Ramblings about crap in my life.
Archive for January, 2007
Preacher
Jan 16th
Thanks to polt I've begun reading Preacher, a comic book series from the late nineties. Me being lazy I'll just paste a synopsis from the series' Wiki-page:
Preacher tells the story of Jesse Custer, a down-and-out preacher in the small Texas town of Annville. Custer was accidentally possessed by the supernatural creature named 'Genesis' in an incident which killed his entire congregation and flattened his church.
Genesis, the product of the unauthorized, unnatural coupling of an angel and a demon, is an infant with no sense of individual will. However, as it is composed of both pure goodness and pure evil, it might have enough power to rival that of God himself. In other words, Jesse Custer, bonded to Genesis, may have become the most powerful being in the universe.
Custer, driven by a strong sense of right and wrong, goes on a journey across the United States attempting to (literally) find God, who abandoned Heaven the moment Genesis was born. He also begins to discover the truth about his new powers, which allow him to command the obedience of those who hear his words. He is joined by his old girlfriend Tulip O'Hare, as well as a hard-drinking Irish vampire named Cassidy.
Sounds weird? It is, weird in the most magnificent way, I just finished volume two, and it's probably the best comic book I've ever read (that doesn't say alot though since I haven't read a lot of them, just trust my taste in litterature, okay?). The theme is pretty dark: brutal murders, rape, child-molestation, disfigured characters, stuff like that, the language is written like it's pronounced and it's very harsh, profanity on almost every page, very Tarantino-like actually, which means it's great and it's one of the things that makes Preacher so entertaining. The stories are very interesting, so are the characters, it's just incredible. If you want to start reading comic books but are tired of superheroes then buy Preacher.
Call of Duty 3 is utter crap
Jan 13th
Oh my god this game sucks. I'm guessing the Wii-conversion is to blame, but that doesn't justify it.
Just look at those hands.
First of all we got the graphics, naturally it can't be even close to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, no one expects that, but the result on the Wii just looks like a poor conversion… which it is. Compare it to games like Zelda: Twilight Princess, Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime, all running on a GameCube, and you will really start realising how crappy the graphics are. All right, next:
THROW IT, THROW IT FOR GOD'S SAKE!
One of the things I was looking forward to when I purchased Call of Duty 3 was the use of Wii Remote gestures in the game. The first encounter is fine, some German wants you dead, he grabs your rifle and then you have to shake him off and give him a nice punch with the rifle-butt, controls respond nicely, but it's only downhill from that point on; as a default option you throw grenades by pushing the D-pad, it's also possible to throw them by doing a throwing motion with the nunchuck, me wanting to get everything out of the game I quickly enabled this, and subsequently blew myself up 10-20 times before disabling it again. It just doesn't work, I'm waving the nunchuck like a maniac, the grenade fuse counts down, and the 'nade blows up in my hand. Once in a while it does throw it, apparently whenever it's feeling like it because I'm doing the same motion over and over again. It's even harder when you have to pick up a grenade from the ground and quickly flick it back at the enemy. The next frustrating thing is preparing explosives to blow up whatever needs to be blown up. First you have to insert the fuse by thrusting the nunchuck forward, no problem, then you turn the nunchuck to screw the fuse into place, still no problem, but then you have to pull out the pin by pulling the nunchuck back, in nine out of 10 situations you have to pull atleast five times until anything happens, also, in most situations bullets are flying around your ears because your retarded teammates can't hit anything, which means you'll be dead before the pin is pulled. Other than that the gestures seem to work fine so far, when driving you need to hold the controllers as a wheel, which is pretty funny.
Lastly I'll just explain the latest mission I played, because it made me turn of the console and write this. You're supposed to plant some explosives around a factory, fine, I plant the bombs, die a couple of times because I can't pull the pin, finally make it and now I have to defend the factory from the German reinforcements, I start shooting enemies, sometimes it seems like you can't hit soldiers from some angles, may just be my lack of skills though. Then a tank rolls in, surprise surprise, I need to pick up a Panzershreck and blow it up, but the Panzershreck is no where to be found. I'm looking at a nice big crate but it's closed, i shoot at it, punch it, nothing happens. I run around a bit, looking for the rocket launcher while my teammates are frantically screaming at me because they're too stupid to pick up the fucking rocket launcher themselves, and suddenly the crate is open, but now I can't pick the weapon up, I have to crouch down and very slowly aim at different spots on the weapon while trying to time pressing the minus-button when the "Press the minus-button" message suddenly appears for a second and then disappears again. I finally pick it up, shoot the tank and then have to protect a soldier who's supposed to plant some more bombs or something. Now this would've been a piece of cake if the god damn controls wouldn't suddenly have gone insane. It's like the worst lag you've ever experience, impossible to control anything and when you're able to shoot the rifle keeps shooting for a couple of seconds. And this is not the first time this have happened, I'm not saying this couldn't be the controller's fault but so far I've tried to Wii Remotes, both with plenty of power, and it's still happening. While aiming into the sky and running towards a squad of German soldiers I die and have to do everything all over again.
I'm probably still going to complete it though, because apart from the mentioned annoyances it's pretty entertaining.
The Jackal, how to ruin a movie
Jan 6th
This action flick was a lot worse than I remembered, the only remarkable performance is by Bruce Willis playing The Jackal, unfortunately his character goes from genious assassin to arrogant schmuck pretty fast in the end. Let's start with Richard Gere, he plays the protagonist, Declan Mulqueen, an Irish ex-IRA sniper who has been sentenced to 25 years in jail or something like that. First of all, he has got the worst Irish accent I have ever heard, it more or less ruins the movie, secondly I hate movies in which inmates are not only helping whatever amateur investagion-teams that need help, but are also more or less leading the entire investigation. The only reason he is helping them is because he knows what The Jackal looks like, so why the hell do they let him decide what strategies to use, where to attack, etc. Then they try to make him seem like a good guy by letting him say stuff like "Oy nevah used bumbs!" in an angry way.
Back to Willis, I'm just gonna skip to the end, because the character is pretty cool until the last 20 minutes, I was actually rooting for him, the scene where he shoots the arm off Jack Black is priceless. So, he's got his Gatling-gun in his Van, he's found a nice spot, got his Gatling-gun controlling laptop ready and is more or less seconds away from being able to blow the first lady, his target, to smitherens. What I don't understand is why it takes him atleast 20 fucking minutes to open the laptop, aim the gun and press the god damn firing button. As you may guess Declan saves the day by shooting the Gatling-gun's scope (with a sniper-rifle, don't ask me why the marksman from the SWAT team wasn't allowed to fire, and don't even get me started on the fact that they just freely gave a convicted IRA-terrorist a rifle) a few seconds before The Jackal opens fire.
What follows is a chasescene in the Metro, Willis being all cool and mental, Gere being annoying. Finally Willis takes a girl hostage, makes Gere drop his gun, is about to shoot him, and boom, Willis is shot in the neck by some chick who was Gere's girlfriend back in Ireland or something. "How the hell did she know exactly what station they were at?" you may ask, well I have no fucking clue, she was supposed to be hiding somewhere so it doesn't really make sense. This movie could easily have been a lot better, a few stupid choices just ruined it.
To summon it all up, 101 on how to ruin a movie:
Let an American play an Irish guy.
Lower the IQ of the villain steadily through the movie, so it'll hit ~20 in the end. That way the lead character'll win no matter how dumb he is. (as seen in most b-class movies, remember the villain kicking ass and more or less being indestructable until he meets the protagonist in the end?)
End the movie with the most improbable thing you can imagine.
Twilight Princess annoyances
Jan 4th
I completed Twilight Princess today, very nice game, took me about 35 hours, with some sub-storylines completed, which was a bit surprising because I've read that the main storyline itself would contain atleast 50 hours of gameplay. Anyway, the more perfect a game is the easier it is to point out the few annoying things in it, and that's what I'm gonna do now.
"EYE GOTZ 5 RUPIZ!" I don't need a message almost every time I pick up rupee that isn't green. Also you can't even skip the text, which means there's a small waiting time before you can close it. Imagine picking up more than five different rupees in a row and you'll get the idea. Luckily these messages only appear when it's the first time you collect these rupees a new place.
You're too rich! If you open a chest with a rupee inside, and the value of that rupee exceeds the amount you have left in your wallet, the rupee (and the chest) will remain untouched. "Why is this annoying?" you may think, well I'll tell you why, when you run around some gigantic dungeon looking for important chests it is pretty damn irritating that you have to remember which chests that contain huge rupees and which ones you haven't opened.
That's it? The bosses are ridiculously easy, I don't think I've died at any of the bosses, didn't die at the final one anyway, and that's supposed to be the hardest one. Therefore the rush you normally get when you finally kill a boss after a lot of tries is non-existing.
It's over when it's over. In a game where you have as much freedom as Twilight Princess it would be nice to be able to save the game when you have completed the main storyline and then continue playing the sub-missions, unfortunately you can't.
All I remember at the moment, if you remember more of them write a comment. ;)
Recent Comments