Zoolander 2

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Comedy sequels are by rule pretty unnecessary; Zoolander 2, a comedy sequel that comes 15 years after the original might be the most unnecessary of all. Ignoring the question of why, Zoolander 2 isn’t an unenjoyable movie. Stiller and Wilson are a solid comedy duo and there is a significant uptick in energy when Will Ferrell’s Mugatu reappears. The whole thing ends up feeling drawn a little thin. There are some good jokes, and some good call backs to jokes from the original, but eventually the callbacks and the overused cameos overwhelm everything else. Zoolander 2 has just enough life to it to not be the complete waste that it seemed almost inevitable that it would be.

The plot, such as it is, is about Zoolander and Hansel stepping back into the limelight after more than a decade away; both sent away by the same disaster that helped reset the status quo from the first movie’s happy ending. After some initial awkwardness the two blatantly state their character motivations to each other and team up. They are soon joined by Valentina, a member of Interpol’s fashion police, who helps the duo get to the bottom of who is killing the world’s most beautiful pop-stars.

The films kind of putters along, making jokes about how Derek and Hansel are stupid and shallow and old, until it gets to the third act and Mugatu is revealed as the mastermind behind everything. Which of course he was. After that it has a stronger sense of purpose as it builds to its climax. Ferrell’s Mugatu has a much stronger presence than the other villains, who were still playing coy about their allegiance.

What good jokes the movie have end up buried underneath way too many celebrity cameo’s that amount to little more than moments of look who it is. The ones that work are actually worked into the plot, like the bits with Justin Bieber, Sting and Billy Zane. There is a sense of diminishing returns, as each comes out to less surprise and less purpose as the movie goes along. That is strange against the somewhat understated jokes in the movie. Near the halfway mark they meet Sting who imparts on them some important information. It is a deliberate call back to a similar scene with David Duchovny from the first movie, but it is also closing the mystery of who is Hansel’s father. Hansel has been looking for his father and it has been made very clear that it is Sting. In the scene he is disguised as a priest, so Father Sting waits with anticipation for Hansel to realize that he is his father. He doesn’t and movie just lets it go for the moment.

Zoolander 2 is a movie without a purpose. Most of its good material was used in the first film, all the jokes it could make about the ridiculousness of the fashion industry and celebrity and Zoolander’s stupidity have been made. All that is left is a trio of characters in Zoolander, Hansel and Mugatu who have just enough life in them carry viewers out of the theater with a grin on their face.

**1/2

Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam

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The Mario RPGs, both of Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi sub-brands, tend toward being tedious at times. I love them, but there is no denying it. The Mario & Luigi games tend toward condescending tutorializing and Paper Marios tend to feature funny bits that are just a chore to play. Those are blemishes on otherwise very good games, though the degree to which those flaws derail the experience varies. Nintendo combining the two series was on it’s a terrific idea; it had the potential to be one of the best games of the year, but it also runs the risk of flaws compounding to make one of the most frustrating game experiences imaginable. While Mario & Luigi Paper Jam is not quite the best case scenario, it luckily strays far from the worst case scenario.

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Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam is not really a combination of the different stands of Mario RPGs, it is just a Mario & Luigi game with the Paper Mario characters tossed in. That in itself is one of the better gimmicks in the series, less tiresome that Partners in Time’s babies or Dream Team’s dreams. The Paper Mario stuff is just a flavoring added on to the usual M&L goofiness. They didn’t go quite far enough with the paper stuff, but they got some good use out of the paper doppelgangers. It clearly made it easier to come up with enemies, since they could double up on the Mario staples and have to lean less on new, and generally less interesting, original baddies. I would say that the lack of original characters is a flaw, but the only truly interesting character this series has ever come up with is Fawful. Instead, the game just lets the slightly different Bowsers and Peaches play off each other for some really fun scenes.

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Comedy has always been a big part of these games’ appeal. That is true of both Paper Mario and M&L. True comedies are rare in games, and even rarer among RPGs. That fact that these games have been consistently funny over almost ten games. While not all of them have been great games to play, they’ve all brought the same sense of wacky irreverence. The two series combined are maybe funniest yet. This is quite an accomplishment for a games with three protagonists, none of which talk. The best bits are the Bowser parts and the seeing the two Peaches outwit the two Bowser Jrs. It never really strays from the conventional Mario cast, but it does really good work with them. Really, the Paper Mario stuff helps sand down the flaws of the previous M&L game. Dream Team, while not a bad game, was interminable with the tutorials and not especially funny chatter. That is cut down quite a bit in this one. There are still some annoying minigames, but they are less frequent and less onerous.

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Despite all that this game does well, I still can’t quite say that I love it. I’m not really sure why; it addresses almost all of the problems I had with the previous game. It also brings some much needed challenge to the bosses. They might actually go a little too far into difficult. The story doesn’t do anything special, but it is funny and fast moving. It might just be that the addition of Paper Mario to the team is just too much for me to handle. I can’t manage three separate characters as once. Really, it is just as fun as the game is from moment to moment, it all feels belabored and pointless in the end. What Mario is actually doing is never particularly interesting; he is just going through the motions that make up a Mario game; except this time the gameplay is not as outrageously good as it is in the platform games. When it stops being funny it starts being a drag. Still, those moments are relatively few. Mostly the game is a joy.

Hail, Caesar! Review

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The Coen Brothers’ movies tend to share a certain nihilism. Even in the comedies tend to be rather bleak affairs. Hail, Caesar! might be the brightest, sunniest affair they have ever produced, but in the end it still shares that nihilism. The characters in this film do not face as dire of consequences as the characters in many of the Coen’s movies, but their efforts still produce the same results. In the end, nothing the characters do matters.

Hail, Caesar! lets the Coen’s riff on all varieties of classic cinema. It stars Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a fictional version of a real person, who works a fixer for Capitol Pictures. The movie follows him for roughly a day as he tries to keep the production going of all the movies in production for the studio. Their big picture is a bloated biblical epic also title Hail, Caesar. The star of that movie, played by George Clooney, is kidnapped by communists calling themselves the Future. While Eddie tries to keep his stars disappearance under wraps, he also has to deal with emergencies with other films. There is an aquatic musical which has to deal with the fact that its star, the wholesome imaged Scarlett Johansen, is pregnant out of wedlock. There is a dinner party drama where the singing cowboy star is having trouble adapting to a new role. He’s also got a pair of twin reporters, played by Tilda Swinton, snooping around. And he’s got a job offer in another industry.

Most of this just exists to let the filmmakers toy with some kinds of movies that they could never actually make. While there is a strong central thread that ties it all together, most of these bits exist in their own little universes. Cameos and bit parts abound. It is fun to see Hobie Doyle, former rodeo stuntman, try to play an aristocrat. It is just as fun to watch him do lasso tricks are inappropriate times and play a singing cowboy.

Unlike most other Coen films, there isn’t much darkness here. There is a ransom, but kidnap victim never seems to be in much danger. The biggest danger to most is that their shameful secrets will get out. The villains are more intellectual and ineffectual than actually dangerous. But ever with its fairly low stakes premise, it still holds that essential nihilism. No matter what anyone does, nothing changes. This is the best case scenario in the Coens film: everything goes back to the way it was. Really, for all intents and purposes the good guys win, but if it can even be called a victory it is a hollow one.

This is not a weighty film, though; it is just a comedy that is not stupid. It is funny. Hail, Caesar! will have attentive viewers in stitches for most of its run time. Sometimes it is just for the absurdity of the situation; sometimes it is because characters have funny accents. So many actors give great performances, so many little jokes and bits land, it really leaves you wanting more. By the time it circles back around to where it started I was ready to take the ride again.

****1/2

25 SNES #4: Joe and Mac

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The Joe and Mac series is one of those small blips that litter video game history. They were moderately popular for a few years before disappearing without a trace and without much thought to where they went. They are not unlike Gex or Onimusha. Not bad games necessarily (I have a lot of good things to say about Onimusha someday), but not the most memorable one either. I only know Data East’s Joe and Mac because I had a friend in grade school that swore by and I heard about it on Retronauts. Having never played it, I added it to my list for this SNES explorative endeavor. I almost wish I hadn’t.

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Joe and Mac shows its arcade roots. I was expecting something more like Mario, but the game shares more with Contra. There is some light platforming, but most of the game is a prehistoric run and gun. Only a run and gun without good shooting ahem, throwing options. There is a bone, a boomerang and a fireball. All of take more than one hit to kill an enemy. In the time I spent with the game, no more than the hour or so it took to finish it, I was not able to tell if there was a power difference between them. It seemed like it only changed the speed and trajectory of the player’s shots. While the overall it was much like Contra, it lacked that series’ tight levels. Joe and Mac feel sloppy and half formed. More accurately, it feels like an arcade game designed to eat quarters hastily remixed to play decently on a home console. There are a lot of cheap hits and deaths, but the game gives players a life bar and plenty of health pick-ups. That just serves to make a lot of it feel inconsequential. There is little penalty for getting hit.

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What I missed, and what I am sure was the true draw of this game back in the day was the coop. I didn’t have someone to play with and this feels like a game that gets a lot more fun with a little cooperation and/or competition. It isn’t bad single player, but there are so many better games to play on just the SNES that I can’t recommend it. But coop can change things. If there is some fighting you to get to the health refills or to rack up the most points, a lot of the inconsequential stuff can feel more important. But even then, it is not like the SNES is lacking other coop games. I know the system was flooded with beat-em-ups.

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Joe and Mac is a relic of a bygone time. Being forgotten to history is probably a kindness to it. It was never good enough to be called great and time hasn’t done it any favors, but it certainly isn’t bad enough to be worthy of any great scorn. It is just a mediocre arcade port from 1991 and it plays like it.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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Despite my general disdain for zombies, I had some hopes of enjoying this film. While shambling corpses do little to interest me, classic literature does and I found that zombies tend to be tolerable in a comedy setting. Look at Shaun of the Dead; I could give two craps about the classic zombie movies it’s riffing on, but the comedy kept me more than entertained. Pride and Prejudice is at its heart a comedy. Yes, Elizabeth Bennet deals with some very serious issues, but foibles of those around her are exaggerated to comic proportions. With a title like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies there is really no place to go but to comedy. This makes it a shame that this movie resists that call so much.

It still has plenty of comic elements, and those elements tend to be its best. Matt Smith plays Mr. Collins as obsequious to the extreme. He almost feels as though he has come from a different, much better version of this movie to lighten things up. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet act much as they do in the book, the lack of change works for a pair of already comedic characters. Unfortunately, the real fault lies with Darcy, who is played as charmlessly serious. While it isn’t a bad interpretation of the character, it doesn’t feel right for this movie. Lily James is better than this film deserves as Elizabeth, which works for her as the center of the film. Still Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is too serious for a movie as patently silly as it is.

It does add some competent fight scenes to the mix, but it doles them out at odd times. Some changes to the book are inevitable in any adaptation, but this movie stick to the book oddly closely at times while going completely off the rails at others. The best one is at the ball at the beginning, with all five Bennet sisters showing their competence at zombie killing. The movie seems as though it is setting up some sort of point about the differences in where the upper crust learned their fighting styles, either in Japan or China, but that is dropped about the midway point. Many of the other fights are either too short or shot in too close to have much of an effect. Still, the battle between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth during his first proposal is excellent, allowing them to show their emotions with more than just dialogue. The great shame is that the film builds to a big climax and them barely lets either character do anything during it. All the pieces are there, much time was spent showing how competent of fighters they are, but the last big fight is not so big and not much of a fight.

Other than that, the film is just littered with ideas that dropped almost as soon as they are mentioned. There is something about the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse to lead the zombies against the humans, but not much comes of it. There is the whole Chinese or Japanese training segment. Lady Catherine de Bourgh looks fearsome in a couple of scenes, but she doesn’t even fight in the one scene it is all but necessary that she do so. Some zombies are able to avoid eating humans by never having consumed human brains, but no one other than Elizabeth seems to care. The whole thing seems half-baked and just reeks of squandered opportunity.

I didn’t hate the movie, though. There was just enough there to enjoy that made it sting all the more how fleeting those enjoyable moments are. This could have been an excellent, schlocky mash-up, but instead it is a tepid mixture of ill-fitting parts. Maybe they did need to go for the extra gore and the “R” rating; that may have helped. The real problem is that it had too many ideas and wasn’t smart enough to sift the good ones from the bad.

**1/2

Xenoblade Chronicles X

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I was shocked about how much I enjoyed Xenoblade Chronicles X. I am not, in general, a big fan of sandbox RPGs. Bethesda’s output has never done anything for me. In fact, it has actively repulsed me. People often describe all the great things they do in Fallout or Elder Scrolls games and while those descriptions are great, actually doing those things tend to be dull. They are simply not fun the play. I am also not remotely interested in exploring their giant worlds. I do like the idea of exploration, but most Western RPGs I’ve played have not strayed far from the well-worn territory of Lord of the Rings influenced fantasy or generic post-apocalyptic (I am undoubtedly doing a disservice to Fallout, but that sort of setting does absolutely nothing for me) wastelands. Xenoblade Chronicles X, despite coming from a completely different gaming legacy, scratched the itch for me that those sorts of sandbox games did for seemingly everyone else. It did this by actually being fun to play and providing a world I actually wanted to explore.

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One thing that had been missing from a lot of JRPGs lately is any sense of exploration. I don’t mean anything crazy, just something on the level of SNES Final Fantasies. Even that level of exploration is hard to find. Look at FFXIII. That game was intentionally aping popular corridor shooters, but it ended up creating a world with a very novel setting that didn’t allow the player to have any sense of how this amazing world fit together. Then there is the largely delightful Bravely Default, which crammed a 40 hour game into 15 hours’ worth of game world. There have been exceptions, like Dragon Quest VIII and the first Xenoblade Chronicles. Xenoblade Chronicles X took the original game and did the world just a little bit better.

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XCX starts the player as one of the few remaining humans, who have escaped the soon to be destroyed Earth and crashed on the alien planet Mira. The player character then joins an organization tasked with exploring and taming this alien world. Mira is hands down the best video game setting I’ve encountered. The player starts in the relatively normal area of Primordia. It is a rocky plain with a variety of plains creatures running around. Even in this first area there are several different landscapes. There are beaches with dangerous crab-like enemies and flying mantas. There are wide open plains with boar-like enemies and prides of giant cat-esque creatures. There are also rocky hills and tranquil lakes. In the sky about all of this are floating plateaus that taunt the player with their inaccessibility. Enemies range in size from dog-sized beetles to brontosaurus looking monsters that are a hundred feet tall. Just running around exploring this one continent can take dozens of hours. Even late in the game, after I had played for nearly 100 hours, I was still finding new nooks and crannies in Primordia. After that, the player goes to Noctilum, a densely packed rain forest and swampy area. Again, this one continent has enough to explore to keep a player busy for a longer time than some games last. After that there are still three full continents to explore, each as varied and interesting as the first.

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The best part is that, after the prologue and tutorial, nearly the entirety of the world is open to explore. If the player so desires, he can run to the fifth continent as see how far he can get. It won’t be too far, the enemies are tough, but it is possible. This lets the game keep players exploring. In all the 120+ hours I played of this game, I never felt like I was repeating myself. There was always some place new to go and some new sight to behold. And the best part is that any place you can see you can go. There are some restrictions, places that require a skell, the game’s names for its mechs that player’s party can pilot, to reach, but many more just require creative use of the landscape.

Those Skells are worth a mention. The player can see other character using them from early on, but the player doesn’t get a license until a good bit into the game and it isn’t until late that it gains the ability to fly. When that flight ability opens up it leads to one of the most exhilarating moments in video game history, as the player seamlessly flies out of the city into Primordia, up into the sky, landing on one of those floating plateaus, and able to look down at the human city and most of the continent below. It is amazing.

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None of that would matter if exploring itself were a chore, but the game wisely facilitates exploration and experimentation. The player’s primary task is to place probes on the landscape. Those allow for more information about the surrounding area. They also serve as checkpoints. The player can warp to many of those probes once they are laid and dying simple kicks the player back to the most recent one, with no loss of experience of money. The lack of penalty for stumbling onto a super strong monster lets the player be bold about the paths they take.

Then there is the battle system, which is complex and active, but not particularly difficult. Most battles can be won with persistence, but there is depth to it if the player wants to find it. That holds true for most of the rest of the game. The income players can derive from placed probes can be manipulated to obscene heights, but the game only requires the minimum effort to be overcome. The story is there. It is told sloppily and without much care as far as pacing and tension, but it is built on some solid ideas and concepts. It doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, but kind of over explains itself since it assumes players have forgotten what’s up with hours between story missions. In contrast to the failings of the central plot, the characters, in aggregate if not each individual, have interesting stories. Each party member has a handful of mission specific to them that helps explain who they are and what they want. All of them are skippable. In fact, other than the handful of party members forced on the player at the start of the game most of the party is skippable. But those stories are reasonably well written and occasionally quite touching.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is not a perfect game. It is big and messy and often obtuse. But the things it does well it does so well to completely overshadow its missteps. It can be annoying to have to track wayward party members down each time you want to change the line-up, for example. That is an odd oversight for a game that does the busy work on collection missions for the player, not requiring them to run back to town to get their rewards. Overall, though, the game does more right than it does wrong by a long shot and so much of what it does well is not done well by any other game. Xenoblade Chronicles X is a singular experience, the kind of game that only comes around once in a great while and is not a game to be missed.

What I Read January 2016

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I read a handful of books in January. It was a good start to the year. I should also have another handful for next month, mostly fantasy and mostly Christmas presents. I still have a backlog of fantasy books from years ago that I hope to get too before too long. This month was odd because I really didn’t like most of the books that I read. All of them fit into genres and styles that I usually enjoy, but a relatively high percentage of them did more to annoy that entertain me. So in the sense of reading books I like it was not that great a start to the year, though it was in terms of the amount of books I read.

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The Bootlegger

Clive Cussler & Justin Scott

Another solid adventure in the Isaac Bell series. I really like this series of mystery/thrillers set in the early twentieth century. The main character tends toward the too adept, the too perfect, but the adventures are a lot of fun. This one moves things forward a little, taking place in the early twenties and the Van Dorns, the fictional detective agency for which Isaac Bell works, having to deal with trying to enforce Prohibition, even if many of them don’t really agree with it. It weaves in with Prohibition with the Bolshevik Revolution and a Russian instigator operating in the United States. It all works together reasonably well, though I am left with my eternal complaint about this series that it doesn’t go quite far enough. The combination of the two threads in this one gets as close as the series has before to actually having something to say, but the agent doesn’t end up being as true to his cause as would be interesting. Still, it is a decently enjoyable romp.

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Atari: Business is Fun

Curt Vendel & Marty Goldberg

I have some very big problems with this book, mostly to do with the editing and formatting. I would call a lot of Atari: Business is Fun’s construction haphazard. Grammatical and spelling errors abound. It actively hampers getting at the genuinely interesting information in this book. Despite the many flaws in the writing of this book, I was genuinely surprised at how well researched it was. It doesn’t attempt to paint any one as a villain or a saint, only people that frequently have differences of opinion. Nolan Bushnell, the main player for most of this book, comes off as half genius and half huckster. He is painted as a man with talent and ambition and a somewhat inflated sense of himself. It paints a picture of a company that simply grew too fast for itself. It played a big part in creating two separate markets, the arcade video game market and the home console market, but was unable to manage at least one side of that. Still there is a lot of insight into the origins not just of Atari the company of also of the many of the games that they made. Despite its somewhat lacking editing, I would heartily recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about the early days of video games.

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The Magicians

Lev Grossman

This book came highly recommended to me, but I abandoned it early last year about forty pages in. Hearing about the upcoming TV adaptation gave me the push I needed to get back to it and finish it up. I maybe shouldn’t have, because I kind of hated The Magicians.

The Magicians stars Quentin Coldwater, a surly youth given to fits of depression. He is moody and unlikeable. It starts with something of a Harry Potter pastiche with Quentin being accepting into Brakebills magic school. Even there he is moody and unhappy, which I understand is the point, but it compresses everything about the school down so much that it is hard to get the sense of exactly what Quentin is learning or how people other than him are taking things. The only other students to get any real sort of character are his eventual lover Alice and his friend Eliot. The rest are at best rough sketches of characters. After graduating magic school, the books moves on to something of a Narnia pastiche, with the characters discovering and then traveling to the magical land of Filory. That at least builds to a memorable climax before a new character comes in to explain to Quentin, and the reader, what has been going on just before the book ends.

My biggest problem is that the book is locked into the point of view of a thoroughly unlikeable character. His depression can make even the most magical of encounters seem terrible. I understand the point of things being the way they are, but it doesn’t actually make the book any more pleasant to read. In the end, it is a book that takes two young adult series and saps all the life out of them in the name of making them adult. The Magicians is abrasively not for me.

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Hallowe’en Party

Agatha Christie

A later Hercule Poirot mystery that is among the meanest Christie I’ve encountered. It doesn’t stray far from the form of her detective novels, but it is the victim, and very nearly victims, that is troubling. The victim in this story is a young girl. A young girl that everyone goes out of their way to speak poorly of after she turns up dead. Ariadne Oliver, Poirot’s mystery writer friend just happened to be in attendance and she tells him about what happened, so he agrees to investigate. The book just kind of meanders after that, never really picking up any momentum. It simply goes through the motions, doing exactly as it should and nothing more. The only really interesting part is that it deals with the death of a child and has someone threaten the death of another. There is a certain baseline of quality that Christie doesn’t drop below, but she has so many legitimately good books that only the completist need to bother with this one.

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A Dangerous Place

Jacqueline Winspear

I was a pretty big fan of the first nine novels in this series (I never ended up reading the one previous to this) and this book comes as something of a punch to the gut. Beware; I will be spoiling the opening chapters of this book. At more than ten books in, I am more the ready for this series to be drawn to a close. Maisie’s struggle in the last few books, between maintaining her freedom and her business and agreeing to marry was compelling. She had good reasons to want both things and if she had chosen to remain single it would have been an interesting choice. But she chose the other way, which was all well and good. At least until the start of the book details just how her husband died within a few years of marrying her and she descends into grief. Maisie was always a character prone to wallowing in misery, and this book heaps it on her. The mystery contained within is nowhere near strong enough to overwhelm the complete pointlessness of coming back to this series. That mystery did hold some promise, with Maisie staying on Gibraltar as WWII draws near and having to deal with the various rising powers of facism and communism and Britain’s desperate attempts to stay neutral, but other than the setting there isn’t a lot to hold onto. After reading this, I really wish I, at least, would have stopped at ten. The mystery is limp and reading about Maisie being miserable is no longer interesting.

Now Playing in Jan ‘16

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I only beat a few, short SNES games in January, but I should be able to finish a few games that I’ve been playing all month on other systems. There are a ton of games for the 3DS hitting in the next few months that should keep me busy for most of the year. I hope to speed through Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam and Final Fantasy Explorers in time to get to Fire Emblem Fates before the end of the month.

Beaten

Super Punch-Out!! – see here.

Radical Dreamers – see here.

Super Bomberman – see here.

Ongoing

Prince of Persia – There is a lot I like about this game, but at about the halfway point there is one fundamental problem that will stop me from calling this game a favorite. The controls are simply loose. There are large windows for button presses needed while parkouring all over this game’s world. It does make the game easy, which I don’t necessarily consider a bad thing, but it causes at least as many problems as it solves. That window is so big that I’m not sure the game responds or that I pushed the right button, so I push another button and screw it all up. It is really frustrating.

Yakuza V – More Yakuza, and this time it’s better than ever. This one starts better than Yakuza 4 if only because it starts the player with Kazuma instead of making you wait until neat the end to get to play as the character you really want to. I haven’t made it more than a few hours in, but I am loving it so far.

Pokemon Alpha Sapphire – Something about the main game (ie the single player storyline) in this edition of Pokemon stymies me. I struggled to get through it when it first came out, struggled again when I played Emerald around the time that Diamond and Pearl came out and now I am struggling with it here.  I simply don’t care much for the Pokemon available and the map kind of curls around on itself in unintuitive ways.  In many ways this is the most mechanically pleasing Pokemon game, but this region is easily my least favorite to explore. It is tedious in a way that the other games rarely are.  I am nearly through with it, though.  I will finish sometime, but the deluge of 3DS RPGs coming in the next few months might mean that it happens later rather than sooner.

Lara Croft Go – I had this recommended to me after gushing about how much I love Monument Valley. After playing about half of this I see the similarities.  Lara Croft Go is slower and more complex, but like Monument Valley it is a game made with the strengths and limitations of mobile in mind.  I am really enjoying it. Maybe not as much as I enjoyed MV, but still it is really good.  I’m not even going to add for a mobile game to the end of that, because this game is simply really good.  It looks like a sort of turn based platform game, but it is really just a puzzle game.  And it has some doozies for puzzles.

Codename STEAM – There is so much good about this game that the problems make it all but impossible to really enjoy it are just heartbreaking. The big one is the camera. It is hard to play a strategy game when you can’t form a strong picture of how the battlefield is shaped. This one is going on the backburner for now.

Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations –

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I played through the previous two games in the original trilogy last year and now I’ve started this one.  The first case is set in the past and has rookie Mia Fey defending young Phoenix from murder charges. It works as a decent case, an effective tutorial and an essential set up of all the cases that come after it.  It is pretty much exactly what the first case of an Ace Attorney game should be.  If I remember correctly, the rest of the game is nearly as good.  I’ll be busy with Paper Jam and Final Fantasy Explorers, but I hope to have this finished by the end of next month.

Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam –

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I wasn’t the biggest fan of the most recent games in either the Mario & Luigi or Paper Mario series, but through the first ten or so hours this combination of the two has been really good. The heavy handed tutorial and chatter overload from Dream Team had and the mix of the regular and Paper Mario crew makes up for Sticker Star being drained of all personality. Really, it has been pretty delightful so far. My only complaint would be with how the Toad Hunts are handled, and that is really more of a nitpick.

Upcoming

Final Fantasy Explorers – It looks like a FF themed Monster Hunter or maybe just an update of the Crystal Chronicles styled games. Either way, I am very intrigued by it. I expected it to arrive in time to start it this month, but it came late. I guess I’ll see next month how good it actually is.

Fire Emblem Fates – I am still undecided on which version I’ll play (I’m buying both, one for me one for my brother) but I am more than eager to play this. Awakening was a big reason I got a 3DS when I did and it has been too long since I’ve had new Fire Emblem to play. Plus, it looks like Nintendo has wisely excised most of the excruciating otaku bait from it, so it won’t be so embarrassing to own.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West – This game was recommended to me as something similar to Prince of Persia and Ico, but I was unable to find it for a long time. Luckily for me, I noticed it was on sale on PSN for a little over $5 so I jumped on it. I have to get through the rest of Prince of Persia and Yakuza V first, but this game is next on my list.

Lufia & Super Mario RPG – I guess both of these could have gone in ongoing, but I’ve barely started both of them. I need to finish at least one to keep on my 25 SNES pace and I feel confident that I will do that.

What I Watched in Jan ‘16

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Movies

Star Wars The Force Awakens – see review here. ****1/2

The Revenant – see review here. ****1/2

The Hateful Eight – see review here. *****

The Ladykillers – This is not a Coens’ movie that gets a lot of attention. After watching it, I would say that it doesn’t really deserve much attention. It isn’t bad, but it is slight. There just isn’t a lot here. It’s a well-executed farce, with JK Simmons and Marlon Wayans, of all people, giving really good performances. Fun, but forgettable. ***1/2

Shawshank Redemption – Yeah, it’s great. I don’t have a lot to say. *****

Hot Rod – I am not always a fan of Andy Samberg, but he is really great here. This movie kind of meanders around and loses momentum at times, but it has a lot of really funny people and some really funny scenes. This is a great movie to watch on a lazy Saturday afternoon. You don’t really have to pay attention and each little bit is entertaining on its own. A solid little comedy. ****

Galaxy Quest – Alan Rickman’s passing made me want to revisit my favorite of his films. This Star Trek pastiche is simply great. It is that oddly prevalent mixed up take on the Magnificent Seven with actors taking the place of the fighters, like A Bug’s Life or The Three Amigos. Galaxy Quest might be the best executed of those, and Rickman’s utter contempt for everything with his old TV role is one of the highlights. This is just a great comedy. ****1/2

The Four Falls of Buffalo – I love 30 for 30. The tale of these Buffalo Bills, the best team to never win the Super Bowl, is kind of heartbreaking. This is pretty well made, since they got most of the big players in to talk about it. To come that close that many times and not come away with a victory is crushing. ***

Pride and Prejudice – This 2005 adaptation of Austen’s novel is really good. It is solidly acted all around and as true to the source as a two hour version of a novel can be. Kiera Knightley is just about as Elizabeth, with the right amount of satisfaction in her witty retorts. It also establishes a sense of scene and time that goes beyond what would be expected. Really, there are some great shots and settings in this film. ****

Paprika – This was recommended to me in a list of the 50 best animated films decided by people voting in their personal top 25. This was one that made the list that I had never seen, so I picked up the Blu-ray on the cheap. It is really good, kind of like Inception (which I have to assume took at least some inspiration from this) without the need to be tethered the reality of having to be filmed. It is also lacking Inception’s explanations. The whole movie is just sort of strange and simply dropped on the viewer. Paprika is excellent. The English dub does not have the most natural translation, but point gets across. Also, some of the sequences are perfectly mind bending. I think some of the character work is either lacking or was lost in translation, but other than that I really liked this movie. ****1/2

TV

Detectorists – For a show that never goes too far in any direction, this turned out to be a complete delight. Andy and Lance are detectorists, guys who spend their free time with metal detectors. Their devotion to their hobby can be a little pathetic at times, but they know that. The show flits from being mildly pleasant to somewhat uncomfortable at times, never being a complete delight or a total drag. The show doesn’t want to beat its protagonists down completely, but it also isn’t going to have them realize all of their dreams. It ends up feeling real, mostly on the back of some strong writing and performances. I can’t wait to see the second series.

Making a Murderer – This is pretty chilling. A great, entertaining documentary. It didn’t convince me one way or the other about Steven Avery’s guilt, but it did leave me questioning the idea of fairness in our justice system. It is rather chilling how they lied to and railroaded the younger of the accused. The whole thing illustrates how the justice system is not after justice, but after a conviction. Really, it is just really well-made.

Poirot Series 5 & 6 – I need to be more considered when writing about this. It is still good, if dry. It is very slow paced, letting the mysteries unfold in their own time. It is a big change from current TV and takes a little getting used to. It also switched from hour long episodes to episodes that are nearly two hours long, which is just a little too long. Still, Suchet does a great job in the title role and they are largely well acted and made. I am going to stick with it until the end.

Galavant – God, I love this show. I hope that we get more of it. I missed about half the episodes when they aired; catching them later on Hulu, but this show is still just delightful. It is lightweight, but it is also thoroughly enjoyable. I don’t really have very much to add, other than hope for a DVD release.

Always Sunny Season 10 – This show somehow keeps getting better and better. This season got really dark at times, in the best possible way. The stars have honed their characters into increasingly deranged collections of neuroses. They react to the situations they are put in in natural and hilarious and awful. That is pretty much this show in a nutshell: hilarious and awful. Just really great stuff.

The Spoils Before Dying – I really liked the sheer goofiness of The Spoils of Babylon and this follow up is more of the same. The same sort of overblown artiness and complete incompetence is on display, along with some wonderfully off performances. It is just so absurd and ridiculous. It can be a lot to take all at once, but it is mostly delightful. Some of Will Ferrell’s episode opening and closing rants by Eric Jonrush were misses, though. The good ones are some of the best parts of the show, but the others are sadly not funny or interesting.

Parks and Rec Season 7 – I thought the end of season 6 was a fitting ending to this show. While I wasn’t going to say no to more Parks and Rec, I really felt like the show had already gone out on a high note. Season 7, though, proved me wrong. This was the perfect ending to the show. It was a well-deserved victory lap for one of the best shows of this last decade. A show as consistently upbeat as this one needed an ending that was equally upbeat.

Super Hero TV Shows: With only a few weeks of shows, I don’t have much to say about the panoply of superhero shows currently airing. I will say that the Flash is still great; it feels like they are building some good stuff here. Supergirl is really coming into its own, with Martian Manhunter really being the perfect mentor and ally for Kara and Cat Grant is getting more focused. Agent Carter came back this year with some great episodes and Arrow has largely recovered from the scattered third season.

25 Years 25 Games #3: Super Punch-Out!!

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For as big a fan as I am of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, it was kind of shocking to me to find out that there was a sequel on SNES.  This was in 2008, about the same time as Nintendo announced the Wii game.  Somehow, the existence of the SNES game eluded me for nearly 15 years.  I really don’t know how I didn’t know about it. I did buy it on the Virtual Console, but I never got around to playing it.

After beating it, I have to say that I don’t like it as much as the other two Punch-Out!! games I’ve played. A big part of that is how familiar I am with the NES game and how closely the Wii game sticks to it.  Super Punch-Out!! is quite a bit different. It is more complex, with a wider variety of punches and dodges available to the player, and it has a roster of opponents that is mostly unique to this game. (and the arcade games that no one has ever played) I think what really hurt my enjoyment of it, though, is that I don’t really remember how long it took me to get good at Punch-Out!!

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I found playing Super Punch-Out!! very frustrating.  After the first few easy opponents, I started ran into the wall that is learning new fighters.  I got by Piston Hurricane and Bald Bull pretty easily, but Dragon Chan and Masked Muscle was where I started having a lot of trouble.  These fighters have a lot of different moves and tics, and learning those takes time.  Especially when the game doesn’t quite work like I expect it to.  The real problem is how fast I was trying to beat this game.  Now I think of NES Punch-Out!! as a pleasant romp, at least until the last three or four fights.  But it took me a long time playing that game to get that good.  Like playing it off and on for more than 20 years. Compared to that, or to a game that is deliberately as close to that game as possible.  Super Punch-Out!! is trying to push the series forward, and it mostly works, but it frustrates an old pro at the NES game.

None of those problems really have anything to do with what this game actually is.  Although I don’t much like this game, I can’t really claim that it isn’t a good, or maybe even great, game.  The complexity it adds should be counted as a good thing.  I really liked the different super punches that Little Mac has at his disposal.  I never really figured out how the different punches worked, but the options are good.  It will take time to learn when to use which one might take some time, but I like having a more options than just uppercut.

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I’m of two minds about the new boxers in this game.  I really like some them; they work.  What I don’t like is how far they start to get away from being, you know, boxers.  Masked Muscle is fine; his luchador shtick doesn’t interfere with him being a boxer.  His one extra move is to spit in the player’s eyes, an illegal move but not a crazy one.  Likewise with Heike Kagero and his hair whip.  But Dragon Chan and his kicks or How Quarlow and his stick are just a step too far for me.

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Super Punch-Out!! is a great looking game.  No one can argue with that. Just like the original was one of the best looking games on the NES, this one has some of the best looking sprites on the SNES. The music is also a highlight.  Really, there is no part of this game that isn’t well made; I just don’t like it as much as the previous game. Nintendo rarely misses and they were really on the top of their game in the SNES days.  While Super Punch-Out!! doesn’t quite have the reputation of some their best games, like Super Metroid or Yoshi’s Island, but it really shows how the mastered this hardware.