Category: M for Mature

Creepier than the average uncle

I suppose I probably should clarify a stance or something, but I’ve been trying to avoid any GamerGate-related talk on here because the only thing that’s good for is bringing people down, and I want my blog to be a more positive place. If I’m going to type anything depressing, it’ll be personal woes, not about people being horrible to other people.

For the record, I don’t think that social politics should be part of video games, so I don’t want to get involved. But I do believe that video games should be enjoyable for everyone. Men, women, everyone in-between. They’re not for an exclusive club of socially-challenged nerds. All my life I’ve been waiting for the stigma against gamers to go away, waiting for the day when I could play my 3DS on the bus and not have to feel like I’m being judged. GamerGate is just making it worse. It has nothing to do with journalistic integrity and everything to do with hatemongering. So yeah, I want GamerGate and all their stupid crap to go away.

But that’s just sort of a preamble for what I really want to write about today, because I honestly can’t say much about it: The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo. It’s a text adventure, which might immediately disinterest a few, but keep in mind that it’s short and you can probably reach the final ending within about 20 minutes.

The game starts out all cute and nostalgic, but quickly gets creepy and uncomfortable. It’s probably the most enjoyable Twine game I’ve played, which isn’t playing much, since I’ve only played like three. There are a handful of endings to earn, and the game does a very nice job of hinting towards ones you haven’t yet found. It also provides a very nice option to restart at the point in the game where your decisions start to matter, cutting out all the setup on replays.

I’d like to say more about it, but I don’t really want to spoil anything. The one thing I do want to mention is that if you make certain choices, the game does go down a very GamerGate-relevant path. Yeah, it gets a wee bit preachy, but it doesn’t detract from the overall experience.

I absolutely recommend checking out UWWFN long enough to find your way to the real ending. A good way to kill half an hour, if nothing else. And it’s a browser game, so you’ve got no good excuse not to. Just make sure you do it on a real computer and not your phone or tablet, because the audio component is pretty important.

Oh, and if you’re a big fraidy-cat like me, maybe play in the afternoon. It gets pretty spooky.

Filler time: Articles for grown-ups

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me: I’m a child living an adult’s life. I appreciate a lot of things that people my age aren’t supposed to, if advertising and demographics have anything to say about it. Marketing is all a big load of crap, anyway.

I guess the point is that I don’t have any ideas in my head at the moment, and I don’t have the gumption to type up the weekly Dark Souls entry. Wait, no, that’s what I wasn’t supposed to say. I’m supposed to make it seem like I’m doing something inspired.

Anyway, I type about a lot of goofy things that are emblematic of childhood. Cartoons, Nintendo games, candy. If you scroll up from the bottom of the article list, you’ll see that it takes a long time to get to anything very grown-uppy. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it. So that’s why today, I’m going to link you to a small selection of old articles that stand out as somewhat more mature among the sea of childish crap that I’ve written.

28 Days Later (2003) – The first movie I ever reviewed, and it’s a scaaary one. Probably because it’s one of the first (if not the actual first) movies with fast zombies. So it turns a kind of slow, tense staple into something much more fierce and immediately frightening. Please note that I have not watched this movie since then.

Catherine (2011) – Undoubtedly a truly mature game, as it deals with many very grown-up themes. Also there are boobies and monsters, but the heart of the game is literally about growing up, accepting responsibility, and figuring out what you want to do with your life.

Chicken Wings (2005) – Chicken wings are undoubtedly a fun finger food, which is pretty child-like, However, wings are most prominent where? Bars, that’s where. Kids don’t go to bars. They’re also one of the staple foods of sports-watching, or so I’ve been told, and sports-watching is a pretty grown-up kind of thing.

Mate1.com Hates You (2006) – To date, still the most popular thing I’ve ever published, if fan e-mails are anything to go by. Mate1.com, if you’re not already aware, is an online dating website. Those are most definitely not for children. It’s not really for anybody, as far as this article is concerned.

Remembering the Cottage (2007) – Yeah, it’s an article entirely about childhood memories, but that in and of itself makes it kinda grown-up, right? I mean, kids don’t reminisce. You have to be old and at least a little world-weary before you really understand nostalgia. Some might say that I’m not old enough to say something like that, but I respectfully have no comment.

True Crime: Streets of LA (2003) – The first video game that I wrote about that earned an M rating from the ESRB. I guess that’s all I really have to say about that. I haven’t written about a lot of games that feature non-laser guns.

Year of N64 – February: Body Harvest

If GoldenEye 007 was one of my most played Nintendo 64 games, I suppose it makes sense to follow it up with one that I have never played and know virtually nothing about. For the sake of contrast, you see.

Indeed, I had never played Body Harvest before The Year of Our Lord 2014. I had barely even ever heard anything about the game. I remember reading an early preview of it Nintendo Power, but I don’t recall ever seeing any actual coverage of it in the magazine. Googling seems to confirm there was never full coverage of the game, just a few hints stuffed into the Classified Information section.

On top of that, Nintendo really gave Body Harvest the shaft. The game was originally supposed to be a launch title for the N64, with Nintendo as the publisher. But they didn’t like it, and dropped it, leaving the game sitting in limbo for a little over two years before it was finally picked up and released. The developer, DMA Design, later became the studio that people know much better as Rockstar North.

So if you think about it, if Nintendo had played nicer with DMA, maybe Grand Theft Auto would have been a Nintendo game, or at least multiplatform thing instead of a big hit for the Playstation. Maybe.

Continue reading Year of N64 – February: Body Harvest

X-Mas Gift Roundup: 2013 Edition

Hey, so Christmas happened a while back. Maybe you’d noticed? I sure did, because I got a freakin’ amazing haul of gift this year, and you know how much I treasure material possessions. So obviously I want to brag talk about them on the internet.

I don’t really have any sort of screed to come in on, I just wanted to note that I haven’t done an X-Mas gift round up since… 2007!? Holy cow! That’s even farther back than I’d thought! Man… that was a pretty great Christmas. Looking back on those pics, I can even remember it pretty well. Yeah, I was so excited that morning that after The Unwrappening was over I fell asleep while watching Bender’s Big Score.

So, uh, let’s just get started then, yes?

Continue reading X-Mas Gift Roundup: 2013 Edition

Halloween 2013: 5 Best Horror Movies

Welp, it’s Halloween today, and pretty much the only thing I’ve done in the spirit of the season is watch a whole buttload of horror movies. Most of them were absolutely terrible, and sometimes that’s the appeal, but once in a while there’s one in there that I feel was legitimately good. Those movies are the ones we’re going to talk about today.

What’s going to separate this from anyone running down a list of their favourite horror movies is my single criteria: I must have watched the movie for the first time this October. So all of these are new to me, and

Curse of Chucky – I love me some Chucky series, but I was a little worried about this one before it came out. It’s a direct-to-DVD movie, which is usually enough to confirm that a movie is going to be baaaaad. I was also under the impression that it was going to be a reboot, and reboots are dangerous territory.

Curse of Chucky is not a reboot. For the first half of the movie, it could be. The Chucky doll looks new, and there are no ties to the previous films. And then one of the characters notices that Chucky’s face has a layer of latex on it that’s covering up all his scars, proceed to peel the latex off, and BAM ITS THE CHUCKY WE KNOW AND LOVE.

And then, AND THEN the events of Curse all end up tying back into the very first Child’s Play and then Jennifer Tilly shows up right at the end and it all fits together and it is damn glorious. Unlike the two previous films, Curse is not a horror-comedy. It sticks to straight-up horror, and I like that they decided to go back to basics. Also, Curse has the best, most amazing post-credits scene ever filmed.

Curse of Chucky is absolutely the best direct-to-DVD movie I have ever seen, and it’s a fantastic sequel to a series that was having an identity crisis. Easily the best horror movie I’ve watched this season, and maybe even one of my favourites of the year at large. It’s creepy, it’s surprising, and it’s a big love letter to fans of the series.

Fright Night (2011) – I’m also a huge fan of 1985’s Fright Night. I mean, who isn’t though? It’s one of the legit best horror movies ever made. So you can understand why I didn’t really want to see the modern remake. But it was $5 at Wal-Mart and with a price like that, I figured it’d be worth the gamble. Oh man, you guys.

The remake of Fright Night is great. It’s pretty much exactly what I like to see in a remake: it’s got a lot of the same elements as the original, but mixes everything up enough that it’s its own movie. Kind of like how a good cover song works. If you know Fright Night well, you’ll have a good understanding of the basic plot of the movie, but it throws enough curveballs at you that you’re going to be shocked at least a few times.

It’s a really good thrill ride too. In the original, Jerry is a fairly passive vampire. He comes after Charley that one time, but mostly he’s just like “hey mind your own business kid.” In the remake, he is the most bad-ass vampire I have ever seen. 2011 Jerry Dandrige does not mess around. He will stalk you, he will threaten you, he will blow your mother-loving house up. It is magnificent, and I am so very sad that I hesitated to watch it for as long as I did.

World War Z – I think the theme of this list so far is “movies I thought would be bad but then they really weren’t” and World War Z is probably the most fitting for that title. You watch the trailer, and you see the wacky zombie tidal waves, and you think that it’s just going to be utter garbage. In fact, if I hadn’t gotten it as a free rental from Redbox, I probably still wouldn’t have bothered to watch it.

The thing you have to understand is that while World War Z has zombies in it, it’s not really a zombie movie. You could more or less sub in any kind of global disaster and tell the same story: Brad Pitt doesn’t give two craps about saving the world or finding a cure or anything, he’s just doing what he has to to keep his family safe.

So then what separates it from other, less great apocalypse movies like, oh let’s say 2012? Brad Pitt helps, that’s for sure. I mean I love John Cusack, but there’s really no competition. World War Z is also paced really well, and I dare say that using zombies as a disaster makes the situation much more interesting. The movie is very tense and interesting from beginning to end, and it’s absolutely more of an action/drama than a horror movie, but I’ll keep calling it horror so I can justify putting it on this list.

From Hell – This is a movie I’d never even heard of that Wifey picked up because it was cheap and it has a young(ish) Jonny Depp in it. It’s a slasher that gives an identity and motive to Jack the Ripper. But it’s not really about Jack, it’s more about the prostitutes that he kills. And also a detective that solves crime by having psychic visions while wasted on opium.

It all sounds a little silly, and it is. It’s very silly if you stop to think about it. But it’s a fairly enjoyable movie to watch. I especially liked that it’s a somewhat unique variation on the usual slasher formula. You know who doesn’t like it though? Alan Moore. The movie is based on a graphic novel of his, and apparently devolves his fine story into a goofy whodunit. I haven’t read said graphic novel (and probably never will), but the movie version worked for me, and that’s all that mattered.

Christine – You know the episode of Futurama where Bender becomes a were-car? Apparently that’s also an old horror movie! Well, not really, but I can’t seem to separate the two in my mind despite the fact that all they really have in common is the theme of homicide by automobile.

It’s based on a Stephen King novel, which is usually a good thing, and has a pretty good story and a handful of great characters. What really impressed me about Christine though, was the special effects. At one point, Christine (who is a haunted car), is completely destroyed. Shortly after, she magically restores herself, and the scene looks so friggin’ good. Like, these practical effects from 1983 are considerably more convincing than most of the computer-generated effects in current movies.

The only thing that really bothered me about the film is that there isn’t even a hint of an explanation as to why the car is haunted. I suppose that’s a fairly common omission is movies based on Stephen King stories, as they’re typically more about the characters and how they deal with the situation than the situation itself. Still, it’s a pretty great movie, and despite the difference in popularity between the two, I think it was way better than Carrie.

The end is NIER

If this image is familiar to you, it likely means that you’ve played and completed NIER. Hats off to you, friend. If you haven’t, I recommend that you head out to your local used games store and get your bad self a copy of this gem. I just wish my phone could take a better picture of the TV screen, because the title is super blurry and there’s supposed to be a flower in that spotlight.

NIER, for the uninitiated, is an action RPG released way, way back in 2010. And it is magnificent. It’s not a long game, but I’ve now spent roughly 60 hours with it, and a good many of those were well spent. I’ve done everything there is to do in the game, and only have a single achievement left to earn, which is for beating it in under 15 hours. Should be a piece of cake, since I can do the entire second half of it in under two.

Anyway, what makes NIER such a great game is not necessarily the gameplay, but everything that is wrapped around it. The basic story is that of a father searching for a cure for his daughter’s mortal illness. Right there you’ve got a story that I care to see through to the end. But there are many twists and turns along the way. There are no less than half a dozen story events that will leave you stunned, staring slack-jawed at the screen wondering if what you saw really just happened. It’s the only game in recent memory where events in a cutscene have made me sit up straight and shout in disbelief and/or terror.

I won’t mince words, NIER isn’t afraid to be cruel. The main characters are pretty great and have terrific voice actors, and you will grow to like them. Which adds so much more emotional weight when awful things start to happen to them.  And that may shy you away, but think about how many video games elicit a true emotional response from you. How many have actually made you hurt for their characters? Not many, I’m guessing. It gets downright depressing, but it’s absolutely a story worth seeing through. You can go read a plot summary if you’re lazy, but nothing even compares to witnessing the events play out firsthand.

What’s really great is that there are four endings to the game, and unlike most games with alternate endings, each one builds onto the last, giving more details and slightly changing the final outcome. There are also a ton of additional little scenes added throughout the game once you’ve gotten ending A which will shatter every preconception you’ve had about what’s going on in its world. When you boot up NIER, you’re starting down one of the absolute best video game stories that you’ll ever experience.

That’s not to say that the gameplay should be overlooked! By all means, it’s a pretty competent game. NIER was developed by Cavia Inc, who have a reputation for filling their games with bullcrap and trollign players to no end, but an average playthrough of NIER is kind enough to the player. It’s only when you go off the rails and decide to earn 100% that it gets to the point of unbearable garbage. So much so, in fact, that I learned how to hack Xbox 360 game saves just to save myself hours days of grinding for rare drops.

If you just play through to experience to core game though, it’s pretty delightful. It’s a third-person action game, and feels a little like a looser Zelda with no Z-targeting system. And then there are a few rather dramatic gameplay shifts here and there just to throw you off. One early part of the quest requires you to play the fishing mini-game, which is actually pretty fun, and another portion is presented entirely as a… well, I don’t really want to spoil too much. It’s not as refined as it could be, but I certainly had no complaints about the actual playing part of the game.

My introduction to Nier was a Let’s Play, and I quit reading less than a third of the way through because I knew that I needed to experience the rest for myself. It was definitely the right thing to do. While my time with NIER is almost over, it’s been a great run and now my job is to get other people to play it and see the light for themsleves. This is one that’s going to stay in my collection and most likely see frequent replays.

Oh, and the soundtrack is The Balls. I bought it on iTunes, but feel bad because it’s so great that I feel like I should have a physical copy.

Another note, NIER doesn’t stop with mature subject matter in the story. There is so much blood, and also constant cussing from a certain character who walks around in some very skimpy lingerie. So, maybe keep it away from the kids. If that’s an issue for you.

Countdown to U-Day

What have I had, three posts about Wii U so far? Definitely out of character for me. I guess I must be growing up, because a younger me would have themed the blog here with all sorts of Wii U stuff. Woulda made up a Wii U banner anyway. Oh, wait. The blog has been Wii themed since… 2007? Wow, past me really was good at that future planning stuff!

As it is, I’m barely excited enough about having gotten my pre-order last weekend. And that’s with only two months left to go! I should be bouncing off the walls and yakking everyone’s ear off about how excited I am for my new console. Alas, I am much more subdued this time around. It’s probably because I can’t afford to buy any games to play on the stupid thing. Gone are the Wii days where I could just throw my paychecks away on as many vidja games as I could handle.

It’s too bad too, because it suddenly seems that I want them all. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but I’m certainly a lot more confliced about which Day One title I’m going to bring home with me on launch day than I was just a week ago. Since these megaposts are kind of what I do these days, let’s have a look-see…

Darksiders II – This was my original choice, and it had no competition, save perhaps Pikmin 3, but that’s been pushed back so it’s out of the running. I had a great time with the original Darksiders and little interest in any other Wii U launch day games, but now I’m having to think about it. Also, I’ve heard rumblings that maybe Darksiders II isn’t as good as the original, so that’s causing some hesitation. It’s still number one, but two months from now anything could happen.

New Super Mario Bros U – Since finances are tight, I have to consider that maybe The Wife would like to play with my our new toy too. Considering that NSMBU is probably the only launch title she’ll get any mileage out of. It’s not that I don’t think I’d like it, it’s just that I’m smack in the middle of New Super Mario Bros 2 on 3DS right now, and I don’t feel like I need another Mario game yet. We also had an absolute blast with the original Wii game, and that’s certainly helping this one’s case along. The real issue here is that I don’t find the New Mario games quite as fun to replay as say, Super Mario World.

ZombiU – You’d think this would be right up my alley, what with the zombies ‘n all. Truth is, I wasn’t really taken with it until I started reading impressions from last week’s Nintendo event in New York. Now I’m very much leaning towards the idea of picking ZombiU over Darksiders. If nothing else, I’d like to have a game that really makes use of the gamepad, and doesn’t just delegate maps and inventory management to it. I mean, ZombiU does that, but in a more interesting way. Or so it seems. I’ll need to keep reading up on this one. I can’t help but remember the mediocrity of Dead Island though.

Rayman Legends – I wasn’t sold on Rayman Origins until last Friday, despite the fact that everyone and their dog has been raving about it since it came out. But then I played a few stages with my youngest bro, including the unbeleivably difficult Secret Final Level, and had an absolute blast. I’d played the demo, but I guess I did it wrong by playing solo. So now the question of the sequel comes up. Do I pick this one up at launch, or do I satisfy my newfound interest with the cheaper original?

Assassin’s Creed III – I haven’t played a singe other game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and I didn’t ever plan to. However, I’m very much into the American Revolution setting of this one. That is all.

Scribblenauts Unlimited – I couldn’t get into the first Scribblenauts game no matter how hard I tried. But the promise of a game with better controls, huge environments to explore, and the ability to creat things has stuck the Scribblenauts hooks right back into me. I can’t see myself actually buying it, but stranger things have happened.

Tank! Tank! Tank! – I haven’t read anything about this since E3, but damn does it look like fun! I’m also a big supporter of the odd-duck games that come out when a new game system is released. Admittedly this doesn’t seem quite as gimmicky or odd as, say, Feel The Magic XY/XX or Rayman Raving Rabbids. Another one that I’m really going to have to look into before taking the plunge.

Okay, so there are only seven launch titles I’m interested in. But it’s still really hard when you can only choose one! Luckily, most of the other games (Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, Runner 2) I want are looking like they’re going to come out around March, so that’s time to sock away a little cash. The fact of the matter is though, that Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is slated for March, so at that point I won’t need any other games. It would be really rad if that had been a launch title, but what can you do?

Good job, zombie arm!

The woman and I went to see The Cabin in the Woods last weekend. Perhaps you’ve seen the trailer? It’s the one where it starts out looking like just another slasher flick, but then a bird crashes into an invisible wall of future-technology and explodes into a fireball. Maybe there’s something more to this…

Since I love cheesy slasher flicks, the interest was already there for me. But then there’s the fact that there’s a whole other level there that we don’t really know anything about, and also it’s written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard? Effin’ sign me up, man! I did read a (very convincing) review in the paper on the Friday too, which at that point was just preaching to the choir.

The Cabin in the Woods was even better than I’d hoped for, and might even beat out Drag Me to Hell as my favourite “horror” movie. If you’ll recall, I really liked Drag Me to Hell. I’d have to watch them both again, but regardless, they’re both amazing films, and I heartily recommend them both. That’s a little too straight to the point though; let’s talk a little more about The Cabin in the Woods.

The movie is played off in the trailer as a pretty generic slasher flick, where four sexy teens and Topher from Dollhouse head off to a creepy, secluded cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway. Does that sound like a million other movies? Yeah, a little.  But there is a second plot! It involves professionally-dressed men (and Whiskey from Dollhouse!) in some kind of fancy complex monitoring and ever-so-slightly controlling the fates of our cabin-goers. It’s not a spoiler, because it becomes apparent that this is happening within the first half-hour of the film.

Eventually the stories truly intertwine, and we see that they’re two sides of the same coin, equal parts of a bigger picture. This is still sounding a little generic, but there’s a lot of subtext here, and the whole movie is really one big deconstruction of the horror/slasher genre. But all pretension aside, what matters at the end of the day is that The Cabin in the Woods is hilarious. Sometimes in a tongue-in-cheek way, sometimes ironically, and most of the time very blatantly.

This is a movie about making fun of other movies, and it is a beautiful thing. You know all those terrible [Genre] Movie parodies that are terrible and should be forgotten from human history? The Cabin in the Woods is exactly what those movies wish they could be. It is poking fun at many, many other movies, but not doing it with an endless stream of references and fart jokes. The closest thing to a reference in this movie is… ah, I don’t really want to spoil it. But I will say that there are a couple short scenes that will leave Hellraiser fans grinning. Anyway, The Cabin in the Woods is funny and very smart, but it’s not inaccessible, which is what puts it head and shoulders above pretty much every other parody ever.

The Cabin in the Woods even spends a lot of time satirizing the people who go to the kind of movie it’s ripping on. Yeah, me. And that’s cool. There’s an element of reality TV parody here too, and I found it to be much more entertaining than the other movie doing that, The Hunger Games. But that’s another story entirely.

So again, The Cabin in the Woods is great. Go see it, and be ready for copious amounts of hilarity and blood. Also a unicorn.

Rated M for potty mouth

 

I don’t know what I’m doing. I kind of feel like I should hop on the Let’s Play bandwagon, but I’m no good at the talkies. Or Spelunky, apparently. Anyway, this was mostly just to play around with Camtasia for a while before I actually started recording the world’s worst LP. Also, I swear a lot when I play games alone. So yeah, don’t let the little ones be watchin’ this.

I have a terrible voice too. Getting kind of used to it though, after watching this thirty-seven times.