Review of Marvel Versus Capcom 3 for PS3

I have been a fan of the Marvel vs. Capcom series since I played the first game in middle school so I was really excited for the release of the 3rd installment. I was definitely not disappointed, the game is fast paced and really delivers on the action however there are a few points that could have been improved on.  The game only has a few drawbacks which I will quickly highlight.

One of the drawbacks is that Capcom had promised a "deep" story, of course as with nearly every fighting game the story is next to non-existent.  A few villains from the marvel and Capcom decide that they want to rule the world or something and so they enlist the help of Galactus, that's it.  While this doesn't particularly detract from the game I still found it an annoyance that Capcom had the balls to say it would have a "deep" story and proceed to flesh it out about as well as the SNES' Street Fighter II. Another problem is the online match finder takes a few tries to find a match and each time it fails to find one you are sent back to the menu which is a minor annoyance.  Another thing that should have been addressed is the online lobbies, you wait in a virtual line to play against someone, and while you are waiting you are just stuck staring at the menu screen rather than being able to watch the match.  Again this is only a minor annoyance. 

Other than these few minor drawbacks I have to say this game is pretty much amazing. The graphics look great and while I miss the hand drawn sprites from the first MVC the cell shaded look that this one is sporting is amazing.

 The cell shaded look of MVC 3

  The online play is completely seamless, out of around 100 matches I can only remember experiencing lag in 3 matches, and even then it was not enough to even annoy me.  The game play is extremely well tuned, the characters are well balanced for the most part and while it is simple enough for a neophyte to pick up and play, it also has enough depth to challenge the hard core fighter fan with advanced combinations, air combos, cancels, and some tricky button inputs.  The final boss Galactus is a great choice, and whats more that dude is hard enough to kill that you feel a serious sense of satisfaction when you finally do it.  The gameplay itself is so addicting that I continue to find myself saying, "one more match" until my fingers are sore.

Overall this game is amazing and I plan to play the crap out of it, the online matches are what really makes the game shine and I recommend it to anyone who may be a fan of fighting games and who has the patience to play a game with a moderately steep learning curve.

While I listed some of the drawbacks to the game earlier I have one more complaint but I have saved it for the end because this, unlike my other complaints is a mainly subjective complaint.  I am a little bit disappointed in the roster that was included in this game.  While some of the old favorites return, others have not and some of the new additions I find to be a little perplexing.  Why take out Megaman and add Zero in?  How about removing Tron Bonne and adding Zero instead?  I'm sure that someone has played a game with Tron Bonne in it and thought it was great but honestly I couldn't give a crap about playing a character that has stupid lego-looking robots hitting people with squishy carnival hammers. Also why does Darkstalkers get 3 characters in the game? Has anyone outside of Japan given a crap about Darkstalkers since the mid-ninties? Why not cut it down to 2 characters or just 1 and drop a character from Onimusha into the mix? Some of the Marvel characters are a little baffling to me as well, MVC2 had Gambit in it and he was awesome. He is one of the biggest fan favorites among people my age because of his appearance in the X-men cartoon show and was pretty damn fun to play in the second game so why take him out? Why take out Gambit and add in M.O.D.O.K. of all characters? And where is Venom at? he was amazing in both of the original games unfortunately he is conspicuously absent.  Taskmaster and Superskrull are two other characters that I think were bad moves, If you want some villains add in some timeless and iconic villains that may be a little more accessible to people. I think Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, or Red Skull would have made better villains, even Silver Surfer could have been added in as one since the developers decided to add Galactus into the game.  Anyway that is my very subjective rant about some of the problems with the roster in this game, it is still a great game however and should definitely be played.

The Green Hornet.

I saw the Green Hornet in 3d the other day, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised given the amount of disparaging comments I had read about it online and in print.  I think that some of the movie's critics may not really 'get' the movie and what it was trying to do, this dawned on me when we returned to my friends' house after the movie and his dad asked us if it was "as good as Iron Man." I had to tell him that it was really impossible to make that comparison.  The Green Hornet has more in common with a mid 90's buddy cop comedy  than a traditional superhero movie.  The movie does have some good action scenes but even these are interspersed with jokes. The main thing to keep in mind about the film is not to take it too seriously because the filmmakers, writers and actors themselves sure as hell don't. 

 So while I thought the film was pretty funny and overall entertaining and worth a watch, I do have to say that Christoff Waltz's performance was absolute garbage even in a movie that obviously didn't set the bar for acting very high. Another thing that turned me off was the 3d effects, they were completely unnecessary and I didn't think they really did anything for the movie. 

Robert A. Heinlein taking a huge dump on sci-fi

The other day I read a book called "Lullaby" in which (among other interesting developments) a rich lady uses her fortune to buy a publishing company so she can destroy all copies of a book containing a poem that when read to someone kills them.  If such a book existed and I had a choice to either destroy all copies of it and save countless lives, or all copies of the relatively harmless  Robert A Heinlein's Number of the Beast; well I would probably have to flip a coin.

Honestly when I picked up this book I was expecting something really special, all the Heinlein books I had read so far had been really good.  More specifically I had read the mind bending Stranger in a Strange Land, the exceptionally well written, creative and fleshed out The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the short but sweet slightly fascist sci-fi action classic Starship Troopers.  All of these books are science fiction classics and I cannot recommend them enough. 
However I think I would rather recommend a battery acid colonic than recommend reading Number of the Beast, it is such a piece of worthless tripe that it nearly destroyed all the respect that I had accumulated for Heinlein. What is so wrong with this book? You may ask.  I'm about to tell you what, but there is so much to hate that I am really having a hard time finding a starting point.


I guess I should start at the beginning.  At first the writing style seemed fast paced and pulpy but it was interesting, however that interest runs out when you realize that despite the tone of the novel starting out quick the thing is 500+ pages long and the plot does not in any way keep up with the pace set by the writing style.  Of course some plot points go by quickly, within the first two pages 2 of the main characters Zebadiah (ugh) and Deety decide to get married, of course this is absurd and completely unbelievable because they are complete strangers and have just met.  I was willing to suspend my disbelief for a bit, thinking that this being Heinlein sexual mores in his sci-fi worlds are generally a little bit wonky.  This didn't turn out to be the case, it really turns out that he just decided that he needed to have a married couple as the protagonists so why not just have two complete strangers meet and decide to tie the knot within the first 2 pages of the book.  Of course the whirl wind romance in the first 2 pages of the book could have probably been spaced out and made a little bit more believable if Heinlein had removed the 50% of the book that is made up by the characters doing math out loud, and programming their ships' computer.   

So complete absurdity and unbelievability aside he goes on to introduce us to the other 2 main characters, Deety's father Dr. Jake Burroughs, who is annoyingly referred to as "Pop" through most of the book, and Debutant and all-around rich bitch Hilda. Who also inexplicably decide to get married right after the first couple chapters, however at least they have some back story to kind of support this.

Now I have gotten to the meat and potatoes of what is completely wrong with this stinking turd of a book.  Some complete incredulously unbelievable plot stuff aside the plot is at least interesting: Dr. Burroughs has created a crazy space/time machine that can take you into any one of six to the sixth to the sixth power number of parallel universes, aliens want to destroy the technology, the four protagonists spend the majority of the book running from said aliens and exploring.  This would be bearable and perhaps even enjoyable to read if Heinlein had not made all four of his main characters into "Mary Sues"

According to the "Mary Sue" wikipedia page:

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an "author's pet".
Although the traits of a "Mary Sue" are not necessarily gender-specific, the term itself is used exclusively for females. The term must be modified to refer to male characters; they are often dubbed "Gary Stu", "Larry Stu", "Marty Stu", or similar names. While the label "Mary Sue" itself originates from a parody of this type of character, most characters labeled "Mary Sues" by readers are not intended by authors as such.

While the above definition is generally applied to fanfiction, I think it best describes the characters in this book.  They are all geniuses, Zeb and the Dr. Burroughs both are fencing masters and incredibly wealthy while being math geniuses, Deety is a martial arts master and incredibly wealthy, a math genius and of course super hot to boot.  While Hilda is a little bit less of a genius but still a genius, a little bit less wealthy than the rest of them but still sickeningly wealthy and super hot to boot. Pretty much all 4 characters are near-perfect copies of each other, and all 4 characters talk in the same way and have the same political ideologies which perfectly coincide with Heinlein's idealistic libertarian viewpoints (WHAT A SHOCK). Ugh, its pissing me off even writing about it.  The only likable character in the book is 'Gay Deceiver' the space ship, and the only reason it is believable is because it is a computer guided rocket-car thing that is supposed to be two dimensional and have no personality.

The dialogue from each of the characters is usually spent spouting out random math equations used for their flight calculations and needless techno jargon. However when they are interacting with each other it usually wavers from sickeningly sweet lovey-dovey bullshit, to righteous indignation. Also there are speeches featuring ridiculous empty headed machismo from the males, overly feminine empty headed prattle from both females, and the occasional reference to the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels.

That brings me to another problem, 3 of the main characters are named in Homage to E.R.B. and his Barsoom Novels, The characters literally spend page upon page talking about how great said novels are. After the first few times I had to read about how totally freaking awesome John Carter of Mars and all his crazy-ass adventures are I decided Heinlein would have been better off just writing a fanfic. Either that or just go give the guy a literal reach-around as opposed to a literary one.

Ugh I am going to just wrap this up with a few man bullet points because I could literally type on how much I hated this piece of shit all day.

1. The characters spend page upon page reciting math equations out loud, maybe to make it seem more like "hard" science fiction.
2. The characters spend page upon page programming the computer on board Gay Deciever, maybe to make it seem more like "hard" science fiction
3. The story is either moving at a lighting quick pace or a hideously slow crawl bogged down in the above mentioned math recitation and computer programming 
4. THE DIALOGUE MAKES ME WANT TO PUKE
5. Libertarian fantasy bullshit: For example a multi-page explanation on how Deety and "Pop" cheat the government out of their taxes and then somehow secretly insert money into programs that are socially responsible like fire departments etc. Or stupid story about how Zeb got a doctorate just to make a statement on how doctorates are completely worthless compared to being just naturally awesome
6. Poorly crafted story elements. i.e. their spaceship is small but somehow they can fit enough supplies into it to last them months just by really trying hard at packing. Also any random item that they need whatsoever just happens to be packed in some back crate in the ship and not mentioned until they need it. 

Now do yourself a favor, if you see a copy of this book, immediately go buy a copy of The Forever War and read it instead. Do not under any circumstances touch this radioactive piece of syphilitic monkey crap.

Inception

I just got back from seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception.  I have to say that this movie blew my mind right out of the back of my skull. I'm sure that I could write a movie that involved bending a city block in half, gunfights, car chases, running gunfights on skis, and a zero gravity fistfight, however there is no way that I could possibly make it such an excellent and compelling story line.  The cast does an incredible job in the film as well, and Leonardo DiCaprio has a sharp eye for scripts to get in on this right on the tail of Shutter Island. I loved literally everything about this movie from the music, the storyline, the acting and the direction. While this movie is kind of a sci-fi psychological thriller, it has loads of solid action scenes and is incredibly intense. I wholeheartedly recommend this film to everyone.

Samurai Saturday

For those of you who enjoy stories about the samurai and feudal Japan I may have a couple suggestions. 

Last night I watched the film "Goyokin" knowing little to no background on it.  The film was very good; it takes place towards the end of the samurai era long after the battle of Sekigahara and establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate and centers on Magobei Wakizaka. Magobei is a ronin who left the service of his lord after the chief retainer who also happens to be his brother in law perpetrated a massacre to cover up the theft of gold from a sunken ship.  The massacre is attributed to being the work of evil crow spirits and Magobei  agrees to keep silent about it if the chief retainer never repeats his actions.  After 3 years of wandering and on the brink of selling his sword and renouncing the Way of the Samurai, he is attacked by former comrades leading him to believe that the chief retainer plans to go back on his word and commit a similar atrocity.  The director of the film is Hideo Gosha, who according to wikipedia is nearly as influential in the "chambara" or "sword-fighting" film genre as Kurosawa, and watching this film I can definitely see why.  Of course this isn't exactly "Yojimbo" or "The Seven Samurai"  but in terms of storytelling this film blows pulp samurai films out of the water, while still having enough action to hold the interest of people who may be fans of stylistic elements of "exploitation" samurai films.



 My second suggestion to fans of samurai lore is the book Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, this is a very famous book however if you are only familiar with it by reputation or if you enjoyed the book "Shogun" I would highly recommend that you pick this book up.  The book is a fictionalized account of a decade in the life of Miyamoto Musashi, and while it has action and combat it is more about character developent. The book follows Musashi from his humble beginnings as a young tough wounded in the battle of Sekigahara, he eventually becomes an outlaw, begins to try to seek the true "Way" and eventually masters himself and finds peace. Yoshikawa is a master storyteller he creates a large cast of characters who are all interconnected. He also tends to neglect one character or the other for a couple hundred pages, and just as you are starting to think "hey what happened to so-and-so?" whatever character you are wondering about makes a seamless reappearance.  Be forewarned however this book is obscenely long it usually takes me 1 to 2 nights to finish a book, this one took me close to 10.  The copy that I rented had enormous pages and was still over 800 pages in length, I can only imagine a paperback copy having over 1000.  In all I found the book to be deeply satisfying if a little lengthy and I highly recommend it to fans of "Shogun" or even Dumas' "The 3 Musketeers."

An Interesting and Moody/Creepy Web Series

I was perusing the forums over at www.somethingawful.com when I came across a post about an online web series posted via youtube called Marble Hornets.  I have only watched the first 6 episodes so far which are anywhere from 1 to 3.5 minutes long and I am impressed, so far it has been very suspenseful and creepy in a david lynch-y kind of way.  I think that it may be a forum goon project because it features "slenderman" which was a bit of an internet meme that started out in the "create paranormal images" thread on somethingawful.com. Here he is in all his creepy uncanny glory:

This weird dude has gotten pretty popular on the internet and has been shopped into many a creepy black and white image to give people chills. 

So head on over to youtube and check out here is the intro and the first clip just to give you a little taste:





You can check out the original thread here if you want more info on the project or if you want an index of all the episodes: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3207172

My Favorite Criminal or My Favorite Artist

The reason I think this post is important is because it is about art. Yes that's right art. I will be the first to admit that Art is boring as hell, well at least the majority of it is. But add crime, scandal, urban culture, scathing social commentary, and a little bit of wicked humor and Art becomes more than just Art. It can become a social movement. 

"Millennials" as my generation has been termed by some have really not had a good counterculture movement. Nothing that holds a candle to the sexual revolution or so called "hippy culture" that encompassed the anti-war movement, radical leftist movements, and the drug subculture.  After another decade and a half or so Punk culture began to develop and with it hardcore culture, skinhead culture (not all of these are positive nessecarily) straightedge etc.

Okay bear with me at this point and don't spout any of that "punks not dead" bullshit at me because it is.  What cool subculture is still out there screwing with the establishment? We "Millenials" don't have much but we do have "Street Art" (Disclaimer here: Like all countercultures there is no definite genesis point. I am not an expert on this subject, just a fan. Street Art has been around for a long time but it seems to be becoming more popular or at least gaining more publicity and more mainstream acceptability).

Street Art is crazy, it turns the world onto its head. When you as the consumer pirate an album, you get the music for free and you break the law, you are stealing from the artist.  When you see a street art piece, its free, but the artist more often than not is the one that broke the law.  They are breaking the law to bring art to you, so you can look at it for free. Its altruistic crime and it kinda makes my head hurt to think about it.  

Of course I can't really get involved in street art because I have no talent but I still want to support the hell out of these guys.  My favorite street artist goes by the alias "Banksy"  

You can read about Banksy here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy or you can let me paraphrase it for you.

Banksy may be named Robert or Robin Banks, or he may be named Robin Gunningham.  The mystery of the identity is part of what makes the dude so interesting to me.  According to his agent they have never even met face to face. 

Banksy started out doing freehand graffiti, but long story short it took too long so he switched to stencils and a legend was born.  This guy isn't doing graffiti for gang related reasons, he does it to make statements about society, some of his statements are simple, some are obscure, and some are just completely ridiculous.

 
This next picture is particularly cool because it was done in the Gaza strip where israel has erected a massive wall to isolate Arab citizens.

Here is one of his sculptures that he left in the street. I think it was given to a museum after it was removed by the authorities:

This though is one of my favorites: the picture will not really do much for you so let me provide some backstory via Wikipedia:

In August/September 2006, Banksy replaced up to 500 copies of Paris Hilton's debut CD, Paris, in 48 different UK record stores with his own cover art and remixes by Danger Mouse. Music tracks were given titles such as "Why am I Famous?", "What Have I Done?" and "What Am I For?". Several copies of the CD were purchased by the public before stores were able to remove them, some going on to be sold for as much as £750 on online auction websites such as eBay. The cover art depicted Paris Hilton digitally altered to appear topless. Other pictures feature her with a dog's head replacing her own, and one of her stepping out of a luxury car, edited to include a group of homeless people, which included the caption "90% of success is just showing up"  -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy 

 Here are a couple more of my favorites:

A piece in Bethlehem:

The next few pieces were smuggled into various art museums (the Tate Britain Gallery, The British Museum The American Museum of Natural History and last but not least the f-ing Louvre. Yes thats right the place where they store the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, etc.) and then installed covertly by Banksy:

 

I hope that I might have got you interested enough in street art and Banksy to watch this movie when it comes out. I hope to see it as soon as it gets within a 3 hour drive of my house. 
This film is about Banksy is going to be capital "A" Amazing. Its called Exit Through the Gift Shop, Go see it. 

Iron Man 2

So I went into the theatre a little wary when Iron Man 2 debuted.  Somethingawful.com had given it a review that was less than flattering calling it an hour and a half long teaser for the Avengers and while there is a fair amount of hints at the future tie-in I have to say that the film itself was actually really enjoyable. 

While the movie itself was not as good as the first film in my opinion it still had a lot of good things going for it, for example Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, and Robert Downey Jr. all give good performances. Don Cheadle does a solid job as well however I have to say that I miss Terence Howard in the role as War Machine.

There are some flaws of course, The movie really emphasizes the whole invincible part of The Invincible Iron Man  as Iron Man never really seems to be in much danger, in fact I think maybe 1 person gets seriously hurt in the entire movie, the rest of it is just Iron Man and War Machine shrugging off bullets and having a jolly old time kicking ass. The Monaco raceway scene is definitely one not to be missed but in all I felt like the action took a back seat.

This movie is definitely worth a watch, however if you really want to see some superheroes messing up thugs I would still go see Kick-Ass before it is too late.   

Kick-Ass? It sure does.

You have probably seen the trailer for Kick-Ass, and like many people you probably think It looks like an amusing romp, suitable for young teenagers.  Well you would be wrong. Kick Ass is a gratuitously violent film and a very hard R.  Kick Ass is probably one of the most violent and most wickedly funny films to be released this year.  The film is based on the comic of the same name by Mark Millar, the man who brought us the gory badass bullet-fest, Wanted. However unlike Wanted  fans of the comic will be glad to know that while Kick-Ass has been changed a little bit to be more Hollywood-friendly, it is still true to the spirit of the source material.

There has been some controversy with the film because of Chloe Moretz' depiction of Hit-Girl which you can read about below.  The main thing to keep in mind before seeing this movie is that it is named Kick-Ass for God's sake. There is going to be alot of ass kicking involved, and it is for the most part a hard R and very lethal type of asskicking.  

http://www.ugo.com/movies/kick-ass-controversy?cmpid=rss-movies-imdb

I already mentioned Chloe Moretz, above but I can't praise her role enough in the film.  Hit-Girl may be the most messed up kid ever, and definitely someone I wouldn't want to meet in real life, but Moretz is again wickedly funny in the role, and more importantly she is the penultimate badass. Seriously this 13 year old girl could probably put the entire cast of the Expendables in the hospital, or more likely the morgue.

 This kid is the real star of the show. 

Nicholas Cage was pretty good too, which is high praise for him lately, of course his character is a total weirdo which helps make up for his current lack of acting skills.

In all I highly recommend this film but only if you like violence, superheroes, gunplay, morbid dark humor, as well as Superbad-esque dick jokes and likable dork humor. 

John Woo knocks (half of) it out of the park.

John Woo has shown us that he can still direct one hell of a film.  

Guan Yu, Taoist god, Buddhist Bodhisattva and greatest badass to ever live makes an appearance in the film.

Last night I watched Red Cliff part 1: Destiny Lies in the Wind.  This is the international release version of the film as opposed to the U.S. version which a combination of parts 1 and 2 and is heavily pared down.  First of all this movie is absolutely gorgeous, all the set pieces and artifacts are meticulously crafted while the CGI is top of the line.  Of course the story is what I really got into it for.  Red Cliff: is the story of the battle at Red Cliff (Chi Bi) a turning point in the fall of the Han dynasty, all the historical characters are present. First you have Zhuge Liang, a strategist only overshadowed by Sun Tzu himself, and his counterpart from the south Zhou Yu who is played masterfully by Tony Leung.  If you know anything about this period in Chinese history you will be incredibly pleased by this film, and even if you do not, this film and the second promise to be the most epic films since the lord of the rings.  Of course the first part of the film is mainly character building with a couple battles, but it is beautiful and very well written. I can't wait to get my hands on part 2.