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Texas Chainsaw Massacre

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Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas are those that hit us the hardest, and none more so than the people we come across in the middle of nowhere. Texas Chainsaw Massacre debuted in 1974 and immediately became known as one of the most shocking, disturbing movies of all time and yet the movie is bloodless, brilliantly forcing our imaginations to carry us to those dark sinister places. The 2003 remake was good in my opinion; as a kid I preferred the remake but as a adult I can appreciate what made Hooper’s classic so terrifying. Both start with the same premise, a group of friends are traveling through the back roads of Texas and find a hitchhiker on the road. In the original, its a creepy ass dude with a red patched face who is obsessed with meat and photographs who suddenly becomes hostile, setting the pictures of the kids on fire when they refuse to pay him, cutting himself and then one of there friends before getting thrown out; in the remake, it’s a pale young woman bleeding between her legs who immediately begins weeping, muttering that her family is dead, they are going to die, and a very bad man before drawing a gun hidden between her legs and killing herself. The original is slow building, almost letting us get bored as nothing happens even when the kids find a creepy old house they came to find. There doom comes from the nice manor with the long grass lawn. Through the screen door we see the crimson walls, animal bone decorations, and heavy silver door we assume leads to a basement. Suddenly the door opens when our victim is near, revealing a tall man in a apron and disturbing leather mask with a mallet as he strikes and we watch the body flail, hear the bone crack with every strike, and the final thunder of the door slamming as we end the intro of Leatherface. Leatherface picks the kids off one by one as we learns all the people the friends come in contact with are part of one big macabre family of cannibals that sell human barbecue. The dinner scene at the end of the original is one of the most influential horror scenes of all time, where we are treated to sheer madness. In the end, our heroine survives at the cost of her sanity, covered in blood laughing wildly as Leatherface dances with his chainsaw in the sun rise. So what’s the difference between the two iterations? The original is very grainy and filmed without a score, the actors look like real people; there wasn’t a moment during it felt like a Hollywood picture but some kind of found footage or crime show reenactment. That’s the remakes fatal flaw. The remake is entertaining and suspenseful but with the glossy cinematography, professionally composed score, and actors you’ve seen before- you know damn well it’s just a movie. Gunnar Hanson will always be the true Leatherface, may he too rest in peace; he has a beautiful moment of pathos in the original after killing one of the girls where he seems regretful and saddened by what he’s done but slowly we see him begin to smile through the mask in the natural sunlight. Both actors did a great job but Hanson rocked it. I highly recommend both but more so the original, which you maybe able to find on Youtube for free. May the gaming gods bring you glory, and may you never experience the real life horror of “one of the most shocking and sadistic crimes in the annals of American history: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

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Tobe Hooper, R.I.P

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I’ll keep this short and sweet my friends; yesterday we lost another horror legend: Tobe Hooper, the man who gave us The Funhouse, Poltergeist, and of course The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a sadly underappreciated film that brought a gritty realism to a slasher story about a group of kids and a very unfriendly family; I find myself having to convince many it is in fact just a movie. 26 years old I can’t escape the chills Ii get watching a beautifully simple movie that changed how we look at a genre taken for granted. So on behalf of Savior and I, R.I.P Tobe Hooper, you will be missed.

Aliens Vs Predator (2010)

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Well this game kinda bummed me out. I watched playthroughs for the earlier games in the series and was blown away by how true it looked. Get to this and…bummer. So we play a campaign as each race: Colonial Marine, Alien, and Predator. Of the three I’m going to straight up tell you Predator is best, followed by Alien, then the marine. The plot is basically the movie- there’s a pyramid underground and greedy intergalactic shenanigans ensue. From a story point I enjoy the story of specimen 6 in the Alien campaign best- a alien smarter than most that escapes captivity and kicks ass all the way to Queen status. Marine again is the worst.

Since I started with the Alien, lets just bang it out: it’s a stealth game. As an alien you are fast, crawl on walls and vents and have claws and tail at your disposal. I like the realism of being able to break lights for dark cover and the way your prey reacts to your growl and how not moving screws with them finding you via motion tracker. Many of your kills come from long, prompted stealth kills that look epic but sure as hell ain’t stealthy and ain’t fast. Good chance your “stealth kill” will get you killed. Your claws and tail are helpful to a degree but only against one, maybe two enemies at a time max. Movement is fast but can easily get disorienting and sometimes the controls are unresponsive which sucks. The final boss is two regular predators, followed by an Elite which all three are pretty wimpy; seriously they keep running from you while pot shooting with their shoulder guns. Remember the 5 D’s of dodgeball and you’ll be fine.

Predator, the best of the three campaigns. You play as an elite Predator hunting the fabled abomination that is the Predalien, which is the best final boss of the game. You have the wrist blades, shoulder gun, smart disc, and combi stick as well as proximity mines, voice changer, cloaking device, and three vision modes. I would have liked if the movement was a little bit more nimble but it’s fine. It’s the most fun in the game, stalking idiot humans and killing then again with horrific stealth kills that suck at stealth but these are quicker and frankly more badass. Sadly, it ain’t long.

Last is the marine. Gulp. You get a pistol as default and can carry two weapons at a time, plus flares, grenades, and motion tracker. So apparently you must be really badass because you can block the alien head on and actually shove them on there asses- sure and I crap solid gold. Seriously, after a while it starts to feel like a shitty boxing game invaded my FPS game. What about the predator you wonder, how do you stack up against him? Well you don’t. Literally the predator has less time in your campaign than Joker in Suicide Squad. Also, strip club full of aliens- I’m not fucking kidding, a strip club full of aliens, poles, kinky music and strobe lights, the whole shabang. Final boss is Bishop…yep and pretty much it’s the dumbest boss fight I ever played.

Overall, you can skip this game but if you have to get it, least it’s better than Colonial Marines.

Alien and Predator: Fire and Stone

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Fire and Stone is a four book Prometheus, Aliens, and Predator crossover from Dark Horse comics that spans multiple stories of multiple characters. It begins immediately after Prometheus with a crew going to find what happened to the doomed ship on planet LV-223. They begin to find the strange creatures on a planet they thought barren- the products of the Engineer’s black pathogen. As they go deeper and an experiment with the pathogen is conducted on a synthetic named Alden, they come across the horrors of the Xenomorph. After a massacre by the aliens, comes a threat by a mutated Alden and the Predator lurking in the background, seeking vengeance on the Engineer that wounded him.

So this is kinda a weird story to cover because there’s so much going on and each story is remarkably different. The Prometheus book and Predator book, were tied for my favorites. The Prometheus book is straight up mayhem and wickedly bad ass monsters

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The Predator book is a cool revenge of the strange alliance between a Predator and a human, ending in a sweet fight between Predator and Engineer. If I had to pick a weak link it was the Aliens book, which really didn’t have many aliens in it, but the story was just kind of meh. The art is the best thing about the series, every book has it’s own unique art style and are gorgeous to behold. Overall Fire and Stone is a cool crossover with great artwork but it’s not my favorite Alien piece and doesn’t answer much of the questions Prometheus asked. The series goes: Prometheus-Aliens-Aliens vs. Predator- Predator.

Nailbiter: vol 1 there will be blood

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This year I’ve really gotten worn out on the standard superhero comics and I wanted to branch out and see what else there was out there. Nailbiter from Image comics quickly became one of my favorites. Nailbiter is the story of Buckaroo, Oregon, a town responsible for breeding 16 serial killers- the most famous being Edward Charles Warren, the Nailbiter they called him because of how he would chew his victim’s finger’s to the bone before killing them. In a very publicized case, Warren was found not guilty and the legend of the Buckaroo Butchers bloomed. Nicholas Finch, a army interrogator, goes to Buckaroo looking for his missing friend, Eliot Carrol, a investigator trying to connect the mystery of the Butchers together. Finch quickly meets the town’s sheriff, Shannon Crane, once Warren’s childhood girlfriend. In fact, Finch begins to discover many of the towns residents are either descendants of the Butchers or somehow connected to them- it’s a small town they say. Finch and Crane are lead to Warren, living a regular quiet life despite his epic pariah status. When questions start being asked, a new killer arises and it’s not Nailbiter…

Nailbiter is a cool story with some pretty creepy imagery. The lore of the Butchers alone got me hooked. I really couldn’t put it down. The tone feels very reminiscent of a blue collar Silence of the Lambs or Seven if James Gunn directed it in his Slither days. I really can’t wait to see what happens next. If you want to get into comics but superheroes aren’t your thing, give Nailbiter a try; I found the first few volumes super cheap on amazon super cheap. You guys are awesome, and may the gaming gods bring you glory because…

nailbiter “there’s enough to go around.”

Alien: Isolation

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After the heartbreak of a game I will not mention because I spent yesterday shitting all over it- ok dude it was Colonial Marines, and it really really shitty- I was really really skeptical when it was announced we were getting another alien game a tad bit over a year later. But I can tell you from the opening trailer I was hooked. Alien: Isolation takes place between the first and second movie, following Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda who has grown up not knowing what happened to her mother. An engineer, she learns from a Company synthetic Samuels, that a ship docked at Sevastopol Station carrying the Nostromo’s flight recorder. She boards the Torrens on a journey to retrieve it. After disastrous events trying to cross into Sevastopol via space-walk, Amanda finds herself alone on a station that has seriously seen better days. Ravaged inside, graffiti plastered all over the walls, bodies in the halls, Ripley is immediately afraid. She has a brief encounter with a guy named Axel who explains to her that bad things that gone on, riots, looting, the Joes, and something else…Ripley soon discovers what it is. A creature of unknown origin that is damn is faster than any human, cunning and extremely hostile. Beside the alien hunting Ripley and the scared shitless looters, the station’s synthetics the Working Joes have gone mad and begun not only murdering the survivors but actually protecting the creature. Every turn Ripley discovers there is nothing she can but try to outsmart the treachery and discover her mother’s fate, discovering her mom’s similar experience.

I’m not a fan of stealth games really but I have to say this is the closest we’ve ever had to experiencing the original film. The atmosphere, music, and details are miraculously recreated for the game, even the alien’s design is beautifully rendered from Giger’s original work. The story is drawn out a bit too long in places but the plot is well told, and Amanda Ripley is a good, vulnerable heroine that we feel push herself to overcome the insane odds against her. Rather than shooting your problems away, you have to craft items to outsmart the dangers of Sevastopol. The AI for this game is top notch; when the alien is hunting your ass down it feels like a real animal is chasing you. My only real complaint is that the controls are a little clunky and at time the rare save points can be a major pain in the ass. Also, as Savior pointed out in his list of Disappointing games, if you aren’t a major fan of the franchise, you may find much harder to get in to. There is a lot of walking around and many of your objectives get tedious after a while but I found the game intriguing and suspenseful. If you guys played it, what did you think- comment down below. If you love Alien, I seriously recommend it or if you like good stealth horror games, pick it up. As always, may the gaming gods be with you and…

isolation2 don’t run…or shoot…or screw up or yanno…kisses!

Evil Within

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Released a week after Alien: Isolation, I was n horror geek nirvana when this casserole of madness and blood hit the scene. Created by the man responsible for the original Resident Evil, we’re thrown back to the origins of survival horror gaming- disturbing monsters, lack of ammo, frightening atmosphere, and a lurking sense of dread behind every twist and turn this and Isolation capture beautifully. We get omages to classic Resident Evil with a play style reminiscent of 4, nods to Silent Hill, Saw, F.E.A.R, all thrown into a blender with a book of acid and it’s awesome. We follow Sebastian Castellanos, Krimson City Detective with a haunted past, his partners Joey Oda and Juli Kidman as they investigate a massacre at a mental hospital. In the camera footage Sebastian sees a scarred man in a white hoodie is the perpetrator-than the headache and the light. Suddenly he’s hanging upside down by his ankle amongst other bodies by a grisly sadist. He chases us through his complex liar with a chainsaw, until, wounded we break free only to be greeted by a massive earthquake that devastates the city. Suddenly Sebastian is thrown into utter madness by Ruvik (voiced brilliantly by Jackie Earle Haley I might add) whose out to rewrite reality in his twisted image via STEM device, making us ask at the end, what really is real?

I’m a huge fan of this game, but I’m not not blind to it’s flaws. Grapically it’s gorgeous, the loading screens are eerie as hell; the game play is difficult but fun. Besides enemies, there are booby-traps littered throughout and much like Dishonored we can play the game a variety of ways which was really cool. The score is creepy and I love the opening theme song. What I found found really original is having to cross a whole other dimension to save and upgrade yourself and gear, Claire de Lune will never be the same for me because of this damn game. Now, the negatives. With the exception of Haley as Ruvik, the voice acting is stiff and even bland. Sebastian may as well be ordering his morning coffee while being chased by the demonic memory of Laura, Ruvik’s sister. At a point the game starts to drag around chapter 13 or so and there are bullshit deaths around the game. In the end it doesn’t have much of a replay value in my opinion, after beating it on PS3 and unlocking new game +, I put the game down and haven’t played it through since early 2015. Overall, it’s a flawed masterpiece but definitely worth a go. If you’re a horror fan and like Resident Evil, you’ll enjoy it…caution, this game is freaky.

Mars Attacks!

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I’ve been a Tim Burton fan for many years and I’m hoping Beetlejuice 2 kicks ass, so last night I found Mars Attacks on Hulu and said why not because I never got to watch the whole thing before. I had fun with it this this goofy 50’s science fiction comedy. Pretty much the plot is in the title- Martians come to earth and well, attack. I have to say I love Jack Nicholson as the President- Jack’s always a welcome addition to any movie in my opinion. Also it was really cool to have such a wide range of actors like a young Natalie Portman, Jack Black, and Sarah Jessica Parker to more veteran actors like Nicholson, Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, and Michael J. Fox. The movie’s effects surprisingly hold up twenty one years later, achieving the retro 50’s alien vibe I really dig. The action scenes are cool and there’s some fun dark comedy spread throughout. While not personally my favorite Burton film, it still reminds me of better days and it’s a good time for Burton fans and retro sci-fi nerds. As always, thanks for checking us out and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

alienscm Well thank you Gearbox for that long five years waiting for this steaming clump of horseshit that’s been marinated in balsamic vinaigrette and Capuchin monkey piss for a year in a hot parking lot…this game thoroughly displeased me if it ain’t apparent. I read the first reveals of it in a Game Informer from 2008 or 9 and thought “holy shit, this could be my dream/ nightmares come true, the real deal Aliens experience.” Sorry young Torsten, sorry lil buddy, because five years later you’ll get a double dump for a 22nd birthday present- Dead Space 3 and this steamer…I think I almost started crying just thinking about that level of disappointment.

So the story takes place between 3 and Resurrection and brings us back to Hadley’s Hope, though I don’t know how that’s possible after the giant nuclear explosion at the end of Aliens but ok, YTF not. We play as a soldier with no personality so I can’t remember his name, or his equally lifeless squad with there dipshit AI… ok seriously, Alien fan or not, if you just want a game to play there’s millions of others to play or you could read a book or learn interpretive dance. The AI for both your partners and enemies are astoundingly stupid, the aliens disappear for a while and for a period the game becomes a lousy Battlefield knockoff which you can tell it wasn’t designed for, nor a stealth game at one point which the special aliens you deal with there are more laughable than scary- oh how Savior and I jovially laughed. You will die a lot, but I guarantee 90% of your deaths will be complete bullshit cheap shot deaths. And I have to bring up the last straw that made me fly into a blood boiling Atrocitus level hell rage worthy of a red lantern- the damn inventory setup. So like most modern shooters like Battlefield, you can carry 2 or 3 guns and maybe some additional things like a health pack or grenades, that’s totally fine. Most you can drop and swap weapons, again totally fine. I keep running low on ammo, being told I was maxed out on other ammo for guns I didn’t think I could possibly possess. I pressed every button, went into the damn strategy guide and nothing, and finally my two friends I shared this whole experience with recommended trying to hold in buttons and lo and behold holding the switch button unfolds a huge menu of fucking weapons, grenades, and other shit that would have been helpful. I was quite displeased. But Torsten, you may be asking, what of the multiplayer? I love couch co-op; this couch- co-op sucks ass. I was hoping like Borderlands, the couch co-op would have the Gearbox touch of enemies at least getting more strenuous and more abundant- nope. A good friend and I actually began arguing over who got to kill the damn things. And the final boss is pretty much over in 5 min so there isn’t even that to look forward to. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a ass Popsicle wrapped in pubes and old moldy bacon; Aliens: Colonial Marines is what what happens when you do believe it’s not butter, it’s starring into an eclipse for 5 minutes after spraying dish soap and lemon juice into your eyes, it’s just crap to the fiftieth power. Overall, friends don’t friends play Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Alien Resurrection: the game

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I used to be a major chickenshit as a kid; I wasn’t able to look at the covers for this and Alien trilogy without almost crapping my pants in utter terror. God, how much I’ve grown. So Alien Resurrection, a movie most people hated, got a video game in a time when if you had a movie you had to have a game. Whereas Trilogy was kind of a Doom clone, Resurrection actually broke some new ground at the time. In the Alien Resurrection game we see a lot modern FPS mechanics come into play; we were able to easily aim and shoot as opposed to many other shooters that were still getting it down. For the time the graphics were fine but now they turned to dogshit by today’s standards

alienr game2 Do you see what I mean? Playing this in early 2001 to 2003, this game was scary as hell. Also there is a really sweet idea in the game I’m pissed hasn’t been used in a alien game since; if you get hit by a face-hugger you don’t die automatically but your time is short and the alien will kill you from the inside if you don’t remove it from a hidden surgical station somewhere in the stage. The game is difficult and a little clunky but there’s one bastard of problem that makes it irritating as shit. Save points are ridiculously few and far between and in Souls fashion, you die- see you at the beginning of the stage mofo and if you don’t have a memory card, well, sucks to be you dude. Seriously, you start as Ripley 8 with no gun. You don’t casually find one on a dead body or given it in a helpful cut scene, nope, you gotta search for that damn thing because there comes a point guards starting shooting at you and you can’t punch. Overall it ain’t a bad game, it has a creepy atmosphere and the fact you are so fragile and there’s few saves adds a lot to the tension. Its on PS1 and PC and worth a try. May the gaming gods bring you glory and a memory card.