Thursday Night, Kinda Bored

Ever forgotten about something you really liked? Just had it slip your mind one day, only to suddenly recall it later in all it's glory? I had just this happen to me recently, when I realised I had forgotten about something that had been very enjoyable many months ago. No I'm not talking about this blog (stupid), I'm talking about possibly the best series based on unlicensed use of copyrighted material. I'm talking about:
For the uninformed, Dead Fantasy is a 5 part (at the moment) series of web videos that pits characters from Final Fantasy against ones from Dead or Alive. But don't let the premise fool you, this isn't just some stupid internet video that exists for the purpose of fanservice. No, DF is a very skilfully created story full of technical skill and good choreography that exists for the purpose of fanservice.

But I don't want to just gush about how awesome I think DF is; I want to talk about an element of the series that I only noticed upon rewatching it. It could be my imagination but it seems to that the creator Monty Oum put alot of thought into how the series would unfold. Okay I can't articulate exactly what I mean so I'll give a quick summary to hopefully demonstrate what I mean.

Part 1 starts off comparatively tamely with only 3 fighters. It establishes the capabilities of some of the cast and the general tone of the series. A couple more fighters jump in and the whole thing is a fun few minutes, the perfect intro to pull in new viewers.

Part 2 is much like Part 1 only...more. We see some interesting team combos, and to keep things fresh there is either a change in the environment or a new character ever couple minutes. Part 2 demonstrates that the action of DF is diverse and flexible, not just girls whaling on each other. It ends with all fighters being teleported away in pairs, with the promise that we 'haven't seen anything yet'.

Part 3 goes in the opposite direction to Part 2; it's a 1 on 1 within a single building. It is also one of my favourite fight scenes in any visual media and the one of the reasons for this blog post. Part 3 is a fast-paced, well choreographed duel that shows that DF isn't just mindless spectacle but has some thought behind what happens. The episode ends with one character getting bloodied (a shocking first) and then a short scene setting up Part 4 as well as hinting that there may actually be some sort of plot.

Part 4 has a much different tone and style to Part 3 (and 5 but I'll get to that). It's full of colour and explosions, lulling the viewer into thinking that Part 3 was just the odd one out, and that everything is just fun and superficial.

Part 5 follows on from Part 3 and is intent to shock the viewer. Not only there bloody, but now there is death (presumably), with faceless ninjas getting sliced up. There is also more plot, indicating that there's a reason to what's happening.

And that's all there currently is (Parts 6, 7 and 8 are all under development). As I was attempting to communicate above, I like to think that the way Monty Oum has paced the Parts is intentional. That he has a good story in mind and is telling it in a way to avoid alienating viewers. It's a lot easier to get people to watch a cool 4 minute fight than a video that is the beginnings of a story featuring game characters and multiple worlds.

So....here's a cool 4 minute fight.

No seriously, there will be spoilers

While it's fresh in my mind, I'm going to discuss (laughably implying that you the reader have some degree of input) the movie Sucker Punch, which I only just saw.
Now while it should always be assumed that there are going to be spoilers I would like to stress this point more than usual, as in my usual egotistical style I'm going to talk about what bothered me and how it could have been fixed. After all who else knows what's objectively the best choices for a film than a 22 year old with no experience at anything commercially creative?

Don't answer that.

One of the things I liked about the first third or so was the ambiguity of it all. As the reality shifted I was initially unsure of what was happening exactly and so was forming various theories. At the time of the samurai fight I was wondering if every major event would shift to a different locale/style and maybe by the end everything would just suddenly fall neatly into place and be awesome in retrospect (like what Darker than Black did for me).
But then we go back to the brothel and you see the three layers and where they fit. So then I was hoping for something surreal to happen, that would throw a spanner in theory by being outside of the previously established rules. Hell, Total Recall had me less sure than SP.
Also I'm not counting the angel at the end, that was established in the opening monologue.

And then there's the end message. Having been denied some twist at around the lobotomy scene, I was hoping for some clever meaning behind everything. Instead SP ended with the conflicting message of 'you have what you need so fight' and the last two girls not having what they need so one has to be sacrificed.
Now one could argue that the point is that ultimately Babydoll will be happier this way, retreating into fantasy (maybe) from a world where everyone she loves is dead. But that's docilely accepting one's fate; fighting would be more of carving a new better place in the world. Instead Sweet Pea escapes because apparently she was the protagonist all along.

That's another point that really pisses me off. It's just so pretentious to be like 'haha you idiot viewers thought Babydoll was the protagonist, shows what you know, isn't this film clever and deep'. Regardless of what the film may claim, she is the protagonist. The plot follows her and her personal problems, the realities are fabricated by around her, and she is the one who gets the plan from the freaking angel.

I'm getting tired now so I'll wrap things up with the last main point I can think of. The action needs some work in my mind. The girls are an unstoppable fighting force, which is perfectly acceptable it's a fantasy, but that also means that there's no tension in the scene.
As the scenes are abstractions there is also a lack of emotion to the scenes (your mileage may vary). Except for that one time, there aren't any hardships or personal triumphs or whatever because it's not really happening, and only Babydoll is privy to them anyway.
So what's left is just spectacle. Don't get me wrong, it's good spectacle, but without any threat to the characters or emotional weight it losses a lot.

And that's an incomprehensive post about what I didn't like about Sucker Punch.

PS: Too much slow motion while overly loud music plays.

Chaos

Like usual I haven't updated this blog in ages and so I'm starting this post talking about how I haven't updated. And now I'm talking about how I usually talk about it, which sadly isn't the first time it's happened. Before things more recursively meta let's just get to the point.

I had no idea in mind when I started this, no well thought out thesis about why something sucks and how everyone should listen to me. No this post is just going to be another one where I have several topics with no coherent train of thought between them. They're just stuff that I've been thinking about (and hopefully someone else wants to hear about).

(Like last time, some of you may have already heard me prattle on about these already)

First off: Just Cause 2, in particular the end.

JC2 is a sandbox, third person shooter with vehicles. If that sounds familiar to you it's because it's one of the most frequently used combination of genres in games at the moment. It's like unnecessary sequels for films in that they are both ridiculously common and hopefully in a decade we'll all shake our heads and laugh at how things were.

But I digress. You play as Rico Rodriguez, an unstoppable god-like action hero who works for the CIA the Agency. Rico is sent into the fictional Asian island nation of Panau which is run by an oppressive regime, to locate your fellow operative/mentor Tom Sheldon who has gone dark and possibly rogue. To track him down you must generate chaos to weaken the governments hold and win the trust of various terrorist factions.

Pictured: espionage

A couple story missions in and you find Sheldon who tells you that he had to go as deep undercover as possible as things are serious; you're just told to keep doing what your doing (fun enjoyable sandbox-based destruction).

Fast forward to the end and it's time to take down the dictator Panay and hopefully replace him with a US-friendly puppet. You seemingly take down Panay and then it turns out that it was all about oil. That's right oil (admittedly it's a lot of oil). Without Panay suddenly Russia, Japan and China are all making their move to try to get control before the US.

And then Panay (whose somehow still alive) launches a nuke at each of the four countries. For the last mission you must grapple onto and disable the nukes. For the last one Rico reprograms it (apparently that's possible) and sends it crashing into Panau's oilfield, destroying it so now one gets it. Rico, Sheldon and associates sit back content that there won't be a world war and I bang my head on the desk at the stupid third act.

There are several things that really irk me, and hopefully you too. The developers had all the pieces to make a coherent, adequately logic end story and then they sudden;y drank paint thinner and put it together wrong.
You'd think that since Sheldon had to go dark for big important information gathering it would be because he was trying to track down where the nukes were. That's reasonable, nuclear weapons are high stakes and anyone would be secretive about them. But no, he was just trying to track down Panay or something, and the nukes caught him and EVERYONE ELSE by surprise.

And then there's Rico taking out the oilfield. This pisses me off on every level, to the extent that if we added another level I would pissed off on that too. But enough tortured metaphors, there's a bad climax to criticise.
Firstly there's the obvious safety concern. Nuking an offshore oilfield (one with more oil than the rest of the world combined!) is not going to end well. Rico and co end the game sitting on a boat with their backs to a huge mushroom cloud, discussing what to do now. They figure that the Agency will be rather mad that Rico destroyed more than 50% of the world's oil but they've got this nice tropical paradise to retire to or something. Except that they don't as any of the following might now befall Panau: nuclear fallout, tidal waves, poisoned water, oil fires, economic depression, collapse of government and order.

About the only disaster that won't befall Panau

And then there's Rico's reasoning. Sure any of the four countries involved getting control of all that oil would shift the balance of power and could quite possibly result in war. But Rico isn't allowed to gain any good karma points from this. You see when generating chaos not everything you do is destroying military bases and propaganda, this also things like water towers and transformers for tiny little villages. So Rico isn't allowed to do anything redeeming. He's a horrible person with the facade of a good guy. I suppose in retrospect his final act is perfectly in character, causing destruction for a weakly justified goal.

So remember way back at the start when I said I'd cover several things. Yeah well...I'm not.

Generic Title

Okay my guilt for leaving this blog dormant has reached the point where I'm actually going to finish a post so let's do this. I've been wracking my brain to find the nice middle ground between things I can talk about at length and things that people might actually care to read about.

So instead of a post about anime no ones heard of or games no ones played I'm going to rant about particular scenes in moderately well known films, Iron Man 2 and Sunshine.

(If you've watched these films with me then you probably will have already heard these thoughts)

Iron Man 2

It's the final fight of the film, Iron Man and War Machine have taken out all the Hammer drones in an adequate fight sequence. Ivan descends from the sky in a tougher looking suit, ready to wreck their shit up as only the main villian can (or rather should). War Machine steps forward and launches his trump card superweapon the Ex-wife, basically a super bunker buster. It bounces off Ivan's armour and Iron Man asks derisively "Hammer Tech right?".

Seriously what the fuck?

The joke is supposed to be that Hammer and his company are incompetant and can't build decent weaponery. But the joke falls apart if you think about it at all.

Only minutes ago War Machine's armour had been under Ivan's control and Iron Man had been desperately trying not to get his face blasted off by WM's chainguns; which happens to be Hammer Tech.

And what if the Ex-wife had worked? Sure it would have blown Ivan away, as it would have IM and WM. Why would you fire a high grade explosive in close range? And how come none of the characters make any attempt to escape/avoid it?

While this all probably sounds trivial and nitpicky, my main point is that our supposed heroes show a worrying lack of perception or foresight, which given that they are wearing power armour, is kind of a big deal.

Sunsine

While the IM2 bit was me raging at plot holes, for Sunshine it's more about missed opportunities.

Let's look at the final couple scenes: Capa (the protagonist) blows the airlock, venting all the air in the spacecraft, presumably killing Pinbacker (the psycho killer). He releases the bomb, jumps through empty space from the ship to it and gets inside. There he finds Cassie (the only other survivng member of the team) and Pinbacker, who inefficiently tries to kill them. During this time the bomb is INSIDE THE SUN. Capa and Cassie escape Pinbacker, Capa sets off the bomb, and any of the budget remaining is spent on special effects.

While I do like this segment, it seems like they went overboard making Capa the hero (he does more in the last act than most of the characters in the entire movie), Pinbacker the villian (did we need him showing up one more time in the bomb, isn't being inside the Sun enough danger?) and Cassie the useless woman (her only contribution to run to the bomb thereby leading Pinbacker there). Here's how I would have preferred the sequence to go.

Capa blows the airlock, explictly killing Pinbacker. He releases the bomb and jumps from ship to bomb. He doesn't get inside, let's say because of safety restrictions eg no opening doors this close to Sun. He remains on the outside and watches as they went the Sun, thus referencing his recurring dream of being on the surface of the Sun which is mentioned earlier in the film. Meanwhile Cassie realising the situation activates the bomb, given that in an earlier scene Capa explains to her how it is done. The bomb goes off, this time without having as much time engulfed in nuclear fusion.

Bear in mind I do like these films, and as a result I hold them up to a higher standard. In my mind the better something is, the more jarring a bad bit is.

Remember when I had a blog?

Well all my tests are done for the year so now I'm out of excuses for not updating this blog. Since there's no single topic sitting on the top of my mind like some horrifying spider I'll do another one of those weekly updates I did last post (you know, at the start of October).

First and foremost, the game I could talk about for several hours and my friends can listen to for several seconds: Minecraft. One of the main reasons this game appeals to me so much is there are just so many potential anecdotes. For example between the last post and now I've:

-Carved a valley through a mountain (because I could). I then roofed the entire thing in glass and started to send lava over the top.

-Discovered my first underground cavern. I had been expecting it to be the size of a house or two like the ones that are topside, only to find it was the size of the shopping centre, full of monsters and ores.

-Started multiple forest fires.

-Opened a portal to hell, a world full of a stone that burns eternally and monsters that manage to be worse than Creepers. What's worse than a silent creature that spawns in the darkness and suicide bombs you? How about a something that flies, spawns everywhere, shoots fireballs and screams constantly.

-Used the hellstone to create walls of fire for defence, lighting and just sheer fun. Fortunately there were no trees left nearby to burn down.

-Lost the entire save file......

.....moving on.

I finally got around to watching Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Going in I didn't have strong feelings either way; I liked the comic but I wasn't convinced they could be adequately adapted. Here's an abridged summary:

Pros

-Good implementation of title cards, narration, scene transition etc, as both a throwback to the comic and as just creative film editing.

-The final fight. While I preferred the comic's version, how the 'extra life' part was handled was a unique twist that caught me completely off guard.

Cons

-Michael Cera. I know it's mean-spirited and heaps of other people have already complained but he didn't have the manic energy I associate with the character.

-The various comments by onlookers during fights just don't translate well. In comics talking is a free action, but in any other medium you can't have dialogue without affecting the scene to some degree.

-Uninteresting action scenes. Despite (or maybe because of) the flashy visuals I felt no rush, no excitement while Scott was fighting. I've heard plenty of people over the years talk about special effects-centric scenes being incredibly dull but until now I'd just written them off as stuffy critics and nerds nostalgic about older films.

Neutrals

-I didn't care about Ramona in the slightest, but I can't hold that against the film as I felt the same about her in the comic.

-Negascott lost all of the emotion depth (it was one of my favourite of the actual serious scenes) that he had in the comic. However what they did do with him was both funny and unexpected so the two points cancel out.

In the end I'm apathetic about the movie. Shocking, me displaying that emotion, but what more can I say? There's nothing substantial that either excites or aggravates me to any significant degree.

There was going to be a third thing but I'm tired now, so just imagine me saying whatever you want to hear.

Odd Picture Choice

Foreshadowing!

I had this idea to help myself update regularly by doing a weekly post that just talked about the various media I had consumed recently. This was a week or two ago. As you might guess, I've already let the schedule slip before it even really began. But Apple just crashed TF2 and I'm too bitter to play anything now.

The first order of business is Minecraft. After hearing good things about this game from multiple sources I gave it a go. And for a couple days I thought it was freaking brilliant.

You are placed in a world made up of cubes of various materials that can be harvested and turned into various items. Also at night monsters spawn and murder you rather effectively if you haven't built some shelter. Beyond that you are left to make your own fun (like Garry's Mod) in a world where basically everything wants to kill you (like Dwarf Fortress). Unlike these two games however, Minecraft is a lot more accessible (once you've browsed the wiki).

Here's some of the shenanigans I got up to while I played.
Since monsters spawn in darkness I decided to convert my house to glass in my spare time when I wasn't doing things such as...
...building a tower to the top of the sky. Unfortunately you cannot walk on the clouds. Naturally the next step was to dig to the bottom of the world which was considerably more difficult. At the bottom there's several nearly complete layers of unbreakable stone. If enough gaps line up the can reach the void beneath the world. So naturally I decided to link the tunnel containing the infinite abyss to the ocean of infinite and see if I broke the game:
Nope, but apparently stairs break the water physics.

I found a strange level of enjoyment linking the ocean to the tunnel. The inability to tell where you are in relation to everything lead to me making a series of tunnels coiling all around the place, and there was a sense of suspense because I never knew when I would strike a another tunnel, which may have been full of water.

Ultimately what turned me off the game was the lack of goals as I'm not obsessive enough to be one of those people that make huge scale structures and models. Once the multiplayer gets stabilised (the game is still in alpha) I will give it another look.

Since I'm running longer than intended I'll finish up with Highschool of the Dead. When visiting the Madman site for an unrelated reason I came across this show andwas intrigued by the idea of the Japanese take on the the standard zombie apocalypse scenario. Turns out it is the same as the western one except with lots more fanservice.

No seriously, lots of fanservice.

After getting over my initial disappointment that this wasn't a dark and slightly serious work that the first episode made me believe, I came to except the show for what it is: an entertaining romp full of bloody and breasts. It's not a work of genius but it still rates higher to me than most zombie fiction.

Oh right, I haven't actually really said anything about the show itself: great animation, adequate attempt at plot, one brilliant musical homage, serviceable action, mostly fast paced, no gore despite excessive violence and blood, fanservice (cannot stress that enough), possible second season.

The Silver Age Begins...

Now that I've got a scanner I can subject you all to the various pictures that I can't reproduce in MS Paint. Here's a brief comic showing my standard reaction to the presence of a cat: