Super Hyped Irreparable Trash, An Aliens: Colonial Marines Reveiw

Heh, I made the title spell S.H.I.T.

It's funny because the game is terrible. 

I have a confession to make, I love all things Alien, even Alien 4. I've played many of the Alien games in the past even those of the Vs Predator variety and have been immediately in like with them.

Be aware gentle reader, I have full game spoilers in this review and I do share the ending. Not now. Near the end of the review. You have been warned.

At first this was the case with A:CM. I really wanted to play this game and I had seen tons of photo references I liked; the throwback design of the text in the game that looks like the text first seen in the opening scenes of the early movies aboard the Nostromo and Solaco.

Immediately after the aforementioned text showed on a blank black screen the game opens into a in game movie that stops, stutters and shakes so bad I turned my system off, loaded the game to my hard drive, and started it again. No change.

"Well ASM," I said to myself, "maybe the playable stuff is better."  As soon as I started moving I saw screen tearing and sighed. A little further in I started to see that everything in the background looked like it wasn't fully rendered. Things like projections on the wall, generators on the floor look smeared and undefined, words on them are muddy blobs.

Then I saw. . . The aliens.

Good god, the aliens.

Honestly they are hard to talk about and not be sad. Yes, only one word of the three words in the title is Aliens, but they should have been the focus. Right away I'll tell you that the story is bullshit. It's a shame, but it's far and away shockingly bad. Badly acted, poorly written, and filled with characters that aren't built in anyway, and animated poorly to boot.

Lance Henriksen is voicing Bishop in it, I will give the game this one allowance and only this one, Lance Henriksen. I digress, the aliens in A:CM are laughable. The aliens continuously walk directly in front of your fire, and whilst walking out in the open will randomly just stand the fuck up on their back legs and do a sideways walking shuffle that is odd looking to say the least. These murderous beasts will kill npcs in one strike but when they face off against you are found lacking, one burst of fire will destroy them and their acid blood might as well be saliva. It effects you for mere seconds and makes it so that your always-replenishing-health doesn't replenish for those few seconds. In fact there is an achievement around blasting an alien close range with a shotgun specifically to get acid on you. Seriously these puppies are defanged.

Now basically your story is random set pieces that they throw the characters into but honestly this could be any licensed game with the bare bones story they provided. Level one is catching up with the story before you get to the Solaco and see the bottom half of Bishop with the white blood everywhere, just the mess left from the movie Aliens. You play a character named Winter, not that it matters. You are mostly teamed with a big guy named Oneal and run from place to place fighting aliens. There is a girl named Bella who in the first level tells you she had a face hugger on her when she woke up in a random room, the player knows what her eventual end will be but they have her throughout more the half the game. Again no development of the character, death means nothing but she dies.

Now you don't just fight aliens you fight enemies that are part of the Weyland-Yutani corporation and they don't like you fucking around with the aliens. There is a ton of fighting these guys too, and they have the smarts to hide behind cover when they are being shot at and actually are sometimes a challenge. Your overpowered weapons and room crossing shotgun blasts will make short work of any enemy so the last few levels just becomes quantity over quality. It is eventually revealed that somewhere in the base the WY folks are harboring a queen in their base and trying to monetize her. Of course she breaks loose and you have to fight her.

I am going to give a quick list of the 11 levels of the game as too what you do in each level.

1. Tutorial you see aliens and learn to shoot guns
2. Bullshit
3. Weyland-Yutani blow up the Sulaco
4. On planet, Hadley's Hope where much of Aliens movie takes place
5. Water level where you've been de-gunned and now have to sneak past new explodey aliens. Seriously. In a shoot-em-up game there is a for no reason stealth level. Honestly this level is quite nerve racking, and with an Alien game the whole thing should've been this level but with just a few guns and low ammo.
6. Bullshit
7. Bullshit
8. Bullshit
9. Poorly rendered bullshit
10. Duckshit, it's like bullshit, but looser
11. End boss fight in which you end the level with 0 kills

The end level boss fight is the worst offender of the game. In this boss fight you don't fight the boss. You are in a hangar where you have crashed a ship. The captain has been pinned in the pilots seat and everyone else has found a way to fuck off and leave you alone. You then find out that the queen is in there with you. You can shoot at her to get her attention but mostly she goes from empty box to empty box that litter the hangar looking to hurt you. During this time you are to activate switches that are on opposite sides of a track with a shoving wall aimed specifically at the hole your crashed ship left. Guess what you do. The queen literally stops searching for you and runs and stands in the center of the track as soon and you activate all 4 four switches. You have one final toggle that launches her towards the hole. At which point she saves herself from falling but the trapped, and now dying captain activates the ship and commits suicide/murders the queen to end the game, stealing your kill.

I beat this game without going out of the way to collect anything and ended with 30 of 50 achievements. I need to be very clear: I hated every last thing about this game. It is not worth the 60 dollars to buy. Use the purchase to get Borderlands 2 if you haven't already.

So that's it for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

If there is a review you would like to see, let me know I the comments below.

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Disclosure: This is a non-sponsored review. All product was purchased by me and the purpose of this review is based solely on my own interests. No product or monetary compensation was given to me by said company. 

I Swear It's Not Anything Like Twilight! A Warm Bodies Review

Here's your friendly spoiler warning!  Slight spoilers ahead. No endings just some early plot points.

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I wanted to start with a positive statement about the movie just to spur you on a little further for the review: Warm Bodies is nothing at all like Twilight. 

Now I was worried when I sat down to watch and the theatre went dark - signaling to the guy two rows ahead of me to turn his phone the fuck off or to at least set it to vibrate and stop playing angry birds. He was a bit slow on the uptake and 18 minutes into the movie he finally caught on that he didn't just pay 8 dollars to rent a comfy chair, but there was indeed shit happening on the screen in front of him. I found myself feeling worried again when the new age hipster music prevalent in the Twilight movies (yes I have seen them, no I am not a woman or gay, but I am married, so I might as well be) began to play and I did sort of jokingly try to walk out when I saw the logo for the studio that foisted the Twilight saga upon us, Summit.

Warm Bodies is first and foremost a zombie movie. I know as a people we have had zombies as the lead dog of pop culture for a while now, so a "different" approach to the same thing is refreshing now and again. Warm Bodies suffers from poor advertising, so much so that it has been described to me as a different movie, each time someone has told me about it. I've heard "Twilight with zombies", a "RomZomCom" (WTF izzat?) and a "zombie love story", and none of these is really true with exception to maybe RomZomCom because that isn't a thing.

The movie opens with a zombie narrating his zombie life explaining the important facts we'll need for the story.

• Firstly there is no recollection of your earlier life once you're a zombie, although the main character, played by Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy, X-Men:First Class) does remember that his name starts with an "R" but that's all. 
• Second, they do have relationships and conversations, which are mostly inarticulate grunts with one or two words, showcased with R's friendship with another zombie, M played by Rob Corddry (Old School, Hot Tub Time Machine.) 
• Third, there exists a subspecies to the zombie, an endgame if you will, that the zombies refer to as, "Bonies," which is a state that a zombie will get into where it gets so apathetic/bored or can't get the food to have the energy (it's not really FLESHED out in the movie, pun intended) to go on so they just start to peel their flesh away until nothing but a bones and like a primer layer. As you can imagine this makes them quite irritable and they will go after and eat anything with a pulse. 
• Lastly, R is a huge hoarder, he's picked out an airplane at the airport his group of zombies hangs out in, and he's filled it with bits and baubles, including a record collection.

The human interaction starts when a group of teens are released from their compound to search for medical supplies. The scavengers are led by the daughter of the compound leader, Julie played by Teresa Palmer (I am Number Four) and her boyfriend Perry played by Dave Franco (James Franco's Mom's womb.) The humans are set upon by R's entourage and here we learn that zombies like human's brains because as they eat them they get that human's memories, also they do it for self preservation in that if the destroy the human brain the human can't become a zombie too. We see this first hand as R kills Perry and eats the shit out of his brains. After a flashback of the dead early into the movie Perry's, R sees Julie newly defenseless and rather than feeding on her he decides to save her. He smears some goo from a gunshot he received on her face and leads her to his plane at the epicenter of the of the zombie horde.

R's heart begins to beat again and he starts to speak in full sentences the more he hangs out with Julie and he lies to her about needing to lay low in the plane for a few days, to spend time with her. Julie gets some insight into zombie non-life, and sees first hand that maybe zombies aren't so bad. There are a few throw away scenes of R learning to sort of drive and Bonies sniffing around.

Some of the better lines are given to some of the background characters with Corddry getting to drop the movie's only f-bomb. As time goes on you can see the development of each character, both as people and zombie. Granted it's built on lies and eating the brain of her boyfriend, but watching the relationship build between R and Julie is actually quite heart-warming.

There are quite a few twists along the way and much more to the story that I don't want to give away due to respect of the movie, and really a desire for others to see and enjoy it. This movie is certainly worth the money and the time, I completely recommend it.

If you get to see it or have seen it already, let me know how you feel about it!

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Disclosure: This is a non-sponsored review. All product was purchased by me and the purpose of this review is based solely on my own interests. No product or monetary compensation was given to me by said company. 

The Walking Dead: The Suicide King

Full episode spoilers exist below!! Please do not go any further if you enjoy your ignorance of all things Walking Dead.

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Walking Dead is finally back! We've been waiting since the last episode on the 2nd of December and it was quite the cliffhangerer they left us on. Last we saw Rick and his group (Daryl, Oscar, and Michonne) broke into Woodbury to rescue two of his group (Glenn and Maggie)  that had been kidnapped by Daryl's older and rascistyer brother Merle who's working for the governor of Woodbury, The Governor. Over the course of 8 episodes we were shown Woodbury and The Governor and what was nice and idyllic was actually super fucked up and crazy, The Governor, the worst of all killing anyone outside his town and keeping their heads, floating in aquariums, and keeping his zombified daughter gross and straight jacketed as a sort of pet.

During the rescue attempt Oscar was killed, Glenn and Maggie were freed, Michonne stabbed The Governor's eye in, and Daryl was captured during the chaos Rick's group had caused to find their missing squadmates. Last we saw Daryl, he was brought into a fighting ring alongside his brother Merle, in front of the entire population of Woodbury for a fight to the death.

See The Governor had tasked Merle with hunting down and killing Michonne, as she was a bit of a loose end, but Michonne has a katana and Michonne is good with it. She killed several of Merle's men and showed enough of her skill that though wounded Merle felt she was too much of a threat and let her go, returned to The Governor and claimed her dead. This made Michonne putting out The Governor's eye that much more of a surprise, and that brings us to the beginning of this episode, just over 2 months later, yet on the show mere seconds.

The fight itself is short lived, Rick, after making sure Glenn and Maggie are Ok, breaks back in to Woodbury to rescue Daryl and succeeds in shooting up the place as well. Daryl escapes with Rick and brings along Merle and his awesome crossbow. When everyone makes it out of Woodbury to the waiting and damaged Glenn he promptly freaks out that Rick brought along his captor and tormentor Merle. Rick quickly establishes a "No Merle" rule. Daryl retorts with a "No Merle, No Me" decree, and fucking bounces. Good thing they went through all that shit to save him right?

Rick returns with his group to the prison, where there is a new group of survivors, waiting along with half of Rick's group to hear from Rick. Rick though, Rick has other plans, he's going to go bat shit crazy and see his dead wife during a stressful first impression with the new group. He pulls his gun and starts waiving his gun screaming "You shouldn't be here," and "Get out!" Of course he's aiming this at the spectre but the new group gets the hint regardless and gets outta dodge.

Definetly a good start for the second half of season 3 (most watched episode ever with over 12 million views) there was a lot of action, I did leave out some of the episode as everything with  Andrea's character makes me sick, but it is a must watch, because they all are, and there you have it. Let me know what you thought of the episode or if you think Andrea should've just died already.

Good News Everyone!

Hey everybody, sorry I went all "radio silence" there for a bit but I'm am alive and kicking and have a few things coming down the pipe that I am really excited about and I needed some time to square some things.

• Until now my blog has been largely about video games and its time to diversify. I will start covering comic book but only the ones I like, which for now means Marvel Now books, Walking Dead and Saga. Most of the marvel books are starting or have finished their first arc. So I'll be able to go over stories in some cases and single issues in others. 
• I recently purchased a copy of Dead Space 3 and I will be getting a review out ASAP. 
• I will be getting Aliens: Colonial Marines on the 12th and a review of that will follow shortly after that. 
• Big news recently Witcher 3 was announced along with a slew of WiiU games that I want to talk about too. 
• Lastly starting February 10th Walking Dead is back on the air on AMC and I will be discussing that as well.