played by T.J. Miller, whom you may recognize as a mammoth douchebag in Silicon Valley, and is one of the reasons I'm no longer watching that show (why is it people mistake awkwardness for funny? I like my funny to be funny. Also, absurd).

The main plot of the movie is that Autobots are hunted down because Chicago in the previous movie has made people wary of any alien robots, regardless of faction. Which totally reminded me of Star Wars, when everyone hates the Jedi because Sith are so evil, and bystanders tend to think everyone with a Lightsaber should just shove off. Are bystanders in conflicts so stupid they can't recognize both sides of a war? A war in which one side victorious would certainly spell their doom? Bystanders in fictional universes are idiots, I guess.

So, this movie has many explosions (which are great) and wrecks Chicago (again. What does Bay have against it? Did it dump Bay for a sexier director?) and travels to Hong Kong, where we do, in fact, get Dinobots. Robots in disguise ... as dinosarus! They'll fit right in! It also has the requisite humour, and manages to redeem Nicola Peltz after the disaster/debacle/disasticle that was The Last Airbender. Also, they brought back Steve Jablonksy to do the score, so the music is fantastic too.


All in all, it's a theatre movie. All the critics are wrong, and I am right, because this is my blog, and were you expecting anything else?

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Zombie Column: Watch Dogs

Contrary to popular belief, Watch Dogs is not about canine time-telling devices. Phooey. However, it is the latest game from Ubisoft, who you probably don't know as the makers of Assassin's Creed and a particular dopey version of DRM called Uplay that they force down their PC users’ throats (Dear Ubisoft, I use Steam, which already has DRM. Well built DRM. Useful DRM, not shoehorned into games DRM. DRM that many, many people have gotten used to. Please, just let me play your games without this extra wrench in the gears, mucking things up. Thanks).

I have been told that Watch Dogs is much like Assassins Creed with hacking, or similar to Grand Theft Auto (the game, not the activity) with hacking. I wouldn't know, as I haven't tried either (the games, not the activities. Though come to think of it, I haven't tried those activities either). But the gameplay does have a lot of hacking. As well as driving, shooting, and hitting people in the noggin with a collapsible baton.
The story centers around Aiden Pearce (the character player). 11 months ago, he and his partner, Damien Brenks, were pulling a hacking job in the Merlaut Hotel. Aiden was in the hotel, hooking up to the wireless, while Damien was offsite, doing the actual hacking. After they got about $140,000, another hacker broke in. The police started to converge, and after Aiden sees a blurry image of ... something, he bails. However, the blurry image is enough to get a hit put on him that results in the death of his six year old niece. Now 11 months later, he finds the hitman who cause the car crash.

The story is kind of weird. You'd think information from the hitman would lead somewhere, but it doesn't. During the tutorial, you give the hitman (Maurice) to Jordi, a fixer you're familiar with and have paid a lot of money to. Jordi's job (besides watching your back occasionally) is to torture Maurice to give up information, but it doesn't really work. Instead, a second plot intrudes and takes up most of the game. That eventually branches off to a third plot (mostly conspiracy) that actually settles the first plot, while dealing with the last of the second plot ends the game.

Aiden himself is pretty good at hacking, but it turns out he's also good at driving, good at shooting, good at sneaking, good at everything needed to accomplish this game. And it's not just because I was in control of him (in fact, I was pretty bad at driving, until I got the hang of it. Even then, I wasn't that great). Aiden is recognized in game as good at this stuff. How did he get so good at it? Most games give an excuse as to why the player character is great at the stuff in the game. Shepard was part of N7 (Navy SEALS in space). Adam Jensen was ex-SWAT. Aiden? He's just a guy who's excellent at everything.

Gameplay mostly consists of hacking things, driving things, shooting people, and hitting people. Hacking is most common, and easy to use. Simply hold 'Q' for half a second, and you hack whatever your cursor is pointed near. Point it at someone’s phone, and you can hear their conversation, or see their text messages, or simply just a display of their bank information (which you can then steal at the nearest ATM). Hacking traffic lights causes green lights at every intersection, and everyone pulls out, causing pile-ups. Every. Single. Time. Hacking cameras allows you to look for things you wouldn't be able to see from your vantage point, even other cameras. A few missions (both main and side) require you to hack a chain of cameras. Later, you gain the ability to start and stop the trains, explode transformers or just any boxes marked 'Explode', street bumpers, road spikes, and even steam pipes under roads, causing massive explosions. It's one of the better ways of getting people off your back if their tailing your vehicle, shooting at you. And of course, one of the very fun things to do is hack the grenades in peoples' pockets. Sometimes they get it out, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they get it out, just in time to fling it in the general direction of somebody else. Whoops.

Most of the game is divided up into missions, either main missions or side missions. The rest of the game is sort extraneous stuff. The side missions consist of a bit of variety. Sometimes there'll be gang hideouts, in which I have to sneak in and knock out the head of the gang (not kill him, for some reason). Some of them consist of Convoys, in which I have to knock out someone who's travelling with two other cars, and all of them are usually filled with people who are shooting at me. I didn't do any of those, because I failed about six times at the one I tried. Four times I died, and twice I accidentally killed the guy I was only supposed to knock out.

There's also Fixer Contracts, which usually involve stealing cars. Sometimes it's to provide a distractions, leading to long car chases along a fixed route. Sometimes it's just to provide a nice car to someone for free, so it involves driving carefully (i.e. slowly) so the car doesn't get too dinged.

The other thing that comes up are imminent crimes. While scanning other people (everyone's profile will pop up with a random fact about them), I'll get a notice pointing me to a location where a crime is about to take place. If I go there and look around, I'll eventually spot a potential victim or perpetrator (their faces will be in a yellow boxes. Most people are white boxes, hackable phones people will be blue, and enemies are red). If I wait out of sight, eventually the crime will start to take place. At this point, I can intervene and clobber the perp on the head, increasing my reputation. Reputation is nice, because it stops people from calling the cops when they see me. Reputation can be lowered by injuring or killing civilians, something that happened with alarming frequency whenever I was involved in a car chase, so I was always going to the crimes and intervening so I could raise my rep.

A lot of the extraneous stuff is heading to specific locations and hacking whatever's there. Mostly it's usually a CTOS box (CTOS is the system Chicago hooked everything up to so it runs right) that I hack into, but sometimes it's a door. Usually doors are locked, and I have a white line I follow around varying obstacles until I find the switch to hack. Sometimes CTOS boxes are locked like that too, so I end up wandering into the neighbor's yard to hack a switch on the back of their house, allowing me to open the garage three doors down. How does that work? Hacking cameras is very useful here, because sometimes the switch is somewhere I can't see. I might have to platform a bit to get there, as well. Once I've hacked in, occasionally I'll have to play a "Connect the signal" minigame where I rotate pieces of electronics (or code?) until it connects to where it needs to go. Anyway, if it's a box I've hacked, usually it just shows something from a camera in someone's apartment. Some of these scenes are funny. Some are perverted (nothing explicit is ever shown, just implied). Some are sad. Some are creepy. Mind you, I guess the fact I'm watching it also creepy.

The main story missions are usually made up of these types of things too. Go here, hack this. Go here, knock out this person, hack their phone. Go here, knock out this convoy. If you're good at the side missions, you'll be good at the main game. Of course, there are also some completely random extraneous stuff too. You can play poker (and cheat by hacking cameras, or analyzing biometrics), you can play chess, you can play AR games, or even drinking games. There was a drinking game as part of the main story missions, but that was the only one I did.

Most of the game is pretty good, but there are a few bad things about it. Firstly, the cops. Police are incredibly annoying and persistent. In most chases, they'll bring in cars and a helicopter. If I outrun the cars, there's still the helicopter around. If I step out of the car to hack the helicopter (because the camera won't pan up that far in a vehicle, and sometimes not on foot), disabling it for a few seconds, then the cars catch up. By the time I've outrun them, the chopper is back up and running. If I'm not in the fastest cars, the cops are just fast enough to catch up to me (but not get in front of me) and run me off the road, usually into a tree (which stops me dead, unlike lamp posts or streetlights, which simply fall over while denting my car. Too much denting and my car handles badly. Even more, and it'll give up the ghost). So escaping from the police is a rather frustrating experience, usually dependent on luck rather than skill.

Secondly, the knocking people out thing. If the target is stationary (like gang hideouts), it's possible to sneak up on them, or at least pick off enough other gang-members elsewhere that the final confrontation isn't too bad. If they're part of a convoy, though, there's eight people shooting at me while I try to run up and knock out person out.

Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored have ranged non-lethal options. DE:HR even as a tranq Rifle, for extra range. But in Watch Dogs, you need to be right up next to the person, which often means they and their cohorts are putting many bullets into you as you try to get that close (hint: Aiden does not survive many bullets).

Thirdly are the bodies. You can’t really do anything with them. Either unconscious or as corpses, bodies stay where they drop, which is annoying, because if anyone comes across them, they get freaked out. Civilians may call the police (or take pictures with their phones), but gangs will be put on alert. I hate to keep harping on what other games do better, but DE:HR let you drag bodies around to hide them in closets, and Dishonored actually had the body fall into your arms by default if you snuck up behind someone and knocked them out, letting you easily hide them in … well, more closets. In both games, guards patrol a lot, but they really should check the closets. I can imagine a tidal wave of bodies falling out on top of the poor sap who opened the door. Creating another body, I supposed.

Lastly are the save points. This game goes by checkpoints with no saving. A lot of other games do that too, but it can get annoying if I’ve perfectly cleared out a level of a parking garage, alerting no one. It’d be a great time to save, lest I set of the alarm one floor up and wind up in another shootout. Unlike Jesus, I can’t save, so if the shootout goes sideways, I’ll have to restart the whole parking garage again. And yes, this totally happened, and nearly put me off gang hideouts for the rest of the game.

Other than that, the only other annoyance I found was story related. Near the end of the game, one of the main characters dies for what the writers thought was a good reason, and for what I thought was a pretty stupid one. I guess the writers thought that someone should die for the emotional gutpunch, but I just though “there was figuratively no reason for that to happen.”

I should make specific mention of the soundtrack to the game. Occasionally, you can hack peoples’ phones and snag a song off of them, which can then be selected when you’re driving. There’s an achievement for getting 23, but there are actually a lot more songs than that. Not all of them were to my taste, but the breadth of selection means there’s something for everyone. I hadn’t heard “Invisible Man” by anyone but Ghoti Hook, so it was cool to see the original done by The Vindictives.

So, I was all prepared to give this game an 8 on 10, because of the annoyances. But then I played the last two missions, which were chock full of police, and so frustrating I had to knock it down to a 7. There’s a difference between challenging (like a good math problem) and a just plain difficult (like a terrible math problem that you don’t understand, because the teacher didn’t explain the concepts to you, and you’re actually a sociology major, and are in the wrong class. Whoops). It’s not a bad thing to put frustrating things in your game (well, okay, it is), provided they are optional. They should not be jam-packed into the climax of the game.


So, 7 out of 10. Pretty good game, full of things to do, but be prepared for some frustrating experiences, with excellent music to soothe you through the hard times.