A Better Tomorrow did not need a sequel and the fact that they used a “long lost twin brother” plot to get Chow Yun Fat back really sucks. That said, the last twelve minutes of this is some of the most John Woo-i-est John Woo possible. It might be my favorite of his gunfight action sequences. However, getting to that climax is a long slog through a silly, rambling plot and some laughably bad Simple Jack style acting.
This is peak John Woo action. I don’t think the narrative is as strong as The Killer or A Better Tomorrow, but the final hospital sequence (basically the last 25 minutes) is legendary gun-fu mayhem in which nobody is safe from the relentless kicks, gunfire and explosions.
The John Woo movie is a collection of bonkers ideas that never really coalesces into a whole. Movie starts off as a mid-century youth hoodlum movie with street fights, switchblades and, for some reason, eighties shoulder padded suits. Then it becomes about Asian political unrest and protests. Then it becomes an old timey gangster film. Then it becomes a wannabe Dear Hunter or Apocalypse Now as our eighties shoulder padded suit heroes end up in a Vietnam War prison camp. And it finally ends with a suit-appropriate John Woo-tastic car-based gun duel. In other words, it tries to be too much.
A writer takes in his dead friends widow only to discover she’s a slob who speaks like Tarzan but is apparently German and she very quickly ruins his life. Although not horror, this is very similar in structure to the Bernie Wrightson comic story Jennifer which was later adapted into a T.V. episode by Dario Argento.
Silas Warner must be spinning in his grave at the thought of his clever stealth game becoming this cringe inducing, tone-deaf melodrama. Wolfenstein II tries way too hard to be hip and funny with its over-the-top plot about a world in which the Nazis won WWII. The story takes the time to point out the horrors of racism and bigotry but also utilizes just about every ethnic stereotype and cliche in lieu of any actual character development. And this in a game that is about 60% cut scenes. Ugh.
Aside from that, the actual FPS game mechanics are fine. The enemies and weapons are varied and the combat is solid and fun. But there were plenty of missed opportunities to mix things up. I mean at one point you fly to Venus and it turns out that it is exactly like Earth except you have to fill your space suit every two minutes. No low gravity, or, um, space stuff. Just run and gun and skip the next cut scene.
It’s been a couple of months since my last update, but my remake of QBob is continuing apace. I am in the middle of the most time consuming part of the project which is reworking all the graphics and animations. Many of the sprites will be fairly straightforward vectorizations of the original bitmaps, but there are several that are getting a complete overhaul.
I have become disenchanted with characters that were originally created as 3-D models using Caligari Truespace. The biggest culprit was Probe. His plastic texture and simple form seemed so out-of-place. You can see my new version above. I am quite happy with it. Faking movement in three dimensions using Flash kinda sucks, but I’ve managed to get this sprite animated quite nicely.
As I write this I am in the middle of a bit of a procrastination rut as I need to get the basic animation rig set up for the player character. I’m about seventy percent there but drawing this character from every angle is tricky. Let’s just say the original sprites fudged it a bit. I need to do this though. Once the basics are in place I will very quickly be able to reuse the source files to create XBob and be done with all the main player and enemy sprites. My goal is to be there by early next month.
I forgot how much I like these Choose Your Own Adventure style Telltale Games. It didn’t help that the last one I played was the weakest release in the series. Given the “meh” taste that one left, I may not have picked The Expanse up, but I recently finished reading the books and I wanted to linger in that world a little longer.
The Expanse video game is a stand-alone story of Camina Drummer before she joined Fred Johnson, serving aboard a ship of Belt scavengers. They discover the location of what could be their biggest score only to run afoul of space pirates, suffer inter-crew drama, and the usual space opera fare. The plot doesn’t really tie-in to the grander themes of the series and books. It feels more like one of the many Expanse novellas. The stakes aren’t as big, but it was an entertaining story nonetheless.
As far as the “game” goes, the choices weren’t quite as dire as other Telltale games. Usually these games throw in a difficult “choose who dies” moment at the end of the first act. We didn’t get that here. In fact, one of the later episodes almost felt choice-free and was more like a non-violent version of Dead Space‘s haunted ships. I didn’t mind it so much, but that sort of sequence would have more appropriate in an RPG. But still, there was enough interaction here to keep it engaging through to the climax.
Like half the movies that come out these days, it’s a sequel that nobody asked for. I did enjoy it for the most part. It’s probably been around twenty years since I watched the original but the characters still felt familiar and it was good to learn how they all wasted their lives for the past two decades. Although it does lean into the “member-berries” a bit more than it should—to the point where they show brief clips from the first movie every so often.
The story of The Expanse has come to an end in a mostly satisfying way. The final book isn’t quite as exciting as the last two, but we finally get a sense of what the inter-dimensional enemy can do and why. They actually manage to tie in plots that, at the time, seemed like unimportant tangents. Overall, a great series to read.
Resident Evil 7 is a stark departure from the most recent games in the series where the emphasis has been on action. This a return to the more pure survival horror roots of the franchise, but as played from a first-person perspective. This means lots more pure horror atmosphere in which the best strategy is to conserve ammo and run away when you can.
The story draws a lot more from Texas Chainsaw Massacre than from the generic bio-weapon zombie plots of the past (I would have preferred if it dug deeper into the mythology of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken). Only in the last act does it start to tie in with the other games in the series. Most of the time you are trying to defeat a family of evil rednecks in order to save your (possessed) wife.
The early parts of the game, when I didn’t really know what to expect, were genuinely creepy. It’s loaded with jump scares that are even more effective from a first-person view. But, in the end, I was never a huge fan of the old-style Resident Evil. I really just want to blast monsters and not continuously be searching for ammo.
At its worst, the game can be more stressful than fun. But once I got a handle on my inventory and the game world opened up a bit, I started to enjoy it for what it was.
