Over the first few chapters I thought this was going to be great. It’s exactly like a John Waters movie, but in book form. But then the sad reality that John Waters is not a very good story teller begin to settle in. His only tricks are tasteless shock and 50s pop culture references. Sure that can be entertaining for a while, but the plot just a series of “and then this happens” with no real conflict or development.
It’s about time that I got back into this excellent series. I had forgotten how stressful these games were. There are never any good choices, and, just when you think you’ve found one, something goes wrong and messes everything up. I wasn’t too happy about the focus on the new character Javier instead of Clementine but there’s enough interaction with her (and a couple of flashbacks where you control her) to make it feel like you are still affecting her character in a meaningful way. After years of the T.V. series and all these games the stories and characters tend to fall quickly into tropes. There’s always the guy who can’t keep his cool or the group leader who seems to have brought back civilization but ends up being a wacko.
It’s been quite some time since I last dove into the Mysteries of the Unknown and this entry in the series was pleasantly skeptical of most of the proceedings. From the get go they cover the very first “table-tappers” and their admission that it all started as a practical joke. The whole idea of a séance is just goofy. You sit at a table in a pitch dark room holding hands and there are sounds and movement occurring around everyone while the medium babbles on about contacting some prince of Sumatra. Even I could perform a flawless Harry Blackstone Jr. level magic show if it was pitch dark.
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.
