Opinion – Page 191 – Savior Gaming

Judge Dredd

judge dread

First I gotta start this review by giving a shout out to my friend Autobot who celebrated his birthday yesterday and gave me the idea to do today’s reviews; love ya kid. So I know the 90’s Judge Dredd film adaptation isn’t really looked upon highly- ok, I’ll bite, I know it’s in that so bad it’s good category- but that and Batman Forever made me want to create a superhero story of my own. I saw both films at the local drive-in with my parents and on big screen it was something mind blowing. Dredd’s first appearance on screen riding through the flames on his Lawmaster was imprinted in my memory as one of the most epic things I’ve ever seen.

Judge Dredd takes place in Mega City; a massive, overpopulated city where crime and anarchy takes hold on a daily basis. To keep peace and order, there are a police force that are judge, jury, and executioner all in one- the Judges, Joseph Dredd being a legend among them. Our story revolves around Dredd having to team with his best friend/partner/hidden crush Hershey and wimpy hacker Fergee have to team up to thwart a plot to dismantle the Judges from inside, leading Dredd to battle the law, Cursed Earth outside the city, and his own blood in the form of psychotic ex- Judge Rico.

So the question, how does this movie hold up 22 years later- oh shit I’m old- well it holds up fine as a 90’s action superhero movie. It ain’t Steele after all. It doesn’t hold to the dark, gritty, serious tone of the source material very much. We see Stallone’s face a lot, he smiles, there’s a ass load of one liners that hit and miss and the costume is a bit ornate but I still enjoy it. A lot of the acting is over the top and even cooky but I can’t help but like Stallone as Dredd; Max Von Sydow as Chief Justice was the best performance as well as a really good performance from Rob Schneider as Fergee. The Angel Family in the desert…I love them. A family of god loving cannibals that look like a futuristic Hills Have Eyes Family. My favorite part by far. Overall if you want a fun 90’s action movie, go for it, but if you want the real Dredd experience, watch the 2012 movie with Karl Urban- review later today. Thanks for reading, and as always, may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Cottage Country

cottage country

Todds plan is simple. Take his girlfriend to his parents cottage, propose marriage, get laid. His brother on the other hand decides to show up uninvited. When Todd accidentally kills his brother with an ax things only begin to go really wrong. After disposing of his brother and his brothers girlfriends body they come home to discover a raging party and the body count climbs even higher.

The movie in itself isn’t bad, but it doesn’t deliver on the laughs one would expect from a a movie staring Tyler Labine. I would honestly suggest checking out some of his other movies for example Tucker and Dale vs. Evil Review which was a far superior movie. Best of luck and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Final Fantasy 9 (PS4)

Every so often in gaming something happens that is a nice surprise. The other day I woke up to an e-mail about the sudden release of a classic from my childhood. Final Fantasy 9. The story of Zidane and Garnet on their quest to save the world. Sure there is much more to this amazing game, but most people know the story. They want to know, how does this hold up?

Well this port was given the full treatment. Beautiful HD graphics, trophy support ( as of the Saturday of release someone has already managed the Platinum) and just like the Final Fantasy 7 port its of the PC version and has some fun little cheat codes you can choose to use. If you never played before I would suggest skipping the max level stuff but if you just want the story that alone will make the game a breeze.

If you are a fan of the JRPG genre, the original release or the series you owe it to yourself to purchase this game. It is truly a treasure, and is easily one of the Best games ever made. Thanks for reading and may the gaming gods bring you glory

The Black Room

This movie is a bit odd. I can’t call it good, but I also won’t say it is bad. The movie starts out with a sleeping woman at her grandmothers house and some strange noises in the basement. The grandmother seems to know what it is going on and isn’t happy. The next part for lack of a better term ( ok for those that are a bit squeamish or easily offended please stop reading..seriously) anyway for lack of a better term the young but adult woman is raped by a ghost. Afterwards the grandmother is killed attempting to protect her granddaughter who is later burned badly.

Flash forward to a new couple buying the house and all hell breaks loose, more people are killed, bunch of nudity and more awkwardness of women alone in rooms having orgasms from a incubus demon. All in all the movie is entertaining in that what the hell am I watching way and is not well made in anyway. As always thanks for joining me and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Left Alive teaser

left alive

Within the last couple of days we got a teaser for Square Enix’s newest project: Left Alive. First mention of Square Enix, my thoughts go directly to Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, beautiful, colorful locations, and deep stories. That’s just me. Left Alive we get the hint some kind of war is happening. I noticed an emphasis on machines, so maybe a Terminator influence? I will not lie, the title automatically made me think of a zombie type of game, which c’mon, no more zombies. The trailer did it’s job, it made me curious to figure what the hell it’s about. Like what I would expect from the company, what I saw of it looked great and the combat looked somewhat like Just Cause, so it should be interesting. These were just some quick thoughts I had on the the first teaser and I’m sure I’ll talk more about it in the future. May the gaming gods bring you glory my friends.

5 Of My Favorite PS4 games

This list was a bit weird for me to make, there were tons of great games for this console so far, and in the end a big part of this was me saying hey I spent a ton of time on this game so it made the list. So here in no real order are 5 of my favorites.

stardew valley

Stardew Valley is essentially the new Harvest Moon except honestly better. After moving onto a farm from your grandfather you begin of course by meeting the towns folk and planting crops. From there you can raise animals, explore mines and go fishing and much much more.

persona 5

Persona 5 is possibly the best of the fantastic Persona series. From the moment this game starts it is a thrill ride of crime, fighting, exploration and oddly living the life of a high school student. Sounds weird but before I knew it 100 hours had passed and I still hadn’t finished this game. Any JRPG fan needs to play this.

bloodborne

Playing Bloodborne had a weird start for me. See after many days of Torsten bitching about Father Gascoigne and him challenging me to do better numerous times he lent me the game. I played a bit and gave it back and eventually bought my own copy. How dare he imply I couldn’t do better. What started as me playing simply to prove I could do better turned into what has been an obsession. The combat, the horror environment the transforming weapons everything became a quest to be a little better. All this time later and I still play this game at least a few times a month in my intermittent quest for the Platinum trophy.

ff15

I had very low expectations on Final Fantasy 15. The demo being pretty fun tho made me buy this game despite my hatred for pretty much everything after Final Fantasy 10. 100 hours later I had the platinum trophy and realizing this was the best installment since 10 and may be just as good.

kerbal

This is an off addition to this list for a few reasons. First the game is currently de-listed from the PlayStation store. It had so many issues not even limited to it occasionally deleting save files rumor has it the company that ported it over was fired and is being reported from scratch by a completely new company. That being said, I still had an insane amount of fun with this. Even failing resulted in a fun explosion and for some reason I could not help by get attached to my little green Kerbals, and feeling bad when I killed one.

So there we have it, 5 of my favorite PS4 games. hope you enjoyed and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Soma- what the hell is it? Week one

soma2

So my first week playing the game horror game Soma, and I’m pretty divided by it. I can’t completely tell you what the full plot is but I can tell you that the bastard above was a hour long pain in my ass. The story involves people consciousnesses into machines and it is eerie how the machines we encounter the blur the line between the perceptions of man and machine and reality. I’ve been chased by a “brute”, a ape like robot and I’ve noticed the great/shitty way the game handles its horror element. When nearby an enemy machine, Jarret’s brain starts freaking out, making the screen appear to glitch and blur, these affects intensifying the more closer you get. When caught, the screen full on glitches, flashing pixalated, creepy images during a loud scratching screech. The bastard above should not be directly looked at; his image blurs and grows brighter as he gets closer but your sight gets slowed and sways when your near and this bastard is always nearby. The environments are disorienting to begin with but this crap was too much. Take four 151 shots in a row, spin around in a haunted fun house hall three times and try finding your way out, welcome to that hour of my life. But I carry on. Thanks for listening to my rant and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Darling

darling

So I was floating around the Netflix horror section late one night and saw a short movie in black and white I never heard of. It begins with a warning about bright flashes and hallucinatory imagery. This movie is Darling. It’s the strange story of a young woman taking care of mansion that may or may not be haunted by the devil as she randomly comes across a guy that may have raped her, causing her to go totally bat shit and kill him. The movie is very ambiguous, leaving a lot of things left to interpretation which is pretty cool. It’s essentially the story of this girl’s intense unraveling of her sanity but there’s a possible demonic edge which is kinda cool. The movie is filmed beautifully and the score compliments it well. I can say this movie really ain’t for everyone, in fact I can say 9 of 10 people I know wouldn’t last it but I enjoyed it for the cinematography and sound and WTF plot. If you want to see something strange, watch this but if you aren’t into low budget art films, this ain’t for you.

Eclipse

eclipse

So if I had to pick a best out of the Twilight series, Eclipse, book 3, would probably be my favorite. There is some compelling narration, decent lore building, and a fair amount of tension to leads to…shit. Two books building up to a grand ass revenge and it’s over in a paragraph. No epic fight, hell the fight were hoping for we never see; the movie at least did us that solid. But I need to do this right and summarize the plot of this. Ah hell, here it goes…

So months passed since New Moon ended, Victoria is still on the loose, the werewolves still hate the Cullens, and teen bullshit. Edward and Bella still going back and forth bout the whole I wanna be a vampire/ I have no soul cuz I’m a monster crap. Also Jacob is all emo again because Bella ain’t into dog sex, she’s all into screwing rich dead people. I always thought Bella was a gold-digger myself. Anyway, they’re also almost graduating from school and apparently people are disappearing in the city next to Forks. So Jacob pops up at there school, letting it out that the two factions almost had it out trying to get Victoria. Soon after, they discover Victoria is stalking Bella, Blah blah blah Victoria is trying to make an army of newborn crack vampires to kill Bella so the Cullens and werewolves have to band together and stop her. Oh and they get engaged while Jacob tries to jump into her pants.

Ok, so Eclipse is the best of the four. There is a fair sense of tension and some cool lore sprinkled throughout. BUT the dialogue is crappy, all the characters just feel whiny, all built tensions just squeak fart out instead of being a cool climax. The movie is full of the bad emo acting the Twilight movies are famous for but we do a decent fight at the end. The first couple minutes of the movie are a nice touch that actually can trick you into thinking its a horror- HAHAHA don’t fall for it. This movie maybe directed by David Slade, director of the totally underrated 30 days of Night movie but he couldn’t even save this damn movie. Anyway, thank you for reading and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

5 Great Games That Are Now Painful To Play

This list is simple. This week I went back and played more original Nintendo games than I should admit to. However some of them were games as a kid I fell in love with, and now they are suddenly painful to play.

Almost everyone that owned an NES played the Mario game and for many it was the first we played. So when I turned this bad boy on I was looking forward to a nostalgia trip. What i got was the realization that this game was boring and hard to control and the sense that the ability to play this game all the way through was lost on me completely. By level 1-2 I wanted to stop. A few worlds and warp pipes later I was done, and possibly forever.

Mario 2 is basically the black sheep of the Mario family for NES. Some hated it some loved it. I fell into the loved category. The whimsical levels and multiple characters with different abilities, whats not to love? Well it turns out everything. From random potions to stealing keys and seemingly random bosses I finally understand how dumb this dream was.

Seriously what were we on that we enjoyed Donkey Kong? It is climbing ladders and dodging barrels with a game that controls like a tank with the emergency break being stuck in the on position.

Double Dragon 2 is a typical brawler. But seriously who in the hell made the decision that the buttons would swap depending on what direction you were facing and that the jump button would be to just hit 2 buttons at once and hoping you didn’t hit one slightly before the other?

Tecmo Bowl. What can I say? Some of you may hate me for this. But by the gaming gods does this game suck in retrospect. The very limited play options is understandable for it time, but hey screw a menu lets go with hitting button combinations. The game play itself reminds me of one of those old football games that shoot and the players just randomly moved

Seriously maybe its an age thing and the fact that better games have come and gone and come again, but these games were simply painful to play. Let me know what you think and may the gaming gods bring you glory.