Okay. So. I was sorely disappointed with Spider-Man 3, the first Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Fantastic Four: the one with that Silver Guy, Iron Man 2 and all of the movies featuring the X-Men. I was ‘meh’ about Spider-man 1 and 2, Daredevil, the second Hulk and Blade (technically Marvel). Frankly, Ghost Rider doesn’t even exist in my mind. So that leaves… the first Iron Man, I quite liked, and now the Avengers.

It’s shocking, I know.

Spoiler Warning!

And don’t read it as if I hate the super hero genre, because it’s exactly the opposite: I love superheroes so much that when they come out with such mediocre movies I become rather upset with the injustice.

What they did right: first off, pacing. It’s actually remarkably similar to how Iron Man was shot, which is awesome. There were a few shaky bits where someone or other was taking the reigns on the scenes and they started to feel like the other movies, most notably the two recent ones Capt. America and Thor, but for the most part it was spot on. Well done for that.

I liked the direction the Hulk is going in, actually. We saw it a little bit in the second of his movies and I’m glad they’re continuing to take it there. I liked his interactions with the other heroes, demonstrating both a loyalty and his wild-card side, and I liked his uh… “interaction” with Loki near the end. After all, he’s the mother-flippin Hulk. That’s his job. The punch at the end was perfect and was a nice point of levity, which actually, was a well done thing overall; the humour bits punctuated things exactly as they should.

Thor is still silly, and the invading army / Loki himself fell under that category again: it’s like those bad Saturday morning Power Ranger shows. The costumes are just so plastic and foam and outrageous and the immersion is broken because you can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous the man you’re supposed to be fearing is. Like, Darth Vader scared me a child – it’s silly now, of course, but that’s a villain. He’s evil by himself, whereas Loki feels like a guy pretending to be evil. A guy who had only seen those terrible Power Ranger shows and that’s how he thought villains should be. There’s no genuine fear there.

The giant flying turtle thing was cool, if only because it reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus, and especially so when they were fighting on the back of it, driving that metal piece into it’s back. Man I love that game… anyway.

Hawkeye was cool, which is a relief because he was actually pretty silly in the comics. I can’t decide if he should get his own backstory movie. He doesn’t actually have any super powers (although, neither does Batman…) and he works as a flat character that’s just explained as having a mercenary history and a spot in S.H.I.E.L.D’s troops. That’s sometimes all you need. I do think it’s silly, as a personal aside, that any hero would run into battle with like, 20 arrows. I mean, then what? He runs out in the movie but even then, it took a long time. You’d get through 20 pretty fast…

Tony Stark is his usual, which is awesome. The Potts romance is sealed and things seem pretty routine. His getting in and out of the suit has been perfected (and in the coolest way possible) and it seems like they’ve settled down a bit. He isn’t so reckless, which is cool to see; we get to watch him mature from the first movie. Grow with him. He’s still witty and has those perfect quips, but I think they strike a good balance in attitude.

Captain is starting to turn into a jerk, honestly. In his origins film he was played off as naive and virtuous and that was cool – that was Cap as we know him – and now he’s standing on the edge of arrogance and seems to have control issues when confronted with Tony who wasn’t really doing anything unreasonable. Cap seems like that straight-laced dweeb who tattles on everyone, which is a quick way to being the kid no one likes. Except, with muscles, so they have to keep him around.

That’s another thing I don’t get. Why don’t they make everyone Iron Man suits. I mean, Tony has what, seven of them now? We’ve seen in the second movie that other people can wear them. I want a movie with Hulk in a flying suit. And why don’t they make them out of the stuff Cap’s shield is made of? “Well, the vibranium used…” you start in your know-it-all voice, but no. If that’s really all the material they had in the world with such fantastic properties they wouldn’t give it to some untested soldier dude in a form so easily stolen or lost.

I was upset at first with Nick Fury being black, since in the comics he was actually more similar to J. Jonah Jameson (who was the best character in all the Spider-Man movies) but I have to hand it to Sammy Jackson’s performance. No one can pull off that kind of nonchalant badassery quite like he can. So, it’s growing on me. It works, and I can see the merit to their decision.

The graphics are good. This is such a moot point these days. We’re already past the point where things are reasonably real looking, so it’s not like any major breakthroughs have abounded. The helicarrier is basically just a MKII version of those found in Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow, which I am entirely fine with.

What else is there?

TL;DR I went in with low expectations given the recent past and was pleasantly surprised. I’d recommend it to friends, yeah.

Photo via

It was on Steam sale so I had to pick it up. I paid the extra dollar and a half for the soundtrack, which turns out to be one of my favorite parts.

There’s a divide in this review, and I wish it weren’t true, but I have to throw it out there: I bitterly hate this game. I absolutely love this game.

So, Dustforce is in the same impossibruuu rage quit style as Super Meat Boy and N+ before it and like those games, I am utterly terrible at it. I just, I can’t. I get frustrated by my own lack of ability to do what I want and eventually have to stop because I’m physically seething. It’s not pretty.

And then, when I’m listening to the soundtrack in my car and it’s so perfect and peaceful it lures me back in; it makes it seem like the game is easy and that if I went back right I would be better at it or something. It’s a trap. That’s how it gets to you.

Then you can see why I’m so torn. I love everything about this – the style is great, the gameplay is (when you can do it) silky smooth and there are those moments where you feel truly awesome chaining backflips and wall jumps and attacks together in perfect harmony. The soundtrack, as I’ve mentioned, is spot on with reminiscing chiptune and environment ambiance. The ‘plot’ is simple: you’re a superpowered janitor and things are dirty. Go to it. That’s entirely sufficient. The levels are unlockable as your progress and you slowly build up the keys even if you’re rubbish at it like me, so you can keep going despite mediocre scores across the board. All four characters are playable from the start and are essentially the same save for appearance.

Here’s one of the world records:

Which is just sickening. They make it look so easy.

That is a cool feature though, at the end of each level there’s a scoreboard comparing the times and scores of everyone who’s ever played that level. Crushingly, I’m always near the bottom. On one level I am literally second last. In the world. Ouch.

No, but it’s a great game and I can’t recommend it enough to the types of people who enjoyed the masochism that was Super Meat Boy. Just because I’m terrible doesn’t mean it’s a terrible game by any means.

I was watching Thor last night while drawing and realized that it’s actually one of the worst movies ever made. So I drew what I assume to be much better: Aliens in the Tron universe.

There should be some reasons for my above statements, as an objective critic it’s unfair to throw out such slander without backing it up but overall it boils down to the root problem with all the recent Marvel movies:

It’s a recipe structure which I can’t really fault them for immediately, but we see it again and again. Iron Man and Thor are, for all intents and purposes, the same movie – the difference being that Tony Stark is likable and we actually start to enjoy his smarm after a while. Thor captured the female vote for his shirtless scenes, but is a flat character otherwise; he’s just relentless in his running around trying to do whatever he wants. Tony learns discipline and humility (at least, relatively speaking) when his actions start to hurt the people around him. They both had lame boss fights. It seems to be something that never translated over well from comics (and I say this to the Marvel movies as a whole) – there is no engagement. Like, you could stop the movie the moment just after the giant beast erupts from it’s hiding place and be entirely content already with the conclusion. You know what’s going to happen. I’m not saying the comics weren’t predictable, but they were clever enough to make it seem like the hero had a chance of danger. It’s not really the script itself, but the execution. I liked in the first Spider-Man the choice presented to save MJ (the love object) or the tramway (the pile of innocent civilians) and we see this stressful choice again in The Dark Knight. It stretches the hero too thin, the tension comes from the choice itself because it directly relates to the hero and what he’s learned throughout the movie but also how each choice is a small action towards a bigger outcome. Batman touches on this much better than Marvel has: reputation. Bruce Wayne’s and Batman’s reputation flux and flow throughout his actions and his emotions. Thor and friends are just people wearing ridiculous plastic cosplay armor and no one seems to care or notice. There’s no immersion into the universe.

Thor felt like, and this something that came to mind a few times throughout the movie, a fan film. Like some people found these costumes somewhere and decided to make their own. The townsfolk don’t want to interact with them because they look weird and they notice one of them is holding a camera. It’s like Super 8, except the whole movie is the kid’s version.

So anyway. That’s why I drew an Alien on a lightcycle.

There’s a lot going on here so I’ll try to break it down best I can.

The video itself is a mess. The establishing shots are too long since they aren’t building suspense. The Disney-esque particle ribbons seem sort of 90′s and busy. The Tron city at the end should have been a modern skyline to show the real world implication (to contrast and offset the entire fantasy of the previous) as if taking the concept and driving it into the real world. That’s where you connect with the real people who want to buy the car. I did like the over simplified and friendly explanation of the hydrogen fuel cell process. I think education on all these technologies need a good explanation to the general public to gain acceptance and dispel untrue stigmas.

The front of the car is brilliant. I love the smug smile of that front curve, like a resolute but happy bulldog’s jowls. It’s a guardian, strong and proud. I like that they’ve purposefully removed exhaust pipes in the back because even if there’s just water coming out it really is an ugly relic of the past and associates with pollution itself. That’s smart psychology in design. The overall form factor is awkward at best. The wheel base is too short for the visual weight of the arch and creates an uneasy balance to the whole thing. This is the same reason I don’t like Mitsubishi’s latest Sportback Lancer, it’s just distributed poorly.

I’ve commented on the Prius before and I think this is a good evolution – taking what used to be an ugly status symbol for those eco pretentious to flaunt and moving it into the decent looking mainstream. ‘You don’t have to settle for ugly in order to help the planet’, it says. Is it sporty and gorgeous? Well… no. But it’s better than before.

With that said, and like all car technology you’re just moving the problem around. How do we get the hydrogen? Well, you need energy from somewhere to break it apart from water. This might be from wind or solar, which would make it clean (but slow) or from burning fossil fuels (sound familiar?). To be fair, it is natural gas, which isn’t as bad as gasoline, and bigger centers can be made more efficient than a mass of individual smaller engines. Hydrogen is harder to deal with since it requires high pressure tanks in order to get any sort of distance from them – tanks which are prone to issues with extreme heat and any cold under freezing and are harder to interface with at the pump (gasoline just flows, adding pressure becomes a challenge). Crashing becomes a much bigger concern but while we can make very robust tanks to minimize that, it adds weight and size. I am curious if they’re burning it with an internal combustion engine or converting it for electric use; they never mentioned.

The chairs I’m torn on. With that colour scheme they look like people wearing vests. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or if I’m just anthropomorphizing things but I think I’d be alarmed sitting on a “person”, even subconsciously. On the other hand, it creates a very friendly, familiar appearance to things. We relate to human shapes, they make us comfortable. And, perhaps that’s the plan.

I am excited though. I think even if it’s not a perfect solution it at least shows that companies are willing to explore other areas and try new things. I appreciate that. It’s these sorts of projects that wean people off of internal combustion and get used to alternatives and as a societal shift that can have great importance with the adoption of new technology.

I’ve been rocking the Gerber Remix since Christmas and I think it’s time to do a proper review.

I like it. If you read nothing else it’s that it’s a decent knife. It’s quite affordable and well built. Mine doesn’t have the serrations on the inside of the blade (like the new generation has) and I think I’d prefer that because things like tape become easier to cut. Is it a big deal? Not really.

It’s big. Both thick and tall. Compared to the thin stoßmensur that is the Baladeo I was also looking at it’s a colossus. With that said, it has the perfect heft in your hand. I have long fingers so for me it’s easier to grip, even without the finger hole. It’s not spring assist and the whole spinning mechanism is a little stiff, which gives it a sort of weighty feel in it’s reluctance to rotate. You can open it with one hand, though, which brings me to the next and biggest point:

It’s upside down.

You see, the belt clip is on the left side which means that when it’s in your front pocket (with the clip to the front) the blade is on the right. If you’re right handed such as I am that means taking it out puts your index finger in the hole and your thumb ready to open… the handle side. So the clip is backwards. But, I know why they’ve done this – if you wear it on your belt (clip in) then the blade opens forward where your right hand thumb is, which is perfect – but since I’m not a hunter it would be weird to wear it exposed like that. The next problem is that even if you do wear it on your belt, when you open it with your thumb your finger naturally falls into the hole. Not a big deal. But when the blade is opened it leaves the knife upside down in your hand (blade edge upwards) forcing you to either cut up or flip it around. It’s just sort of a bizarre problem that arises with having the finger hole there. In solid knives you hold the handle and can open the blade with your thumb naturally blade edge down because there isn’t anything else your fingers can do.

So, the finger hole is a cool design aesthetically – I do really like it – but makes for some awkward functionality. It makes for a better grip but contrary to another review I’d read before I got it there would be serious issues in a knife fight; it makes a perfect fulcrum to trap and break your finger (much like a pistol’s trigger guard tends to be). Obviously I never condone pulling knives in fights and it would be a monumentally bad idea to escalate the violence (and legal ramifications) but hypothetically, this would not be a good knife for that. It might be for zombies, however, since they wouldn’t be smart enough to counter, but in all reality you’ll be using it to cut cardboard and things and the hole is more annoying than anything there. The problem (although, to be fair, I have this issue with most knives) is when you’re cutting precise things you tend to put your index finger on the top of the blade itself. On solid handles this is fine since your fingers wrap at a different angle to accommodate and it’s all good but here there’s this big volume to work around. I’ve taken to (and I just noticed, actually) my thumb and middle finger tips touching in the middle of the hole like a sign language 8 with the bottom two fingers wrapped normally.

I like it. I really do. It’s awkward, yes, and some of the design doesn’t suit my particular usage, but it’s a well made thing and has served me well over the months. Would I buy another one? I’m not sure. I would probably try something else, honestly. Would I recommend this one to other people? Yeah. If they were okay with the above pitfalls, for sure.

I love this style. I’m not sure if it’s a new thing or if it’s just gone vogue recently but it’s a perfect mix between the old shiny anime robots and the stealthy military types.

It pops in and out of the augmentation’s style in the newest Deus Ex:

Speaking of which, played the Missing Link DLC since it was dirt cheap on Steam sale recently. Quite liked it. I once again promised myself I’d do a stealthy non-lethal playthrough and once again filled my inventory (+2 expansions) with guns and left no man standing, so, that’s terrible of me. I’m such a hoarder. I feel the need to pick up everything I find. The final boss battle was underwhelming given the struggle that was the main game’s three major baddies, but I really don’t mind. The bosses shouldn’t have been there in the first place, so perhaps this is just learning from that mistake. The story is good and comes so close to having an opinion on human trafficking but – like the main game re: the augs – backs down and eludes actual comment. There are some big choices to be made and consequences for your actions which adds to the gravity of the game / +1 to immersion. The background lore fits surprisingly well given it’s slot into a game that already exists and holds a nice weight despite the whole ‘ending must make everything go back to normal’ to lead back into HR’s last chapter. It’s neat that you start off with a blank slate of augs and a hefty number of Praxis kits to reassign as you please. None of these make any difference to the main game’s augments, of course, so it’s cool to experiment with the ones you didn’t pick up during the normal playthrough.

Overall? It was five dollars for about four hours of gameplay. That’s pretty expensive for my usual entertainment/dollar ratio (Just Cause 2 was also $5 and I’m 27 hours in, 28% done the game) but I’m sure the less miserly of you out there wouldn’t mind spending such. It’s still a better deal that buying a grande latte.

TOCA ME via

It’s nothing new, of course. I’m sure most of you readers have been following this since last June when Microsoft decided they should blog about things in an effort to seem more open.

And I could write entire essays about the various things, from the recent logo debate to the timing of the recent beta release, but I really want to prod about the superficiality of the whole thing.

I don’t like it.

They wanted to make things youthful and fun and I feel like it’s tripped over itself on it’s way there. The tiles idea, from a cross-device cross-media platform view is brilliant. The OS is fundamentally similar between the desktop and phone versions because the tile underpinnings are so fluid and scalable. I like that problem solving. There are other, even better ways for the power user, but I think it’s a good thing what they’ve done trying out this format. I’m also glad that they seem to be running with this. I watched the first look demo from last summer and wondered how much of this would be taken out for the final production, much like concept cars get boring-ized before actually available. Okay, so these are nice things.

But the aesthetics. The raw, easy to change bits like tile colour. Where did they come from? I wanted to compare it to a local kids amusement place thing that we had growing up but it seems like they never had a web presence. Shame. It was garish. I remember thinking that even as a kid when we went there.

I was really excited to see screenshots like these:

Where there is unity and boldness and youth and vibrancy and that useful starkness that works so well for phones. Icons that has to be powerful to minimize language usage. But then they took that and stirred everything all together and made this soup of mismatched colour and style and I feel like the desktop OS end result is worse off for it. It’s just muddled.

The good news is that it should be very customizable (at least, we’ll find a way to force it, if not native) and the changes needed to streamline it aren’t that big of a deal. Icons. That’s easy, given everything else that went into the system.

I hate to say it, but the Vista Ultimate style would actually work perfect here. A nice unobtrusive background with those famous blues and greens popping as tiles? That’d be fun and elegant, bold and restrained. It’d be fresh and young without being childish.

Did I just write all of that to say that they should think about changing a few colours? So it seems. Twitter’s taught brevity might be a valuable thing to learn after all.

TL;DR Just wait and change the tile colours in the options because the default ones are rubbish.

The everpresent MG has some reasonable words regarding this quote by Samsung’s Chris Moseley:

TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

[1]

but an even more immediate example comes to mind: have you watched a streaming Netflix movie recently? My internet connection is no slouch and it looks terrible. But, I watch it because of the content and because it’s still easier / cheaper / faster / more convenient than driving to the store and buying the Bluray. Same with Youtube, granted in a different capacity. But we put up with some pretty abhorrent quality given the ability that’s already there (compressed 640×480 videos stretched to a 1920×1280 screen? Really? Because we can’t wait for buffering…)

So picture quality: Pfft. Convenience. Ease. Now.

And if Samsung doesn’t pick up on that quick they’ll go the same way Kodak did recently – trampled by their own failure to move.

We walk out of the theater into the crisp night and laugh, “That movie was ridiculous” and proceed to point out plot flaws and the bizarre events that occurred. But there’s a distinction, I’ve realized, between realism and reasonableness.

We use the word realistic to mean both and it’s not quite accurate: suspension of disbelief is actually really easy and we don’t mind much at all that there’s aliens or zombies or people with super powers roaming about. That’s fine, it’s a movie made to be fictional and larger than life; we don’t dislike that. The parts that we really mean when we say ‘unrealistic’ is that the characters didn’t do the reasonable thing given their situation.

Transformers was decent (certainly better than it’s sequels) and while we’re entirely happy to suspend disbelief for giant alien robots than choose to take the forms of American earth cars we get really upset (if subconscious) in the part where the awesome giant robot gives the AllSpark cube to the relatively weak and flimsy human to run through the battlezone with. These sorts of plot decisions are made to sensationalize the movie but it actually resonates the opposite with us as viewers because it isn’t a reasonable action for characters in that situation.

So it’s not about how real the situation could be, it’s how reasonable the characters act within it.

We have a lot of classics in the action movie category like Terminator, Predator, Rambo and Robocop that are actually very reasonable movies because of the perhaps flat acting and very static characterizations. Are they ridiculous? Yeah, sure. But the characters (namely those played by Ahnold) behave in a predictable manner. He’s a robot sent back in time to protect understandably afraid and confused humans. This is a dynamic that feels right when played out. It isn’t realistic (time travel, robot singularity etc. etc.) but the interactions between the flat, unfeeling robot and the weak and dazed humans makes sense if we as the audience were put in the place of those actors. Compare this back to Transformers where if the robot gave us the AllSpark we’d look at him like he’s crazy: “Uh… why? You’ve got guns for arms and a 10 meter stride. You take it.”

The recent rash of Marvel movies are played out in the same way: Wolverine is actually a much better character than Magneto was in First Class – one knows what he wants and does it. It’s reasonable. It’s slightly unfair to compare static and dynamic characters like that, but the way Magneto acts when confronted with things doesn’t really make sense and we lose that connection to him since we silently deplore his actions. It’s like those horror movies where the girl is in the house and we know the killer is upstairs and instead of getting the heck away she decides to explore in the dark alone and weaponless and we sit there thinking “NO! What are you doing?! Don’t go up there. Go to the police! Get away!” This is done intentionally, of course, for that tension, but it shouldn’t be happening with the character’s we’re supposed to identify with.

Even insanity can be reasonable. We look at movies like Memento and characters like Dark Knight’s Joker or Inception’s Cobb (notice: all Nolan films) and we can actually develop a fairly deep bond with characters who although don’t represent us do the actions we would do if put in that situation. Now, are we insane? No. And it’s not really fair to put ourselves in Joker’s shoes since he is actually crazy, but his actions are reasonable given that characterization. In Memento he’s just trying to figure things out like any of us would. Inception is interesting because every character except for Cobb is static and serving him, so in a way each of them is a splinter of his personality (after all, it is his dream) and combines to create one unit who we can identify with. The actions of the insane might be unstable and unpredictable but still remain reasonable to us.

So, in the blue corner we have things like Mad Men or Memento – entirely earthly, normal, real environment with people acting reasonably within them. The yellow might be the Terminators and Predators or Shaun of the Dead type where there is some element of fiction to the world but the overall reactions to things makes sense to us. Green: any number of dramas and soaps or the serial killer movie (where the killer is just a normal – if deranged – human) where the characters do things that don’t make any sense given their environment and situation. I might even put Drive on the line between blue and green; it was realistic and worked but some of his actions made no sense to me. Red could be most things that are in theaters these days: The G.I Joes and Transformer 3s. The Fast and the Furious series started in the yellow and has moved down over time. These are the movies where even if we can suspend disbelief for the unrealistic aspects the people who inhabit the world don’t seem to follow any logic for their actions and so alienate us as an audience.

I’m entirely happy watching the yellow category – often those are the best – taking some fantastic fictional realm and providing a good adventure within them. It’s not that I’m a stickler for “Oh, well that would never work in real life” because those things are the cool part. Neo can fight an entire mob of Smith agents? Sure, he’s the one. His reasons for fighting them make enough sense that we don’t even mind the sheer ridiculousness of the fight scene itself. That’s the entertainment.

TL;DR  It’s not about realism, it’s about having a character that does what makes sense instead what would raise the stakes purely for the sake of arbitrary sensationalism.

This game was part of the Humble Indie Bundle a friend gave me for Christmas and I hadn’t actually played it until the other day. I’m actually really glad I discovered it because it’s the perfect break game – you can play for 5 or ten minutes at a time and then resume working.

It’s a danmaku shmup which is to say skin-of-your-teeth sheer insane bullet hell type. I’m terrible at these. Most of the gameplay is me alternating between giddy “Oh my goodness how on earth am I still alive” teeth gritting and heart panic that my usual cardio workout would be jealous of. In other words: fantastic.

The soundtrack is awesome, the plot is ridiculous and entirely fitting. The pixel-perfect sprite work reminds me of the old Yukon Trail games we used to play on the elementary school computers. It all comes together into this little ball of excellence that spites the polish of any big name game.

Then there’s these bonus levels:

That look so easy when other people play them and are entirely impossible when I try it. I’m not sure how many times I’ve played that particular bomb one, but I remember the first time distinctly: “Oh, 15 seconds, that can’t be that hard. The first half is entirely calm, so it’s really only 8 or 9 seconds that you have to dodge and survive… OH MY GOODNESS NO” *ship explodes immediately*

And from there a Super Meat Boy-like masochist addiction was born.

All in all, it’s awesome. Buy it. Not just to support the indie devs, but because it’s a game that honestly holds it’s own. It’s the perfect coffee break length and despite being digestible in small chunks will provide hours of quality heart-palpitating fun.