Is Josh Tyler’s review of The Backup Plan, the latest cliffside impact of Jennifer Lopez’ long, spastic plummet into the Canyon of Obsolescence:
The Back-up Plan is one of the ten most terrifying movie experiences of my life. The other nine movies on that list are a motley and varied assortment of everything from M. Night Shyamalan to Hitchcock, yet this one is in a class of its own. I can only assume from the bubble-gum pop blaring out of the theater’s speakers that it was director Alan Paul’s intention to create another one of those bland Jennifer Lopez romantic comedies which seem to do so well. But replace The Back-up Plan’s secretary rock score with music composed mostly of chillingly high-pitched string instruments and you’d have the scariest movie of the year.
That’s the dumbest paragraph in the review, and it still makes me giggle.
-ssr
[h/t Pajiba, which has also been nice enough to post Fyre’s review of The American Way of Death. See how I brought all that together? It’s like the circle of life. Hakuna Matata, bitches.]
I’m pretty amazingly not into the idea of the FPS “reboot” of X-COM. I didn’t play X-COM for its trite, skeletal story or its anonymous, disposable soldiers. I played for the nerve-wracking strategy and squad tactics. Making an FPS and calling it X-COM is like making a cel-shaded platformer and calling it NASCAR.
My best X-COM memories involve situations that I couldn’t predict, but could only learn from. The time a squaddie opened a farmhouse door and stood helpless, out of action points, while the alien on the other side shot him. The moment later in the fight when another soldier, who had saved up his action points, spotted the same alien through a window and gunned it down in return. The soldier who saw another unit member die right next to her and went berserk, firing a fusillade of Heavy cannon shots in every direction, killing almost the entire team.
In a modern FPS, all of these events would have to be scripted, coded in by programmers to be sure they happened the right way every time, just while the player happens to be looking at the affected soldiers. Every event in the game is right there in your hint book, on GameFAQS, in your memory from the last time you played. If the good folks at 2K Marin can find a way to inject the big-budget FPS genre with a healthy dose of X-COM-style unpredictability, God bless them and keep them. I haven’t seen anything like that yet from a game in the genre, though, and I’m not inclined to make pre-emptive excuses to justify this genre switch.
The gritty reboot of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is already in Alpha testing
I mean, I understand where they’re coming from. FPS are a big genre anymore, maybe the biggest depending on how you look at things. X-COM is a storied franchise that’s been sliding down a long, slow, sad decline for over a decade now. It might make sense to say “Hey, let’s try freshening things up with a gritty re-make, get all Casino Royale up in here.” Except that’s exactly what’s been going wrong with X-COM for year now. The first game was fun in a slightly weird, opaque way. The second game was really just the first one again with a different set of graphics and a vertical difficulty curve. The third game, Apocalypse, added a trendy but really unnecessary RTS element that wasn’t enjoyable, as well as some pretty dismal 3-D rendered graphics. After that came a shitty space fighter game and a bland 3rd person shooter game. Again and again, X-COM has been shoe-horned into the genre of the week in hoped that lightning will strike again, apparently without thought as to what actually made the first game good.
I’ll tell you what. You could make an FPS that hewed true to the stuff I played X-COM for, but it would involve the player character huddled behind the landing strut of a VTOL, choking on smoke grenades, and eventually dying in a hail of plasma fire and alien grenades, Modern Warfare style. Every mission. The soldiers in X-COM are fucking cannon fodder for most of the game; you can’t develop a story about how one of them super-heroically and single-handedly drives the alien menace from the world.
FyreHaar: the site is fucklered FyreHaar: I have no idea what to do Sonic Rob: greaaaaaat Sonic Rob: ok, let’s have a look at this FyreHaar: we can just delete it FyreHaar: and it will re-gen the correct way FyreHaar: but I’m leery of that Sonic Rob: I didn’t upload anything to our FTP, did you? FyreHaar: nope FyreHaar: it was a hack I think Sonic Rob: bah fuck Sonic Rob: are you logged into the site right now? FyreHaar: yes FyreHaar: we need to back up Sonic Rob: you can handle this as easily as I can FyreHaar: but that is besides the point FyreHaar: instruct me! Sonic Rob: you know as much as I do Sonic Rob: um Sonic Rob: hm FyreHaar: oh god FyreHaar: I really don’t know what to do FyreHaar: I will ask teh google Sonic Rob: ok FyreHaar: I’m going to backup FyreHaar: and then upgrade Sonic Rob: sounds good Sonic Rob: /fingercross FyreHaar: w00t!!!! FyreHaar: up! Sonic Rob: you win! FyreHaar: victory! Sonic Rob: take that, China! FyreHaar: or Russia or what have you!
It’s been noted elsewhere that I have a bit of a knack for picking out video games that my sister will enjoy. Honestly, it’s not that hard; she likes games that star remorseless murderers with firm butts. Fyre tries to reciprocate, bless her flame-wreathed little soul, and that’s how I came to own a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, which is the most infuriating game I’ve played in probably the last five years.
I should have loved this game. I cannot front: I find the design appealing, the graphics are handsome, and the course of play is stimulating. There’s a lot that Sins gets just right, which makes it a damned shame that the few problems it has are total bunny-boilers for me.
Sonic Rob: we have found a microscopic animal Sonic Rob: the water bear Sonic Rob: it is resilient, difficult to destroy Sonic Rob: and BIOLOGICALLY IMMORTAL Sonic Rob: which is to say it can’t die of old age FyreHaar: that is possible FyreHaar: if the cells renew themselves and replace themselves Sonic Rob: it is in fact real Sonic Rob: the fucked part is Sonic Rob: what are we doing with them? Sonic Rob: the Russians are fucking launching them to one of the moons of mars Sonic Rob: to try and test the theory of panspermia FyreHaar: ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! FyreHaar: their culture will destroy ours in a million years Sonic Rob: for REAL Sonic Rob: they are FUCKING IMMORTAL Sonic Rob: some day our space bear children will return FyreHaar: they will fuck us to take back the earth and gain revenge for our banishing them FyreHaar: it could be good times Sonic Rob: uh Sonic Rob: no Sonic Rob: having your angry, better-evolved child species return from space to destroy you is never good FyreHaar: it could be kind of a litmus for human colonization FyreHaar: first step FyreHaar: do the water bears die? FyreHaar: no? FyreHaar: okay FyreHaar: send the chickens Sonic Rob: chickens are not biologically immortal Sonic Rob: they are biologically tasty FyreHaar: mmm Sonic Rob: oh man Sonic Rob: what if earth was populated by some retard species on another planet, to see if their theory of panspermia was real? Sonic Rob: they loaded a rocket up with sea monkeys and launched it here
I was unable to resist the lure of GameStop’s big sale two weeks ago, and picked up a number of games that I hadn’t been interested in buying at full price. One of these was Prototype, which never really looked to be worth $60 or even $30, but became a bit more sexy at $20. I played the game for a while during the voting period for MMPVG2, and a gap week review may be forthcoming at some point, but there’s an aspect of the game I’d like to take a moment to discuss right now.
Alex Mercer, the protagonist of Prototype, sucks. So, a problem for the game.
Before I get too deep into this, let’s be clear that I don’t want to bag on Prototype as a whole. It’s a fun game, a fine budget title. As a playable character Alex controls well, and while I reckon I’m only about halfway through it, the story is engaging if a bit familiar. It’s just too bad that every time Alex says or does anything in his role as the main character of the story, I check the extensive movelist for a command to make him smack himself in the face.
FyreHaar: weird, we got backtracked SonicRob: automatically generated SonicRob:“may” be related SonicRob:we have the most random blog on Earth FyreHaar: hey, that’s an achievement! SonicRob:ding SonicRob:10 bloggerscore
FyreHaar: one guy I messaged FyreHaar: Don’t cap with your whole army FyreHaar: and they sit there SonicRob: are you fucking serious? FyreHaar: yes FyreHaar: We would win a skirmish and they would want to stop and catch their breath FyreHaar: I’m like, we need to keep at them, keep fighting FyreHaar: keep them on the defensive FyreHaar: we need to play together SonicRob: why were they out of breath? were they clicking really hard?
