I Am the Bored Thing That Watched This Movie

I’ve watched a lot of Netflix Original shows, and most of them have been very good. Some not-so-great, but for the most part, it’s been above average. I watched my very first Netflix Original movie last week. It was… hmmm, what’s the best way to describe it… awful.

pthingI Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House sounds an awful lot like the kind of movie that I would like from its description. Have a gander:

A nervous nurse who scares easily finds herself caring for an ailing horror novelist while living in a house with hidden secrets.

Sure, it’s a bit generic, but they wouldn’t want to spoil anything, right? Well, the thing is that there’s not a whole lot to spoil. The entire plot is about a girl who is afraid of ghost stories reading a ghost story, and then learning that it’s actually true and the ghost lives in the house she’s currently occupying. Maybe I’m being a little reductive with that summary, but that’s the gist of it.

The hugest thing I disliked about the film is that it is nearly 90% voice-over narration. Though I guess it can’t be helped when your movie has a grand total of three characters, and one has dementia and another is on screen for about four minutes total. But yeah, too much narration drives me bonkers. It’s just so boring to watch something while a disembodied voice tells you what you’re watching.

Anyway, the story is a very slow burn, and there is basically zero payoff. The climax comes out of nowhere and is over so quickly that you’re just like “wait, this is what I’ve been waiting for?” and then you have to sit through another seven minutes of epilogue in sheer frustration.

Do you want to know what happens? The girl hears a mysterious knocking inside the house, goes downstairs to investigate, and then dies of fright upon seeing -that’s right, just seeing– a ghost. A ghost that, by all intents and purposes, she should know is in the house. It is literally spelled out for her over the course of the film. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m terrified of ghosts, but I can’t imagine that I would keel over if I were to simply catch a glimpse of one. I’d be pretty amazed, actually, because ghosts aren’t real.

Also in this scene is a very bad digital effect of the ghost marching across the kitchen. What makes it so terrible is that due to plot, her legs are on backwards, and this gives the illusion that she’s a marionette or something, gambolling along so unnaturally. This could be frightening, maybe, if they had done it right (though I can’t quite conceive of how that would be done). But the net result here is that it looks like something out of a children’s program, and completely dissolves any tension that maybe have existed, further reducing the effectiveness of that big, final “scare.”

Do I regret watching this movie? It’s hard to say. I do love watching terrible movies, but this one was mostly just boring. I can’t get excited about any of its terribleness. There was nothing so corny that made me giggle. It’s the kind of bad movie that How Did This Get Made? would pass on. So, yeah. Maybe I would like to have my 87 minutes back, but on the other hand, I now have this little gem in my pocket as a short conversation piece.

Late to yet another party

Netflix has been consistently trying to get me to watch Pacific Heat over the last couple of weeks, popping it into nearly every category as I browse for things to watch. So, I figured, okay. It looks almost exactly like Archer, so I’ll give it a try.

When I finished watching the first episode, I decided that my joke line about the show would be “imagine if Archer wasn’t funny” and I figured that was gold.

Then I Googled Pacific Heat and that was the summary of nearly every result on the first page. It’s even the headline of AV Club’s review. So much for that hilarious little nugget.

I guess, if you were going to take anything away from this post, it’s that you shouldn’t watch Pacific Heat. It’s terrible. I was going to say that it’s even worse than Brickleberry, but AV Club beat me to that as well. Geez.

A Whiff o’ the Irish

I bought this deodorant some time ago in a moment of desperation. The store I was at did not have my usual brand, and I didn’t feel like travelling farther to get the right kind. Days later, I ended up purchasing the correct deodorant as well.

Yesterday, I ran out of the normal deodorant again, and had to use this back up stick. The memories of why I haven’t been using it came rushing back to me before long.

The Irish Spring Speed Stick smelled nice in the store. Also it was cheap. Sure. Great! But what I could not have hoped to realize in the store is that the scent is very powerful and I would be smelling it constantly, all day long. After a couple hours, the smell becomes significantly less pleasant. So I guess I had better quit being so lazy and go pick up some of the good stuff tonight.

And that’s my story for today. Are you dissatisfied? Would you have preferred yet another post about video games? I’m trying to diversify here!

Wherein I played The Cat Lady

Yes, you read the title of this post correctly. I purchased and played a video game called The Cat Lady. It didn’t even come in a bundle. This may come as a bit of a surprise to any who don’t know the game, as I am famously known as “the guy who doesn’t like cats” and that often puts me at odds with cat people (to be fair, they’re pretty weird).

For the record, it’s not so much that I don’t like cats as a species. Mostly it’s that I can’t stand their lack of respect for my personal space. If I want you in my lap, I’ll let you know. That goes the same for any animal (though human ladies are always welcome).

Anyway. A video game. The Cat Lady. The description on the Steam store sold me pretty well, although in retrospect, I think that I was expecting a completely different game. Let’s have a look, yeah?

The Cat Lady follows Susan Ashworth, a lonely 40-year old on the verge of suicide. She has no family, no friends and no hope for a better future. One day she discovers that five strangers will come along and change everything…

What I thought would happen is that you’d watch Susan be depressed for a bit and then five people would happen along and teach her about how to live and love again. Or something like that. But the game is billed as a psychological horror game, so I knew something was off about my interpretation. And lo, it certainly was!

The first thing wrong with this description is that Susan is not on the verge of suicide. The game opens with her actually committing suicide. And the five strangers that “come along and change everything” is somewhat misrepresenting the case. After taking her own life, Susan is given the opportunity to be revived and become immortal if she agrees to seek out and kill five psychopaths.

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Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – November 2016

Hey. November. It’s cold outside now. All the more reason to stay inside all the time and play video games. Except when it’s not and I go outside to play Pokémon Go.

~ Game Over ~

Pokémon Sun (3DS) – FINALLY. I haven’t been so excited about a game since Smash 4. And you know I’m not kidding because I tore through that sucker in only a week. Also, have you seen Crabominable yet??

crabominable

Heaven Island (PC) – A VR walking simulator MMO. Note that I do not own a VR device, so half the experience was lost on me. But I still wandered around until I’d picked up enough apples and seashells to claim all of the “achievements.”

You Deserve (PC) – I think I would have liked this horror adventure a little more if it had run a little bit smoother. It pushed my PC a little harder than it really needed to. Oh, and also it’s got jumpscares placed in seemingly random spots just for the sake of cheap jumpscares. I put up lots more words about it yesterday.

Wario Land 2 (GBC) – I was itching for a replay, so that’s what I did. Considered taking the secret route to complete the game in five levels, but opted to go for good ol’ 100% in the end. I like Wario Land 2 that much.

Paper Mario: Color Splash (WiiU) – Quite a divisive game, though personally, I think it’s incredible. It’s not really much like the N64 or GameCube Paper Marios, but at the same time, it kind of is? Also, it’s super pretty and maybe the funniest game I’ve ever played. If I have one complaint to lobby against it, it’s that they spelled “colour” wrong.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – November 2016

What do I deserve?

youdeserve

In the super-spoopy Halloween bundle that I bought from IndieGala, I received a game titled simply You Deserve. I knew nothing about it, save that it was horror-themed in some way, and that the thumbnail they used to advertise it caught my eye. Maybe this isn’t the best way to choose what to play, but the way I see it, most indie games will either only last two hours at most or I’ll get bored and quit before then. Not an especially big commitment.

Let us start at the very start: the title. You Deserve. It’s not a good title. But after playing the game, it makes a little more sense. Not from the context of the plot of the game, but rather from the context of I am 99% sure that English is not the developers’ first or maybe even second language.

Although reading that sentence back, it may sound like English isn’t my first language, either. It sounds better when you read it with the proper cadence, I swear.

Continuing that thought, the game was likely not developed in English, but it was translated fairly well. It’s got a few grammatical oopsies here and there, but that’s something one comes to expect after having played so many no-budget indie games. What really gives it away is the voice acting. In the odd instance that your player character speaks to herself out loud, it’s very slurred and heavily accented. So much so, that I’m confident that the actress does not actually speak English, but was just taught to read her script phonetically.

That’s small beans, though. Who really cares about whether you can understand the voice actress anyway? We all just want to know more about the gameplay! Because gameplay is king! Nothing else matters! This exaggeration isn’t funny!

You Deserve is what the kids would call a “walking simulator” but there is a little more to it than just gambolling from plot trigger to plot trigger. You will have to pick up items and find where they belong, solve some very simple puzzles, collect a wide variety of keys, and sometimes punch over a stack of boxes to continue forward. So, yeah, it’s pretty much a walking simulator, but with some adventure elements. It’s slightly more interactive than The Park was, for comparison.

What is annoying about these adventure elements is that the game is dark, and the items you need to collect don’t always stand out from the environment. They don’t flash or sparkle like items in other games. I spent 15 minutes looking for a crowbar once, because it was placed on a surface with a very similar texture and it was very difficult to pick out. Also, some items are in semi-randomized locations, so something might be found in one spot, and then magically show up elsewhere (albeit nearby) if you die and need to pick it up again. Super annoying.

Sometimes, a glitch will cause necessary items to simply not spawn at all.

That’s the kind of game this is.

The best puzzle in the game is one where you need to magically unlock a door by opening a set of lockers in the right order. It’s not terribly difficult, but it did seem like the kind of puzzle you’d find near the beginning of a Silent Hill game.

The absolute worst part of the game is the very end, where you’re dumped out into a massive area and have to collect three items. As I mentioned before, they don’t necessarily stand out enough, so they’re very easy to pass by, and also there’s an insta-kill monster on the loose and if you die you end up back at the start, having lost any items you collected. It’s a massive pain in the butt, and the point where I no longer had any patience for the game, so I quit and watched the rest on YouTube.

So if the gameplay is wanting, the story should be strong enough to push the player through to the end, right? Well… not especially. You begin in a strange park-like area, with an inexplicable catacomb beneath it. Or at least that’s what I took away from it. Your character has no idea where they are or why they’re there. Then you’re ambushed by a monster and wake up in the basement of your character’s high school. This is the point where you can start to suss out who you are and what’s going on, should you read the files scattered about. I wasn’t really interested enough to bother, and read any files I happened upon, but there were definitely a few that I missed. Then you wander through another park, a haunted house, and finally, an expanded version of the aforementioned park. All the while, very little story is happening.

To summarize said happenings: the plot is about a girl in some sort of nightmare realm created by the zombified remains of a former classmate. This classmate allegedly committed suicide because she was bullied by your character and her clique. So zombie girl leverages her lingering hatred to pull the offending kids into a nightmare and kill them off one by one. Your character is ostensibly the last of the crew to go. Then at the end you try to exorcise the zombo-girl, but in typical horror story fashion, the success is a short-lived fake-out. Did I use enough hyphenated words in that sentence?

I think the fact that I didn’t care enough to remember a single character’s name says enough about how invested I was in this tale.

Personally, I think that I spent too much time with this game. It’s only about an hour long, but I faffed about and got lost enough that I doubled that, and then some. I think that if you know all the passcodes and where the items and keys are located, you could probably clear the whole thing in under 20 minutes. Me, I had trouble with some events triggering and ended up running in circles for far too long before consulting a guide and resetting to correct the bug. And then the aforementioned issue with the key item that failed to spawn.

All in all, I found that my expectations of You Deserve were met, but that’s not saying much, because said expectations were about as low as they go. The title screen may have been the most impressive part of the game, which set a pretty poor precedent. Would I have enjoyed it more if I had a more powerful machine and it ran at full speed? Maybe. Would it be a better game if the bugs were ironed out? That’s debatable. Would streamlining the fetch quest at the end improve the game dramatically? Certainly. But none of those things are going to happen, so You Deserve will forever languish in mediocrity. To be 100% truthful, I would suggest that even if you get this game in a bundle, even if you’re given a free copy, that you just shuffle it over to the category of Steam games you’re never going to touch. It’s not worth your time or effort.

Pokémon Sun-Day

It’s finally here! The day of the new Pokémon games! Hurrah and hooray!

My brother and I went to a midnight launch event last night, which was not the best idea for me, as I still had to work all day today. But I just couldn’t wait another eighteen hours to get that sweet, sweet Pokémon Sun cartridge into my hands. I think I got a grand total of about three and a half hours of sleep last night, but hey, it’s Friday. I can afford run at less-than-optimal performance today.

I also made the executive decision to play for an hour when I got home, which wasn’t really enough, but it was the perfect allotment of time for me to reset over and over until I rolled a female Popplio (did not worry about getting a beneficial nature). Maybe I’m being insensitive about gender roles or whatever, but Popplio’s evolved forms just look like ladies, you know? It would feel wrong to me to have a male Primarina.

Anyway, enough typing! It’s time to actually play the darn game! All night long! Or at least until I pass out from exhaustion!

Here, have a trailer that will make absolutely no sense if you’re not a Pokéfan:

An idyllic island of some sort

During my, uh, “travels” through my mighty backlog of Steam games, I happened upon one called Heaven Island. It is a game like no other. Wait, no, that’s a lie. It’s actually got a lot in common with Proteus. And I didn’t really care for Proteus. Also, I’m not entirely sure what the actual title of the game is. On the bundle page I redeemed it from, it’s called Paradise Island. In the Steam library, it’s called Heaven Island. I don’t think the game proper ever references its title, so maybe it goes both ways? *wink*

Moving on, Paraven Island is the walkingest walking simulator that ever simulated. That’s almost literally all there is to it. Just bumbling around an island, looking at the trees and random structures scattered about. You can also pick up apples and seashells to earn achievements.

The game’s gimmick is that it’s an MMO, in the most basic sense. There’s no actual player interaction, though, and every player is represented by a ball of shimmering light instead of the more typical humanoid avatar. The online portion seems like a vestigial limb that probably should have just withered off long ago.

I suppose there’s another gimmick, which is that Heavadise Island is VR compatible. I did not play it in VR mode, as I have no VR device. I don’t think that this really affected my experience, because… the game isn’t really VR friendly.

See, the entire conceit of VR is that it’s more immersive than anything else. In this game, however, there is pop-in like crazy (that may very well be my PC’s fault), and you can simply walk through a lot of solid objects. These are not overly immersive traits. Also, there’s nothing to do but wander! Collecting apples only goes so far.

As one more little thing to do, there are a number books scattered about the island. They all contain short messages telling you to appreciate the game for what it is, couched in feel-good adages like “If you are depressed, you’re living in the past. If you are content, you’re living in the present.” I stopped looking at them after a while because if I had rolled my eyes one more time, they would’ve popped right out of their sockets.

Overall, there’s really nothing to Paradise Heaven. It’s a nice little beach to boot around on, but I can’t help but feel like I’d get a lot more out of, you know, actually being on that island. And not in the VR sense. It’s a perfect representation of a secluded little spot that I’d love to go to get away from the world for a while, but the lack of interactivity with anything makes the pretend version feel more hollow than anything. I can only watch digital fish swim in circles for so long.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – October 2016

Every October (and even in late September), I get so excited about Halloween, and intend to play a bunch of spooky games to celebrate. And that… doesn’t usually pan out. Was 2016 any different? Read on to find out!

~ Game Over ~

FNAF: Sister Location (PC) – If you don’t count the RPG spinoff, this is the first FNAF game I’ve really gotten into. And it’s spectacular. While it is not quite as terrifying as its older brothers, Sister Location is still Spooky As Heck.

Year Walk (WiiU) – I’ve been itching to replay this for months, telling myself “wait for Halloween” and finally the time came! It’s a really great adventure with clever puzzles and a neat twist halfway through. Turns out that you can clear it in well under an hour, but still, it’s Pretty Darn Spooky.

Pokémon Pearl (DS) – While I have a team that’s half spooky-looking Pokémon (Misdreavus, Crobat, and Luxray), and the bad guys want to basically destroy the universe, Pokémon is simply Not Spooky.

Metroid Prime: Federation Force (3DS) – A regular Metroid game could definitely be considered spooky, but with Federation Force’s focus on action and teamwork, it falls just short of the bar. Not Spooky, but a very solid game otherwise.

Picross 3D Round 2 (3DS) – Decidedly Not Spooky. In fact, it may be the least spooky game on the list, with its relaxing atmosphere and lack of any sort of conflict.

Final Fantasy VIII (PC) – There are a number of creepy monsters and witches in this game, but overall, I’d have to say that it’s Not Spooky. The hammy characters and colourful graphics just don’t lend themselves well to creating a frightful atmosphere.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – October 2016