Category: A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words: WMMA5

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WMMA5

Grey Dog Software’s World of Mixed Martial Arts 5 is an excellent mixed martial arts simulator/tycoon game. It’s best to keep your game worlds small as loading times are still an issue, but that’s the only (small) sour note in a very sweet game. As a tycoon, you can participate in building your own MMA empire, and learn the hard way that trying to do right by either your fighters or your fans has financial consequences.

Or you can just smash the figures together in the game’s Quick Fight mode, which is where I spend most of my time with it. The character editor means you can create anything from all-rounders to monomanical specialists who can’t strike or can’t grapple (or both!) As MMA has even more “moving parts” than boxing, making a proper sim is tough. Thankfully, this delivers.

A Thousand Words: People Playground

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People Playground

When I was young, one of my favorite games was the Rube Goldberg generator known as The Incredible Machine. Now I’ve been delighted to announce that I’ve found a spiritual successor, People Playground. You can make all sorts of contraptions there in a physics sandbox-that mostly have the end goal of killing people. Or monsters. Or robots. For someone with as frequently twisted a sense of humor as me, I’ve loved it.

Yes, you can manually spawn a weapon and just kill your test subjects, but where’s the fun in that? One example of the breadth of this game is my most satisfying creation. One victim was strapped to a chair while another had an incandescent light bulb wired to him. The light bulb was switched on and given a heat transfer, causing the first victim to burn to death. A heat pipe was then attached to the second victim’s head, leading it to light up like a candle, before the whole body followed suit.

There’s a real sense of satisfaction in making an elaborate deathtrap that finally, actually works, and it’s for that reason that I recommend this game for people who like messing around in sandboxes. It’s very fun.

A Thousand Words: Ishtar

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Ishtar

The film Ishtar, about a pair of dopey musicians that end up involved in a Middle Eastern revolution, is frequently labeled one of the worst films ever. Is it that bad? Not really. Is it bad, period? Kind of. See, it wants to be smart, but it fails spectacularly at being smart. When it lets itself be dumb, it has some good moments.

The highlight of the film is a scene in a bazaar involving a ton of secret agents with terribly stereotyped disguises. It had me laughing massively, and reminded me of the classic Oktoberfest scene in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. But the attempts at actually providing DEEP POLITICAL COMMENTARY? Not so much. Even some of the dumb comedy moments don’t work-there’s a scene later in the movie that involved arms dealers, natives, and the main characters “translating” by speaking gibberish that came across as contrived, unfunny, and honestly a little offensive.

The acting is iffy. Charles Grodin does a great job as a secret agent. The actor playing the emir of Ishtar is undeniably talented and would have worked well in a serious movie, but fails here where a Chaplin/Baren Cohen-style goofball dictator would have fit a lot better. The main characters are annoying and idiotic, but they’re meant to be annoying and idiotic. Does that help? You can decide.

It’s not the best movie of all time or even really “good”, but it doesn’t deserve to be considered one of the worst films ever.

A Thousand Words: BUSTAFELLOWS

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BUSTAFELLOWS

So, it should be obvious that I’m not the target romance fiction aimed at women. But romance fiction that doubles as a crime thriller? Call me intrigued. So when I saw the Blerdy Otome Review of BUSTAFELLOWS (the official title is in ALL CAPS), I felt like I should check what’s still a crime thriller out. Hey, if an otome game took place in a conventional World War III, I’d look at it (I’d be seriously interested in how someone who came from the opposite background as most technothriller authors would handle it.)

Anyway, BUSTAFELLOWS takes place in the fictional NYC stand-in of New Sieg, where a reporter who can send her mind back in time and bodyjack someone in the past to change the present (the implications are addressed, and it’s portrayed as more limited and less powerful than it could theoretically be) gets involved with five possible love interests/vigilantes. While a visual novel doesn’t have much in the way of gameplay per se save for selecting choices, I have to say that this is one of those “PC version as a total afterthought” ports with a bizarre control scheme. Oh well. I got used to it, and the actual game ran fine.

The good news is that this is the rare “Romantic Suspense” that actually succeeds in balancing “Romance” and “Suspense”. The bad news is A: I think there’s a bit of culture clash that’s iffy but still bears little ill will (I’d expect the same from an American production that tried to tackle East Asian socio-political issues), and worse, B: The tone zigzags too much from “too serious” to “too goofy”. But these aren’t deal-breakers and I found it worth my money.

A Thousand Words: The Story of Ricky

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Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky

It’s time to review one of my favorite movies of all time. The story of The Story of Ricky is one of bizarre decision-making. A Hong Kong producer looked at a Fist of The North Star knockoff manga and bought the rights. Then came the decision to make the movie. However, it comes across as having almost all of the budget spent on fake blood. And most of the rest spent renting out the sets for the jail.

The plot is this: The titular character ends up in a prison and gets into fights. Actually, that isn’t quite right. There is only one properly choreographed bout in the entire film. The rest is just someone getting hit and cheesy, bloody special effects resulting. That’s basically how you can describe the entire movie, and it is amazing. Hearing the bad-as-you’d expect English dubbing is part of the fun.

This movie is, in its own stupid, horrible way, a masterpiece. It’s one of the best “B-movies” I’ve seen and if you don’t mind (fake-looking but still plentiful) gore, then you have to watch this. Don’t expect well, anything technically good from it. But do expect a lot of fun.

A Thousand Words: Fallout: New Vegas

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Fallout: New Vegas

It’s close to the anniversary of the release of Fallout: New Vegas. That game is one I played a gigantic amount several years ago, and it’s one that seemed to suit my style more than the “Bethesda Fallouts” ever did.

New Vegas has a very simple plot. You control a deliveryperson who gets ambushed, shot, and left for dead by someone in a bad suit who wants to gain control of a Las Vegas that’s been left intact after the nuclear war. After being saved by a robot, making your way to Vegas, and dealing with the guy in a bad suit, you get to decide who gets to control it. The plot is simple, but the setting is amazing. It’s this very interesting “post-postapocalyptic” theme where society has fallen-and risen again with big cities and big armies. It feels alive.

What makes this an orange to the “apples” of Fallouts 3 and 4 is that this is more linear. You’re railroaded on the main quest route both by dialogue and the game placing powerful monsters in all the places you’re not supposed to go, and the world is a lot less flat and explorable than in those two. But because my strategy was to just go through the main quests, I didn’t mind.

While this has the infamous “Gamebryo Bugs” and balance issues (speech is an overpowered skill that there’s no point in not maxing unless you want a self-imposed challenge), it’s still my favorite PC RPG of all time.

A Thousand Words: Pokemon Black/White

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Pokemon Black and White Versions

It was recently the 11th anniversary of Pokemon Black and White’s release. Now in terms of actual gameplay, it’s the same monster-catching as always. But in terms of opinion, it’s one of the games where, with full hindsight and difference, my views on it have shifted the most.

At the time, I viewed the story’s very slight challenge of its premise as something hamfisted and dumb. For the gameplay, while it wasn’t bad, it still felt like business as usual. Now with three more generations and a decade of thought, I can actually appreciate it more.

The first thing is realizing that Unova, the region of the game, is (loosely) based off my local area, the New York City metropolitan area. That’s neat, at least. The second is seeing that Game Freak played it so safe with the next three games that their mild, necessarily child-friendly critique comes across as the best they could do. Instead of slamming them for not doing it the best, I can praise them for trying. The third is the graphics. This was the last Pokemon game to feature classic sprites, which reach their apex here. After that, it’s ugly, basic, horribly optimized 3D models.

So what I wasn’t the fondest of at the time has turned into a nostalgic memory.

A Thousand Words: Stealth

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Stealth

2005’s box office flop Stealth has become a cult classic for all the wrong reasons. This military thriller feels like what would would happen if you took someone who once read a Dale Brown novel and watched a few old war movies as his sole references, gave him a $100,000,000 budget, and turned him loose. It has “stealth” aircraft behaving in the least stealthy way possible, a haywire robot plane, and a bunch of jumbled plotlines that end with the characters just walking casually across the Korean DMZ.

I’ve long felt that the movie would be better if it was either smarter or dumber. If it was smarter, it could be prescient look at drone warfare. If it was dumber, it would be a much more focused Iron Eagle-style funfest. Instead it’s just a bizarre mess with the occasional attempt at a serious point mixed with advanced jets fighting like it’s 1916 and product placement music.

Still, I can’t bring myself to truly dislike this movie. The sheer excess of it in all directions means that it’s at least interestingly bad. And it does have explosions in it.

A Thousand Words: Requiem For The Phantom

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Phantom: Requiem For The Phantom

The 2009 anime Phantom: Requiem For The Phantom is an adaptation of the “Phantom of Inferno” visual novel, the first work by infamous creator Gen Urobuchi. It tells the story of a young Japanese man and enigmatic girl turned underworld assassins with German number codenames, as they fall into a twisted world. It’s perhaps the best example of a “mean 51%” work I can think of, because of how zig-zaggy it is. A “median 51%” story would be bland but effective consistently, and this is anything but.

The production values and especially soundtrack are excellent overall. But the animation quality is surprisingly inconsistent. And the plot and characters are much more so. It wants to be this dark drama exploring the human psyche but it also wants to have tacticute girls and ex-East German supervillains bouncing around. This doesn’t always mix. A bigger problem is that so much of the story line is devoted to a fundamentally uninteresting conflict between various equally unsympathetic amoral criminals. It just became hard to care about, and the main characters spent more time moping than taking advantage of the agency that they theoretically had.

This is the equivalent of Dave Kingman or Chris Davis, a show that just swings and swings and either hits the ball hard or strikes out. While it often doesn’t succeed, I can give it credit for sincerely trying, and it was never outright bad enough that I didn’t want to watch.

A Thousand Words: Valkyrie

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Valkyrie

2008’s Valkyrie stars Tom Cruise and depicts the July 20 Plot that tried and failed to kill Hitler. An unusual historical movie for Hollywood, it has both the strengths and weaknesses of a lavish production aimed at a big audience. The strengths are obvious-great production values. The visual style is excellent, and the John Ottman score is nothing short of amazing.

However, it also, in the interest of audience morality, sugar-coats and oversimplifies the plotters. The movie does do a decent job in showing how unlikely it was for the Valkyrie conspirators to actually gain control of the government even if Hitler and his inner circle were killed off. However, it does not dwell on how the actual plotters ranged from “ok, at least a little better than Hitler, but that’s definitely not saying much” to “Really bad, including Einsatzgruppen commanders and mass POW-killers”. It also does not bring up that the Allies would never have accepted the terms the plotters wanted to offer, and would have just viewed it as infighting among thugs. While understandable, this is still a missed opportunity for complexity in addition to an inaccuracy.

Leaving factual issues aside, the acting is a mixed bag. Cruise himself is quite wooden, but a lot of the supporting cast does well. Tom Wilkinson does a great job as the weaselly General Fromm in my favorite role. An underrated performance is David Bamber as Hitler. Not only does he come across as appropriately menacing, but he’s menacing in a soft-spoken way that’s quite different from the usual (including Downfall) bombastic Hitler.

For all its issues, Valkyrie is still worth a watch, especially if you don’t mind historical inaccuracy.