Fighting Game Characters Suck #2 - Andy and Mai

Last time on Fighting Game Characters Suck (which was like five months ago, Jesus fucking Christ), we discussed how Ryu, the poster boy of fighting games, is actually a mental deficient with the social skills of a drainpipe and is hellbent on ruining his best friend's life and, eventually, the lives of everyone else. This week, we're going to get a bit more personal with our mud-slinging - rather than insulting one guy, we're going to insult two people and explain why their plans are total crap. Step in, Andy Bogard and Shiranui Mai!

Today's FGCS comes with picture captions! You're welcome!

Welcome, welcome, take a seat. Now, I hear that the both of you are engaged to be married at... some point in the future. Whenever your company can make the time to make it a canon thing. And really, I would like to say congratulations. I mean, you two are such a perfect fit for each other! You both practice the same martial art, you both have ridiculous body proportions and you have irresponsibly long ponytails! Andy is a calm, compassionate soul and Mai is a fun-lover looking to settle down! Truly you are the perfect future partnersnrrrrrrrrk

...okay, I'm sorry, I couldn't finish that with a straight face. I would say congratulations, but then my throat would turn itself inside out for telling a dirty lie. Instead, I would suggest you not go through with this idiotic plan and just break up already. And if you, the reader, want to know about this weird marriage counselor turn I've taken, hit the jump and be educated.

WARNING: One or two images here may be NSFW. Please ensure your boss isn't reading over your shoulder before hitting that jump button. And then TATSUMAKI!

WTF Is Up With... Pooh's Adventures?

Nostalgia is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it influences such things as Kickstarter, where Mighty No. 9 and other retro-inspired creations can flourish, free from the more toxic influences of this cutting-edge world of ours. It's gratifying to see that the best of the old ways can persevere in a culture that normally won't even spare at glance at anything if it doesn't dynamically render ever drop of sweat on Marcus Fenix's forehead as he chainsaws yet another alien to death. And in many ways, we should be thankful that the things we were brought up on as kids shaped us to be the people we are, instead of decrying the new stuff that's trying to shape the kids of the future in the same way.

On the other hand, Pooh's Adventures.

The smiles are all false, trust me.

I hesitate to classify Pooh's Adventures as a web series, but that's the closest I can get to describing this loose collection of crossover films made by various different people. Mostly a YouTube thing, the basic premise of these films is to shoehorn Winnie the Pooh and his friends, along with fifty other characters from different franchises, into the plots and scenarios of other cartoons, films and related media with about zero respect for continuity, age groups or common sense. I can only assume this to be an offshoot of the Disney crossover stuff made by actually talented people, spawned from the flabby folds of nerds and dorks alike who want to imitate such grand works but only have Windows Movie Maker pre-installed on their laptops.

Just in case you think you've accidentally stumbled across one, keep an eye out for these reoccurring tropes that infect the genre like an inoperable cancer:

• The creator styles themselves as a "studio" much like Disney and Warner Bros., despite having none of the resources or talent. Usually have poorly-spelt usernames, or ones with "movies", "films" or "studio" in them.
• Each video begins with a lengthy series of idents or title sequences. Usually starting with the creator's own, but also adding in those from the franchises used. These can take up half the first video, in the worst cases
• The other characters are brought in through spliced-in footage. The intention is to assume the character's are performing the same actions in the footage, just in the new scene they are in. However, because the creator can't/doesn't cut out the background, it looks as though everyone's standing in different places.
• When a character needs to speak lines they didn't say in the source material, the footage is abruptly muted and subtitles are thrown in. These are uniformly white and in a font that is both simultaneously hard to read and obscuring the actual video. Often, a small segment of dialogue is muted just to get a character to say somebody's name, creating a really jarring effect.
• This is often used to have characters say lines offical characters used, and then have the character that originally said that line respond with "I agree" or some other inanity.
• On that subject, the writing is usually poor as fuck.
• The "film" itself is loosely based on the original film/show being adapted, but every scene is padded out to include the other characters as well. Usually every character, because we have to know just how Snagglepuss and Scamp are reacting, don't we?
• There's almost always a gathering of heroes and a gathering of villains. Often, the villains will be beaten in the same way they were in the films, just with other characters doing it.
• In the very, very worst cases, crossover ships will happen. Dear sweet Poseidon, do they happen.

Or, you know, just look at the video title. Then you should probably run screaming. Hit the jump if you want to know more.

Fighting Game Characters Suck #1 - Ryu

So since I got out of uni for the holidays, I managed to find a good balance between work and free time. Enough to allow me to cogitate on some issues that I want to talk about - namely, fighting game characters.

Now, this is not going to be me talking about shitty character design, because there's probably already shitloads of threads and blogs dedicated to that. Nor is expecting any amount of depth from most fighting game characters a fair thing, especially when most are raging stereotypes to begin with. This is me talking about how some fighting lads and lasses are massive idiots who need a slap in the face and maybe some therapy. Because seriously, they do.

And who better to open up this festival of idiocy than the poster boy of fighting games, Ryu from Street Fighter?

Ah, Ryu. Your tales of martial arts mastery inspire us. Your simple design and iconic fighting style have been copied by imitators and competitors the world over. And your gripping, emotional and spiritual quest to master your teachings and become the strongest warrior is what keeps people coming back to your side of the story, again and again. Truly, you are a noble and endearing character.

Except when you think about it, that's all a steaming crock of cow shit. If you want to know why, hit the jump.

An Open Letter to Mission 3 in Injustice's S.T.A.R Labs

Fuck you.

Just fuck you and everything you stand for.

You clearly don't belong in this game. Everything else about it is brilliant - the visuals are slick and gritty, the gameplay is solid and extremely different from Mortal Kombat and the Story Mode is engaging and challenging without being bullshit hard. When Bane kicks the Joker into an elevator, then runs inside to smash his head against the walls hard enough to leave dents, I pump my fist into the air with joy. The game as a whole could have been a beautiful rose in the colourful flowerbed of video games, but it isn't. And that's because you exist on it as a hideous, parasitic fungus eating away at it's insides and ruining everything that's good about it with your rank stench of dog turd.

Allow me to elaborate. I had cleared the Story Mode and earned a load of Armoury Keys to unlock alternate costumes for the characters. However, the Keys are only awarded with every alternate level you reach, so I wasn't able to unlock all of them. It was then that all my common sense leapt out of my brain and scurried away, leaving to me to make a really stupid decision. "Okay," I say to myself, "perhaps I'll try the S.T.A.R Labs missions. Mortal Kombat's missions were cool and I beat loads of those, so maybe this'll be a ticket to free XP and Armoury Keys." Little did I know of the bullshit that was lurking over the hill, waiting for the chance to pounce and sink his filth-encrusted fangs into my patience.

So I start up the missions, and all goes well. Lex Luthor has kidnapped Louis Lane, as he is wont to do, and Superman has to save her, as he is also wont to do. Mission 1 has me beating up The Flash for some off reason - all I do is follow the on-screen prompts and I complete it, earning three big silver stars. "Huh," I say to myself. "This isn't so hard. I was expecting a bit more, but okay." Mission 2 is more fun - Superman is low on health and has to stay in these patches of sunlight to recover it whilst fighting Bane. It's tense and frantic, and I complete it with little fuss. I earn only two stars this time, but then I try again and it turns out I had to punt Bane through a building as well, which is fair enough.

But then you come along, Mission 3, and put a fucking brick wall between me and progress.

Lex is mind-controlling Batman and has given him a supply of Kryptonite-laced Batarangs (no they don't specify how, put your hand down). And it's not like the challenge is difficult in concept - beat Batman, use a stage prop, don't get hit by the killer green projectiles. No problem, one might say. And indeed, for the first few minutes, it seems pretty simple. Batman barely puts up a fight as I wail on him with Superman's arsenal of kickass moves, punching him through a glass cabinet and throwing a plane on his head. I've whittled him down to half health and so far, things are fine.

And then I get hit with a Batarang.

I ignore this and complete the mission. But because I was hit, I'm deducted a star. And the only way to get all three stars is never to get hit. So I try again. And again, and again, and again, and gradually the veil of normalcy is torn away to reveal the hideous beast underneath, the sight of which makes me swear in disgust and throw my controller down so hard it bounces off the floor, hits the TV and knocks my copy of Metal Gear Rising off my shelf. Because the tongue-slapping otherkin dickheads behind the creation of this mission have rigged it to the point where earning that precious third star is fucking impossible.

See, there is literally no way to predict when Batman is going to throw a Batarang, because the A.I. doesn't have the same patterns one would find in a Capcom game. And it seems Lex's mind-control device also made Bruce Wayne fucking precognitive as well, because everything I do can somehow be perfectly countered with a telepathically-thrown Batarang from the fucking future. Heat Vision blasts are interrupted without a fuss, attempts to dive in are blocked and any attempts at actual combos or closing the distance are met with a giant Batarang-shaped middle finger. And even when I'm close up to him he will find some way to throw one in my face, because Ryu is apparently a pussy for not throwing projectile attacks at a such a close range as to render them pointless over regular punches or kicks.

My problems with this are twofold. Firstly, one shouldn't set such a fucking narrow goal in the first place. Not everyone is going to be capable of dodging a Batarang every time, so there's no reason to penalize us for not being picture perfect. Three will do at the most, because even then the Kryptonite Batarangs (note how fucking dumb that sounds, by the way) don't even do that much damage. Secondly, even if you are going to set such a goal, you have to make sure the enemy A.I. for that mission isn't an input-reading arsehole that delights in ruining people's dreams. Because Heaven forbid that the players actually succeed in completing the shitty challenges we personally designed to have a fucking reward at the end for completing! Only pansy casuals design their games to let their players have any chance of winning at all! No, kicking the player's arse for having the gall to try and do anything besides take it like a bitch is where it's at, because Dark Souls did it so we might as well too! Haw haw haw, tongue-slap tongue-slap!

In the end, I gave up. I turned off the Xbox and played some Mario Tennis instead. There came a point where I asked myself "Why am I even bothering to press any buttons?" because clearly I wasn't meant to succeed, so what was the point? I refuse to put up with bullshit A.I., idiotic goals designed by Hitler and fucking capital punishment for the slightest of errors, because challenge is one thing, but setting up a concrete wall and expecting us to bash it down with naught but a toffee hammer is an exercise in frustration and anger. I'm not proud of my lack of patience when it comes to these things, but from now on I'm only playing games that at least give me a chance to actually fucking complete them. And if that makes me some kind of casual scrub, then call me Scrub McNewbpants, but better to reign in Casual-Land than continuously have my face shoved into dog shit and broken glass in New Hardcoria.

In short, fuck you, Mission 3. I hope Killer Croc rips you open and eats your insides. I'll just grind Story Mode from now on if I want my XP.

Some Words About Iron Man 3

So I just got back from seeing Iron Man 3 at my local cinema. And I'm not gonna lie, it rules. The actors are still great, injecting a whole lot of personality and heart into the script. The effects are as amazing as ever, and some of the stunts will leave you gaping with amazement or cringing with fear. And the story is fast-paced, full of intruige and on-the-seat tense at times. There are moments where you'll burst out laughing, especially at half of the stuff Tony says and the antics of the badly-behaved Mark 42 armour.

The film even manages to do the impossible by making Tony Stark, a man as fazed by danger as a rhino is by an irritated sparrow, seem vulnerable and desperate - he's dealing with a force that strikes from the shadows, never being where he wants it to be and never facing him personally like he wants. It responds to his overconfident threats by blowing up his house and stripping him of his suit, forcing him to use his head and think his way past the Extremis-dosed assassins trying to kill him. And the best sequence in the film has to be the arrival of the Iron Legion, all the suits Stark has built leaping in to help him save Pepper Potts and defeat the villain.

That said, however, I have a major problem with the film.

And that's it's villain - the Mandarin.

SPOILERS START HERE! HIGHLIGHT TEXT TO REVEAL SPOILERS!

We start off with this shadowy, robed figure seated on a throne, bearing his iconic ten rings and leading a veritable army of loyal terrorists. From the get-go, he launches into fantastic rants about his cause, comparing the ideals of America to a fortune cookie in a metaphor that sent chills down my spine. His identity is a mystery, he can strike at anything from anywhere and he has access to the hihgly-unstable Extremis virus, making his forces that much more dangerous. The sudden segue's into his video speeches, and indeed the videos themselves, are like something out of fucking Marble Hornets - genuinely scary in their imagery and coming right the fuck out of nowhere. You expect a massive showdown with this guy, the kind that rocks the socks of the movie-going audience.

And then Stark breaks into where the Mandarin is supposed to be, and it turns out the bearded figure on the TV is a mere puppet, bribed with cheap beer and women. The real Mandarin is Aldrich Killian, the leader of A.I.M. and Pepper Pott's old squeeze, who has a vaguely defined plan to kill the president and take over the U.S. Also something about the vice-president's daughter needing the Extremis to live, it wasn't very well explained. Killian injects himself with Extremis, becoming a fire-breathing monstrosity that Stark has to jump between various suits to defeat.

I honestly felt kind of cheated by this twist. Granted it was a very clever twist - for a while, Killian was thought to be working for the Mandarin - but I feel that Killian was a far weaker villain than the puppet he was controlling. His sole motivation for his actions was a classic case of rejection, going after Stark because Pepper chose him instead, and his attempts at giving villainous monologues came off as passive-agressive whinging. Granted, the way he transformed from the start of the film into a crippled nerd into a swathe, handsome jock was pretty cool, but in the end the character was nothing more than a) a big child throwing a temper tantrum and b) another scientific genius, which Tony has fought at least three times before.

The Mandarin puppet was a far more fascinating character, in my opinion. He had the air of a shadow, mysterious showman who had seemingly no end to the tricks he could pull, soliloquizing about the "lessons" he was trying to teach America, and felt like a far bigger and more credible threat than the scorned child Killian showed himself to be. His speeches felt like something from Sun Tzu's Art of War, the source of the character's philosophy, and the stuff he didn't only just make you despise him, but also geniunely wonder what was going on in his head. In the end, the reveal that he was a drunken British actor being paid by the word served to undermine all the character's intruige and felt like a complete cop-out. What's even sadder is that even though he commands the Ten Rings group from the first film and we get a glimpse of the rings he wears, the connection is never made and nothing comes from that little point.

Personally, I would have liked to have a Mandarin that was closer to the comics than what we got in the film. Say we have a man who, in the aftermath of losing his family to the Chitauri invasion in Avengers, finds the rings in the wreckage of a ship and discovers their mysterious powers. Blaming Tony for his losses and deciding America to be weak, he overtakes the Ten Rings group and uses the rings to convince people he is a sorceror, using fear and tricks to decieve people into doing his bidding. Blackmailing A.I.M. into handing over the Extremis formula, he uses it to create the super-soldiers he needs to send his ten "messages" to the government, whilst at the same time calling Iron Man out on failing to live up to what's expected of him. Killain commits suicide, unable to bear witness to his project becoming weaponized, and Stark has to confront the Mandarin when he strikes at Potts as a means to make Stark feel the same pain he felt when he lost his family. Cue showdown with Stark jumping between suits to combat the effects of Mandarin's rings.

Also, throwing A.I.M. in like that may have been a bit too much. Save it for the fourth film, guys - I know you can make M.O.D.O.K. cool!

SPOILERS END HERE!

So yeah, great film but really weak villain. By all means catch it when you can, as it still delivers everything you'd expect from a film featuring Robert Downey Jr. and co., but the big reveal of the film might leave you dissapointed. On a side note, I saw it in 3D, which probably didn't really add that much to the experience, but I don't rate films based on that alone, so feel free to splash out if you want to. But not on snacks. Fuck cinema food prices.

Film Review - "Titans" Duology

Well, seeing as I haven't written much beyond Monster Mash or RP-related stuff this year, I thought it would be a nice treat for you guys to review a DVD double-pack that I recently purchased for around £12 whilst helping my mother with the shopping. Now, keep in mind that because I don't know shit about transfer quality or stuff like that when it comes to DVD's, I'll just be looking at the movies on their own rather than the technical aspects of the DVD release that most critics do.

With that out of the way, Clash of the Titans and Wrath of the Titans.

Greek Myths vs. The Mullet of Doom

Clash of the Titans is a 2010 remake of the classic 1981 fantasy film, based on the myth in which Perseus slew Medusa and saved a town from the sea monster Kraken. Wrath of the Titans is the 2012 sequel in which Perseus, now with the world's most ridiculous mullet, must free his father Zeus from the Underworld and stop the titan Kronos from gaining his revenge for being imprisoned millions of years ago. Both films star Sam Worthington in the lead role and also feature Liam Neeson as Zeus, Alexa Davalos as Andromeda and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, with Bubo the mechanical owl from the 1981 film making cameo appearances along the way.

Now both films aren't trying to be smart. This is a given, considering we're dealing with Greek mythology and angry swordsmen fighting hideous monsters. Neither Clash nor Wrath wants to inspire people, send a heartfelt message or adress a sensitive issue. They just want to be bombastic action flicks, full of swordfights and special effects, that you can kick back and watch with mates and let yourself be thrilled by. And to their credit, the films do provide that. They're both drama mixed with action mixed with a sprinkling of comedy, mostly at the expense of everyone who isn't Perseus or his immediate friends. They're fun flicks that don't try to make you think too hard about anything, and sometimes that's all we want.

That said, however, I wholeheartedly reccomend Clash over Wrath.

"I leave for five minutes and you trash the place! You're unbearable, Zeus!"

Due to the fact that it's sort of shackled to the original film plot-wise, Clash does try to make an effort to suck you into the world that it's trying to build. It has a nice, slow start where it sets up the scene and tells us that mortal man has finally gotten sick of dealing with their prick gods and have declared war on them. It takes time to develop Perseus as a character and show us scenes of him with his foster family, so we can understand what motivates him to save Andromeda. We feel worried when Calibos shows up, we feel tense and nervous as we sail the river Styx to find Medusa, we boo when Hades betrays Zeus and we cheer when Perseus finally defeats the Kraken and flies away into the sunset. It's coherant, epic without being overwhelming and you definitely feel for the character's struggles and motivations.

Wrath's problem is that it's trying too hard to be bigger than the previous film. If Clash is Pirates of the Carribean by way of 300, then Wrath is trying to ape Michael Bay's Transformers without grasping the subtleties. It's trying to be this huge, massive film where the stakes are high and the CGI fills the screen, but in order to do so it sacrifices a lot of what made the first film enjoyable and crams the spaces with more computer-generated beasties and mindless action. And as a result it ends up making several fatal mistakes that definitely cause it to drop in quality when compared to Clash, on top of a sudden drop in cinematography that causes the camera to shake like the cameraman is standing on a trampoline.

And these mistakes, briefly, are:

1. Retreading Old Ground
The first problem one encounters with Wrath is that, especially in the first half, it feels incredibly similar to Clash. Perseus may be going to different locations and trying to defeat different monsters, but there's almost a bit of a formula going on - The Djin from Clash are replaced with Cyclopes, Hephaestus (played by Bill Nighy, of all folks) stands in for the Stygian Witches, Ares replaces Calibos, the nameless hunters are swapped out for Agenor, son of Poseidon (think Jack Sparrow minus the charisma and likeability) and Kronos takes the Kraken's place as the Giant Monster Antagonist of the film. Even whole sequences get interchanged - the Djin leading the heroes across the desert to the Witches turns into the  Cyclopes showing the way to Hephaestus's temple, an underground maze replaces the Styx and the Fury attack at the start of the first film is replaced with an angry Chimera.

"Alright, own up - who superglued this wig to my head?"

For a sequel that aims to be bigger than the first film, this is kind of sad. It's as if the film doesn't trust itself with trying anything new and is just going through what it's comfortable with because that's all it knows. Things do get interesting later, when Ares finally snaps and takes on Perseus one-on-one, but for the most part there's a heavy air of "been there, done that" about the film that seems almost cynical.

2. Lack of Pacing
As mentioned before, Clash has a slow start in order to ensure that the audience is drawn in, and then mixes up the action with moments of tense anticipation or wonder in order to keep us interested. Wrath throws any notion of pacing out of the window - first five minutes in and a Chimera is breathing fire everywhere. From then on we get sweeping vistas with Pegaus flying about, a bombastic struggle with the Cyclopes, panic as the shifting Labyrinth nearly crushes our heroes, a fist-fight with a Minotaur and then it all spirals into a chaotic mess of betrayals, confrontations, reconciliations and an over-the-top battle against Kronos before the film finally calms down.

The film seems afraid that if it stops being huge and full of action and digital beasts, it's going to lose the audience's attention. And that's not a good thing - without calm moments to juxtapose against the tension or epicness, then we've got no point of comparison and anything afterwards is either dull by comparison or just disorienting. In it's haste to try and eleveate itself in scale compared to it's predecessor, Wrath cuts out all the more focused drama from Clash and crams more juvenile explosions into the gaps, and the result is the cinemaic equivalent of jangling your car keys in front of a cat's face for two and a half hours.

3. No Subtlety
Speaking of subtlety, a sequence that stuck out in my mind was when the Chimera was attacking Perseus' village. In one instance, the creature clearly demonstrates that it creates fire by breathing out a flammable spray from it's left head, then igniting the vapor with sparks from the right head. As I watched this, an off-screen villager felt the need to shout out "Look out, it's venom catches fire!" I had to laugh at that moment, not only at how corny the line was, but at the fact that the film needed to include it as a means to explain what we could clearly see with our own eyes.

Why it didn't eat the annoying kid, however, was never explained.

Wrath as a whole suffers from a dire need to simply "Show, Don't Tell", as the rule goes. Things are outright stated that would help the movie infinitely more if they were simply implied or hinted at, as if the film doesn't trust us to simply use our heads and make our own deductions. To take that Chimera scene, for example: what does that screaming villager really add? Nothing in the way of drama or tension, so what was that line even for? Why did the film feel it needed to explain what the Chimera was doing when we could clearly see it? Would it not be better if we could simply, you know, assume with our brains that it has flammable venom, without being told so? Give your audience some credit, Wrath - you know not everyone in the theatre's a total moron!

4. No Feel For The Stakes
This is probably my biggest gripe with the movie, and the point I'm probably going to write the most paragraphs about. As part of it's ongoing quest to overshadow Clash in scale and bombastic-ness, Wrath tells us that the stakes are higher than ever, and all of the universe is in danger if Hades and his wicked plan is not stopped. Unfortunately, as an unfortunate side-effect of the previous problem, the film doesn't take the neccesary steps to show us that the stakes are, indeed, raised. And even if it did, it would be kind of meaningless to us as viewers.

Firstly, Kronos is stated to have the power to tear apart the entire universe - pretty ambitious, for a man made of lava. But when he finally does emerge from his volcanic prison, all he really does is stumble forward, groaning in an unidentifiable movie language and smashing apart a few villages with his massive hands. For the most part, it's his Makhai soldiers that do most of the killing or get involved with the heroes. Yes, we see Hades and Zeus try to fight him, but he brushes them aside regardless of whatever power these gods seem to have. We never see Kronos show any power other than spitting lava everywhere, so I hardly see how it makes him any more powerful or dangerous than the Kraken from Clash was stated to be.

"OH GOD I KNEW I SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD ALL THAT CURRY"

Secondly, the scene where Zeus is chained up so Kronos can drain his life force is also a little confusing. Does this process hurt Zeus in any way? It turns him older, yes, but doesn't it cause him any pain? He's having his own life drained away here - the least he could do is maybe howl in pain or struggle to break his chains. But the old god just stays calm and takes it rather well, considering the process could very well kill him or worse. Seeing this, one gets the feeling that this horrible disaster isn't really so horrible or diastrous, and if Perseus fucks up we could always just send another guy in tomorrow or something.

"Sorry I'm late, dad, had to pick up some fish and chips for dinner."

On top of that, the film has raised the stakes a little too high for the audiencr to swallow. From an entire town and the life of a beautiful princess we've jumped straight into the entire universe being at risk, with no middle ground in between. It's too big and overwhelming - the audience can't comprehend the scale of the danger, and thus they can't empathise with the heroes' efforts. Either the stakes are so high that they are meaningless to the audience, or the danger that is stated to be present doesn't seem as... dangerous as claimed. Either way, the whole thing falls flat because the film is either trying too hard or not hard enough.

In summary, while both films are good-hearted, action-y romps that ensure many a spectacle, Wrath feels like a bloated slog that doesn't trust itself to take any risks or the audience to go along with the story. When it's not treading the same ground as the first film, it's stuffing itself with overblown sword fights and CGI images to try and distract us from the shaky writing, annoying characters and cliche'd drama. By being smaller in scale due to it's ties to the original film, Clash actually manages to be the better story - it focuses on being just a part of a huge, epic world where Gods and Men hate each other, rather than trying to set loose another ancient abomination to destroy the world. If you ever have the chance to pick up one of these films, I reccomend the first, every time. It's not particularly deep or congruous, but you're guaranteed to be entertained all the way through.

Also, Natalia Vodinova makes a great Medusa.
 

...Some joke involving snakes and bad hair days.

How Hollywood Killed the Lorax - A Rant

Well, hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, you guys! I sure did - excepting that Legend of Zelda calendar that never came in the post because so many people were buying them up, I got pretty much all that I wanted and a little more besides, and right now I have a brand new Wii U set up in my bedroom, looking all slick and shiny in it's Premium Edition awesomeness. I could use this post to talk about how kickin' radical it is and how ZombiU is really difficult because I can't do survival horror and how Monita from Nintendo Land simultaneously terrifies and annoys me.

But instead, I'd like to bring you down from your post-Christmas high by talking smack about a terrible movie I saw recently.

In this case, Dr. Seuss's The Lorax with Danny DeVito.

Relesed in the spring of this (last?) year, The Lorax is loosely based on the award-winning book by Dr. Seuss (which I have recently discovered is meant to be pronounces "Soyss" because Germany is funny like that), in which the Once-ler, in his desire to become rich and corner the market for his all-purpose Thneed, ignores the pleas of the titular Lorax as he ends up causing massive ecological damage for the sake of gain. It's a cold, harsh metaphor for how rampant industrialization affects our planet, and unless somebody "cares a whole lot" then it's just going to get worse. Yet it ends on a high and hopeful note by implying that we, the ordinary person, have the power to ensure that we can avert what the Once-ler caused and balance progress with sustainability.

The film is none of that.

Watching this film on the family's recently-purchased Sky TV On Demand thing, I came away from the film with a distinct sense of being cheated. While I could complain about things like how Danny DeVito's deep voice doesn't seem to suit the orange fuzzball, or how ham-handed the film deals with the original themes, there's one giagantic tumour growing in the bowels of this picture that I want to take a blunt kinfe to until it stops kicking and screaming. Some months ago, Del complained quite venemously of Space Marine, calling it a boring, homogenous mess that doesn't try anything beyond ticking the standard Gears of War-esque shooter checkboxes, sometimes forcing the source material to conform to those standards. And if the same can be true for films, then The Lorax is quite similar in that regard, in that it's safe and by the numbers.

It doesn't try anything new, this 3D-animated checklist. It has everything one expects from a big-budget Hollywood production. It has a love interest. It has a villain. It has celebrity voices, with Danny DeVito's alarmingly deep tones coming from the Lorax being top billing. It has humour that balances the fine line between "family-oriented" and "unimaginative", with not one joke being funny in any regard (the line "That's a woman?!" in particular made me cringe). It has stock action sequences as our protagonist dodges the intruder traps set around the inexplibably belligerant Once-ler's house. It even has the bog-standard pop-culture reference - the sequence where the Lorax infiltrates the Once-ler's cart is set to the Mission Imposible theme tune, disregarding the fact that the reference stopped being clever a decade ago. Nothing new or radical is tried, and for a Dr. Seuss movie this is kind of an insult.



Look how insulted the Lorax is. Look at him.



And what creative liberties the film does take with the source material are either completely asinine or only exists to help the movie tick those Standard Hollywood Film boxes. As in the book, the story of the Lorax is told in flashback, but on this occasion it's framed by a post-apocalyptic setting where a boy called Ted tries to impress his girlfriend by getting a real Truffula tree, sneaking out of his gated, totally-synthetic community under the nose of the greedy, scheming Mayor O'Hare. Leaving aside the question of why an all-powerful man who controls the city's air supply feels threatened by a bit of greenery, this "new", cookie-cutter story pretty much shoves the original Lorax tale to the side in order to prance about waving coloured ribbons and blowing kisses to the dollar-waving audience. The whole hero-girlfriend-villain dynamic exists because the film didn't feel like it was being enough like a Dreamworks film, and the depressing-yet-hopeful message of the book is twisted into the bog-standard "we can change the world if we work together" that films like this continuosly spit out like everyone has ADHD. The climax of the film, where Ted busts a hole in the city walls to reveal the desolated landscape beyond, feels hollow and token, as if we've seen it a million times before (which we definitely have).

But it's not enough for the film to try and ape every other, better movie in existance, is it? No, it also feels the need to slap the source material in the face. There are multiple times where lines from the book are referenced in the Duke Nukem sense, where the characters immediately turn to the audience and go "gee, doesn't that sound completely stupid, I wonder what drugs Seuss was on when he wrote that, eh?" The film not only completely misses the subtext of the lines in the first place, but also has the gall to mock it for being written in the classical nonsense-poem style that made Seuss the literary genius he was in the first place, as if to say that modern audiences are too stupid to understand what the author was trying to get across. It's ham-handed attempts at, to quote the wretched hive that is TV Tropes, "Lampshading" the original material that make me want to reach other to where the producers live and strangle them for their incompetence.

Especially if they look like this. Seriously.

Instead of using Seuss's imagery and prose in clever ways, the film feels like it's simply going down a checklist to ensure it has everything that a movie of it's calibre is supposed to provide to an audience that apparently consists of slack-jawed sheep who'll consume anything if you dress the trailer up with enough faintly-recognizable eighties pop songs. And on top of that, it has the nerve to insult the source material that it's based on without any sense of irony, disguising ham-handed insults as self-aware parody in the same way one disguises a vicious killer bull as a fighting rooster by dressing it in feathers. The film has some clever moments (the Once-Ler being browbeaten by his family to resume logging when sustainably harvesting the Truffula trees proves too slow is a nice touch), but ultimately you could swap out half the material with that from any other Dreamworks or Pixar film and it would still be a boring, unintelligent mess that makes no attempt to push any envelopes whatsoever and parrots the same old messages most films of it's type do.

As an Animation student who takes a deep interest in films, this grinds my gears. The Lorax had so much potential as an animated film, especially since the technology involved means I lose track of time trying to count all the hairs in the Lorax's moustache. They could have run with the Seussian imagery to create a cautionary tale that hammers home the consequences of callous environemtnal destruction in the pursuit of money and succes, or perhaps span a story of how we as a species can live sustainably and not have to drive trees to extinction due to demand for all-purpose knitwear. But instead the studio showed no ambition above shoehorning in the same tired old tropes to ensure a safe product that doesn't scare away the average consumer and make guaranteed big bucks. And this dissapoints me.

The Lorax is not a film. It's a giant middle finger to your intelligence and Dr. Seuss in general. Avoid.

Jack Thompson - A Rant

(WARNING: This post was made at God knows what time in the morning. Hence, there will be a greater amount of swearing, bile and typos than normal. Reader discretion is advised.)

Over the past few weeks, a combination of University stress and general boredom have been causing my tension levels to rise to somewhat uncomfortable levels. And although I have managed to let off a good whine or two in Chatzy about problems that apparently only I can see, I haven't had anything that has been actually worth getting angry about come up in conversation yet. What I need at the moment is a good long rant - something to blow off steam and help me calm down and not lash out at my good RP buddies.

So thank you, Jack Thompson. Thank you for this chance to unwind by calling you a psychotic little dickbend.

I know people will say I'm beating a dead horse - making fun of the recently disbarred, anti-gamer attorney general is nothing if not low-hanging fruit, after all. But up until now, I've always assumed that the man was at least sane in some degree, if a little bit misguided in his attempts to censor gaming culture. Then I discovered his page on Wikiquote, and Jesus Crunchy Christ on a pogo stick, all of what I could only call "tolerance" for the man went out of the window faster than Max Fucking Payne doing another of his crazy bullet-time stunts. If the page is to be believed, JT is a dangerously unhinged, self-glorifying cock-gobbler with the same grasp on reality God would bestow to the average nematode worm. Except that would be an insult to nematode worms - at least they have some sort of function in the natural world.

I'm not going to link to the page, because I assume everyone reading this has access to Google at the very least, but here's the general gist for you people. This man, this lowlife masquerading in human form, has literally come to believe that the word "gamer", a term tentatively used even in the best of circumstances, denotes some kind of fantastical fucking religious movement or subhuman species. He literally claims that gamers are incapable of rational though or reasoning because Grand Theft Auto is a brainwashing device, apparently, and that anyone who plays games is a future Boston Strangler or Columbine Massacrer waiting to burst from it's cocoon like some filthy fly. He has blamed Half-Life, one of the greatest PC games of all time, for the Virginia Tech massacre, not even bothering to do his research beforehand, and talks down at gamers as though they're Alice in fucking Wonderland, claiming they are incapable of connecting with reality where "grown-ups" get this done. And all the while, the smug bastard constantly builds himself up as an avatar of God, a righteous, infallible messenger sent to cleanse the world of the sinful gamer plague and rid the world of anything that might damage our children's minds. Oh, and he sometimes talks in third-person, just in case he doesn't sound retarded enough.

Most of the time, I would just laugh. As someone who doesn't play video games that much, yet sympathises deeply with the problems facing today's gaming culture, I would merely tolerate the ravings of this senile old fogey trying to prove his law degree wasn't a complete waste of money. The self-glorification, the flimsy arguments, the ham-handed attempts at enforcing what little legal power he has - I would have been able to dismiss it all as the ramblings of a harmless old wierdo and move on, confidently playing Mortal Kombat safe in the knowledge that I would not be inspired to slice up my classmates, no matter what the Daily Mail says.

And then I saw the quote comparing gamers to the fucking Hitler Youth.

Listen up, you pasty-faced, shit-spewing old fart. You can call gamers many things. You can call us fat nerds who don't get out much and subsist on pizza and Wotsits (the Brit equivalent of Cheetos). You can call us wierd for forgoing human compansionship for a few hours just to beat those last few levels on Call of Duty. But when you have the balls to compare us to the subjects of an evil brainwashing scheme created by history's biggest prick, that's where you cross the fucking line. That's where you shut your giant twat-mouth up, take a good step back and listen to what the fuck you're saying, because at that point you begin to sound exactly like the brain-damaged future serial killers you have invented in your ongoing quest to demonise an important setting stone in cultural development. I'm not joking - you sound exactly like your dipshit of a mother dropped you on your head when you were a baby, which wouldn't surprise me.

What you don't seem to realise, you is-dribbling, donkey-headed circus child, is that there is no actual conspiracy behind the gaming movement, despite whatever your mad ocelot god may tell you. Games companies do not have some massive machinations in place to turn us all into mindless zombie slaves in the hopes of one day taking over the world like a James Bond villain. Zelda was not created to train us in sword-fighting, because Link's sword fighting technique bears as much resemblance to the real article as my arse does to the Turin Shroud. Games companies exist, first and foremost, to make money, like every other company does. And they do this by creating products that we can enjoy and talk about, like every other company. And to imply that this is the same as Hitler covertly teaching little children army drills and to hate anything other than blond-haired, blue-eyed Supermen is not only incredibly fucking disrespectful to the memory of those who suffered in Nazi Germany, it's also incredibly disrespectful to the video games companies who don't even have or want the kind of resources required to raise their own private armies. Simultaneously insulting and offensive in one backhanded middle finger. Well fucking done.

And it's not even like you've got any evidence to clarify that point, either. You've just made the assumption because you want to feel good about yourself. You want to demonise gaming culture so you can jerk off to how clever you think you've just been, because why would a messenger of God need to prove that all gamers are psychos? Have you not ever heard of games that don't involve pointing a gun at something? Like Tetris? Oh, wait, you'd probably invent some bullshit about how Tetris is a Freudian symbol for anal sex and therefore is unconstitutional. You're building your entire argument around a stereotype that is both completely incorrect in the majority of cases and was almost always based on uninformed, scaremongering dick-baggery, with your head too far up your own arse to realise that you need things called arguments and evidence to back your claims. Admirable, in a way - making your arguments look like a Year 7 student's shitty history essay takes real effort.

Moreover, you need to realise that video games are not some alien force created by Satan to turn us all into the real/life equivalent of the Combine (although that would make a kickass movie if Jack Black and Leonadro DeCaprio were in it). Video games are a huge stepping stone in our evolution as a race, the cutting edge of a whole new form of technological and cultural development - Interactive Media. Now, while I'm not one to claim that games are art because I'm not the right sort of person to debate that issue, such a development is as important to humanity as the day Leonardo Da Vinci scribbled out his first flying machine drawing, as it's one of many measures of how far our technology has come from those days of hiding in caves and stabbing rhinos for breakfast. And as society develops and becomes more accepting of things like sexuality and the occasional knife-fight in a crowded street, games evolve to reflect those changes in attitude. To build this entire ass-backwards campaign based on decrying blood and tits in video games shows that not only are you trapped in the mindset of your childhood past before your first damning changing-room stiffy, but that your are inherently opposed to the development of technology, culture and society. You are literally trying to stop humanity from progressing by pulling the old Godwin's Law farce on us. That is not a thing to be proud of. That is a badge of shame made of frozen turd and you should feel ashamed.

In short, well done, you miserable old fuck. You have finally gotten me angry enough to devote an entire blog post to how manically damaged you really are. I'd end this post by saying thank fuck you've been disbarred, but I personally think that's too good for you. What I think should have been done was that you ought to have been dragged from your home, put out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, tied to a block of concrete and thrown into the sea. And eventually, your corpse would have reached the stinking slime and rot on the ocean floor that is your real home.

There, I feel much calmer now.

My Reaction to PS Vita Version of SFxT Getting 12 Exclusive Characters

And there's no word on if they're going to be DLC for the console versions because Yoshinori Ono is a goddamned troll and a cocktease.

Fuck you, Capcom. Fuck you.

Self-Inserts, and Why I Hate Them

Enough of me gushing about games that nobody cares about. Time for me to get a thing off off of my chest.

Writing characters is hard. Everyone who reads this blog should know this, and anyone who's attempted writing longer than a few paragraphs should know this, too. And as we all know, the human mind is conditioned to try and find the easy way out of any problem the world throws at it. I remember waaaay back in secondary school (or whatever you Americans have in place of it) when I suddenly got the urge to write a fantasy novel about a civil war between knight and ninjas. The title would have been Ninjas vs. Knights, which shows you how much of a creative drive I had back then, and would have featured a roster of characters based loosely on myself and the circle of friends that I was a part of in those days. I figured that since coming up with proper characters is hard to do, I'd simply use our personalities as a template - a phenomenon that hive of scum and villainy TV Tropes calles "Write Who You Know".

I got as far as the first chapter before realising "Why would I want to do this terrible thing?"

See, I appreciate that it's hard to give depth to a person who doesn't really exist - all that nonsense with backstory and justifications is like trying to untangle a giant knot in a shoe-lace factory. But if you go to all the effort, then it can be hugely rewarding - a character can become something else entirely. They end up having their own voice and thoughts, and they fit into the world you've built as smoothly as a hand in a nice warm winter glove. Writing them can become second nature once you have all their quirks and characteristics down. And when that happens, it's wonderful.

But creating a character who stands in for yourself or a person you know, as far as I'm concerned, is a cheap and lazy tactic. When you do that, you immediately show your audience that you have all the imagination of a brick, that you have absolutely no intention of putting any kind of effort or creativity into your work, and would rather just paste an established personality into a setting. As a person who likes to spend the effort making sure that his characters make sense and have credible personalities that the audience can identify and sympathise with, it grinds my gears to see people trying to cheat their way out of one of the most vital aspects of story-telling. If you're going to skimp out like that, then there's a good chance you're going to skimp out on everything else too, you talentless hack.

And it becomes even more obvious if the kind of person you've based your character on does not even fit into the setting - your skater cousin might be a cool and infulential person in this modern world of wonder, but even if you made him a bard who spoke in the generic fantasy English of the setting, he'd still get chucked in the dungeons in all probability because he called the princess a funny street name. When you create a character, you have to ensure that their personality is not only credible, but makes sense in the context of the worldbuilding you've done - their race, history and relationships with people around them. There is no excuse for cheaping out and copy-pasting your own personality, because then that raises the question of why the palace guards haven't shot you for using the world "dude", which, for the sake of example, might sound vaguely like the Dwarvish word for "prostitute".

But there's an even bigger problem with self-inserts that butters my crampons more than anything else. Often, the writer is literally putting himself into the story for the sake of wish-fulfilment. To elaborate, here is a quote from Yahtzee Croshow of Zero Punctuation fame in one of his many snarks against Ctrl Alt Delete, that lurching zombie of a webcomic:

"But while you are a repressed, socially retarded dullard who no one would ever honestly admit to liking, your author insertion character is a fantasy, so they will be a charismatic eccentric who is unconditionally loved by everyone, even while he's setting their dog on fire."

Do you see what I'm getting at? The one big reason for making a self-insert character is to stroke the author's ego - they want to snog the princess, slay the dragon and do all the awesome things they can never do because their copius cheeto-dusted bulk is permanently glued to the chair in front of their laptop. I went into writing Ninjas vs. Knights with a similar mindset - I only wrote it because I wanted to turn myself and all of my friends into a quirky action squad worthy of a Power Rangers film directed by Michael Bay (Let's hope that never happens), and as I mature I look back on this and wonder how I possibly could have been so God-shockingly retarded. Was my self-esteem really so low that I had to steal the name of a rejected Mortal Kombat character and put myself as the head of a ninja clan to make myself feel better? Had I become so bored with my otherwise decent life to even consider writing such a hopeless fantasy, regardless of the fact that ninjas and knights didn't even exist in the same fucking time period? It goes without saying that this is why author-insertion is considered a symptom of the Mary-Sue disease - because the character in question is basically the author doing what he wants in a world of his own making in order to make him feel more worthy of existing than he really is.

Phew, that was a big paragraph.

Anyway, let me just clear this up right now, because I know someone is going to call me out on this - Gooper, I'm not attacking you. The thought never crossed my mind. It was brave of you to admit that Widow Maker was an author-insert, and for the most part I have no problem with that, because at least you're not trying to fulfil some deranged wankfest. But I am of the mindset that a character should be their own thing, and have their own personality and depth. Using a character as a mouthpiece for your own beliefs is generally a bad idea, especially in RP'ing situations such as DnD and whatnot. But sadly, there are some people out there who just don't seem to understand this (I'm looking at you, B^Uckley and Dominic Deegan).

Welp, rant over. Tune in next time, when I gushingly review Street Fighter X Tekken and drop subliminal hints telling you to play as King.

Kingdom Hearts: Boredom By Stodgy

I don't understand why people like Final Fantasy.

Seriously, I honestly don't. I can understand that it might have been good at some point in time, but I care so little about the state of the franchise as it is now that I couldn't honestly care if it was good at any point in time. Call me a jaded, instant-gratification scrub if you will, but I don't see the appeal in games that are 15% gameplay and 90% boring spectacle - surelyb the whole point of a game is to be played, not watched. That's why I usually steer clear from JRPG's in general - to me, they're all full of the same blocks of grind and exposition that I don't find appealing.

At one point in time, however, the planets aligned and I tried to play Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.

FUCK YOU, DEMON TREES, AAARGH!

I tried to like it. I really did. But it wasn't long before I discovered that the game didn't like me very much, and I had to just put it down before my body absorbed my gentials. On a related note, I also don't understand why people like Kingdom Hearts. How crossing something I don't like (i.e., Final Fantasy) with my own childhood (i.e., Disney) suddenly equals loads of money is beyond me. But Kingdom Hearts shares quite a lot of similarities with Final Fantasy, so by playing a game that is only remotely similar to the product I have the true beef with, I can finally pin down what it is that turns me off Final Fantasy, and indeed, most JRPG's in general. (Dragon Quest doesn't count, for reasons I'll elaborate on later)

So here's a list of things I noticed while playing Birth by Sleep that could pretty much apply to Final Fantasy as well.

1. Cut Down On Cutscenes
Movies can be good. Yes, Square-Enix, I'm glad we've finally found some common ground. But there is one big difference between movies and games, and that is that you expect to do something in games. When I buy a game, I expect to jump right in and start playing it. I do not want to be pre-empted by approximately twenty minutes of cutscene, pre-rendered or otherwise, that forces me to sit and listen to a bunch of people I care nothing about talk about things I could care even less about. As a person who plays Zelda games, this might seem wierd coming from me, but at least Zelda doesn't have pre-rended FMV's up the backside.

Allow me to expand. Birth by Sleep starts with a pre-rendered AMV intro with a song by some Japanese band I don't even know and expect never to encounter ever again. Then there is another custcene ivolving some shadowy figure on a desert island, another featuring Mickey Mouse surfing on a book (which is admittedly awesome), and ANOTHER where Ventus (the character I picked only because he kind of looks like me if I went on a starvation diet and dyed my hair blonde) looks out of his window to see shooting stars- Whoops, too late, I've already put the PSP down and gone to make a hot chocolate.

At least mugs don't whine about their purpose in life.

See, there came a point where quite a lot of developers in Square-Enix suddenly forgot that they were making video games, and decided they were trying to make movies instead. Unfortunately, this means that most of the time every significant action you perform in this game is bookended by lengthy videos where you sit and listen to the characters exposite until your ears turn black and drop off. No-one should expect to go into a game to sit still and watch things happen - that's what movies are for. Games, despite what some eccentric people may tell you, are not movies. Games are interactive, meaning you pick up a controller and do things with them. Trying to make a game more like a movie just results in bad design choices, like the aformentioned cutscene binge, or bad camera controls.

Sadly, it's a trend that's cropping up a lot in video games, and consequently there are few games that don't make you wait until allowing you to do what the game is supposed to let you do - i.e., play it. The Zelda games have this problem, but at least you get to press a button to make the text zoom by as if you were on speed, and Dragon Quest IX (one of the few JRPG's I actually like, shock and horror) pretty much throws you in aside from a few bits of dialogue and exposition. Birth by Sleep straps you to a chair and forces you to watch it recite its latest theatrical masterpiece - which is both unneccesary, seeing as I would gladly sit down and watch if it asked kindly, and boring, because it drones on for ages in monotone until I fall asleep in the chair.

Which brings me neatly to...

2. Show Some Emotion, People
Birth by Sleep lets you pick one of three characters to play as, and by playing all of them you can at least attempt to untangle the snarled mess that is the game's story. The characters you pick are Ventus the aformentioned blonde dude, Terra the tall man with a skirt and Aqua, the only girl in the room. Already it sounds as if I'm talking about a strange Japanese webcomic, like Kontorōru-Aruto-Dereto or something. Anyway, the manual tells us that Ventus is outgoing and inquisitve, Terra is disciplined and quiet and Aqua is kind and righteous.

And that's it. That's all they've got.

Now, I'm not a proffessional writer, but I'm pretty sure that there has to be something wrong with a game where your characters have one, and only one, personality trait. See, whenever you play a video game that involves you controlling a character of some sort (i.e., all of them nowadays), then you want to be able to relate to them, to sympathise with them as you take them on their journey through the magical land to save the world or whatever. Already on the second hurdle and Birth by Sleep has tripped over again - how do I relate to someone who has all the personality of a cardboard cutout?

Even a Jack Sparrow cutout has more character.

It seems to me that JRPG's are nowadays populated by the same shallow stock characters you can find in any Shonen manga, all completely unlikable for the wrong reasons - they may be too cheerful and grate on your nerves, they may whinge about something or someone that went wrong, or they may be smug gits who have their brains where their crotches are. It's like they were all made with a biscuit cutter - swap Cloud Strife for Squall Leonhart and I bet you the average joe wouldn't notice the difference, not that there was one in the first place. And it makes playing the games much more difficult for me - telling us we have to control this guy is all well and good, but what's the point if we can sympathise with the hero's problems?

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit racist here - unintentionally, I hasten to ad. Western games, too, often lumber us with protagonists who suffer from a compelete lack of emotion. Take Kratos from God of War - his answer to everything is to ram a blade into it's face, and the whole dead family and retribution against the gods thing rings a bit insincere when you consider he cuts apart minotaurs for a living. But at least the Ghost of Sparta doesn't have terrible dubbed dialogue or a bad haircut to go with it. Listening to half the drivel spouted by the characters in Birth by Sleep makes me thankful for games with a silent protagonist like in Pokémon, where I can at least pretend my avatar character is singing "On the Open Road" from The Wind in the Willows as he trots down a route with his Cyndaquil.

And it's these characters who are driving the story, not me. This ought to go in a separate topic, really, but they're so closely linked it bears a special mentioning here. The whole time I was playing the game, I felt like I was contributing nothing to the story, merely wheeling Ventus and his stupid hair from one boring dialogue to another. He was the one doing all the work, while I was simply sitting at the back of his mind tugging on nerve endings to try and get him to earn a few IQ points. This is why everyone picks the created characters on Soul Calibur - smashing Algol's face in feels so much better when it's your glorified self-insert character doing it, and not some girl in a miniskirt.

Or your terrible recreation of a bonus character who hasn't been seen in ages.

Speaking of gameplay...

3. Make Your Minds Up!
Seriously. One the one hand, Birth by Sleep had the most repetitive combat mechanics I had ever come across. On the other hand, it had more confusing and unnessecary features than anything Billy Mays tried to sell, and considering that he once pitched a multi-purpose kitchen tool with interchangeable blades, that's saying something.

When you do finally get to shred some blue demon face, there's only one button you need to press - X. Keep pressing that until the enemy dies. That's it. Oh, sure, sometimes you have to jump before you press X to hit an airborne enemy, and you can press triangle to cast a spell before you get back to pressing X, but other than that there's no real variation to basic combat. Every once in a while, the Attack prompt changes into a finishing attack, which you pull off by... pressing X.

Where's my banana, you spiky-haired jerk?

See where I'm going with this? Relying on just one button to pull off an attack is all well and good, but it gets boring and monotonous after a while, and you start to feel as if you're not putting any effort into it - Darksiders has this problem, too. Fighting games have all those buttons for a reason - each one corresponds to a different type of attack, and that adds a bit of life and variety to the game. No-one wants to play a fighting game with only one attack button - your attack options are limited and it gets dull and repetetive very quickly. And that finish command that suddenly pops up every now and then simply breaks the flow of combat like an axe to a glass window, doing the complete opposite of what itss supposed to be doing in the first place.

But on the other end of the spectrum are mechanics that are look as though someone on the game design team said "Fuck it, we have to put something in there, if only to compensate for our bare-bones combo system". Shotlock Commands, which let you target and attack multiple enemies vat once, sound fine on paper, but the fact you have to manually target every enemy defeats the whole point of trying to attack multiple enemies in the first place - it breaks that flow of combat you were working on, and you have to wrestle with the control nub just to keep up with the swiftly-moving enemies. And you're standing stock still while you're doing this, so in trying to attack the mob in front, you leave your character's backside vulnerable to a swift kicking from the back.

Yeah, you wish  it was a velociraptor doing the backside-kicking.

Then there's the Action Commands, a menu-driven spell-casting system which can be customised by swapping out abilities with ones you collect from opening chests and whatnot. That's all I understand of it, really, because in order to find the best combination of spells for every situation possible you need a strategy guide across your lap, and the only thing I like on my lap is a tray with some pizza. Meanwhile, Dimension Links, as far as I know, are one of those things that you save for boss fights in a textbook case of what Yahtzee Croshaw calls "But I Might Need it Later Syndrome", and the Fever Pitch mode only really works if you're going up against the Ten Thousand Demons of Demon Mountain, as Jack Black would say.

The mechanics I have the most beef with are the Fever Pitch and the Finishing Moves. They are an example of what I like to call "Wild Mechanics" - a gameplay mechanic influenced by a random number generator to some degree. The big, raging issue I have with these is that they are to strategy what a slegehammer is to a wall made of breadsticks - a game becomes less about skill and more about luck as you hammer away at foes, desperately hoping that the enemy you kill now, and not the last one in the room, will grant you the random power-up you need to take on the real beefy lad over there. If the mechanics employed some kind of meter that was filled over the course of a battle, I wouldn't gripe, because at least there is some indication that you're working towards the awesome energy attack you need. Fever Pitch comes when you least expect it, and that's often a bad thing.
Birth by Sleep couldn't seem to make up it's mind if it wanted the combat to be nice and simple or deep and flashy, and in trying to do both it gave me a bulky, top-heavy mess. I don't know if Final Fantasy suffers from a similar problem, but the game designers at Square-Enix need to pull themselves together, because half of the stuff the game gave me would probably never be used in the average combat situation. I'm not a man to advocate ripping off the other games, but Birth by Sleep could have taken a tip from God of War - less menu-driven commands, more variety with basic attacks, have the spells and blade-swinging merge seamlessly.  Or at least have puzzles that involve using the spells, like that bit in Ocarina of Time where you used Din's Fire to light all the torches in one go.

4. The Fans
My opinion of Kingdom Hearts, and indeed Final Fantasy in general, was heavily coloured towards the negative before I even picked the game up. This was because I encountered most of the setting and characters via that wonderful medium called Fan Fiction, which, as moves go, is as smart as dipping your head into a bucket containing an angry tarantula. I emerged from that bucket with a sorely bitten face, the only thing learned was that Kingdom Hearts has some of the creepiest fans ever. Not even the ones that bray Portal memes can compare.

The impression I got from reading half the content on the sites I visited was that the fandom is as clueless about the setting and characters as I am, because they delight in taking huge liberties with the world that Square-Enix has built. When the cast of spiky-haired, androgynous teens isn't trapped in an alternate high school where Goofy is the dorky but likeable history teacher ("William the Conqueror was a bad man, a-hyuck!"), they're boning each other at the slightest provocation, and believe me whan I say that's only the male half of the cast, because according to the fandom heterosexual relationships are second only to baby-eating in the list of cardinal sins.

That, or they're trying to pair Sora off with the Disney princessesAAAAAAAAaaAA sanjgbmje rkjthjrtlhjh kgkgkglglglglglglglglhj

Okay... okay, I'm calm. I can do this.

Now, I know that it's not really a good idea to judge a game soley on it's fanbase - really, I tend to ignore the fanbase of anything in general, because it will almost always turn out horrible somehow. But if Portal's fans are mindless parrots that squawk out dead memes the moment someone mentions cake, then Kingdom Hearts fans are parasitic nematode worms that feed off the sludge at the bottom of the interweb and do nothing apart from stink up the place. I suspect that many of them also like to think that Twilight is a masterpiece and Justin Bieber has the voice of an angel. When a game like that attracts fans of that sort, you know something is fundamentally wrong.

This will sound really redundant, considering that most fandoms have the same problem, but when your first encounter with a series is from shamefully explicit erotica, then it's probably a good idea to steer away from the series until you manage to form a better opinion though exposure to more tasteful and appropriate material. Sadly, I was young and naive, and my expectations were already poor, so when I got my mitts on Birth by Sleep I wasn't too surprised to find that I didn't really like it. But then again, that's the price I pay for being an impressionable nerd.

About £40, to be precise.

I guess this isn't really Square-Enix's fault - there was no way that they could predict what the creepy fangirls would do. So I've no real reason to blame the series for this, but I guess it deserves a mention here for helping to build by poor view of the company's franchises as a whole.

And finally, the coupe de grace...

5. Demon Trees
The following is an actual account of something that actually happened in the game, and needs no explanation as to why it sucked a polar bear's funky ass.

So I get to the bit in Birth by Sleep where Snow White is, and I'm expected to help her get to the Dwarve's cottage, thereby kicking off the movie's plot with the least amount of time paradoxes or something. Unfortunately, almost everything in the forest suddenly decides it wants to slightly menace our poor princess, and a host of blue demons rise up to bother her. This includes - and I wish I was kidding here - the demon trees that appeared in the movie. You know, the ones that were meant to be hallucinations that reflected the terror and fear that Snow White was expereincing? Yep, they decided to go all Evil Dead on our protagonist. "Subtlety? What's that?" crow Square-Enix as they wipe their greasy jowls with a Cloud Strife flannel.

So off went Ventus, hacking apart demons and keeping the princess safe for completely platonic and good-natured hero reasons, so close the word document at once. Unfortunately, whenever a demon tree came too close to Snow White, the camera focused soley on its grinning, wooden visage while the gamera grew all blurry, as if Ventus was on some bad acid, and our spiky-haired hero had to run over and bludgeon the crap out of them with his giant key to get them away. It didn't help that there was a boatload of blue demons running about trying to get a piece of that action, nor did it help that Snow White had the constitution of a pigeon with acrophobia.

Eventually, Snow White gave up and sank to her knees, weeping, despite Ventus' best efforts to keep her safe. And the game then had the gall to make me attempt this pathetic excuse for an escort mission again.

THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER IN THE WORLD BIG ENOUGH!!!

So there you have it. An itemized list of why I don't like Kingdom Hearts, and by extension, Final Fantasy. I take back nothing I said during this rant, because it was all true, and if disliking this sort of a game makes me stupid, then call me Retard McShitforbrains, but I'd rather be stupid and having fun then intelligent and bored. Now, if you excuse me, I have to play some Tekken before my stomach crawls out of my throat.

I'd love to see how long Squall would last against Heihachi. Maybe all of five minutes.

Trouble at Mill - A Rant

So I went on the forums this morning to find everyone talking about how the Bar needs to be sorted.

Again.

I don't see why we bother to talk about it. We have no power to make and proper changes in the forums, and we really have only ourselves to blame for the RP explosion that caused all this. It's really too late in the tournament to even try and revert back to the talking-heads RP style, and even if we do pull it off it won't save the bar's repuation one bit. Everyone will still remember it as being full of creepy losers who get their characters married to one another instead of cheering on the best cyborg animal. And thinking of it like that, it really makes me want to put of RP'ing next year, because at this stage no-one knows what's going to happen to the forums at the end of the tournament. Will it get a clean-out? Will it be archived, or reformatted? No-one's about to tell us any time soon, and it worries me.

Honestly, the only way I can see this getting sorted is if the Major and Gravitas come in and do a bit of rearranging, as well as putting down some guidlines for us to follow. But, as I so tactfully put it one time, the mod's official stance on those who frequent the bar is "Fuck 'em. Have a burger". Or, in EnforcerWolf's case, "Fuck 'em, hope they burn". So the only thing we can hope for is that something gets sorted out at the start of next torunament, because the Major is too nice a person to not ignore the situation we've got. But when he does, what will he do? I'm seeing some of us being banned for some reason or other, or probated at the very least - and on that list is myself, AtJ, Del and Erebus for the whole marriage shenanigans and Cornwind for being a drama hog. JRM can whine all he wants about the old days, but unless the mods step in we're going to have to put up with what we've got.

Anyway, to cheer you all up about the rant, here's a jazzy Nyan Cat. I know David Wulf likes jazz, so this is his cup of tea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoUAiHTQNUE