After posting all those comics last month, I suppose it’s only right to follow up with some less panel-bound doodles. Like this one here!
The more I look at this, the less it looks like something I would have drawn. But I did! Make no mistake about it! This is entirely a product of opening up Photoshop and just going with the flow. Literally the only thing that I had set out to do was to draw something in Photoshop instead of Flash. Get with the times and all that, you know?
Hey all. Against all odds, I am sticking to my guns, and still playing Drakengard 3. While the opening hours were a little bland and the trademark Drakengard insanity had only reached “silly” on the bonkersometer, I forged ahead, undeterred by mediocrity.
And it’s begun to pay off! But we’ll get to that in just a moment. First: gameplay. It hasn’t changed much. In addition to the swords that you begin with, I have unlocked spear and bracer weapon classes. Spears are kind of garbage, as they don’t cut a nice, wide swath like swords do, and it’s difficult to connect with enemies if you aren’t locked on. This is in stark contrast to NieR, where the Phoenix Spear was my weapon of choice for nearly the entire game. Bracers, on the other hand, are super fun, as they let you combo a whole bunch of hits really fast. That, and punching guys just feels right, you know?
I also learned that blocking is a thing. And like most games of this style, you can parry attacks if you block just before they land. Unfortunately, enemies are kind of hard to read, which makes parries even more difficult to perform than in, oh, let’s say Dark Souls. Also, Zero has crazy long recovery lag after attacks (even worse with spears), making it nearly impossible to time a block properly in the middle of an attack combo. As a result, I basically haven’t been blocking at all, relying mostly on the dash as my defence strategy. So essentially, I’ve been playing Drakengard 3 the same way I play Monster Hunter. Only Zero’s dash doesn’t have any invincibility frames, so it’s not terribly effective on large enemies with wider attack ranges.
I think the best way to describe Drakengard 3’s combat is ” like Hyrule Warriors but slower.” But it’s still a heck of a lot faster than the combat in the original Drakengard.
Luckily, the game isn’t all hack-n-slash. It also has a handful of stages in which you ride around on Mikhail and blast fools with fireballs. The missions that still technically take place on the ground (All-Range Mode, if you will) are a little janky, as you have to manage Mikhail’s altitude by flapping his wings now and then. It’s a little more involved than other air combat games where you have the privilege of consistent propulsion. Missions in the sky proper are a lit more fun, as they’re basically just less interesting Star Fox levels. It’s on-rails, and you just blast everything out of the sky. No obstacles, no wingmen, no power-ups. It may actually be more akin to Galaga than Star Fox, to be honest.
What surprised me the most about Drakengard 3 so far is that it has a very overt sense of humour. The first game and NieR may have had their moments, but were typically played very straight. D3 takes every opportunity to make a joke, whether it be the soldiers freaking out about being slaughtered, or Zero and her companions trash talking back and forth. Though, in the latter case, whenever a companion character takes a jab at Zero, her response is usually “You wanna die?”
Zero and Mikhail also have a very weird relationship, wherein she is like a very abusive mother towards the immature dragon. There is a touch of love buried deep beneath the insults that Zero is constantly slinging at Mikhail. And while Mikhail does question Zero’s motives, he always follows her orders and tries to do his best in an effort to earn her respect. It’s very entertaining just to listen to the banter between the two. Criticize the game all you like for its awkward gameplay and last-gen graphics, but it’s got some excellent writing.
There are also the hilarious hijinks that ensure during cutscenes, like when Zero kills Five and the screen switches over to a censor card stating “this content has been deemed inappropriate for pretty much everyone” while Z stabs her sister repeatedly. Or the time where Zero and Dito are crushed by an avalanche and a “The End” screen pops up, only for Zero to burst out of the snow shouting “I’ll decide when it’s the end!” while Dito turns to the camera and shrugs. As a fan of comedy, Drakengard 3’s sense of humour is very welcome, especially since it stands in such stark contrast to the ultra-violent and otherwise horrific content of the rest of the game.
Speaking of which! It’s time to see what makes Drakengard 3 completely bonkers!
So, after the prologue, Zero was severly injured, having lost an arm. The arm was replaced with a metal prosthetic, which is apparently controlled by a parasite that attaches to the wearer’s body. Gross. But what’s more, Zero also mysteriously started growing a flower out of her right eye. A flower with what sort of looks like the butt end of a syringe sticking out of the middle. We get no information on this weird flower until halfway through chapter 2, where Zero’s other arm is chomped off by a wayward Cerberus head. Zero is about to collapse and die when the flower suddenly blows up to super-size. Then, a bloody had shoots out if it, and pulls out… a fully-formed clone of Zero, complete with the arm that just got bitten off, covered in nothing but buckets and buckets of blood. Calling this scene grotesque may be underselling it a little.
And that’s more or less been it as far as actual shockers go. There’s the rather explicit implications that Zero is banging her companions, which isn’t weird in itself. But when she recruits Decadus, she orders him to “Clean yourself up. Front and back. We meet tonight.” to which his eyes widen in fear and his voice beings trembling as he complies. At one point, Dito asks if Mikhail and Zero have slept together, completely serious. Mikhail, of course, is incredibly naïve and has no idea what Dito is really asking. I can’t decide whether the exchange is hilarious or disturbing. Probably both.
So that’s pretty much the extent of my impressions as far as the end of Chapter Two. Stay tuned for more, maybe!
I didn’t buy a Playstation 3 just for Drakengard 3 (that would have been silly), but it was the first exclusive game that made me really want a PS3. Fortunately I was able to adopt the console for the low, low price of free, and then I bought Drak3, and then I… didn’t play it for like two years. Oops!
But now, I am playing it! Time to get m’self up to speed before NieR: Automata drops. I mean, they’re only very loosely related so it’s not like it really matters, but I still feel like I ought to play through this game that I was desperately excited for before I start up the next game that I’m desperately excited for.
Before I even started up the game, I logged into the Playstation Store to check out the DLC options, as I knew there were add-ons for extra chapters. While I was ready to go ahead and buy them sight unseen, I decided to wait and see how the base game turned out before dropping another $30. It turned out that you can’t play the extra chapters until the main story is cleared anyway.
There are also costumes and music packs to purchase. The costumes are all of characters from the previous Drakengard games and NieR, and they also actually affect gameplay! But, they’re $4 each, and that’s a little too steep. Even though I could be running around dressed as Kainé or Nier (albeit the inferior “brother” Nier). Even though I don’t know exactly what it does, I did drop $3 on the NieR BGM pack, which adds three remixed NieR tracks to the game. Where? Not sure yet! But they sure are cool mixes. Wish I could put ’em on my phone somehow so I could listen to them whenever I like!
The game starts with “protagonist” Zero and her dragon partner Michael (not a good name for a dragon) assaulting a fortress, with the express intent of murdering Zero’s five sisters. Apparently they’re all legendary angels, but I don’t really know what that’s about. Gameplay is very basic hack-n-slash business in the intro. Hopefully it’s just keeping it simple for now, but if the previous Drakengard games are any indication…
After mowing through countless soldiers, who bleed as if they’re literally just huge bags of blood, you finally meet up with the sisters. And then a massive four-on-one boss fight ensues. It’s not hard because Zero is nigh invulnerable, but it can be tricky to keep your sights locked on to any one girl for long. Once they all give up, One, who appears to be the de facto leader of the group, summons her own dragon pet, Gabriel (oooh I get it now). You fight Gabe for a bit, then he blasts Zero’s left arm clean off and presumably kills Michael. The pair tumble into a chasm and we jump a year into the future.
Zero, to this point, doesn’t seem like much of hero. We have no idea what’s going on in the plot so far, and her only justification for attempting to murder her sisters is that she wants to be the only magical angel lady (or “Intoner” as the game calls them). She is also not very appropriately dressed, but this isn’t surprising, because Taro Yoko very obviously has some issues with women. Her outfit isn’t quite as skimpy as Kainé’s lingerie, but it’s not very much better. In fact, I sort of regret having purchased the game at a real store, because the checkout girl that seemed happy to help me at first took one look at the cover and shot me a look that told me she’d decided that I must be some sort of weird pervert.
But Zero is definitely a badass. She’s got a short temper and a foul mouth, and has got the skills to back it up. The way she flies around the screen, slicing her enemies to ribbons, is very cool. Actually, she is basically just Kainé, if Kainé was a murderous psychopath instead of a grumpy hermit. Her temperament is much more like that of Caim, the hero from the first Drakengard. Which I greatly approve of, if only because his characterization in The Dark Id’s LP was amazing.
An I make it sound worse than it really is when I call Zero a psychopath. Because every single character in Drakengard is on the psychopath spectrum, and it looks like D3 is following suit. Except for Mikhail, Zero’s baby dragon buddy who is apparently a reincarnated version of Michael. Mikhail is constantly asking Zero why she wants to kill everyone instead of just talking it out and trying to resolve their issues. He’s a naive little dude that dislikes violence, but follows Zero around anyway. It actually seems like he belongs more in the NieR branch of the series than Drakengard.
Anyway, the game hasn’t made much of an impression yet, but these things are often pretty unassuming from the start. Gameplay is snappy but uninspired, graphics are not the best the PS3 has to show, and the story hasn’t gotten twisted at all. But that’s after just the prologue and two levels into chapter one. It may take a while before it really opens up and goes coo coo bananas. There have been a couple shocking scenes, but nothing on the level of the Grotesqueries yet.
Stay tuned to maybe read some more about this wacky game!
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Japanese horror (“horror”) film Hausu (or House, if you demand Englishness), but I watched it over the weekend, and BOY OH BOY was it a thing that happened.
At first blush it seems as though this would be the kind of movie that bombed hard and then gained a cult following in the decades that followed. This is mostly the case, or at least that’s what I got from briefly skimming the Wikipedia article. But this film is actually part of the Criterion Collection! It’s considered to be fine art! Which is not the kind of thing one would suspect after having watched it!
That’s not to say that Hausu is without merit. It’s got a lot of insane scenes and I certainly appreciate that they were going for wacky. But as a whole, it mostly left me cold. Maybe it’s because we live in the year 2016 and I’ve become desensitized to goofiness, but I feel like they didn’t really push the envelope far enough. There remains plenty of room to be even more mind-boggling.
But hey, three paragraphs in and I’ve already written my conclusion! That will not do! Let’s turn this puppy around and start from the start. Which I’m going to tear through in a single paragraph, because the first half hour is a slog.
I’m fairly well-known as the kind of person who doesn’t like to do things that require effort and/or pants. But last weekend, I did a whole lot of things! New(ish) things! Including but not limited to:
What an exciting life I lead!
It’s October! Time for scary movies! Right? While it isn’t exactly the Halloweeniest movie out there, I decided to skip school last night to watch The Shallows. Totes worth it!
The film is about a young lady who goes surfing at a secluded beach somewhere in the depths of Mexico. Or, I suppose, on the fringe of Mexico. Whatever. It’s out of the way, and a secret to everybody who isn’t a local. If you know nothing else about this movie yet, I recommend that you stop reading here and go watch it. The less you know going in, the better.
If you aren’t interested in actually watching it, yeah, might as well keep reading.
Do you like listicles? Because apparently I do. I promise that I won’t do as many of these stupid things this year. Cross my heart.
Okay so remember a couple years ago when I did lists of the top albums and artists that I’d listened to the year before? Well I’m doing it again. Only just with albums this time because it’s so redundant to do both. It works like so:
I pull up my Last.fm page and check the top albums for the last 365 days. Keep in mind that this is only considering tracks that were actually scrobbled. So anything I listened to via the Scrobbler app on my phone or Winamp on my PC. CDs obviously don’t count (not that use those too often), and neither do tracks that were played with Media Player Classic, because I don’t have the Last.fm plugin for that, if there even is one.
So no, the list isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s the best metric that we have. Enjoy.
It’s a little sad to think that the DLC support for Super Smash Bros 4 is finally coming to and end, but man, is it ever going out with a bang.
Cloud is already available, and pretty cool. I haven’t quite gotten used to his style, but he’s certainly not as difficult to master as Ryu. Will I give him up and just go back to Ike for my Big Sword Times? Probably. Midgar is a really awesome stage, with interesting obstacles that aren’t too obtrusive. I’m looking at you, Metal Face.
I cannot wait to play Corrin. She looks like she could easily be my new main. I love Robin and all, but that chainsaw sword is way too cool. Plus, that counter, man. That counter.
Bayonetta, I have no idea how to feel about. She looks great, but I have not connection whatsoever with the character. At the very least, she seems like she’ll fit right in with the Smash crew, and that stage looks pretty darn cool as well.
Last night was my office Xmas party. Normally I hate these functions, as I have a long history at being awful at mingling. So I spent the entire week dreading the evening, as I do every year.
It wasn’t so bad though. Actually, I had a really good time. I ended up talking to a lot of people, and even sat at a table separate from the rest of my department. So somehow I managed to survive and even have a good time despite being miles away from my comfort zone. Who would have thought?
Of course, by “somehow” I mean “thanks to the liquor.”
I haven’t had a drink in over 5 years for reasons that I will not get into, but last night I decided that it was time to let go of that particular anxiety and have a few liquor drinks. I wouldn’t say that I was full-on drunk, but I’m pretty sure that there was a noticeable shift in my demeanor. I most certainly cracked a number of jokes that I would not have had the nerve to get out if I’d been sober.
Despite the fact that things turned out well, I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken the first step down a long, dark, downward spiral…
I’ve decided that my current “thing” is going to be browsing through my movie collection and watching any that I haven’t watched before. You may scoff at the idea that I might buy a product and then never use it, but I’m both very materialistic and busy. Well, “busy.” The idea here is that I’m going to write a thing after every so many movies and then fire off a couple paragraphs about each.
Anyway, I’m sure this won’t last for long. We all know that I have a habit of abandoning projects really quickly. But at least I’ll get one or two articles out of it.
This batch comes from a Midnight Horror collection, the likes of which you will find in the $5 garbage DVD bin at Wal-Mart. It contains a whopping eight films, and as you may have already guessed, they’re pretty much trash as far as cinema goes. Let’s take a closer look at a handful of them, shall we?
Firstly, let’s assume that I didn’t choose this one to start with because it’s pretty close to Resident Evil. (It’s also known as Decadent Evil Dead in the UK, which is just.. ugh.) Also, assume that I wasn’t growling “Decadent Eee-vil” and then giggling to myself constantly between the time when I chose to watch the movie and when I actually sat down to watch it.
Decadent Evil is 67 minutes long. That includes the intro and ending credits. I’d wager that the actual film portion is roughly 50 minutes. This is good for me, as my attention span dwindles by the day.
This film is about vampires. Specifically, a trio of lady vampires that live in a gaudy LA mansion and work as strippers. They also have a little pet lizard-man, Marvin, which they refer to as a homunculus and keep in a birdcage. The head vampire is nearing the milestone of having sucked the blood of 10,000 humans, which will apparently make her an invincible Vampire Queen. Sure, why not? At least she doesn’t get magical sparkle powers.
But then a vampire hunter shows up and, with the “help” of the youngest vampire and her boyfriend, locates and defeats the boss vampire. He dies during the process, but ends up turning her into a homunculus. The final scene is of Marvin porking her in the cage while she makes a noise that sounds an awful lot like “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow Ow.”
While not egregiously terrible, Decadent Evil is not a good movie. Even the nudity is shoddy.
This seemed to be the most boob-filled flick of the bunch, based on the description on the back of the case, so it got second billing. In that regard, I was not disappointed. There was ample boobage on display indeed.
Please note that this film has the subtitle “Kiss of the Beast” on occasion. This was not one of those occasions.
The movie’s protagonist is Catherine, who moves into a castle in Italy because reasons. Her friend comes to visit and invites a bunch of carnies over and then the carnies drug and rape the both of ’em. Whoops. Also the one that has his way with Catherine is a were-sasquatch. Double whoops!
I don’t know how it turns out because I fell asleep shortly after that point. I do know that there was a ghost of a dead girl, the were-sasquatch was cursed and also knew about a secret passage in the castle that led to Hell apparently, and… Yeah, that’s all I got from the few moments that I drifted back into consciousness.
Meridian, at least what I saw of it, is a much better movie than Decadent Evil. I guess it must have had some people who knew anything about making movies on staff. Sherilyn Fenn is the main character, and she’s a… known actress. It’s still not one I would recommend, because the plot was super dumb, but I could see someone defending it as a decent movie.
Confession: I did go back and watch the rest… It turns out that were-sasquatch was also a ghost. With an evil twin. And the trick to breaking were-sasquatch’s sasquatch-ghost curse was to have him murder said evil twin. If it weren’t so slow and romantic, this could have really been an awesomely stupid movie. As it is, it’s just stupid.
Where the heck do I even start with this one? Let’s start with the fact that this film is amateur-hour in every way. The story follows the same plot beats as every other slasher, the actors are mediocre at best, and the camerawork is all over the place. I suppose the gore is okay.
One might assume that the director had a glut of red corn syrup, and said to his friends “Welp, I guess we’d better make a slasher movie.”
As the story so often goes, a group of teens goes into the woods for a weekend getaway. Despite a token warning from a local hillbilly, they press on and are subsequently picked off one-by-one by a forest monster. The twist is that in addition to the monster, one of the teens is also a psychopathic killer. So I guess that’s unique. It’s normally only one of the two.
The monster is a big let down. Called a Hodag, the “beast” is really just a dude dressed all in black with predator dreadlocks. It’s given a little backstory about how it has evolved over the years into the shape of its prey (which is people), but that’s still just a lame handwaving for not being able to come up with some decent creature effects. It’s especially disappointing when you find out what a Hodag is actually supposed to look like.
At least the Hodag’s story is kind of neat. The locals are used to a couple people going missing every year, as the Hodag will kill a few folks and store their bodies away for the winter (like the nagging grasshopper). But it just so happens that now, it’s killing at an alarming frequency because it’s got a baby on the way. It’s eating for two now! How sweet! Better than just killing because it’s a mindless monster, at any rate.
Just so that we can tie this one into the common thread of “how’s the nudity?”, I feel obligated to mention that during one of the sex scenes, there is a still, close-up shot of a single breast for about five seconds. The editing in this film is baffling. Also the Hodag keeps one of the girls tied up and alive in his lair, but by the time she is found, it has chopped off her breasts. That’s… not a thing I’ve ever seen before. Backwoods Bloodbath goes to some really strange places.
I can’t in good faith recommend this to anyone. It’s not even amusingly terrible. It’s just terrible. The one saving grace for me is that I was playing Chibi-Robo! Zip-Lash throughout, so it didn’t really feel like I’d wasted those 90 minutes.
The last one on today’s lineup, as absolutely the best. By a long shot. A really, really long shot.
I have no idea why this was billed as a horror film, or why anybody suggests that it is scary in the least. Because it is not. The last three minutes of the film might be construed as somewhat frightening, but even then, that’s being pretty generous.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I’ve become so desensitized to zombies that I cannot fathom how anyone could see them as something frightening.
Anyway, this movie is totally a comedy. Like, it’s not hilarious or anything, but it made me laugh out loud a few times. And, of course, I was laughing with this movie. If I chuckled while watching the other three, I definitely would have been laughing at them.
Zombie Dearest tells the story of a couple, Gus and Deborah, who are going through some severe marital difficulties. They end up moving out to an old family home in the country, and Gus digs up a dead body while trying to replace his septic tank. By some manner of Zombie Wang Magic (yes, it’s a thing), the body comes to life and starts following Gus’s orders.
The zombie, Quinto, puts even more strain on Gus and Deborah’s relationship at first, but eventually they patch things up and grow closer than ever when they decide that they need to re-kill Quinto.
Things do take a turn for the worse near the end, but unlike every other zombie comedy ever, it doesn’t dip into bleak, depressing territory in the third act and forget that it’s supposed to be funny. No, it hangs onto its somewhat humorous tone until it absolutely must push the plot to its climax. But it quickly invokes Zombie Wang Magic a second time to undo the damage and give the characters their (presumably) happy ending.
I am fully willing to put myself out there and suggest that Zombie Dearest is actually a good movie. It’s not a life-altering film, but I was entertained and impressed but it. It may be due to the fact that I was expecting another 90 minutes of garbage, but there’s also a chance that it really is decent. Even if you’re fully burned-out on zombies, I’d heartily recommend watching it. (Fair warning: it’s got only a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)
