Metroid: Other M semi-review

    When I last posted on Metroid: Other M I said it was fairly good. Since then, my opinion has changed for the worse - drastically. There have been plenty of complaints on the internet about Samus's portrayal and there have been many defenses against those complaints. Well, I agree with both.The game certainly has it's problems, but their not completely indefensible. I don't hate the game, but I hate several things about it. Let me explain.

    First of all, cut-scenes can't ever be skipped, paused, or re-watched. What happens if you get an important phone call? What happens if you have to go to the bathroom? What about people who don't care about a game's story and just want to play? In this day and age unskippable, unpausable cutscenes are inexcusable - especially when they're over 20 minutes long. I had to go to youtube several times to catch bits of story that I missed because I had to shift my attention elsewhere. I don't want to single this one out as I've been seeing lots of this problem lately, but it's still inexcusable.
 

     Another bad thing is the storytelling. It's not really a bad story and it had a couple touching moments, but it felt like Team Ninja (the game's developers) was trying to make a Metal Gear Solid game. The delivery is far too melodramatic for a franchise that's had a simple, straight forward story until now. It's mostly told through Samus's monologues. Not only that, but these monologues are far too wordy and delivered in the most monotone way possible. Most of these monologues could easily be replaced with real conversations and using facial expressions to convey emotion rather than explaining it through empty words. With few exceptions, these cut-scenes are boring. To make a long story short, Samus has gone straight from almost never speaking to never shutting up about "the baby" (the baby metroid from "Metroid 2" and "Super Metroid.")

Movie Review - Turkish Star Wars

    Back in the 80's, Turkey loved to rip-off Hollywood movies that they couldn't watch in their own country. This is one of them. Now Turkish Star Wars isn't the movie's real title, as the real title translates to "The Man Who Saves the World." In addition to that, the plot has very little to do with George Lucas's cinematic classic. So why is this movie called Turkish Star Wars? The answer is simple really, it directly uses Star Wars footage. If this were done in North America, there would be lawsuits galore. Some of these rip-offs weren't all that bad, but most of them, like Turkish Star Trek for example, are an absolute chore to watch. Turkish Star Wars happens to be one of the bad ones.

But the real question is, how bad is it? Read on to find out.

Wow, just wow!

    OK, so I have now seen a movie that's both worse than The Room (quality-wise) and about as entertaining as Garbage Pail Kids (physically painfully bad) at the same time. Yup, that movie is most widely known as Turkish Star Wars. I'm working on the written review right now, but my college program comes first. I also plan on re-visiting my thoughts on Metroid: Other M as the further I get into it, the more it's problems are building up. Yeah, I should be finished the game by now, but when Other M is as much of a betrayal to the Metroid series as it is. It's just so much easier to play better games like, oh I don't know - Eternal Darkness and Halo Reach! Just so you know, Halo Reach is the best Halo game yet. While I've never really been a fan of the series, I've enjoyed the games thoroughly. It combines everything that made all the previous Halo games good, and makes some significant graphical and artificial intelligence upgrades. Sure, the graphics still aren't top notch and there's still much better AI out there, but these changes are surely welcome. If you don't like Halo then this one won't change your mind, but if you do then be sure to check it out if you haven't already.

    I might as well talk about my college program here too. As some of you are aware, I'm taking a journalism program. So far, the program's actually pretty awesome. I get to play with power macs, expensive video cameras, and all sorts of cool stuff. I'm taking this mostly to improve my skills, and hopefully that will reflect in any future posts on this blog. I'm taking the program because I'm interested in becoming a movie or game critic down the road, but it'll be fun to explore other forms of journalism as well.

    Anyway, until I finish my Turkish Star Wars review, enjoy.

Game review - Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

    Holy Crap! How did I miss this gem last generation? No joking, this is a really, really good game and I just played through it for the first time. For those who haven’t heard of this masterpiece, Eternal Darkness is a survival horror game exclusive to the Nintendo Gamecube. It also happens to be one of the, if not the best survival horror video game in history. Let me give you a number of reasons why.

Just Started College

Well, I just started my College program in Journalism. I'll still be posting here hopefully several times a week, but I won't have the time to write a review every week. From now on, movie and game reviews will be posted whenever they're finished, and I'll most likely have more movie reviews than game reviews. That's really all I have to say for now.

Crackdown 2 DLC problem

    If you've watched this, then you know I didn't like Crackdown 2. The game's first DLC released recently...it can apparently make the game stop working. Even more reason not to buy the new Crackdown for $60 when you can get a better Crackdown experience in the exact same city with the exact same bad guys for $15.

    Ruffian games (the developer) suggests that you delete your cache, the DLC, and your Profile in order to fix this problem. Seriously, WHAT THE FRICK?  OK, so you can recover your profile and the DLC afterward, but this is really pathetic. This problem really shouldn't happen for DLC that you have to pay for . Before you ask, yes I am aware that there is a free version of the DLC with less content....but is it really worth paying 560 Microsoft points for 8 new armor colors and a couple new weapons and vehicles? Just further proof that Crackdown 2 is a rush-job that adds nothing new to the franchise.

    According to Ruffian, the reported problem with the DLC "May be an issue with the packaging process Microsoft applies to all DLC before they put it online". Yeah, blame it on Microsoft even though they've done this thousands of times before. I officially hate Ruffian Games now, and you should too.

Metroid: Other M impressions/ Inception thoughts

    This post is more of my thoughts on Metroid: Other M and the movie Inception than anything else. I finally just saw Inception (took me long enough,) and thought it was brilliant. But before I get into that, let me talk about Metroid: Other M first.