Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2023

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Super Mario Bros Wonder (Switch) – Classic Mario, but with enough tweaks and new mechanics to make it feel completely fresh. Most stages have unique Wonder gimmicks, and just about all of them change the stage in a really fun way. My favourite by far are the musical stages, which have enemies singing and bouncing along to the music. Happily played this one to 100% completion.

Mega Man X DiVE Offline (PC) – It’s a lot of fun and I really like the fanservice (of course). However, the story is just so boring and there’s so much dialogue. I’ll keep playing it to 100% because of that “a lot of fun” part.

Mega Man Battle Network (GBA) – There’s something to be said about the simplicity of the first entry in a series. Yes, it lacks the quality of life improvements from the sequels, but it also doesn’t have nearly as many gimmicks layered on top of the core gameplay. I had a great time revisiting it!

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Desire: A Follow-up

You know that meme, “how it started/how it’s going”? I’m doing that today, but in text form!

Basically, I just want to take a quick look back at my “24 Days of Desire” feature and see how many of them have been fulfilled. It’s been almost a year now, I should have been able to get everything I wanted, right? Let’s see!

Day 1: Television – This was about me wanting to have cable, and if I recall correctly, it was specifically so I could watch the Chucky series. Well, I never got cable, because that would be stupid, and I still haven’t watched Chucky, because I don’t pirate TV shows or movies any more. Chucky is also on Paramount+, which has other things I want to watch, so I’m thinking about a subscription to that… But probably won’t bother.

Day 2: A better GPU – Ain’t got this. I’ve heard that prices are going down, but I haven’t bothered to look in many months. Besides, I only wanted it to beef up my Quest 2, so it’s right down at the bottom of my priority ladder.

Day 3: Star Wars sequels box set – I haven’t looked to see if this exists, and I don’t actually care enough to check. This was a filler episode, for sure.

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Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: October 2022

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Shovel Knight Dig (Switch) – A roguelite prequel to Shovel Knight, it’s not what I would have asked Yacht Club for, but it’s what we got. Looks great, sounds great, but unfortunately… roguelite. Somehow, I managed a winning run after only about two hours of gameplay, so that was a nice surprise. It’s got a few creepy enemies, but I wouldn’t call it even slightly spooky.

Resident Evil 2 (PC) – Played this many times, actually! Leon A (easy), Claire A (randomizer), Leon A (normal), and finally, the Kendo’s Cut mod. I wanted to get at least one B story run in, but just ran out of time. Needless to say, ’tis a fairly spooky game.

Power Wash Simulator (PC) – Finally loaded it up to play the last few stages added to the official release. Such a nice, satisfying way to waste time. Not at all spooky, though.

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Movieween 2022 Round-Up

Full disclosure: I have not been a very good Halloween turbofan this year. While I have leaned into it pretty hard on the ol’ YouTube channel, that’s really the most I’ve done. My condo is scarcely decorated – all that’s out are a Halloween Pumpkaboo plush and a dish towel with skellingtons on it. I’ve also been way behind on watching any season-appropriate films or television programs. But I did manage to sneak in a couple movies. Here are my short reviews of them!

The Devil Below

The Devil Below is about a rag-tag group of scientists who set out to explore an old coal mine that had caught fire and been abandoned decades earlier. They’re not only in search of what caused the mine to catch fire, but also why the surrounding town had been abandoned and completely wiped off the map. Led by a spunky, uh… tour guide/bounty hunter/supermodel, it’s not long before they discover that there’s something a little more sinister lurking below the surface.

I’ll start off by saying that this film has an 8% Rotten Tomatoes score. Yikes! That’s especially dire! I didn’t think it was all that bad, though. Or… was it? I’m sitting here and struggling to think of positive things to say about it. The main character, played by Alicia Sanz, was pretty cool. Though her acting was a bit stiff; I’m not sure if that was a choice to make the character more aloof or simply bad acting. The movie managed to hold my interest for the most part – I may have picked up my phone here and there, but it’s not like I had my Switch in hand at any point.

Onto the bad! Personally, I kind of hated the monster designs. Not that they’re necessarily bad. But they’re supposed to be this advanced race of insect-like creatures and they just look like people with oversized lamprey masks and claws. I appreciate that most/all the effects were practical, but the creature design didn’t really seem to fit the lore, especially since the boss monster resembles a termite queen. Although I suppose that “too anthropomorphic” isn’t the worst thing you can say about a monster design. On the upside, they did wait a very long time to give viewers a decent look at the creatures. Way to show restraint, director!

Other than that, the story was very paint-by-numbers, none of the other characters were endearing in the least, and it was much too dark throughout. Most importantly, there’s no satisfying resolution to anything. I’d like to know more about the creatures other than “they’re kinda like ants or bees”. I’d have liked to see more of the background story of the miners initially fighting off the creatures and sealing them away. I’d like to know why this allegedly superior race isn’t popping up anywhere else in the world. I mean, they live underground and eat people. How could they have survived for decades trapped in a burning coal mine with no food? Cannibalism, presumably, but that’s not a fun answer and would realistically only take a species so far.

Upon reflection, yeah, The Devil Below is not a good movie. But I didn’t feel strongly either way about it while I was watching it and I certainly didn’t feel like I’d wasted my time watching it. I also think that the 8% approval rating is a bit harsh. I’d say it’s more deserving of something in the 15%-20% range.

There’s Someone Inside Your House

Let’s begin with a fun fact: Actress Jesse LaTourette is in both this movie and The Devil Below. I did not recognize that it was the same actress, and probably would have gone my whole life without learning that fun little coincidence had I not been Googling these films to learn their casts’ names.

And that’s probably the most interesting thing I have to say about There’s Someone Inside Your House.

I called The Devil Below paint-by-numbers, but that almost seems unfair when you compare it to There’s Someone Inside Your House. This is the most boring, uninspired, cliché-driven movie that I have watched in a long time. Tears! I was bored to them! Well, not like, literal tears, but my soul was weeping. Because not 15 minutes in, I realized that I was watching Teen Revenge Slasher #3087 and I felt despair fill my gut. Sure, I could have simply turned the movie off, but I foolishly held out hope. And instead of rewarding me, There’s Someone Inside Your House just took a dump in my living room. Again, not literally.

Here’s the plot synopsis: Teens are getting murdered in a Middle American town, and it’s up to our gang of misfits to try to figure out who it is before they all get killed themselves. Sound familiar? YUUUP. If that had been Netflix’s synopsis, I would never have pressed play. Instead, they gave me hope by telling me that James Wan (Insidious) and Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) produced it. This is a cautionary tale to not watch things just because people who’ve made things that you like are involved!

I’ll go ahead and say that I didn’t much care for anything about this movie, but the most egregious part by far is that I didn’t really understand the killer’s motivation. He does a big ol’ exposition dump at the end, and I kinda get that end goal was to kill his dad in a huge, cinematic fashion, but then… what about all the teens who died along the way? I guess the idea is that he’d cracked and decided to just kill anyone who’d done something bad, but eh… it just rings hollow. If your plan is to expose people’s nasty secrets to the rest of the town, why not just do that? Why go the extra mile to murder them? Wouldn’t it be worse to have to live with their horrible secrets revealed? I guess the severity varies by character, but whatever, I still didn’t like it.

What mystifies me the most is that There’s Someone Inside Your House has a 47% Rotten Tomatoes rating!? The most bland, derivative movie I’ve watched in recent memory, and it’s got that much better a rating than The Devil Below? Really??? While I didn’t much care for The Devil Below, I did feel like I wanted my 1 hour and 36 minutes back after watching There’s Someone Inside Your House. And if that’s not the most damning criticism, I don’t know what is.

Okay, so maybe I did end up having some more interesting things to say. Who knew!?

Silent Hill

Nothing new to say here, I would think. Seen this movie probably a half-dozen times, but I haven’t watched it in a decade, at least. And with the announcement of a new SH movie in the works, I figured now was the perfect time to revisit it.

But first, a short aside: As this movie came out in the stone age, I still have a copy on DVD, and that’s how I watched it. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a DVD, and I’d actually forgotten that they used to put ads before movies. What wild times those were!

If you had asked me before, I would have told you that in my opinion, Silent Hill is the best live-action video game movie. I know it’s a low bar to clear, but I always really liked this one. If you asked me now? Well, it’s hard to say. I was a little bit high when I was watching this, and also texting with a potential date throughout most of it, and also I fell asleep for the last half-hour or so. So it would be hard to say that I really watched Silent Hill, and as such, I don’t have a revised opinion to provide. Here are a few random thoughts, though!

Sean Bean is in it a lot more than I remembered. Like, he’s got a whole B plot where he’s trying to figure out where the heck Rose and Sharon went to. I knew he was involved at the beginning and end, but no, he’s got scenes all throughout the film. And yet still I can’t remember what his character’s name is!

Most of what I did remember are the parts of the movie that are closely based on the game(s). The general plot, the sequence where Rose is wandering through the alleys and gets attacked by the monster kids, how half of the monsters are actually from Silent Hill 2, stuff like that. Anything that was originally introduced for the movie? Basically all new to me. Except for the part where Pyramid Head rips off that one girl’s skin. That moment will forever be burned into my nightmares.

I really dislike how the movie grinds to a halt for a 10-minute exposition sequence. It’s really bad and I can’t fathom that nobody involved in the production could come up with a better alternative.

So, I’ll probably have to watch Silent Hill again soon, but with a little more focus. I have no intent of revisiting Silent Hill: Revelation though, as I didn’t much care for that one.

24 Days of Desire (24): Christmas Crunch

I know that I already did a Cap’n Crunch post, but it’s Xmas Eve and I wanted to do an entry that’s specifically related to the holiday(s). There honestly aren’t too many Xmas-related things that I want, so we’ll have to swallow our pride and go for the low-hanging fruit: seasonal cereal.

I guess there are a lot to choose from, when it comes to cereals that get a red-and-green-coloured rebrand ’round December. Or, at least, there’s a lot to choose from if you’re an American. I went looking for any sort of holiday-flavoured cereals against my better judgement (to stay out of stores because COVID) and found squat for my troubles.

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24 Days of Desire (23): Resident Evil VR

It seems like there was a very long time where VR was just something I’d never be able to have for myself. It needs a huge room, an expensive headset, an even more expensive computer… There were just so many barriers to entry that I just ignored VR as a thing that existed.

Then Facebook started bombarding me with Oculus Quest 2 ads, and at some point I decided to see what it was all about. Now here we are a year later, and I’m enjoying a… fairly limited library of VR games. There just aren’t all that many games available for Quest 2. But that actually doesn’t matter, because it has the best game of them all: Resident Evil 4.

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24 Days of Desire (22): Fazbear Frights

I was all gung-ho to write this post about how I wanted a physical collection of the Fazbear Frights book series, and how I was sad that in this age of digital everything it would likely never happen.

And then I was proved wrong. It’s happening in February of 2022.

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24 Days of Desire (21): Band-Maid

I’d like to say that I’ve really missed going to concerts during COVID times, but I really go to all that many concerts to begin with. At least one a year, I’d say, which could seem like a lot to some, but I think there’s definitely room for improvement.

I also don’t really miss concerts because I’ve checked off a lot of the most important boxes on my “bands to see live” list: Queen, Tesla, Matthew Good (twice), Joe Satriani, Dweezil Zappa. As for the ones that are still outstanding? Thrice, Tonight Alive, Story of the Year, TWRP… oh, and Band-Maid. We absolutely cannot forget Band-Maid.

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