Resident Evil: Revelations 2

Why is it that all of the Resident Evil games since five have partners? I mean, yeah 4 had Ashley, but that hardly counts. She wasn't playable and she tended to be more of hassle than anything else. But now, ever since 5, Capcom seem to have a hard-on for coop play. I can’t imagine why. I mean, asides from the slightly clunky inventory system, Sheva had to be the worst part of that game, thanks in no small part to her AI, if only because she needed ammo and shit unlike future itterations. I mean, if there was one thing that 6 did well, for all of the flack it got for not being an actual survival horror game, your AI team-mates didn't rely on in-game ammo and health. Hell, even Resident Evil: Revelations, the one game that finally realized what, exactly, people go to play resident evil games for. Although, to be fair, at least in that game, one or two of the characters felt like something other than a hanger-on. I even liked that one french guy who hung out with Jill (at least I think it was Jill who he was with).

All of this being said, I think it kind of interesting that Revelations 2 tries its best to mix in survival horror with co-op. But I suppose I should probably to get on to the plot. This time around, we follow two seperate pairs of co-op parters, following storylines, one happening before the other. the first being Jill Valentine, I think, (to be honest, by now, keeping track of all of the various RE characters and factions probably requites a flow chart and much more time than should be spent on such matters), and Moira, the daughter of Barry Burton (yes, the "Jill Sandwich" guy, they even hang a lampshade on it so heavy that anyone who doesn't get the joke will be left feeling underwhelmed),as they each traverse the maze of traps and Evil Within rejects, all the while being taunted by the female version of the Director from Manhunt. The second follows Barry Burton and creepy girl du jour (her actual name is Natasha, but for the sake of my schlocky sense of humor, from here on out, I shall refer to her as various creepy children from whatever piece of fiction strikes me at the time), after the two disappear with at least, and I'm willing to bet cold hard cash that she ends up dead. This time around, it is only Jill (I think) and Barry who are allowed to use to guns. Barry Burton's daughter and our LIttle Sister wanna-be are relegated to using a flashlight and crowbar and infrared vision monster detection powers and a ready supply of bricks lying for the latter. It also helps that you can switch characters at will, allowing you blind a particular silent Hill resident one moment and shoot the crap out of another.

Now while I'd understand why we wouldn't allow Emily the Strange to use a weapon (let's face it, the Japanese aren't so crass as to feature child soldier allusions), but why the hell can't Barry's little girl? Supposedly it has something to do with guns being a trigger for her, but I'm pretty sure life and death situations should demand that you take up arms, as it were. I suppose it doesn’t do well to dwell on such matters. I might as well be wondering why the president’s daughter could only throw lamps at baddies at best. The resulting dynamic is that it does feel a little bit more like a proper survival horror game, at least the Jill sections do. While stealth is something of an option in both stories, it’s much more viable in the Barry/Carrie side of things, what with the help of a certain villager of the damned. There are also little things that make Jill/Moira feel a lot like the resident evils of old and the Barry/Mandy of Grim Adventures fame. The only weapons Jill has access to are a pistol and double barrel shotgun, making it feel all the more like you’re desperately scrounging for whatever ammo you can get your hands on. Barry, on the other hand, is armed to the teeth like every Resident Evil protagonist ever and even has his own flashlight, and the option to kill off the various “The Suffering” rejects Solid Snake style. In other words, we get a nice variance of gameplay styles, one harrowing and nerve-wracking and the other stealthy and/or full of badassery.

As you may have guessed by now, I haven’t exactly completed this game. The reason for this is, of course, that the damned game has been spliced into four episodes, a format that I don’t really think compliments any game style much less a Resident Evil game. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a place for episodic content in this world… just… not in video games. It’s especially misleading because I thought I was picking the game up for a steal when instead Capcom was stealing from me. All of this being said, I, for one, will indeed be waiting for this game to drop a little in price and then pick up the complete version, because I’ll be damnned if I pay fifteen dollars or what have you

So I decided that I'm going to be a little more dedicated to this blog this year, and I figure the best way to go about this is to start out with something that I wrote approximately six months ago. So without further ado, I give to you my review of no one's favorite Xbox game (no, not even for ironic reasons):

            These days, there’s a lot of emphasis on Indie games. Indie games allow for small groups of people to put their heart and soul into whatever they’re doing and create unique, beautiful experiences. Games like Limbo, Bastion and Dear Esther have proven to be the cream of the metaphorical crop. That being said—as anyone who’s ever listened to Jim Sterling’s most recent stuff will tell—being indie doesn’t automatically make you a clever hipster who fights convention. For every genre-defining Braid, there are half-a-dozen Day One: Garry’s Incidents, Earth: Year 2066, and bullshit flappy bird knockoff. Just as not all indie films are genuinely good, so are all indie games. I bring this up because I’ve recently been playing “Dead Lights,” a game which rips off several other games, with only shitty writing and shittier voice acting to show for it. Frankly, a more appropriate title would’ve been “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.”

            So here’s how I envision the creator of DeadLights going into his, or her—because suckiness knows no gender--“opus”: “well I just spent $100 on a copy of Microsoft game studios, but I have the imagination of a lobotomized monkey. How do I make my money back? Well, let’s see what’s popular on Xbox Live: Walking Dead, Limbo, and Shadow Complex. I know! I’ll combine the shooting and generic white dude—because god-forbid I create anything original for my first gaming outing—from Shadow Complex, the dark and dreary atmosphere, puzzle-platforming, and arbitrary inability to swim from Limbo, minus the German-Expressionist inspired surrealism, and setting from Walking dead, minus the racial/age/gender diversity. Oh and voice acting, because even though my writing is worse than the combined efforts of Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, it’ll be way more legit if I have voice actors. I’m sure my friends down at the local community college would love a spare five bucks plus pizza. Professional voice actors are overrated, anyway. Alright now for the plot: To the online Plot Generator!”

            As you may have guessed, after having played through the majority of the game, I’m not exactly impressed. That being said: let me get this out of the way: yes, the aesthetics are pretty damned decent. And yes, the controls work just fine. That being said, those aesthetics and controls don’t exactly gel with the rest of the story.

            Here’s the thing about 2D plat-forming: it doesn’t exactly work with the whole “Zombie apocalypse” setting. 2D plat-forming is at it’s best when it’s slightly cartoony, either due to the limitations of the technology or plain old aesthetic choice. Limbo is dark as hell, yeah, but the whole thing has this very German expressionist feel, which already bordered the weird. Dead Lights on the other hand  is supposed to take place in the real world, and last time I checked, there’s no way in hell one underground hobo can create an entire labyrinth of traps that reset themselves. This isn’t fucking Indiana Jones here. I thought one of the aspects of the Zombie apocalypse were at least some vague pretentions to gritty realism. At the very least the puzzles in Limbo had a sort of disturbing edge to them. Any moment could involve using the corpses of fellow children to swim across a river or using the very spider that had been hunting you as just another box to climb over. The closest we get to that in Dead Light is tricking zombies into traps, and they’re not even your undead comrades.

            As for the story, well let’s play a little drinking game: I’m going to describe the plot and every cheesy videogame/zombie apocalypse cliché you come across, take a drink. If you’re not drunk one paragraph in, you clearly need play more videogames and/or watch more zombie movies. So the world has succumbed to the zombie—in this version called “shadows,” which only makes sense because everything is nice and contrasty—apocalypse has happened. You play as Randy, a survivor out to save his friends and family— and incidentally the latter group might as well have “bad shit happened to us” taped to their backs if only based on those arbitrary little trips down nostalgia lane we experience every other scene. Along the way, you’ll encounter a sewer level which is a good third of the game, run by the blandest crazy old man I’ve ever seen, as well as, naturally, a group of rogue humans who have decided that the zombie apocalypse is the perfect opportunity to act like complete psychos despite the need for man-kind to stick together, and a military which has gone bat-crap crazy “containing” the virus. Oh and you save two people in total, one of whom dies in the middle of piloting a helicopter, and the other is a young woman who almost gets raped but Randy saves her—in cut-scene no less, because god-forbid anything interesting happen gameplay wise.

            Don’t get me wrong. The aforementioned setup—as clichéd as it is—would be decent in the hands of some decent voice actors and decent writers. Even if it hasn’t been proven time and again that the zombie apocalypse can be an effective setting for everything from deep reflections on how far people are willing to go to survive (see 28 Days Later  and Walking Dead) to social satire (see Dawn of the Dead and the first two Dead Rising games), to paraphrase Movie Bob, “you can make a good story about anything.” That being said, it isn’t the set-up that kills this story, but, like most bad stories, the execution. As mentioned before the voice-acting is… mediocre at best. Randy is constantly making bland statements pointing out the obvious like he has some sort of disability that makes it necessary to say things in order to process them. If you’re going to pull that sort of crap, at least do it in a way that tells us a bit about the character as a whole (see the chronicles of Riddick games)—Batman in the Arkham games only got away with it because he’s Batman and you’d hardly expect him to be waxing philosophic while taking down thugs or solving environmental puzzles. The Rat—the aforementioned inventive sewer hobo—has to have the most boring voice for a guy whose supposed to be so eccentric and insane that his own son ran away from him. And then there’s the girl you rescue near the end. Seeing as how you rescue her, you’re forced to escort her. That’s right, the last half-hour of this puppy’s an escort mission, because the game hasn’t bothered taking any risks up to that point, so why should it bother giving us a climactic ending? If that wasn’t bad enough, she manages the impossible task of making the Ashley RE4 seem like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite by comparison. I swear, if I hear “Randy! Shadows!” Or “Randy! Soldiers!” one more time, I’m gonna gouge someone’s eyes out, preferably the developer’s.

            Despite the last thousand words or so, though, the game isn’t that bad. The plat-forming works and the aiming system works well with the setting. That being said, if you are going to buy a downloadable game, there are an endless supply of better ones to spend your hard-earned cash on, such as “Shadow Complex,” “Limbo” or one of the episodes of “Walking Dead.” Hell, Goat or Surgeon Simulator would be better uses of money than "Dead Light," or as I've come to refer to it, “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.” At least some genuine imagination went into those last two. 

On H.P. Lovecraft: The Cyclopean Horror in the Room

Ah yes, I suppose if I am going to be a commenter on the internet, I might as well discuss this topic, seeing as how I’ve lost traction with that novel I’d spent the majority of July writing half of.

            For those of you who haven’t heard of him, short answer: he’s the guy responsible for giving us C’thulhu and the Necronomicon, as well as being blessed with the best name to have as a horror writer outside of Misery McDeath. If you've never heard o C'thulhu, I hope your readjustment to society went well, because you're clearly a feral child. There are C'thulhu plushies for Pete's sake

I'm sure you've seen him around here and there

Long answer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is quite possibly the most influential writer in the geek world next to JRR Tolkien, an analogy that I’ll want to get back to later in this. His most enduring contribution to the world is the “c’thulhuverse,” which aside from giving us the above mentioned names, also introduced the ideas “cosmic horror,” in other words the idea that there are beings beyond space and time that whose very presence is enough to drive most men mad; much in the same way that Tolkien gave us the typical epic fantasy setting with Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, etc through the Middle Earth Saga and Robert E. Howard gave us the Sword and Sorcery setting with a certain Conan. Aside from that, the c’thulhuverse has inspired numerous videogames like Amnesia: the Dark Descent and Eternal Darkness.

            While you could argue that the idea of making something “incomprehensible to mortal beings” a bit of a cop out of not actually trying to, you know, actually describe what we the reader are supposed to be looking at. Then again, you could say that it was lazy of Spielberg to not show the shark until the end or for us to see the Xenomorph actually kill something in the Alien movies. That being said, the C’thuluverse also gave us a wide array of interesting creatures, from the shifting, twisting shoggoths, to the lobster like Mi-go to the radial, plantlike elder things.

            Lovecraft’s career proper started around 1920, although you know it comparing him to some other writers of the time. The guy was undeniably Gothic/Romantic in inspiration, especially Edgar Allan Poe, so you probably won’t get much out of comparing him to the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. He was also a critic to a degree and a travel writer. He was a resident of New England and it shows in his work, where things like the old buildings and the like, giving them almost a character in and of themselves.

            I myself have read a decent chunk of Lovecraft’s work, including a decent chunk of the C’thuluverse, and that being said, I sort of prefer those stories of his not based in the C’thuluverse. I’d heartily recommend In the Vault and The Outsider, the latter a classic homage to gothic horror stories like “The Devil and John Proctor” and the latter a tale of loneliness and sad realizations.

            If I had to choose a story that took place in the C’thuluverse proper, I’d probably go with At the Mountains of Madness. There are a couple of reasons why. Primarily it’s because of the Elder Ones, these settlers from another world. We really get a picture of the society these creatures have created, as well as almost come to sympathize. Another reason is the Shoggoths. You see, I have a bit of a soft spot for anything pertaining to AIs or the like, probably owing to the fact that Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot was the first real sci-fi book I got into, and when you get right down to it, At the Mountains of Madness is pretty about that. You see, the Elder Ones created the Shoggoths as sort of menial laborers, but the rebellion of the shoggoths was what ultimately ended the Elder One’s society. In essence, Mountains of Madness is a sort of odd variant of the Rossum’s Universal Robots story. Elder Things create Shoggoths, shoggoths rebel, shoggoths remain in the aforementioned Mountains of Madness.

            If there is one thing that I dislike about his writing style, it’s the sheer—out of lack of a better word—panziness with which his protagonists respond to most situations. There’s an almost “ewe, kill it!” factor to the way things are revealed, as if Lovecraft was trying and failing to put a jump scare in book form, except we the reader would just come away annoyed by the whole thing, seeing as how by now we were just kind of disappointed. Hell, in “Madness” he calls penguins “grotesque.” And not even the blind, albino penguins either. According to the protagonist, plain old penguins are grotesque. In fact you get the feeling that anything not coming from New England was grotesque, including people. Which brings me to my next point.

The Cyclopean Horror in the Room.

            So there are two types of Genre fiction writers, progressives and conservatives. For every Heinlein there’s an Ayn Rand. For every individual who interprets Invasion of the Body as the whitewashing of culture there will inevitably be another who sees it as foreigners taking over. For every individual who sympathized with the Creature in Frankenstein, there’s at least one individual who sympathized with Frankenstein (despite being a chicken shit who didn’t even have the decency to name his creation, but that’s neither here nor there) and considers the creature to be “an abomination” or whatever. Lovecraft was definitely in the latter category. He definitely would’ve sympathized with Frankenstein.

To specify, Lovecraft was racist. Really, aggressively racist. And this wasn’t even like someone like Orson Scott Card whose overt homophobia you can just ignore while you’re reading his books. No, if you’ve read any Lovecraft, especially anything in the C’thulu mythos, then you’ll know just how bad it is. From discussions of “savage cultists,” to cats named “ni***man” you’ll find it all. Not only that, but the racism manages to seep it’s way into the undertones of the piece. Yeah, you’re starting to understand why so many of his creatures looked so otherworldly, or the aforementioned “ewe, gross” style of writing.

It gets particularly annoying in “The Whisperer in the Dark” where it turns out that the creatures assaulting the titular Whisperer are the Mi-go, an advanced alien race who are offering to let him travel the universe as just a brain in a jar, in a surgery that’s no more invasive than a haircut, and all the protagonist can do is react in disgust. We never hear that the mi-go are in any way going to use the man’s brain for diabolical purposes. We’re just supposed to react with horror when we hear that he’s been taken out to space. This guy is going to explore the outer reaches of outer space, how horrid. The amounts of both imagination and yet backwards thinking it must have taken to think of such fantastical idea and frame it as something horrifying like that is astounding.

The most blatant example of racism in Lovecraft’s work would definitely have to be “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” It turns out that the residents of Innsmouth have been mating with a race of underwater creatures called the Deep Ones (real original, H.G., real original) as part of a pact made with said creatures. The resulting offspring have blue-grey skin and are rather reptilian in nature. You read that right. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is an allegory for the evils of intermarriage. Never have I heard a more offensive science fiction concept since I read about Tyroc on Cracked.com. What makes this all the weirder is that Mrs. Lovecraft was Jewish, although maybe Mr. Lovecraft was okay with it seeing as how Jews are generally white, and he only had a problem with how much melanin other people had.

Incidentally, this is primary reason why I tend to like his works not associated with “The C’thulu Mythos”. The aforementioned mythos tends to have the most racist undertones of Lovecraft’s work, and it feels significantly less awkward to read a tale where the narrator is talking about how evil other ethnicities. It’s also one the reasons why I like “Mountains” the most out of the “C’thulu Mythos”. It’s the only one of these stories where the narrator at least vaguely begins to sympathize with the writer’s creations. We’re at the very least supposed to feel vaguely sorry for the Elder Ones (jeeze, Lovecraft, how hard could it’ve been to think of a decent name for the s.o.bs), not to mention we’re at least supposed to respond to the Elder Ones society with fascination as opposed to the usual disgust.

So does all of this mean that the C’thulu Mythos itself is a racist entity? That anything that bases itself off of the work of Lovecraft is inherently racist? Not necessarily. The great thing about art is that even if it has some unsavory elements, doesn’t mean that there aren’t good things to be found in it. The movie “Birth of a Nation” romanticizes the Klu Klux Klan and even glorifies the lynching of a black man. Even so, many a critic argue that it is primarily responsible for the way in which modern movies are made. The same goes with Lovecraft’s work. Many artists have taken the themes of endless horror and changed them into completely not racist entities (see the aforementioned “Amnesia: The Dark Descent”).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. If it doesn’t matter that a lot of Lovecraft’s work was racist, why bother bringing it up? After all, Lovecraft’s pushing up daisies, making it supremely less awkward to buy his books than, say, the works of the extremely homophobic Orson Scott Card. Honestly, for the same reason people love to point out that people me (see: y-generation hipsters) like to point out that Edison stole half his ideas about electricity from Tesla, that Ford was Anti-Semitic or any a number of other flaws we like to find about people who were influential. There’s something fun to finding out that a famous person wasn’t the perfect little angel they’re made out to be in those picture books from fourth grade. There’s a sort of mischievous fun to it, if you will. And is it slightly immature of me to devote three days of work, and 1800 words to informing you the reader that Lovecraft was racist. Definitely, but then again it is my blog and I can do whatever I like with it.

Pontypool: Schlub Up or Die!

People—such as Movie Bob—like to say how the world of cinema has changed and that when viewing a movie poster, you literally had no idea what you were getting into outside of what the. Now, while there certainly isn’t that much that can be done for major motion pictures, I’d disagree with those sorts when it comes to slightly less known motion pictures. Instead of being clueless when going to the movies, viewers will be clueless when picking up a movie from redbox or when looking through suggestions on Netflix or some streaming service. All you have to go on are a little square with some awesome poster art and a little description at the bottom along with a couple of stars indicating total value, not unlike how those of the 80s and nineties had naught but the cover of a VHS and some vague description on the back, just as movie-goers of the 7

You gotta admit, that's a pretty
kickass poster

0s and 60s had a poster and possibly a preview they saw at another movie.

            I bring this up because this is very same mentality I went into “Pontypool” with. Going in, based solely on the poster, I’d be lying if I wasn’t expecting a schlocktacular zombiefest, but what I ended up with—while arguably containing zombies—was a little smarter than that, if not a little nonsensical at the same time.

            So Pontypool. Pontypool opens by introducing us to Grant Mazzy, the smooth DJ who was newly hired to be the voice of the local radio station in the titular town, Ontario, Sydney Brier, his producer, and Laurel-Ann Drummond, her Afghanistan vet assistant. As the day progresses, reports of something very wrong going on in town proper, beginning with a supposed riot at a dentist’s establishment to and ultimately climaxing in reports of “indescribable acts” by the towns people, including picking people up with their teeth and eating them.

If my description hasn’t made it all together clear, this is a very “Lumetian” picture. Chances are you haven’t heard of Sidney Lumet, but you may have heard of—as well as—seen some of the movies he’s made over the years, including both “12 Angry Men” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” films which give us one or two locations but due to things like camera angles, editing, or even the situation of the story, these locations stay dynamic enough to not completely bore the audience. Now, while he certainly wasn’t the first to think of this style of film making—indeed the style itself is arguably the great-great-great-grandchild of Greek style performances, and can still be seen in many a modern play—it is arguably his signature. Now Lumetian style can do a lot of different things for a film, however it is best at giving us the tension between a group of characters in an intensely personal setting. It also, if done well, allows the creators to skirt the classic “show, don’t tell” rule that is so integral to proper story telling. In 12 Angry Men, it allowed for us, the audience, to try and gain what we could from the descriptions given by the jurors. In “Dog Day Afternoon,” it helps to show the relationship between Sonny and the rest of the hostages.

In “Pontypool,” the three being trapped in the radio station really emphasizes the mystery of what’s going on. It’s hard not to be creeped out about what’s going on as reports cannibalism and god knows what else are coming from the poor schlub who liked to pretend he was on the traffic copter when he was just in his van. Meanwhile Mazzy is trying his best to be patient while Brier and Drummond try their best to get a feel for what’s going on. The effect is very Lovecraftian. You, along with the protagonists, aren’t entirely certain of what’s going on, but know full well that it’s bad and that no good can come of it. It’s a bit like a found footage movie, except without the pretentians to go along with it.

As I said earlier, there is a sort of Lovecraftian element to the fact that we're just hearing reports of what's going on as opposed to the team and the audience hearing for themselves. You could argue that this is sheer laziness on director Bruce Mcdonald's part, just as you could argue that leaving the horridness of the beasts up to the audience is laziness in Lovecraftian fiction. I'd argue that sometimes our limitations, and even our laziness, can lead to innovation. When Stan Lee was asked to to make a new superhero team, instead of thinking up some complex origin story, he just said they were mutants and wham, the X-men were born. Movies like Jaws, the first two Aliens movies and the Thing are all the better because of how little we see the titular creatures. What I'm getting at is that I'm giving McDonald a pass for not showing revealing the creatures until the end.

That being said, no movie’s perfect, and Pontypool is no different. The reveal of just what’s going on can range from completely a unique—if not convoluted—take on the zombie apocalypse genre, to completely and utterly convoluted. I’ll give you a hint: it defies even the most basic of understanding of how diseases are spread. My biggest problem is with the way the movie itself reveals just how the zombie apocalypse works. So the trio are all confused as to what’s going on and such and then all of a sudden, some German scientist comes along and just gives us a big old exposition dump about what’s going on. Not only that but the guy’s a caricature of every stupid b-movie scientist around. Now, while I don’t really have a problem with that sort of thing, it sticks out like a sore thumb in a film that’s been building up slow, uneasy tension. It’d be like if you were going through one of the “Grudge” movies and all of a sudden Freddy Krueger comes swaggering along making bad puns and whatnot.

Overall, Pontypool is not a “perfect movie.” But it’s got a genuinely interesting—if not convoluted—premise and some perfectly done execution. If you ever find yourself with some friends who just wanna have a decent time watching some movies, give this sucker a try. It’ll certainly b