New stuff!

This weekend has been a smorgasbord of entertainment!

Up was fantastic. It says something about a movie studio when you walk out of every single one of their films thinking, “Wait, was that their best one yet?” I’m sure there are heated discussions throughout the internet attempting to pin down which of Pixar’s masterpieces is, in fact, the best, but such discussions miss the point: they’re all so far above the competition that there may as well not be any competition.

As evidence I submit: the first thing you see when you go to a Pixar movie are previews for about a half dozen other animated movies by studios like Dreamworks and Sony(?) who aren’t even in the same zip code as their ball park. Talking animals being sassy? Oh ho ho, you don’t say! Celebrity voices? Well, what else were we going to spend half our budget on? Wait, wait. Don’t tell me.  Poop jokes!! Oh, I am slain!

Finding Nemo wasn’t a movie about a fish with attitude taking on the whole ocean, it was about a concerned dad ready to do anything to find his lost kid. The Incredibles wasn’t about a superhero team saving the world, but a family working through a tough situation together. An Up wasn’t just a high-flying adventure through exotic locales so much as a story of regret, loss and moving on. Pixar is the only studio doing it right because it’s the only studio telling us stories about ourselves.

There will always be a place for movies to shill themselves out to kids for a cheap buck — every fart joke in every cartoon is someone’s first fart joke after all. It takes some real talent, though,  to dare to make something timeless. That’s what Pixar does every year.

Bionic Commando. Before we knew a lot about this game it was supposed to be awesome. 3D sequel to one of the best 8-bit games ever made? Yesplz! But then after some reviewers got hold it was supposed to be soulless and mediocre. Well, now that I’ve spent a weekend with it, I can say… it’s both.

The game does a lot of things right. Swinging around is probably more finnicky than it needs to be, but then it was pretty finnicky in the original (and the remake), too. I’d say it works about as well as you could hope. I was terrified for the longest time that you’d only be able to attach the bionic arm to blatant grapple points, like in Metroid, but that’s not the case. If you see it, you can latch onto it, zip into it, swing from it, and use it to launch yourself upwards. Scaling buildings and giant cave walls is effortless and fun, in the same sense as it was in Crackdown. “My hero can do what!? Oh hell yeah!”

Combat is simplistic enough, but again, if you’re just going to run around and shoot guys you are missing the point. A few levels into the game your murderous options have increased a great deal. You can lob grenades, pick up rocks and cars and use them as bludgeoning instruments, hold a guy ten feet off the ground while you pump rounds into him, or whip your mechanical arm around in a frenzied clothesline. In one sniper-filled level I scaled a water tower where one of the bastards was hiding, grabbed him, then zipped into him and kicked him off into the wild blue yonder. Then in the next level I picked up a guy and used him to kill another guy. The game supplies you with a steady stream of increasingly crazy challenges as incentive to try a huge variety of stunts, such as “blow up five dudes with a grenade launcher while swinging at them.” You don’t get this kind of crazy action from Halo or Metal Gear Solid.

The game has problems. The aforementioned exploration aspect, where you can swing freely through levels, is tempered greatly by the blue gas that permeates the atmosphere. Run or swing off the beaten path and the hero dies of radiation poisoning almost instantaneously. A single, huge freeform world like Crackdown or Grand Theft Auto would have enhanced bionic arm in a way the confined linear stages never could. You can’t just load up the game and swing around for fifteen minutes.

I hate the characters. Part of the charm of the original was the almost flamboyantly patriotic heroes versus the cartoonishly evil villains. Spencer and Joe weren’t just the good guys, they were goddamned American heroes. The remake made this even more apparent, giving Spencer some great Duke Nukem-style one-liners and painting the bad guys as a vile empire based on midget exploitation. In the sequel Spencer and Joe are both rat bastards, murderers or traitors or whatever else. It’s too gritty and there are too many shades of grey. In the original your commanding officer was an old military gent who had your best interests and that of the mission at heart. In this one he’s some prick who refuses to share vital information and tells the hero to “try not to get killed… but don’t try too hard.”

All that pales in comparison to the idiotic implementation of the collectibles, though. I mean, okay — games have collectibles. I get it. I like collecting things; I like getting 100%. Bionic Commando makes this process as terribly difficult as possible. As mentioned earlier the game is a series of levels, and each level has a set number of collectibles. However, you cannot go back to previous levels. So if you miss one in your current stage, you’re locked out of 100% completion for that entire game. You can pick that level off a list to play it again later, but the collectibles you grab in level jump mode don’t count. And the icing on the cake is that the level exits are not consistent or even clearly marked, so unless you’re working off a guide or a walkthrough every single yellow dot will strike terror into the core of your being: “Is it safe to advance? Does that take me to the next area of this level, or end the level entirely? Do I have all the collectibles up to this point or did I miss one somewhere?” I had to restart the game from the beginning about three times before I finally bit the bullet and downloaded a guide.

Margarita pizza. Crust, olive oil, cheese, tomatoes. This pizza is absolutely sublime. I’m never going back to tomato sauce again.