Michael Douglas is Falling Down

I watched Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down" today and figured I'd do some kind of review for it.I've never ventured into the realm of movie reviews so please forgive me if this isn't what you normally would expect from one.

To give a quick synopsis of the movie it essentially goes like this, Michael Douglas is angry, Michael Douglas smash. Done deal. That's essentially the majority of what actually happens in the movie, the main character, Bill, is frustrated with life and he finally snaps and begins to take it out on the people of L.A. At the same time it's his daughter's birthday and he wants to make it to her in time to give her a present and at the same time he decides to leave a mess of destruction behind him.

While Bill is on his rampage. the movie does a good job of making him seem almost justified for his actions, well at the first half of the movie at least but I'll be getting to that a little later. There were times in the movie where I was almost rooting for him when he was off on his spree. He never seemed like he was trying to legitimately hurt innocent people he just wanted to fight stupid shit. My favorite example of this is when Bill went into L.A's local "Whammy Burger" and asked for breakfast, but they wont serve him because breakfast ended at 11:00 o' clock. It was 11:03. Quickly enough a gun is pulled out and food is then served.

Moments like this are what made me really feel good watching this movie. Self liberation, at first, seemed to be his motivating factor. There's something about the things he did that felt...right. Throughout the movie you even begin to root for Bill. Sure, he may be doing down right terrible shit, but hes taking a stand. Hes taking a stand in a world where its hard to do so. He's telling the world to fuck off because he needs to see his daughter on her birthday. In a world where we're put down by all the dumb rules that make no use in life but to annoy us and make our lives harder, seeing something like what Bill does in this movie go down is pretty great. Its like the whole "Stick it to the man" thing. Not exactly the same but on the same level.

I found it really interesting that every character besides the 3 leading roles were almost symbolic of this idea of the stupid bullshit we deal with in life. You have a homeless man with a selfish philosophy on life, who feels entitled to everything because he is homeless. You have a wife of a cop who is obsessed wit herself and is forcing her husband into retirement. Almost every extra character that is shown in this movie is just there to help add emphasis to this idea and ultimately lead the main character into madness even further. These characters almost justify every action of the main character. These characters are so unlikable that I could imagine myself taking some kind of action against them had they existed in real life.

Now around the second half of the film Bill starts to take an even deeper dive into insanity. At first his actions were reckless and wrong but they still had some control to them, they had some lawfulness. By the end of the movie he begins to terrorize his ex-wife to a point where it looks like its going to result in her death. This felt kind of odd for me. I liked this character but then his actions started to rub me the wrong way. After a while you start to understand him a little more and understand the tragedy that is his life. Because of his anger problems he had prior to his divorce with his wife he ended up pushing away his wife and kids. Getting fired from his job adds to the misery of this character, he ends up feeling cheated and alone. Bill has lost everything. The two things he cared about the most in life were taken away from him and ended up left with nothing but the same old stupid bullshit. He brought most of his misfortune on himself, but no one helped him in anyway, or cared. Its really sad in a way.

There was one scene that almost had me in tears, it was when Bill started watching old home videos of his family before the divorce. Everyone was happy and all that bullshit but then it cut to a video where he got in an argument with his wife. It really showed that darker side of Bill. Which in turn stopped the tears from coming. I felt conflicted again, the dark side pushed me away from the very likable parts of Bill.

Another scene that was really interesting was the final showdown between Bill and, to be retired cop, Martin Prendergast. These two characters are extremely similar in that they both have the same situation in terms of having to deal with people who treat them like shit. Martin goes through shit that is just as bad as Bill's but deals with it in a diferent way. He even has a line that essentially sums it up when he says that even though he has been treated like crap it doesn't give him the right to terrorize people. I really loved how these two really contrasted from eachother but held so much similarity in the end.

Yeah...Falling Down is a pretty cool film. I recommend it.

The Summer Long Back Blog

At the start of 2009 I promised myself that during the summer I would finally go back to a bunch of games in my back log. At the same time I also decided that I wanted to help improve my writing and work ethic, as you can see from the time stamps on my posts I'm really inconsistent when it comes to updating. After a lot of thinking I came up with an idea for a new feature I could write for this blog: The Summer Long Back Blog (See what I did there).

So here's how its going to go down, I have a list of the games I want to finish by the end of my summer vacation, which is the 31st of August. Every week I will update on my progress with the game I'm currently on, I'll be talking about my impressions of the game and things of that nature. I'll be writing an update every Sunday, today not including since I just started my first game 2 days ago (The game I'm currently playing is Rogue Galaxy).

Here is the list of the games I'm aiming to finish, all of these are in the order that I'm going to play them in:

1. Rogue Galaxy
2. Shadow of the Colossus
3. Metal Gear Solid 3
4. Yakuza
5. Kingdom Hearts
   
6. Kingdom Hearts 2
7. Final Fantasy 10

Hefty list I know, but I'll work at it. I'm not really planning on finishing all of them I just want to get to at least 3.

Alright so that's the quick update I'm going to go now I've got gaming to get to.

The will to game and how I lack it also, Prototype

I don't know what it is about me but I have a hard time actually starting up a game. I don't get it. There's a part of me that is just too lazy to bother popping in a game disc. I don't know, sometimes I think I have a hard time because I don't feel like investing the time into a game. Its starting to become a hassle for me. I mean, I still like games but the barrier of entry for the ones I do want to play are long.

I think it might be all the long JRPGS I have on my plate that seem to be the problem. I just hate the feeling of starting one and loading up the menu screen and starting a new game because every time I do I can't stop thinking of the other fucking Atlus game I got sitting on my counter and how I need to finish that one also. Because of this I've been trying to go the route of playing games that I can easily pick up with a quick start up. Which is why I Picked up Prototype.

Alright segue time! Prototype. It's pretty good. But it also frustrates me so much. This game is essentially an amalgamation of Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Crackdown, which I'm sure you've heard before. At first this sounds like a good mix, the bad assness of the two games mixed in a pot to form a super bad ass...pot...or something. But then I come to remember the horrible memories I've repressed from my experience with Hulk: Ultimate Destruction: The game was frustrating as all hell. And surprise surprise, its the same deal with Prototype.

You are a fucking bad ass in this game...when you're not fighting anything. Okay, well that's not true, if you beat the shit out of a civilian or something to that degree, you're a bad ass but if anything with a gun or some kind of rocket dispensing cylinder (IE a stupid fucking rocket launcher) you're boned. I can't help but not understand why I can't stop some fuck in a tank when I can leap buildings and do elbow drops from the clouds. The game literally says "When fighting other military forces your own powers won't suffice, using military weapons will help." Uh...why? I CAN ASSUME ANY FORM I CHOOSE AND GROW TENTACLES. Its annoying. I understand that they don't want the game to be too easy but honestly, this is far more frustrating. Having all these cool abilities go to waste is stupid. There are other ways to add difficulty to the game. Just the idea that I have all these amazing powers and that they are pretty much useless makes me angry as hell.

The worse thing about this game is that it will force you to use tanks and things of that nature to move to certain areas in certain missions. Why? Because I need to escort some girl to her safe house. Seriously? I need a slow tank for this? I can leap buildings. Put the bitch in my hands and I will get her to the house in no fucking time. What, are you afraid I might drop her? I'll grow a tentacle and grab her or something, I don't fucking know.

I like this game a lot, but I also hate it. I know, its an odd conundrum I got going on here. Prototype is one of those games where I love a bulk of it but again, like Assassin's Creed, makes me angry with small annoyances. Frankly, I'm done with having patience for that shit, some people can look right past those kind of things but I'm am so done with having to hold a stress ball while I play my video game (I don't actually do that).

I hate Assassin's Creed, I hate Ubisoft

Okay, so maybe I don't hate the whole of Ubisoft but I do fucking hate the Assassin's Creed team.

"But Why?" you might ask, well a lot of this hate has arose out of the frustration I've had while playing through Assassin's Creed. This game makes me extremely angry, and here's why:

The game has a lot of opportunities to build an extremely interesting game but only scratches the surface.

I like being an Assassin. The parts of the game where you really become an assassin are where the game really shines. Trying to successfully assassinate someone while trying to avoid detections is done so well in this game. When I say trying to avoid detection I don't mean killing someone and hiding the body in the dark for no one to see it all quietly and such, I mean killing someone in broad daylight in a busy shop district and running through a series of obstacles leaving the scene of the crime. I always hated the slow pace of most stealth games; having to wait for a target to come to a safe distance from you to kill them, having to find a safe spot to hide the body. Fuck that, I want to take someone out in the thick of the madness and get out of the open streets undetected, you know, something that really gets my adrenaline running.

I feel like Assassin's Creed really does this well in the assassination missions. The real problem I have here is that these missions and the ones leading to the assassinations themselves are super repetitive. I realize saying this isn't an original critique to the game, but it's true. The first few assassinations you do are great and well designed, I wont question that. The problem is that they rehash the same mission EVERY SINGLE TIME. Nearly everything you do is the same; to the way the sequences in the missions play out, to the mission's objective themselves. You walk into a new town and talk to the dispatcher at the Bureau, he tells you that need more info on the target, you scout the area for missions and do them.

The Assassin's Creed team has this weird problem where they fall into routine, its like going to school or doing office work. You know, when you get so used to doing the same shit over and over that your work begins to look the same all across the board. Assassin's Creed feels like that to me. I've noticed the same problem with the Prince of Persia game that came out recently.

What pisses me off about this is that there seems to be so much potential in this IP; relatively interesting story with limitless potential for new worlds to explore, it has an interesting twist on the stealth genre, characters that are compelling (I fucking hate that word) enough to follow. but as it stands they're just scratching the surface of what they can be doing.

Another thing that keeps me frustrated is the game's ability to consistently keep the player annoyed. In combat people will throw you around. It doesn't really do any damage, it doesn't really effect you much at all. All it does is break up the flow of combat. It creates this overwhelming nagging feeling when in a fight. Also, why the fuck is there a need to have beggars and drunks who throw you around? It hardly makes things challenging. Its just another annoyance. This isn't creating difficulty for the player, its not challenging anyone, its just testing someone to see how tolerable they are to stupid bullshit. Its ridiculous, is this how they thought they were going to build a vibrant real world? How the fuck does this equate to a real world experience in any way?

I want to like this game a lot, something in AC compels me. I want to enjoy it but there is so much bullshit built up in this game that it really stops me from even remotely enjoying this game. I still can't understand for the life of me why people raved so much about Assassin's Creed. We shouldn't be supporting game design like this, we should encourage people to break out of these trends. And what makes it worse is that this game has a sequel, and I guarantee that no lessons we're learned, we're going to get the same old garbage and everyone is going to love it.

Fuck Ubisoft.