This is science, damn it.

Classy

Just Guts

Those damn dads.

4pan_09032010, originally uploaded by thatguynoonelikes.

Poor Legion~

leish_ss, originally uploaded by thatguynoonelikes.

It’s hard drawing someone you do not know at all.

The first Transformers film was a bit of a surprise. Mainly because it was a competent product — from Michael Bay of all people! — that seemed to satisfy the throes of Transformers fans (for the most part). I’ll tell you now: I did not grow up liking the Transformers. I got a few of the toys at some point, but they never really got their hold on me. Same goes for the cartoons, which I never saw until Beast Wars; which was decent, but again, did not hold my interest. So I came into the first movie not really expecting anything, and I thought it was okay. Not the best silly action movie of ’07 (see: Spider-man 3), but it was okay!

So the sequel has gotta be a step up right? ‘Cause that’s what sequels are all about! It’s gotta have lots of explosions, and a big fight in the desert that takes up a lotta time! And maybe some silly jokes, and John Turturro too!

“Hey, you were just describing the first Transformers,” you might say.

Boy, are you in for a surprise~

Michael Bay: “I don’t know how to start things, so lets just have Optimus explain it in a voice over.”

So after Optimus explains that thousands of years ago a bunch of Old Transformers built some Energon harvesting-thing conveniently on Earth — and after we breeze by the title logo incredibly fast — things get started. The Autobots, along with their (AMERICAN!) government buddies, arrive in the sorriest excuse for Shanghai Ive ever seen (because it’s actually Pennsylvania) to take down a Decepticon who’s been hiding there. After the obligatory wanton-destruction, the Decepticon ever so kindly provides the team with more exposition: The Fallen — one of the previously mentioned Old Transformers that liked to stomp pesky human savages — is back to… turn on his machine or whatever. Only 5 minutes into the film, and the shear amount of exposition that was being forced upon me was already making things slow to a crawl.

Michael Bay: “The Fallen… great name huh? I came up with that myself.”

Cut to Shia LeDORK as he’s finishing packing for college and telling Bumblebee (BUBBLEBAYYY) to stay the fuck here, when a shard of the AllSpark  falls out of his old jacket. After two fucking years, he just now pulls it out of the closet and the shard conveniently falls at this moment, huh? Yeah, fine. And then we cut to some more exposition about Megatron’s body and another piece of the AllSpark from the (AMERICAN!) government and Optimus, while Soundwave tentacle-rapes a satellite to listen in. And then Shia and his stupid parents arrive at the college after like a day of driving, even though they were in L.A. and the college is on the East Coast. “Huh,” I thought to myself, “That’s a little odd, but okay.” There’s more stupid scenes with the mother and we meet his annoying roomate, who I’ll call Walking Plot-Device ’cause that’s all he fucking is; as well as some skank who turns out to be a Decepticon and wants to get into Shia’s pants for some reason. Back at the ranch, the cardboard cutout that is Megan Fox stops a stupid little RC Truck from stealing the shard by locking him in a box, and then sits around to wait for a video chat date with her zany boyfriend; but he’s at a party for some reason, and Bumblebee shows up and — not even noticing that the skank girl sitting inside him is a Decepticon — drives our stupid hero to Optimus, who is in a graveyard for some reason… and then they talk about something… and if you’re reading this and saying, “Man, this is really dragging on,” well guess what: this is just how the movie feels!

Michael Bay: “The graveyard scene! So deep on so many levels. Yeah, I came up with that.”

Meanwhile, the Decepticons steal the other piece of the AllSpark and use it to resurrect Megatron. He then immediately flies to the Decepticon Moon-Base (huh?) and talks to his master, The Fallen (double-huh?). If he was his master, why didn’t he go get him at some point during the ridiculous amount of time Megatron was frozen on Earth? In fact, why didn’t he just take over the fucking planet before the Autobots even got there if he’s so fucking powerful!? Grrrrr. Anyway he’s this red guy who just sits around and does nothing until the end, so who cares about him. Shia goes bat-shit, Rainn Wilson makes an awesome cameo as a ladies man professor, and then Megan Fox flies out to see her man and arrives what feels like minutes later — I’m not even gonna bother figuring out how she got a robot locked in a box on the plane — and walks in on the Decepti-skank and Shia. And then there’s a chase, and a little robot tries to rape Shia’s brain; then we transition from a warehouse on the docks to a forest (what is going on with this editing?!), and then Optimus gets gang banged and dies. Boo hoo.

Immediately after what is supposed to be a deep and meaningful moment, we get bombarded by “the Twins” — some people think they are racist characters; I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying so I can’t really say one way or the other… but they are annoying and I hate them. They were nowhere to be seen in the previous scene, so how they managed to meet up with Bumblebee and the stupid humans is beyond me; I’ll just chalk that up to the terrible editing. Anyway, Walking Plot-Device serves his purpose by knowing where John Turturro is for some idiotic reason that I ignored, and then there are lots of dumb jokes and talking until the party heads to Virgina to meet up with a geriatric Transformer. Hey, remember that shoddy editing? Well, after busting out the hanger door (in Virginia, remember), the gang steps out into an airplane graveyard that looks nothing like the area should look: because it’s Arizona. And you don’t need to know where it was filmed to tell that it doesn’t fit; You can just look at the FUCKING MOUNTAINS in the background. But who cares about that, since the old robot teleports the gang to Egypt!

Michael Bay: “How do we get them to Egypt? They can teleport. Huh? ‘Explain it’!? I don’t have to fucking explain it; I’m Michael Bay! YOU’RE FIRED!”

Yeah, things get worse. After the longest exposition ever (Fuck your Matrix of Leadership, buddy), and the longest movie fetch-quest ever, we are treated to the longest series of explosions in a desert ever. The RC Truck and the Twins just sorta disappear without explanation after awhile, and Plot-Device and Turturro do annoying and pointless shit. Shia dies (?) and is brought back (??) by the Robot Gods (!?) or some nonsense, and if they are powerful enough to do that AND put the Matrix of Leadership back together why didn’t they just skip this whole step and bring Optimus back right off the bat? I doubt even Michael knows. Finally, we get an anticlimactic ending where Optimus does everything ’cause everybody else sucks, yet he just lets Megatron leave after he says “This isn’t over.” After one final scene of Rainn being more interesting than everyone else in this movie, It’s over. Everything is back to normal, no one (important) is left to bring back from the dead…

Hey, that’s just how the Power Rangers movie ended.

Michael Bay: “Man, I love the Power Rangers movie!”

God, and the characters. Shia’s alright — I personally don’t mind him, but it usually seems like he’s just playing himself rather than a character — and he tries to keep this whole mess of a movie together, but fails miserably; he’s just being dragged along for the most part by the end. Megan tries to flex her acting chops but is undermined by the fact that her character is pretty much useless, as well as the ridiculous positions she’s forced to endure; the first shot of her (“where she’s fucking the motorcycle,” says Mora) is not only unnecessary and over the top, but she’s painting something on the bike upside-down while she’s doing it… which doesn’t even make sense. Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson return as White Soldier and Black Soldier, respectively; both of them have nothing to do for the whole movie aside from the occasional joke, until the very end where they get to yell and blow shit up. Even then they are criminally underused. Ramón Rodríguez — who was actually kinda good on The Wire — plays Walking-Plot Device, an annoying fucking character who’s only redeeming moment is when he tazes himself; even then, he’s a chore to watch. And Tuturro’s character doesn’t even make sense anymore; he knows all this shit about Transformers that he just kinda put together in his own head, and he always turns out to be right.

The Transformers themselves are almost a non-entity at times, being drowned out by the incessant chatter from the stupid humans. Optimus is probably the only one with a decent amount of dialogue, and even after being dead for about an hour he still manages to say more than most of the other Autobots combined. The Twins also talk a lot, but I could rarely comprehend what the hell they were saying, so I won’t count that. Megatron and Starscream just sorta growl at each other, and The Fallen is probably the most useless villain ever. He just sits around for the whole movie, until the end where he wrecks shit briefly before being killed. He’s just another bullshit Summer Villain that doesn’t even warrant having a whole movie dedicated to him. (see also: Ivan Ooze)

I never thought a movie could have so much talking with so little to say. At 150 minutes (2 minutes shy of The Dark Knight) this movie is excruciatingly long. And there really is no reason for it to be so long, as barely anything happens: There is a machine on earth that will blow up the sun, and the Autobots need to destroy it. That is ALL THAT HAPPENS. Near-endless scenes of irrelevant dialogue and stupid jokes pad out this paper thin plot, beating out Wolverine for the title of “Longest Movie with Least Amount of Things Happening” this year. And Michael Bay once again shows us just how out of touch he is, giving us the obligatory “Worldwide broadcast with everyone watching, which would never ever fucking happen” scene that’s straight out of Armageddon; and a group that hunts down Decepticons all over the world that — save the one guy with an accent — is all AMERICAN and run by the AMERICAN government, which I would say is jingoistic but I doubt Bay knows the meaning of the word. Add to that some incredibly strange editing and scene transitions that give you no sense of how much time has passed, and you’ve got a mess of a movie.

The first film must have been a fluke, because this is the worst kind of Summer Movie tripe: Everything works out in the end, no important message is sent to the audience, and its not even fun (see: Speed Racer). In other words: It’s Michael Bay.

Michael Bay: “Yup, I’ll probably get an Oscar for this one.”

I’ve been struggling to write this for awhile now. It’s very easy to talk about something that’s bad; the bile flows easily from my mind and into text, and soon I have an over abundance of complaining to work with (see: Bionic Commando). When confronted by a truly good game — one where the enjoyment is mainly derived from actually playing it — I’m kinda at a loss as to how I should discuss it.

So I’ll try to keep this short, simple, and electric pun-free.

inFAMOUS literally starts off with a bang: after hitting start on the unassuming title screen, the blast that sets the games’ events in motion immediately occurs. It’s a novel way to start things off, and it does a good job of getting you right into the thick of things and interested in what’s going on – even if you didn’t know a whole lot about the game before starting. You play as Cole, a bike messenger before the blast, and after walking out of the blast crater you learn of your newly gained power over electricity. What follows is a rather substantial trek through the now quarantined city as you assist the citizens (or not), tap into the city’s power grid to unlock new abilities, and generally wreck up the place (even if you’re good!) — all the while searching for the ‘Ray Sphere’, which is what got you into this situation to begin with.

While having control over electricity may initially seem somewhat limiting in the variety of attacks available, there is a steady progression of unique abilities — both utility and combat – to unlock as you play, as well as both a good-only and evil-only power. In addition, the secondary effects of many of the powers differ depending on whether you play as good or evil: Good powers generally have more precision, keep enemies aloft longer, and conserve energy; Evil powers are all about excessive firepower, adding additional collateral damage, and the like.

Speaking of Good and Evil, there are many “morality” moments in the game. Don’t fool yourself into thinking these are deep choices that will have you second guessing your decisions; they merely boil down to being a decent human being or King Douche of Douchelldorf. The evil choices are always intentionally excessive or over the top, and really, why shouldn’t they be? They’re simply there to help fast-track you to Hero or Infamous status, and nothing more. However, the game does do a good job of making you feel bad when you pick the evil choices, and rightly so (you fucking jerk).  I would go a bit more in depth about how morality systems just do not work in games (as we currently know them), but that’s probably better suited for somewhere else and by someone smarter than myself.

The game is challenging, but not frustratingly so — something many of the games I’ve recently played fail to understand. Checkpoints come often and death is usually a mere inconvenience; you get to keep any XP or Blast Shards you got before you died. Any time you feel stuck, approaching the situation from a different angle or changing up your attacks will get you through. Epic sized battles that seem difficult early on become a veritable ballet of destruction that is both entertaining to watch and fun to play once you’ve gotten the hang of the powers available to you. Jumping and climbing has also been simplified to remove any of the frustrations that usually come with platforming. The game has a ‘sticky’ effect when jumping to objects, similar to how the Sly games handled, and even prevents you from having to start from the bottom when falling from certain high places during a couple missions by popping you back to the nearest checkpoint. Overall, the game feels like it was made for the kind of players that don’t like to feel restricted: you can abandon missions at any point while keeping all the XP you got during it (!) and the game regularly (and invisibly!) auto-saves, for all those people who don’t always have time to wait around for the next checkpoint.

Similarly refreshing is the varied encounters throughout the game. There are 3 different groups you’ll fight, each with a variety of enemy types. Conduits — enemies that also gained powers from the Ray Sphere — are also present in these groups, giving you a super-powered opponent to tangle with from time to time. While not on a mission, random encounters can occur pretty much anywhere, which range from ambushes in alleyways to brawls between two of the groups in the streets. This means you merely have to walk in a direction and you’ll find something to do; something other open world games don’t do enough of.

Rounding out the overall experience is a very good soundtrack that non other than Amon Tobin worked on. Tobin previously worked on one of my favorite game soundtracks ever (Chaos Theory), and his unique style fits well here.

There’s a saying: “Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.”Whether or not they intended it, I feel that Sucker Punch – creators of the vastly under appreciated Sly Cooper series — have managed to make a game that embodies this with inFAMOUS. Even the story of the game seems to allude to this; regardless of whether you’re a Hero or Infamous, you’ve still got a difficult road ahead of you.

But hey, the journey was so good that I experienced it 3 times. And thats probably the highest praise I can give.

As someone who did not own an NES, Bionic Commando was one of those elusive titles I would often hear about but never got a chance to experience. You’ve got a bionic arm, you can’t jump, and you swing around and blow up Hitler“Master-D’s” head? Sounds kinda interesting, I suppose.

So it was a welcome surprise when Capcom released Bionic Commando Rearmed — a 2.5D remake of the NES original — last year, which I promptly downloaded. Most reviewers familiar with the original agreed that this remake was an overall improvement on an already great game. Having never played it myself  it was all new to me, but I mostly agreed; The game was challenging but enjoyable, and I could see why people liked the original so much. The fantastic “Neo Chip Tunes” style soundtrack was worth the price of admission alone.

Rearmed’s release was also a lead up to the fully 3D sequel, coming a full 20 years after the original version. The remake did a decent job of getting me a bit hyped up for this game, which was obviously Capcom’s intention to begin with. I liked Rearmed, so it makes sense that I’d like the sequel, right?

…right? *cricket noises*

In the original Bionic Commando and Rearmed, you play as Nathan ‘RAD’ Spencer — the titular Bionic Commando — as you’re sent into enemy territory to rescue Joseph ‘Super Joe’ Gibson, who has been captured after he himself was sent in to take down the baddies before they inact their evil scheme (ie. resurrect Hitler ‘The Leader’) or whatever. It’s the kind of story you might expect from an NES game; it’s fairly simple and gets the job done, but it isn’t anything to write home about. Rearmed cleaned up some of the more glaring story inconsistencies as well as expanding the backstory a bit, but otherwise it’s fairly similar.

So how do you follow up an NES story 20 years later? By making it SUPER SERIOUS of course. That’s not to say Rearmed wasn’t serious; It was serious in an old Captain America comic kind of way (ie. lighthearted at times). The newBionic Commando – on the other hand — is serious in the “we want you to think this is important” way. And when the plot of your game is predictable and mediocre, making it take itself so seriously results in an overall silly story. Such is the case of Bionic Commando. (Protip: I’ll be spoiling the story in a moment, so stop reading now if you care)

10 years after the end of Rearmed, Spencer (voiced by Mike Patton, aka all the infected in Left 4 Dead) — who you know is SUPER SERIOUS because he swears a lot — is released from prison by Super Joe (Steve Blum, aka Spike Spiegel, aka every 3rd voice in everything ever). He was imprisoned because of the ‘Bionic Purge’, but that’s not really important to the story. What is important is that some pro-Bionic terrorists have detonated a bomb in a city and Joe sends you in to deal with it,  with the promise of information on your (missing) wife to give you a little push. Joe’s bastardly mustache and general demenor may not be telling enough to the more sheltered gamers, but anyone with simple knowledge of how plot twists work can tell he is the bad guy of this tale straight off the bat.

Why he’s the bad guy, I still don’t fully know; Maybe I wasn’t paying attention by the end or they just didn’t explain it well enough. It had something to do with bionics I guess, since he was secretly (or not so secretly) leading the terrorist group. In fact, there are quite a few elements of this story that seem important but are either poorly explained or just vauge. There’s a girl with bionic legs named Mag who’s with the group that seems to have a troubled past with Spencer which is vaugely skirted around; so vauge, in fact, that I did not really care when she got crushed by a robot. There’s also a mysterious sniper who shows up breifly near the start and saves you near the end, who may have some connection to Spencer or something. In this case, it’s vauge enough that even Spencer doesn’t seem to know who the fuck he is, and he promptly vanishes without a trace.

And then there is the whole story with Spencer’s wife. Joe wasn’t lying about having information, but the information in question is kinda baffling: bionics need a human catalyst to bond with their host, so Spencer’s wife became that catalyst. Soooo, his wife’s dead and they made her into the arm? Or his arm IS his wife? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, frankly. All of this feels like they tried to add depth to a story that was too shallow to begin with. To top things off, they had the nerve to leave the ending ambiguous as to Spencer’s fate, which is just as bad as someone popping up on screen and saying, “The End…?” while shruging their shoulders and raising their eyebrows a few times.

But enough about the story; how’s the game from a mechanics stand point? Well, it ranges from competent to poor. Once you get the swing mechanic down, it’s quite enjoyable to whiz through the environments (even if you do flail about from time to time), and there are certain setpieces where the swinging and the combat just go together with the environment so well (the Archives come to mind) that I found myself smiling. Using the bionic arm as a weapon, however, is where you get into problems. Grabbing enemies to use the zip-kick and finishers (pretty much a requirement when you fight all the mechs later on) suffers from the finicky nature of the auto-aim. If you’re even slightly off, you arm will instead grab the ground/walls or possibly nothing at all, leaving you either to reposition yourself to try again or falling to your doom if you happened to be in the air at the time. Said doom comes either from water you have a high chance of not being able to escape from in some cases due to there not being anything close enough to grapple, or “Radiation” which is Bionic Commando’s answer to invisible walls, except for the fact that these walls kill you. About 40% of the time you can see where the radiation is due to a blue haze, but there are still plenty of invisible spots that are lurking about. Quite a few times I died due to swinging too high/low and (due to inertia) was unable to escape the invisible field of radiation in time.

Speaking of dying, the majority of my deaths in this game were purely due to shoddy mechanics/invisible radiation; enemies and even bosses vary rarely posed a threat unless I happened to not be paying attention during a fight. And this was while I was playing on the Hard difficulty setting (just for the extra Trophy, shut up). The bosses in particular were a joke (all 3 of them), with the final boss (Joe in a mecha for some reason) being nothing but a Quick Time Event/Cutscene. Which is actually kinda odd since up till that point there were no QTEs in the game at all. So in the end, I hit some buttons, headbutted Joe’s face in, and ‘won’. If you can even call it winning.

This game was a disappointment. I was entertained for awhile near the start, but it became bland quickly. For those of you who haven’t played Rearmed, I would suggest you go play that before you even consider trying this. It’s just a better and more enjoyable product all around. Also it’s cheap and you can buy it from the comfort of your couch/chair, so that’s a plus. Or you can just listen to the soundtrack some more.

The End… OR IS IT!?!?

Yes it fucking is.

I’ve been contributing to Grump Factory, is all. I’ll try to put some more non-review style stuff here soon though.

I seem to do this every so often… post awhile, then go into a long slump, and show up again and repeat.

I’ll try to break the cycle this time. Hopefully.

eatsomepamcakes, originally uploaded by thatguynoonelikes.

Saw The Golden Army today. A definite improvement on the first one.

After seeing the prince whip out those blade skills, Guillermo better direct the Drizzt movie if they ever make one.

scoutinitup, originally uploaded by thatguynoonelikes.

Drawn while @ work.

Those big shot Scouts are so full of themselves, the JERKS.

zack_junk, originally uploaded by thatguynoonelikes.

Magus told me to draw Zack so THIS IS WHAT HE GETS.

atsabkun, originally uploaded by thatguynoonelikes.

Dr. Atsab from Autobomb, by the wonderful YAM (aka Amy Johnson)

He’s a crazy genius, has a giant robot, hangs out with a talking bug who likes to smoke… What more do you need to know?