So recently I've started to get into the world of unplugged gaming, also known as board games. Or more specifically, Battletech. This past weekend I was able to talk my LAN gaming group into giving Battletech a try. Even though a few were a bit unsure about playing a tabletop game, every one enjoyed it. Even the player who was the most unsure of the game was shouting with joy when he scored successful hits after a few turns.
We played a simple grinder where everyone has one 'Mech, which starts as a light class and moves up to a bigger 'Mech when their current 'Mech is destroyed. We never made it past the medium 'Mechs due to starting much later than we should, but it was a blast. The most suprising was one player started with the Jenner light 'Mech and was able to go the game without taking any damage, but was able to pull off several sneak attacks successfully.
Since everyone enjoyed it, I'm going to put together an actual scenario next time with teams instead of every man for themselves. Should be fun.
Well, 14 years actually. The game that most thought would never be is finally here, Duke Nukem Forever. With its tumultuous development history, its rather amazing that a product ever actually made it market. Its massive hype built up simply for being vaporware and the butt of jokes for years makes this a most difficult game to analyze, its impossible to look at it in a complete vacuum, and even doing so would lose sight of both where the game succeeds and where it fails.
Overall, I'm rather late to reviewing the game (UPS got me game later than expected), and the reviews so far haven't been kind to Duke at all. Chances are you've already read a few of these reviews, but there was a worrying trend in many of the reviews that I surprised me that I'd like to point out before I start my review proper. Many reviews slammed Duke for its content. Or rather how offensive its content is, but claimed Duke Nukem 3D itself wasn't this way... which couldn't be farther from the truth. I wonder if the gaming press (and many fans at large) haven't played Duke Nukem 3D in recent years, because the crass humor (such as implied rape) and the bad delivery of the jokes in Duke Nukem Forever was all featured in Duke 3D. In fact, one of my biggest issue with Forever is how much it simply recycles from Duke Nukem 3D. So if you're easily offended or can't get in the mind set of a 14 year boy, you're best ignoring the game entirely. Duke hasn't grown with its audience, he's the same pervert he was in the mid-90's.
Also, there a ton of complaints about the graphics, yes they are dated, and can be inconsistent, but with the length of development; I'd be surprised if they weren't. I've also heard of texture pop in problems, but that seems to be a console exclusive issue, on the PC the only time I have textures pop in was after alt+tabbing the game. I can also safely say the PC version's load times are quick and painless unlike the console versions.
Now that I have that out of the way, time for the real review of what matters, the gameplay. Everyone should already know if they like the Duke attitude or not by this point if they're a gamer, due to how much Duke Nukem 3D influenced the industry in the late 90's.
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Last night I got to go to an advanced screening of the movie Attack the Block thanks to /Film. I'd been following the film from before its break out showing at SXSW, and I have to say the movie lived up to my heightened expectations while subverting them to a degree. I was expecting something in the vein of Shaun of the Dead, but instead I got something more akin to the 80's kid adventure films like the Goonies crossed with 80's horror sensibilities. The movie still managed to be as hilarious as the trailers promised, if not more so.
What impressed me most though was how well the horror was handled, it was more suspenseful at times than most modern "horror" movies. I also thought the score was nicely done. Its industrial and electro score, that is ambient when needed to set a mood, but kicks up the intensity nicely when needed. And at times it reminded me of the sound effects from Space Invaders. The acting was good overall, and I can see John Boyega who played the main character Moses as having a nice career (in the UK) launched by this film.
The weakest part of the film though is its plot resolution, skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want spoilers. The sudden discovery of the reason for the attacks and Moses's self-sacrifical style plan (spoiler he doesn't die in it thankfully) felt a little too cliche to me, but I can't fault it too much, as I can't think of a better way of wrapping it up. I think maybe if they had spent a bit longer with them trying to come up with plan using the knowledge of the aliens motives, it would have seemed more natural, but it probably would hurt the pacing.
The advanced showing to me seemed to be thinly disguised test screening to see what, it anything needs to be changed for a wide release in America. I hope they change nothing, but I honestly don't see it doing well in a wide release in America. Like Scott Pilgrim it would be greatly loved by those who get it and be an instant cult classic, but it would be too weird for general public. The general public would have some difficulty with the slang, and overal British-ness of it.
I had been looking forward to Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins since I first saw the trailer for it last year. I can't claim to be huge fan of Miike since I've only seen three of his films before, Audition, Ichi the Killer, and Sukiyaki Western Django; but I greatly enjoyed them all.
Well, 13 Assassins was released in America finally yesterday, not in theaters, but in video on demand. This isn't the first time I've heard of this happening, but its the first time it was a film I cared about seeing. I was going to originally rent it from the Xbox Live Marketplace (or Zune as they renamed it), but was off put on the price for the rental: $15 for HD, $10 for SD. Amazon VOD and iTunes both had HD for $10, but I had no easy way to get those to the HD TV without some work and I was feeling lazy, so I looked at other options. I would have rented it from PSN, but apparently Sony only puts up new rentals at the same time they put up new game content for download. So, I decided to look into the other service that was mentioned in the press release, VUDU. VUDU had it much cheaper than Zune, there was a PS3 app for it, and apparently they offered $6 in credit for creating a new account.
13 Assassins was excellent, its also one of Miike's most mainstream films from what I've seen. I can best describe it as Akira Kurosawa meets the Dirty Dozen, I highly recommend it to fans of samurai films. But what I really want to review is VUDU.
VUDU when its working is excellent, but it has a few issues. Since it is purely a stream service, with little to no pre-cache as far as I can tell, you can and probably will see a dreaded buffering screen. Thankfully, I only had one point in the film where it seemed to have problems about 15 minutes in, the rest played flawlessly. Sadly though, that one area was painful. After buffering a few times, it asked me if I wanted to switch to SD because my internet connection couldn't handle the speed needed. Yet the speed test in VUDU said I could handle the 1080p stream and I was only using the 720p stream, and I knew my internet connection was fine. After jamming keep watching in HD about five times, the rest of the movie played in HD just fine. What really annoyed me about it was that they charge more for HD, so if I paid more for HD, why would you even ask me to switch to SD? If you do, you need to offer a refund of the price difference for doing so. And it should not ask multiple times in a row to switch, that's just annoying to the end user. Overall, I don't have much to compare VUDU to, since I rarely rent anything, but it was decent. If a similar release happens to another film I'm interested in the future, I may use it again.
Last night I saw the world premiere of the Gantz movie as one of those Fathom Events that you often see advertised in theaters. It was first time I've been to one, so that was rather neat. You don't just watch the movie, you get to see a Live stream from the premiere in Hollywood introducing the film and the Q&A afterwards.
Gantz for those of you who haven't heard of it, is originally a manga about people who have died being gathered in a room with a black orb that tasks them hunting down aliens. The series is extremely violent and raunchy, but has, from what I've read (and saw in the anime series), a message about society and how evil man can be.
The movie is more or less a sanitized version of the same concept. It does deviate quite a bit from the original, mainly in an effort to greatly compress the story so it will fit in two movies and to make the protagonist, Kei Kurono, more likable. At times though, it feels like they may have cut too much, a lot of character interaction gets completely lost. A good example of this is in the Q&A after they brought up the fact that one of the characters was a teacher, but this was never mentioned in the film, I only knew from watching the anime. My friend who was with me who had no knowledge about Gantz before hand seemed to follow the movie well, but was confused by the Q&A because of that.
The movie's direction seemed solid, if not particularly inspired. The special effects were some of the best I've ever seen in a Japanese film, usually their CGI work is terrible, here it is passable. I wish I could comment on the acting, but the movie was dubbed. And the dub was horrendously bad, it lacked any emotion in scenes where the actors were crying their hearts out. Also, what subtitles they had for the on screen text were also poorly handled, white text on white is unreadable. This leads me to wonder how well done the translation was done in the first place.
Overall in spite of the localization problems, I enjoyed the film. I'm looking forward to seeing Gantz Part 2, if it comes as a Fathom Event, I just hope they subtitle it.
Two anime related blog posts in a row? I guess I'm becoming an anime blogger.
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