25 Years of NES Part 20: Contra
Author: skoce
Paul Review
As big a fan as I am of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it should come as no surprise that I was eagerly looking forward to Paul. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost together again was all I needed to hear. I was aware director Edgar Wright was not a part of the movie, but that was only a slight deterrent. After watching Paul I think I have a better idea of how important he is to this team’s success. With Edgar Wright, they made two outstanding movies, without him, they made a fairly good movie. Paul is not bad, but it does not come anywhere near the quality of Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz.
Comparing Paul to Pegg and Frost’s previous movies is both easy and apt. As with those, Paul is a parody that also works as a fine example of the movie type being parodied. Shaun of the Dead works as both a comedy and a zombie movie; the same is true for Hot Fuzz, albeit with buddy cop action movies. Paul is both a humorous send up of Sci-Fi movies, especially the works of Spielberg, as well as a good Sci-Fi movie in its own right. Somehow, the movie does not come together as well as the other two.
The biggest failing is on the comedy side. For a comedy, Paul is surprisingly short on laughs. The alien story works well. Paul, voiced by Seth Rogan, is a foul-mouthed E.T. Graeme and Clive (Pegg and Frost), two British science fiction nerds, are just the sort who would help him try to escape from his captors. Their attempts to evade capture work. But the jokes often fall flat. They try to do pot jokes, but they do not work. They try gratuitous cursing and I expected better. The only jokes that really work are the references to other sci-fi movies. They are incredibly frequent, but still weaved into the movie mostly seamlessly. Paul requests Reece’s Pieces during a gas stop and it took me a few moments to realize it was an E.T. reference. If you have never seen E.T., it won’t seem out of place, just the alien asking for candy. (Though if you haven’t seen E.T I suggest you remedy that.) These references are more likely to get a small chuckle than a big laugh, but they go a long way in keeping this movie amusing. While it never rises to any real hilarity, Paul is genially humorous throughout.
One thing the movie does well is its treatment of the nerds and of the old sci-fi movies. While the main characters are frequently referred to as nerds and do exhibit some the standard nerd behavior, they are much more likeable characters than the usual movie nerds are. They treat the characters’ nerdiness not as something to be embarrassed by but as a simple description. The sci-fi references, as mentioned earlier, are also respectful. Often parodies treat the works they are mocking with sheer contempt. Paul’s treatment of old sci-fi movies, though, borders on reverent. The jokes are never at their expense. Paul is not about mocking old sci-fi, it is about celebrating it. That is where the movie really shines.
Paul is not a masterpiece. It is not a classic. It is simply a mostly enjoyable comedy. Coming from whom it does, this is something of a let down. It is a comedy that is not particularly funny, but it is intelligent and well made enough that it remains generally enjoyable throughout. Your enjoyment may be dependant on how well you know 1970’s and 80’s science fiction movies, but those who have fond memories of Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, among others, will be amused throughout. Paul is a worthy addition to the Pegg and Frost oeuvre, if a lesser one.
Scott tells you what to watch: Summer Movie Preview
Even though it is only just now spring, the big summer blockbusters are starting to came back to theaters. In order to help stop disasters like last years Scott Pilgrim fiasco, I am going to tell you what to watch this summer. Seriously, to everyone who did not go see Scott Pilgrim last year: shame on you. This is why we can’t have nice things. By going through the coming soon section on IMDB I have pulled out about 20 movies coming this summer, some to recommend, some to ridicule and some to merely comment on.
- Sucker Punch: Zack Snyder has proven that he knows how to make entertaining and visually stunning movies. His films might not hold up to close scrutiny, but as summer popcorn flicks go they are very good. Sucker Punch looks to be in line with his other movies. Most notably, it is an original movie (or at least an original combination of tired ideas) I am very excited about this one.
- Super: I had not heard of this until I saw on IMDB, but a dark superhero comedy starring The Office’s Rain Wilson, Ellen Page and Kevin Bacon? Sign me up. It sounds like what if Kick-Ass wasn’t terrible. Not that I’m sure this won’t be terrible, but at least it seems worth watching.
- Your Highness: This can’t be as bad as it sounds, can it? James Franco has me interested, and I like Danny McBride, but this sounds like Year One all over again.
- Fast Five: The trailer for this in The Adjustment Bureau nearly broke my brain. Luckily, this is the kind of movie intended to be watched with the brain off. If past Fast and Furious movies are anything to go by, this will be stupid and stupidly awesome. Plus, it adds the Rock. There is nothing the Rock can’t improve.
- Thor: I won’t lie, I love Thor. Thor is the best. As long as he wrecks things with his hammer in sufficient quantities I will be satisfied. The fact that Kenneth Branagh, known for Shakespeare films, is directing is a good sign for the right tone. I will see this, possibly multiple times. The trailers look good. They do not appear to be shying away from the crazy Kirbyan Space-Asgard. Highly Recommended.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: While the last Pirates movie was really tired, they seem to have jettisoned most of the baggage the original trilogy built up. I hope this is a return to entertaining antics from Depp’s Capt. Sparrow. I’m not too optimistic though.
- The Hangover 2: While I seem to be the only person who did not see the original, the universal praise it has gotten makes me interested in both remedying that oversight and seeing the sequel. Even with a returning cast, comedy sequels are no sure thing, but this my be the best comedy of the summer.
- Kung Fu Panda 2: The first Kung Fu Panda was a pleasant surprise: a really good non-Pixar animated film. I see no reason why the sequel can’t be just as good. Dreamworks is pretty hit or miss, but they have been on a roll lately with How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind. I can’t whole heartedly recommend this, but I really want a Jack Black movie I can like. (Goddamn you, Year One)
- X-Men First Class: While I am a defender of X-Men 3, that movie seemed to have left the X-Men movie franchise scorched earth. This prequel is reportedly set in the 60’s and looks to get he X-Men very right. There is even a commendable lack of Wolverine. Don’t get me wrong, I like Wolverine, but the original 3 movies might as well have been titled Wolverine and the X-Men. This could easily be a train wreck or the best superhero movie of the summer. Go see it.
- Green Lantern: This will likely be the best superhero movie of the summer. It seems to be doing just about everything right. Except the costume looks a little weird. Ryan Reynolds is a good fit for Hal Jordan, and the Green Lantern is a different kind of Superhero, one with a distinctively sci-fi premise. Maybe if it is really successful and I’m very lucky the next film will have Guy Gardner.
- Cars 2: Cars was not the worst Pixar movie–not that that is a very damning mark–but it was pretty far down the studios list. But I expect the sequel to be nothing less than great simply because it is a Pixar movie. I still wish this was Incredibles 2, but Pixar has earned my trust. Recommended.
- Transformers Dark of the Moon: Michael Bay continues to rape your childhood and you continue to thank him for it. Though I know my pleas will fall on deaf ears, but please don’t go see this movie. (A note to friends of mine: by all means invite me to see this movie with you, but know that I will mock it constantly throughout, probably ruining your day.)
- Horrible Bosses: Jason Bateman and Charlie Day were all I needed to hear to be interested in this. Put upon employees try to murder their bosses. If the Hangover sequel does not meet expectations, this looks to be the next best comedy bet.
- Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows 2: The first part of this movie was pretty good, and I hope this series goes out with a bang. The movies have always been a pale imitation of the books, but they have largely been entertaining pale imitations.
- Winnie the Pooh: Do you have a soul? If so, then you already want to go see this movie. I wouldn’t say I was excited for Winnie the Pooh, but I foresee nonoccurrence that keeps me from seeing this. I am so glad Disney has returned to traditionally animated theatrical releases, even if I did not love the Princess and the Frog.
- Captain America: The fact that it is last to the party could be a problem for its box office take, but Captain America looks to continue Marvels solid job of putting it’s biggest characters on the big screen. Chris Evans was great last year in The Losers and Scott Pilgrim, I have no doubt he will do great as Cap. I am less excited about Captain America than by this summer’s other Superhero movies, but I have liked a lot more of the last decades superhero movies than I’ve hated. Better enjoy it before the Avengers ruins things for everyone.
- Cowboys and Aliens: While the title is banal, Harrison Ford is action movie gold and Daniel Craig is no slouch. Favreau did a great job with the Iron Man movies, I am eager to see is he can work outside that. A sci-fi western mash-up could be great, or it could be a generic mess like the title.
- Conan the Barbarian: This claims to be less a revival of the Schwarzenegger Conan movies and more of a adaptation of Robert E. Howards original Conan stories. Either way, it could be a very good swords and sorcery flick. There have been too few of those of late, especially like those prevalent in the 80’s, like the old Conan movies, Red Sonja, Ladyhawke, Willow and Legend.
- The Smurfs: I’m seeing Garfield and Scooby-Doo here. Looks like one to avoid, despite the presence of Neil Patrick Harris. How many beloved cartoons from my childhood have to turn into horrible CGI travesties.
Yeah, my interests this summer lie mostly in the blockbuster and children’s fields, but there are an abnormally large amount of movies I’m looking forward to this year. If there is anything coming I’ve missed, please point it out to me. I don’t see myself having a free trip to the theater to see something picked at random this year, though that is how I saw RED and The Losers last year and they were some of my favorites. It should be a great summer for movies.
I’m Finished!
25 Years of NES Part 19: Kid Icarus.
Gotta Catch’em All
I spent most of the last week or so playing the newest Pokemon release (White for me because I’m racist). I love it. Pokemon has lost nothing in the 13 years since it landed on American shores. Amazingly, the Pokemon “fad” seems to have diminished slightly or not at all if the record first day sales are to be believed. For the first time since I bought Red on a whim, I went into this game virtually blind. I knew how the game worked, it doesn’t change drastically from game to game, but other than what the starter Pokes looked like, I knew almost nothing about this version. Playing it blind has made me absurdly nostalgic for the old Game boy days of Pokemon.
As I said, I bought Pokemon Red on a whim way back in October of 1998, about a month after its release. I was a newly minted teenager, flush with a small fortune in birthday money and in control of the family Game boy Pocket. But the Game boy was a tired system, especially in the Skocy household. The system was closing in on 10 years old at that point and while we hadn’t had it that long, we had definitely had it long enough for me to extract all the fun possible from Super Mario Land 2, Kirby’s Dreamland and Wario Blast (a Bomberman/Wario crossover). A fortuitous Wal-Mart stop allowed me to glimpse a commercial for some game called “Pokemon.” A kindly older, animated gentleman, who I later learned was called Professor Oak, told me how you catch monsters and force them to fight in virtual cockfights. The screens reminded me of the Final Fantasy series, which I was already enthralled with. I had to have this game. After wheedling my mother for permission, as I hadn’t actually brought that birthday money with me, I became the owner of a copy of Pokemon Red.
I got in somewhat before the craze, but I soon learned that a cartoon was already airing in the morning. So I set my VCR to record it. Because even if I had the desire to wake up early to watch it, my mother did not allow us to watch TV before school. To this day I have several tapes full of Pokemon cartoons. But the cartoon was always a side attraction. The game was where it was at. There was so much to love about the game. It took the gameplay of Dragon Quest and combined it with the fun of pet raising, a truly addictive combination. The similarity to Tamogotchi and other similar virtual pets probably helped fuel the fad talk, though Pokemon has surely outlived that. The trading aspect was the game’s crowning achievement. There was something great about trading on the Game Boy, though I certainly do not miss the hassle of the link cable.
I can still remember my first team, the one that I first used to curb stomp the elite four into submission. My starter was Bulbasaur. I gave him a nickname that it kills me to not remember; he never left my party. I used a Mankey who fell back near the end of the game, but that little pig-monkey has always been a favorite. I had a Jigglypuff I used quite extensively despite its near uselessness. I had a Pidgeot, the first Pokemon I caught. My ringer, the Poke who pulled the other’s bacon off the fire when things turned south was a Gyarados, the one that an unscrupulous hiker would sell at the start of the game. The joy of Pokemon, especially the first generation, was in the discovery. Each of the Pokemon was a revelation. Now everyone knows that the useless Magikarp evolves into the all-powerful Gyarados, but when I first started, I had no idea. I hoped, guided by an already sharp grasp of video game logic, that that little fish couldn’t just be useless, but I did not know. Each new area of the game unveiled new monsters to tame, with new abilities and skills to master. It perfectly captured the feeling of stepping into a new world that as a player it was your job to explore. It is no wonder it was the phenomenon that it was.
After the first game, though, the series lost some of its luster. I played Gold and Silver, but the magic was gone. I think a big part of that was the fact that I had scoured the internet in the months preceding the release for information about the game. I had nothing to discover. Then I skipped Ruby and Sapphire entirely. I wasn’t really up on the release at the time, I had just moved on. But when Diamond and Pearl came out for the DS is was itching for some Pokemon fun. And Pearl scratched that itch, but it still lacked the magic of Red and Blue.
But White has recaptured that magic. I think the key is that as soon as I decided to buy White, I stopped checking out information on it. I made a point of knowing as little as possible about the game before I played it. Nintendo and Game Freak helped me out by limiting the available Pokemon during the main game to only the new ones. While many of the Pokes fall into the same archetypes as the original 150, there was enough new for it to be fresh. I don’t think I’ll have quite as fond memories of White as I do of Red, I’m not 13 anymore, but I’m having just as much catching them all as I did back then. The fact that it is still going strong makes me hope that there will be many future releases that rekindle this joy of discovery and collecting.
The Crystal Bearers
If there were ever a game that was more than the sum of its parts that game is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. This Square-Enix action game–if you are being generous you could call it an action-RPG–is a spin-off of a spin-off of that revered RPG institution Final Fantasy. Being a double spin-off is not the best pedigree that a game could have, especially when it strays from the original series’ genre. Released in December 2009, The Crystal Bearers, despite its exceedingly popular parent title, landed with a wet thud on the gaming scene. The genre, the system, the buzz; it all worked against the game. Even as staunch supported of the Wii as I am (best console of the generation, no contest), the game fell off my radar for most of the year, but good fortune and the clearance rack worked in my favor.
Despite its original, and not wholly unwarranted, poor reception The Crystal Bearers is at the very least an interesting game. It is one of the most inventive and original games not only on the Wii, but also of the entire console generation.
The game’s reception is no surprise when one takes a closer look at who made it: Akitoshi Kawazu. Kawazu is the man behind the bulk of Squaresoft’s, now Square-Enix’s, most obtuse and reviled games. While the hate for his games is not entirely unfair, it is somewhat small-minded. Kawazu’s games, most notably the SaGa series in its myriad forms, ply by their own always complex rules. Mostly they look and play like regular JRPGs, but the underlying mechanics are usually different enough that playing them as though they are just another Final Fantasy game results in an awkward and unsatisfying experience. If the player takes the time to properly learn the game’s systems, they can be some of the most satisfying games. It is not easy to do so, though, because the games are usually obtuse and unintuitive and downright unfriendly. Moreover, as his games are often experiments, some of those experiments are failures–I’m looking at you Final Fantasy 2. The best way to describe Kawazu’s oeuvre is that it is an acquired taste. While The Crystal Bearers is very different from most of Kawazu’s games, it still fits that acquired taste mold.
The Crystal Bearers is two different games jammed together. There is the story mode, a sequence of partially controlled scenes and events. The events are not exactly mini-games, but they do usually use unique mechanics specific to that one event. They are similar in concept to QTEs but with more player control. Some of them even use the central mechanic of the other game, grabbing and throwing things with the Wii remote. The story takes about 8 hours to play through and as far a JRPG stories go (I know that Crystal Bearers technically isn’t a JRPG, but it is still Final Fantasy) it is pretty solid. It is not particularly well written or original, but it has its own unique charm. The Crystal Bearers’ story doesn’t take itself too seriously, moves quickly and keeps the action coming. Comparing the pacing to an action movie is accurate. It doesn’t hurt that the game is darn pretty. And I do not mean that backhanded compliment “pretty for a Wii game.” On a pure technical level, it is not particularly astonishing, but the artistry and the design of the world are outstanding. The story part of the game is a thrill ride with plenty of fun, though not too deep, gameplay.
The real meat of the game is the open world parts, which are everywhere that is not a story scene. The player only has one ability, the aforementioned grabbing and throwing. Despite the simplicity of this core mechanic, the game has tons of ways to utilize it. If you throw a skeleton’s head, he will stop attacking to chase after it. If you throw two long time Final Fantasy enemy Bombs at each other they will explode fantastically. Enemies are not just focused on the player, but they react to each other. The King Behemoth chases other monsters around his map. There are tons and tons of different reactions to get by throwing enemies different places or at other enemies. Similar to the joy people get from tooling around in a Grand Theft Auto game, The Crystal Bearers gives you an open world with tons of possibilities. I spent tons of time messing around and ended up with about 30% of the game’s medals.
True to its predecessors, The Crystal Bearers has some baffling choices in game design. Like the fact that everything non-story is optional. You do not have to do anything outside of the short storyline. So all that emergent gameplay in the field areas is easy to miss. The player is given little incentive to explore the game, outside of sheer curiosity. I was halfway through the game before I started really messing around with all of the field parts. The two different games are put together, but they do not mesh very well. The player will get out of the game what they are willing to look for. Except for at the very end. The last boss takes the gameplay of the field segments and uses them for the basis of the battle. It is suitably epic and enthralling, but if the player has not kept up with the optional parts and increasing the quality of their gear, there and only there will they have a problem.
It is odd and unique and definitely not for everybody, but The Crystal Bearers is a flawed gem. All of the wonderful emergent gameplay that the game is built for is sidelined for a focus on the trite if somewhat entertaining story. It shows the best that Square can do, but also how they are still stuck on the recreating the success of FFVII. At the very least, it shows that the experimental and odd Square from the PS1 days is still around; it has just been branded Final Fantasy.
Some Sweet Zelda Art.
When I was looking for Zelda pics for my article on the Legend of Zelda, I happened upon this awesome Zelda art by Katsuya Terada. It came from an old issue of Nintendo Power.
Seriously, how awesome is this stuff? I might track down some other old Nintendo Power Art, just in case anyone hasn’t been scarred by the Final Fantasy 2 art. I think most people deserve to have to see it.
You Mean Samus is a Girl?
25 Years of NES Part 18: Metroid
Last Month in Reading
It’s time for the monthly review of the books I read last month. Quite the variety in terms of subjects and quality. Still a good month for in terms of number of books read.
Opening Atlantis, Harry Turtledove
The first of Turtledove’s trilogy of Atlantis alternate history novels, Opening Atlantis is an adequate read. It is not mind blowing or anything, but it is sufficiently competent and entertaining to be worth reading. The novel tells the story of an alternate history where a large island, or small continent, (I’ve since realized that it is the East Cost pulled off of America) sits between Europe and America. Dubbed Atlantis by its discoverers, the novel follows it is colonization up through its equivalent of the French-Indian War through the eyes of the original English settler and his descendants.
One problem with it is that it covers too much time and is too much of a history to really develop the characters. This is very much a novel of plot and not character, but the viewpoint is too close to the characters to give a wide, history like view. Another problem is that Atlantis’ history too closely mirrors America’s. What is the point of an alternate history when it sticks so close to actual history? This is more of a mild disappointment than a big problem, though. With all of history to use as a canvas, Turtledove transplants what we already know with some cosmetic changes. I hope the latter books deliver on the promise that Opening Atlantis nearly squanders.
Skociomatic 