Epic Default Productions

A little late, but better than never. Come check out the movies, video games, and general fun in Rant Time With Anthony.

1.    Most Sterile, Clean Room Looking Zombie Game: Left 4 Dead

I realize I’m taking the “path less traveled” on this one, but I have to say that I felt more like I was performing autopsies on multiple twitching corpses in a very dark and surprisingly nihilistic morgue than slaughtering through hordes of the undead in a merciless, albeit self-preservation absorbed, killing spree with zero consequences.

I just didn’t feel the magic.

Now this isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the game, because that would only be half true.

Or maybe less then half true.

The game certainly provides plenty of circumstances where the gamer will utter the following phrases with great justification: “Holy fucking shit! They’re coming from everywhere!”, “Die! Die! Die you fuckers! Just die already!”, “You fucking idiot! Why did you just set off that alarm, you fucking idiot!”, and of course “We’re only how far into this stage?! Yeah, we’re fucking dead. Game over man. Game over.”

While this is all well and good and fun, the game did a better job of ruining the mood than telling your lover, mid-stroke, that you might have the clap while not wearing a condom, by explicitly making the movement and general ambiance of the game akin to hordes of 1980’s white teen males attempting to do the robot while trapped in a very dark Pentium processor factory with gun-wielding members of “Survivor” that are each riding on a minimum of 5 lines of coke at any point in time. By the way, did I mention that the controls in this game left something to be desired?

Do I hate this game? No

Will I play this game some more? Most definitely. Particularly in the multiplayer, Zombies Vs Humans mode.

Is this the most badass zombie game ever? I’ll place this something more on the order of a Dark City. The ideas behind it are great but they need a hell of a lot more work before you can start calling it amazing.

2.    Best Example Of A Game Suddenly Spawning A Storyline: Gears of War 2

In contrast, I realize I’m really jumping on the bandwagon with this one, but I’ve never been afraid to do that. I might be a hipster, damn it, but I’m not an asshole. Or at least not an asshole in that respect.

Anyway, this game was fun because it kept the same gameplay, control scheme, and general gritty feel that would make Chuck Norris flinch. Only a little bit, but still.

What made this game awesome was the fact that when they brainstormed this game, someone actually had the juevos (which he must have a frickin’ wheel-barrel for) to suggest that they introduce some back-story and storyline to this game to add more intrigue and capture the audience. I want to meet this guy and give him a frackin’ high-five with a resounding “Hell Yes!” Hell, I might even be caught up in the moment enough to throw a chest bump in there.

The reason being that this gave the game substance. I wasn’t just tearing through (almost literally) hordes of (or are they?) aliens from stage to stage for general fun. I was doing all that to find out if there’s a chance to rescue Dom’s wife. I was doing that to find out where the hell these “locusts” really came from. I was doing that to find out that our main character Marcus Fenix has the crazily-secretive, unknowingly amazing and possibly ultimate badass father that so many nerds yearn for.*

But in the end, who can truly resist action and storyline?

Not to mention humorous achievements.

* Every single nerd thought it would be badass to have Darth Vader as their father after Empire. Every one. Don’t even try to deny it.

3.    Biggest “I Told You So, Mother Fuckers!”: Robert Downey Jr./Heath Ledger

I totally called both of those, even against the odds and the doubts. I was the Texas street team for both Downey Jr. and Ledger in Iron Man and Dark Knight respectively. I totally should have been paid for publicity. Or at least given the Joker’s badass suit. That would be suitable payment.

The tougher sell, I’ll admit, was Robert Downey Jr., but Mr. “Knight’s Tale” was a bit of a tough one as well. I will say that “Brokeback Mountain” and having died just a few months before release certainly did stir things up, but even I didn’t expect how amazing a job he would do with The Joker. Holy crap, he reinvented the character in the minds of millions of nerds, thus completely shattering Nicholson’s 20-year-old, nut-sack-throttling stranglehold on the character in a matter of 2 hours. If Ledger doesn’t posthumously win an Oscar for that role, I call on Peter Jackson to melt one of his Oscars to be molded into a dildo to be used to dick-slap every member of the Oscar voting committee for such treachery and ill-conceived blindness towards such beautiful acting. If he decides to not take such justified action, I call on nerds everywhere to assassinate every one of those fuckers.**

As many can attest, I was tremendously excited about the fact that Downey was going to play Tony Stark in the Iron Man movie. I thought he was definitely crass and assholish enough, with acting skills to spare for the part. Others were very skeptical, and my references to “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang” fell on deaf ears. Even up to opening day, I was still bombarded by people going on and on that they were skeptical about Downey as Stark.

But at the same time, they would still definitely see the movie. I mean, they’re nerds and this is a comic book movie. For many a nerd to not see a comic book movie, particularly one as classic as Iron Man, would be on the order of trying to fight with a retarded kid about mathematics. You may very well be in the right in some cases but it will not take away the frustration of doing so and the action is still going to make you feel like a jackass after the fact. [ed: What?]

When every one of the those guys left the movie theater, however, they all had grins that more closely resembled how their faces looked after losing their virginity than I’d like to elaborate on at the moment. Suffice it to say that they loved the movie.

And yes, I was the jackass that totally said, “I told you he would be good,” as soon as I saw them.

**On a side note: it certainly is scary to think that if every nerd were to combine powers, this could be done in very little time, with no one getting caught, and varying degree of public knowledge of the events depending on user discretion.

4.    Best Cut / Paste / Edit-For-The-Better Example Of What E3 Was In It’s Heyday: PAX 2008

Though I’m usually one with morals, I have no qualms sucking this dick with a smile and justifying the reason for doing so in an unabashed tell-all with no sarcasm or remorse.

Figuratively, I swear.

I think with all the fantastic reviews and alluring stories that so many have had of this event, one could easily consider this to be an over-hyped topic. I have come to reassure you that, in fact, that would be impossible.

If you are a nerd that wants to find a social oasis amongst hordes of other nerds in a Candyland of gaming, then you just have to attend this three-day shindig to really see what all the fuss is about. Truly, the reviews at this point seem more like strategy guides or walkthroughs. They tell you more about what you can do then whether or not you should like it because, hell, if you are someone that can accept and hopefully enjoy the fact that you are a nerd then you’ll fucking eat this shit up.

All I’ll really say is this: Buy tickets, Travel, Attend, Enjoy, Revel, Repeat annually.

5.    Best Reason To Break Plastic Wheels In Half: Mario Kart Wii

Yeah, that’s pretty much a given on this one. Maybe I just had bad placement on my sensor. Maybe the system was just BROKEN. I’m tempted to go with the latter, but the real thing is this: this is a Mario Kart game, and it’s fun and great and a good game to play with other people. If that were not the case, I would be simultaneously urinating and pouring hydrochloric acid on the disc. Instead, I went from super-duper-hella excited about playing with the wheel to super-duper-hella pissed the fuck off about it in a matter of ten minutes. All a simple man was hoping for, during a game that explodes with a megaton of force full of childhood memories, is stability and simplicity to the controls. It shouldn’t be that hard. But oh no, it has to be the fucking hardest thing in the god damn world. There’s a reason I use the classic controller on this game. It’s the only way I can play the damn game without having to destroy something.

Preferably not my 52” HDTV.

6.    Most Horrifically Disappointing Game Created By Will Wright: Spore

When so many of my friends (you know who I’m talking about) started filling up their pants with precum over this game, I decided it might be interesting to give it the benefit of the doubt. While I’ll admit that the initial previews of the game and gameplay walkthroughs with the designers made it seem really awesome, I can also remember sitting at PAX and watching the “final product”.

I had these amazing visions in my head of the game I saw months beforehand, and I was imagining that it might not be a good idea for me to get this game because I’d be spending 40+ hours trying to bring a civilization from a single-cell organism to a space traveling race, then spending another 40+ hours to do it again. Instead I was left looking at the screen and going… “eh”.

This final product seemed… well for a lack of a better term, kind of campy and stupid. The overwhelming emotion of being unimpressed left me staring at the screen in puzzlement. I suddenly realized I was coming face to face with the feeling that some women have complained about. Spore had ejaculated too quickly for me and I was left alone in the sheets wanting more.

Thankfully, I still have my long lasting and extremely stimulating RPGs to go to. Who says gamer polyamory is a bad thing?

7.    Best Reason To Get Hot Coffee: Grand Theft Auto 4

This was just a flat out fun game to play. Pretty much all GTA games are; this was no exception. You can take the simple route. You can take the slayer route. The pig killer route. The pacifist route. Okay, you can’t really take the pacifist route but you get what I’m saying.

With all the guns and explosions and mayhem and fun characters and dirty nookie and such, what’s not to like?

Oh, that’s right, the annoying calls to hang out constantly. Those are fucking ridiculous. I mean Jesus H. Christ, cut me some slack here. I have other stuff to do. Quit your bitching!

Regardless, the game was still a fucking blast. I mean how many games let you play 7 person online killfests with friends, in just a 40 yard radius of a pretty decent sized map, for 3 hours, before finally being laughed out and having to move on to another game? Not many, I’ll tell you that.

8.    Best Example Of A Movie Whose Filming Style Should Have Been Used For A Zombie Movie: Cloverfield

The filming style was what got me interested in seeing this movie. A movie shot from the first person point of view is quite the skull-fucking to the 4th wall, but in the end, I watched the movie and realized that the problem with this concept was that the movie used way too much CG and didn’t really know how to meld it well. The result was a multitude of creatures that stuck out more than Woody Allen at a Nazi rally.

Now, the benefit of this style is that surprise becomes a wonderful thing again. When you are limited in view, particularly to the first person P.O.V. of one of the characters in the movie, you’re pushed into the action around that person and left not always knowing what’s coming after you, and you don’t need fancy lighting and camera angles to do it. When you’re in the action, you don’t always see everything. There are certain elements like fear and survival that dictate what you see.

So what does this style really point to for a new, cinematic, genre-breaking format? The zombie film. This is perfect. It pushes the genre to a whole other level. It isolates a character or a small group of characters within a horrific event. It pushes the audience into the concept of being trapped by a seemingly insurmountable force. I mean imagine looking around you, being completely surrounded by zombies. Even if you have guns, or a group of people with you that have guns, it’s still a shit your pants moment.

So in the end, thanks Cloverfield. You might have failed at the try, but it’s the attempt that counts, right? Or at least it’s the attempt that gets the ball rolling.

Huzzah!

9.    Best Example Of A Movie Being Absolutely Ridiculous While Possibly Trying To Be Genuinely Good: Wanted

Many comic book lovers I know enjoyed “Wanted”. Hell, how could you not love a comic book about a guy that can kill anyone and a place where villains have beaten down every super hero and now rule the world? So when people talked about a movie version of Wanted, I could see it going either way; I try to stay hopeful on these things, though. I also was thinking positively when I heard that James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman were in the movie with Timur Bekmambetov directing.*** I could see this wonderful potential for it to be a fantastic movie. Then, commercials came. The trailers. The horrible trailers!

Damn Angelina Jolie and her doing mostly terrible movies since Hackers. Sweet, sweet Hackers. Mmmmmmm… Right, freeze ray.  After suffering through the horrors of the trailers, I pretty much signed off on this movie. That is until my trip to Moscow.

On the way to Moscow I was sitting in the plane at 3am, unable to fall asleep, and I wanted to find something to watch. After searching through the list of movies, and having already seen the movies I really wanted to watch, I ended up figuring, “Eh, what the hell?” I pushed the play button, shut off my brain, and took the next couple hours to laugh my ass off.

Holy crap, this movie was hilarious! And the best part was that it actually was trying. It wanted to be a badass movie but it was so horrendously over-the-top it ended up forcing me to muffle my laughter every few minutes in order to not wake up the other passengers snoring away.

In the end, though, isn’t that what counts? Yeah, sometimes we want a kick ass movie that moves us and makes us think about ourselves and the world we live in, and sometimes we just want a movie to make us laugh our asses off.

*** Night Watch, people! Night Watch!

10.    Best Reason To Not Have To Spend An Extra $460 On A PS3: Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360

When I first started playing games, one of my favorite genres to play was the RPG. A game where things were constantly developing. Where characters would grow and develop into more then just a Joe Schmoe. They are games that take a long time to play, but that’s okay. It’s like reading a book over just watching a movie. That extra effort and time put in comes out into a beautiful thing sometimes.

Now in no way am I saying that RPGs are the end-all-be-all of gaming, but more so taking a little time to place you in my spot and show you what I see. This is all in an attempt to point out why I have always considered keeping at least $460 aside to buy myself a PlayStation 3 and a copy of Final Fantasy XIII. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy games for years. I’ll admit there was a bit of a drop off in playing between IX and XI, but then things picked back up with XII, particularly with the new fighting system. Real-time fighting systems for the win.

So when I heard that Final Fantasy XIII was going to be on the 360, I broke out into hooting and hollering immediately. Halle-mother-fuckin-lujah! I don’t know how Microsoft did it, but I’m just going to be thankful and sitting on the edge of my seat in anticipation.

I just hope they can do it again for Kingdom Heart 3.

Key Blade Wars MOTHER FUCKER!

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