Batrock

Look, it’s the game of the year! It has an “Oscar worthy” storyline!
… then why is it so limited in scope, even compared to GTA III?

In the things you can’t unsee department: she has six fingers on her right hand.

On his first day out of prison for armed robbery, Jake Blues is picked up by his brother, Elwood, in a repurposed cop car. When they discover that the orphanage where they were raised by Cab Calloway is on the verge of being closed by the state, they decide to get their band back together and raise some righteous dough! Unfortunately, Elwood has not been the most diligent of drivers, kicking off a series of cross country car chases, run ins with Nazis, and good old fashioned rhythm and blues! With cameo appearances from Aretha Franklin, Carrie Fisher and James Brown.

Wait, am I thinking of the wrong game here? Niko Bellic, from somewhere in wartorn Eastern Europe, is picked up from the Liberty City docks by his dear cousin, Roman. Niko wants money, Roman has criminal connections: what could possibly go wrong? The line of dialogue “I’m barely struggling to make ends meet, Bernie!” when Niko has $400,000 in his pocket, that’s what.

Grand Theft Auto IV is, more accurately, the seventh in the series (nine if you count Liberty and Vice City Stories, ten if you count that London expansion way back in the day), but it’s the first one to use the shiny new engine, so it’s IV. Is it automotive insanity? Is it a dating simulator? Is it ridiculously obsessed with homosexuality (way more than I ever have been[!])? Yes, it’s all of the above. But I don’t know, I think it’s missing something.

Continue Reading »

You may recall that I wrote a very tangential piece a few months back that was, in theory about homosexual paths in video games, which then developed into a general theory that, for the most part, choice in video games is an illusion – and is closely tied into character or lack thereof.

I think that, in finally obtaining Mass Effect, I have discovered true choice and character! I have become quite attached to my plucky redhead Spectre LL Shepard and her ragtag squad consisting of a reptilian wonder, a Protoss with Saiyan technology, a blue hermaphrodite, a Snifit and, I guess, a couple of humans.

The thing about this game, I’m finding, is that it probably naturally gravitates towards the way that the player would consider situations in real life. If you know anything about it, you know that you get an answer wheel that can best be summarised by reading this page of Ass Effect. The upper options are the more “good” actions while the lower are the “evil” choices. The way I read the options, to be a rogue you’ve pretty much got to be a dick. I don’t feel like being a dick for no reason, so that’s not the way I’m playing the game. I don’t quite know why I, who tries to avoid confrontation in real life, am playing a game which involves shooting people and making their internal organs implode and disabling their brains the same way. If I break into someone’s compound and hold a brief meeting with them, well, this is the way it’s going to go:

Bullrush Antwerp: You should not have come here, Commander Shepard! I now command the galaxy’s entire ice cream supply!
Shepard: Are you sure that you need all of that ice cream? It could be used to assist the survivors of Eden Prime!
Antwerp: You fool! With all of this ice cream at my disposal, the children of the universe will be at my beck and call!
Shepard: Whoa, back off there, Antwerp. I can’t even remember having seen a child since I left Earth. All you’ve got here is a frozen asset that needs liquidation.
Antwerp: Now that I think about it, you’re entirely right. I guess I’ll go home. Here: have a tub for the road.

1250 EX +
Paragon 8+
Ice cream

However, maybe someone else would prefer to play it like this:

Bullrush Antwerp: You should not have come here, Commander Shepard! I now command the galaxy’s entire ice cream supply!
Shepard: Cut the crap, Antwerp: the sweet stuff’s all mine.
Antwerp: You can’t just take my ice cream from me! Do you have any idea how hard it is to organise the space freight on all of the ice cream in existence? I only stole the damn stuff because I couldn’t afford it after buying this storage station!
Shepard: That’s enough out of you!
Shepard shoots Antwerp, and kicks him into a vat of ice cream. As Antwerp sinks out of sight, Shepard puts her finger in the vat and tastes some of the ice cream.
Shepard: Aww yeah; that’s the stuff.

1250 EX +
Renegade 8+
Ice cream

That’s a really bad example because I actually like the idea of drowning someone in ice cream and tasting the spoils of victory. But the point is you can talk people down from stuff, like the time I dismantled a criminal syndicate through the power of words. Words that I had to level up to be able to use, mind, but words nonetheless.

The rest of the gameplay isn’t too shabby either, but the point I’m trying to make is that I feel like my choices have some small bearing on the outcome of the situation, while still making Shepard into a reasonable character. Of course, sometimes it strains credulity to be entirely Paragon like in nature, or just a total dick – and you can make contextual decisions without totally breaking character. It’s like in that other hit game I’ve quite enjoyed, Bass Effect: each time you catch a fish, you can choose to let it go, hit it with a hammer until it dies, or give it to a starving orphan. Different situations call for different solutions.

I’ll get back to you some more when I stop playing so many side missions and get further into the story proper. I’ll let you know, though: from 12 hours play, I’m enjoying this far more than I did GTA IV, but that’s another story entirely.

“You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry.”

All I ever write about is comic book movies. I don’t even read comic books. I was drummed out of the union for my positive stance on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so covering movies about CGI green dudes fighting exo-skeletors is my only stock-in-trade now.

Does anyone remember Ang Lee’s Hulk, the incoherent mess about radioactive dogs and (I think) electric jellyfish and the ravages that drugs can have on a career? I think that it may have been erased from the collective consciousness: Lee went on to make movies about shepherds with lousy work ethics and Chinese resistance groups; Eric Bana went on to fight for Israel in overlong movies about girls in red dresses; Jennifer Connelly protected diamonds from Tony Blair, was cuckolded by Kate Winslet, and somehow became more stunningly beautiful; Nick Nolte was eaten by a hog-goblin and has not been seen since.

The Incredible Hulk – it is not that movie! It can conceivably fit into the continuity, but it doesn’t have to. It’s basically a beautifully shot film with sketchy motivations from some of the characters and … well, sometimes it’s frankly Iron Man Lite. But that’s almost okay.

Continue Reading »

Hey guys, remember the 11th Japanese Film Festival? Shut up! We’re in Sydney Film Festival 2008! And we start with Japanese movies … Yeah, I’ll get there.

My first movie for this year’s festival was Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django, a Japanese Western starring Japanese people, speaking exclusively in English. In Toronto, they got subtitles but we weren’t given this luxury. It’s not too hard to understand, but it can be a struggle – but a struggle that you shouldn’t regret.

A gunman arrives in a town where two rival gangs search for a treasure of legend. Each tries to woo him over to their side, but the gunman is not to be swayed: he plays his own damned side.

This is a genre film. As much of a wank as it seems to say, a good man to appear in a genre film is Quentin Tarantino. He shows up in the first scene, and shoots a snake out of mid-air and cuts out the egg contained within. Then he shoots a bunch of guys … then he eats sukiyaki. When he returns to the movie much, much later, he has redefined steam punk, and his English has worsened. He’s a funny addition to the movie, but the movie is supposed to be funny and he totally fails to steal the limelight from any of the main cast – which includes a multiple personalitied sheriff, an old business lady with a mysterious sharpness about her, a leader who insists on being addressed as Henry, and gangs of what can be best described as walking anachronisms.
It also has a dance scene with accompaniment by a didgeridoo.

Yeah, this is a genre film all right.

Sukiyaki Western Django is weird, but not for weirdness’ sake. It’s the sort of movie that I love but also the sort that others love to dismiss as a bunch of wank. It is a sort of labour of love, dedicated to a mixture of samurai and Western ideals – which we have learned, over the last sixty odd years, are exactly the same thing. If you want to see a bizarre amalgam that really benefits from the inclusion of subtitles (even for Tarantino!), then this is exactly the right thing to go for. Some of the gun work is deliberately stupid, some people can take insane levels of beating and shooting, but it all ends with exactly the sort of song that should end this movie – and that makes it worth anyone’s while.