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what's Sackboy doing in a horror film?

I’m not a big horror movie fan. Though I like the history and story of quite a few series, I’m still not someone who watches that type of movie very often. Yesterday I made an exception and watched “Trick ‘r Treat” with a friend.

The movie was made in 2007(and was supposed to come out in October 2007 as well), but it was just recently released on DVD/Blu-Ray(October 6th 2009). It got quite a few screenings in-between. But it ended up being a direct-to-DVD release. And it was reviewed fairly positively as well. I watched the trailer just before watching the movie and it looked not too bad.

So is this something that will one day be considered a Halloween classic, or should it be forgotten as soon as possible?

Read on!

The Plot
The movie actually has 4 stories. Before those stories, it opens to a couple who is done trick or treating/partying, and coming back home. The wife closes the light in her jack o’ lantern, and, while cleaning up the decorations, she gets violently murdered.
The first story involves a school principal killing people randomly with poisoned candy. That’s just about what that one is.
The second story involve a 22 year old virgin girl (a college student) and her friends trying to pick up guys. This one has a really weird twist ending.
The third one involves kids going to a rock quarry, where a bunch of kids were murdered in a bus a long time back. They try to play a prank on a “retard” but the plan backfires.
The fourth has to do with Sam (the sackboy lookalike on the movie’s cover), who is attacking a man named Kreeg for “unknown” (but pretty obvious) reasons.

Each story is intertwined in some way, all of them happen at the exact same time and in the same area, and some characters from each story appear in other stories. Including the couple from the introduction. And all of them include Sam, the not so creepy sackboy clone, who is usually over-seeing every story, or just watching what is going on. It’s not exactly clear why he’s doing it and what his motives are, but he’s always there. He’s basically there to force people to continue the Halloween traditions, otherwise he kills them. Pretty brutal. Each story has a moment that can be seen in the other stories, or are linked to something that happened in another one.

The whole story isn’t told in chronological order, opting for… showing scenes in completely random order. They all take place on the same evening, probably in a range of about an hour or 2, might be less. Needless to say it gets a bit weird when the movie is constantly saying “Earlier that evening” or “Later that evening”, and seemingly at random too, though there is a pretty.

Each story isn’t too great. The first one is clearly just comedy, with a Principal killing kids and telling them about Halloween rituals. The second one includes a “vampire” bitting people to death, but who ends up in a deadly situation when he bites the virgin girl (played by the girl who plays Rogue in the X-men movies). The third story is just really stupid. A bunch of kids go to the rock quarry and talk about the bus incident there, where a bunch of kids ended up drowning in the river below, and the bus driver escaped never to be seen again. Then(after the flashback) the kids try to prank the “retard” girl they picked up on the way there and end up getting killed. Off-screen. By zombies. The fourth story is about the neighbor of the principal, who was attacked by “something” during the Principal’s story segment, and now you actually see what happened. He has a dark secret and disrespects every Halloween tradition, so Sam comes in to teach him a lesson. That’s about it.

Not much here I can say without spoiling too much.

My impressions
Well, since I can’t talk too much about the story without spoiling everything, here’s my impressions of the movie!

Well… It’s stupid. Really stupid. Each of the stories are intertwined, and they actually work pretty well together. And each has some pretty obvious references to each other. That element is pretty well done. But the problem here is that there’s tons of build up. Literally nothing happens in the first 40 minutes of the movie. And I’m being completely serious here. And in the end the payoff is completely stupid, pointless and predictable. There’s really nothing much to it. When the movie ends, all I can find to say is “wait… that’s it?” It ends abruptly (it ends with the beginning of the very first scene of the movie) and explains nothing really. It just… shoves random events in your face and expects you to accept them.

The characters are a mess. None of them are enjoyable in any way. The Principal is kinda funny and weird, but that’s it. The other characters come off as… cliche and stupid. They’re just really boring. There’s nothing wrong with the way the actors delivered them really, they did a good job, but the writing was really bad. The dialogue was boring and the overall plot makes little sense.

Special effects? Well, there’s the weirdest Were-wolf transformation scene I’ve ever seen. The transformation involves them ripping off their human skin, showing their were-wolf selves. I thought it was one of the weirdest parts of the movie, but it wasn’t badly done at least. Also, you see Sam’s actual face (under the “sackboy” mask) and it looks completely stupid. It’s all CG and pretty crappy. There’s one effect where he’s thrown to a wall, but it’s clear that someone just kicked a mannequin towards the wall, it just looks so fake and unnatural. And completely out of place too. There’s a part where a dismembered hand is “walking” around, and it’s pretty well done. Not sure if it’s CG or live-action, but it seems CG. The effects are a mix of “okay” and “horrible”.

Oh, and the sets looked really good too. They did a good job with the environments and houses and such. The overall atmosphere was pretty nice.

Overall
It really wasn’t good. Wikipedia says the movie had a 12 million dollar budget, but it doesn’t look like it was done using any more than a 100k$ budget. The effects are pretty cheap, the actors are nothing special and none of the performances stand out. The script is incredibly lame and the story sucks and doesn’t really have a point. I guess the whole budget went for the werewolf scene, and the sets…

You know what this is? It’s a high-budget B-movie. It looks like a B-movie, the story is very B-movie-like, the effects look just right out of a B-movie… except there’s really nothing good about it. Some B-movies have that campy feeling to them where you just see they had fun making it and showed lots of effort to make the movie despite the low budget. Some B-movies are just made of pure awesome. This one though just feels like a half-assed B-movie.

Sure, the art direction isn’t too bad, and the sets are really nice, but a movie needs a lot more than that to be good. And for a horror film, it definitely was not scary. There weren’t even any jump scares. It was kinda funny at parts where it shouldn’t have been. I mean, there’s a very Bugs Bunny-like moment during the movie’s “climax”(if you can call it that), which feels completely out of place. It’s a disappointment on almost all ends, and I have no idea why it’s being reviewed this positively. Especially considering how everyone who rented it at the same time as me at the video store we rented it asked for a refund because it was crappy. Reviewers are giving it 8/10 overall, but I feel it deserves no more than 5/10. It’s not even average. It feels like the whole movie is a big joke.

The Save Factor
1 penny.

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Leagues of Legends is nearing its release as a free to play, pay for some misc. stuff game.  But for now, the game is still in Beta.

I currently have 5 invitations to send out to anyone that’d like to give it a try.

If you want one, it’s easy. Leave a comment, making sure to fill up the email field (if you’re not registered), with a comment that will let us know that you are a human being.  If you’re already registered to the site, make sure your e-mail is in your profile. I will be emailing those invites until they run out.

Have a nice Thanksgiving!  (If you’re in Canada)

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Back in the days, the cool days, the ninja turtles were the shit!  With that came an handful of games during the NES and SNES era.  Most of them were fairly good, at least in their own way, even that Ultra one, kind of kicked ass for its time.  But the one I played the most back then was definitely Turtles in Time on SNES.  My cousins and I were playing this one intensively on the Christmas I got it.  Crazy story, the Easy mode turned out harder to beat for us back then than the Hard mode, as you had more continues or more lives (whichever went with difficulty level) on the harder modes.  While the versus mode was crap, and the Story mode lacked the 4-players mode of the arcade, it was a golden experience back then.

Now we’re in 2009, my beloved Turtles have seen multiple re-launched series, both in games and TV/Movie series.  By the way, the 2003 series up to before they go in the Future (I think it was called Fast-Forward, which kind of sucked) was kick-ass! Anyway, here we are with a remake of Turtles in Time Arcade.  Was it worth getting our shells back on our back alongside our ninja headbands? The answer is down here.

Developer: Ubisoft Singapore
Publisher: Ubisoft
Date of Release: August 5, 2009 (XBLA) / September 10, 2009 (PSN)
Platforms: XBLA / PSN

Genre: Beat ‘em up
Players: Up to 4

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Looks and Sounds

Standards for graphics and sounds have evolved a few hundred times since we last played Turtles in Time at the arcade.  This version re-vamped the whole game in 3-D and added the different green for each of the brothers in shells, just like in the SNES version.  That’s about all they took from that version.  The rest is the arcade version.  The voices were recorded using the voices of the Turtles from the 2003 series I mentioned earlier. I think that’s a great thing too. The younger ones that watched the 2003 series and never saw the old school cartoons, will more easily recognize these voices, and to be honest, they’re much better than the ones back in the day, with their low-bit noises-like voices.  On the music side, I don’t remember particularly the one from the arcade, but the SNES one was good. But here, it’s very much the other way around. Barely rememberable, even though it’s similar to the old music.

Gameplay

I’m not planning to go in-depth here.  It’s the same game as the over 15 years old Arcade game. So I’ll keep it at pointing out the differences.  First and foremost, you can now attack in all 8 directions.  That makes the easy gameplay, even more easy.  Another difference was that when you run out of lives when playing online with other people, you’ll only be able to hop back in the game at the end of the start of the next level.  This sucks. Not because of it makes it “harder”. But because in the instance where I found that out, I had no life left when we got to the last level, against the Shredder.  I was being punished because I didn’t Game Over at the end of the previous level instead of doing my best at staying alive as long as I could, and ended up dying fast against Shredder on my last life.  So I could not use any Continue because of that.  Moreover, there was the “Press Start” over the 3rd Player (I was fourth), which had left earlier, so I thought I could try and take this spot, so I light up my second controller and Press start, but it does absolutely nothing. Is that reserved for the host of the game? Anyway, that’s BS.

Finally, the only other difference is the health, which you have much more per life than in the arcade version, closer, or even more than in the SNES version.

Online

I’ve only played one full game so far.  But I’ve played the game so many times before, that I didn’t need much more to give it ultimate judgment.  Online didn’t seem to work for my friend I wanted to play with, he plays other game son his PS3 just fine online, but this one didn’t work at all.  But anyway, for me, it worked fast, I joined a random game, and we were 4 and going in a flash. I don’t know if the others were waiting for a while or if it was as quick as it was for me.  Anyway, the game lags up a bit when the first level starts, but after that, there’s not many issues I can speak of that doesn’t have to do with stupid players behaviors.  The same two guys (the ones playing Leo and Mike) were hugging all the pizza even though they didn’t need it.  I thought it was common knowledge in beat’em up that you pick up health restore items after beating the stuff around it, and you leave it to the one with the lowest life. No, not in their case. Oh well.  That just means, you’re better off just sticking for this game with friends, and talk on mic to decide on these things.

Overall

It’s been pointed out by a lot of people, the game isn’t bad because it’s a bad port, but because inherently it is a port of a badly designed game.  The SNES version was a hundred times better than the Arcade version, with its additional levels and more fun boss fights.  Here you don’t get to fight Rat King, you skip the Technodrome level, skipping the fun fight with Shredder where you throw foot soldiers at the screen to damage him, you don’t fight Slash, you fight Cement Man, so one-time villain instead, you don’t fight Bebop and Rockstead nor Super Shredder with his fun special moves.  You also don’t get the parts of Neon Night Rider level that made use of Mode-7 on the SNES.  It would have been fun if they would have mixed up a bit more the two games, to include those levels and boss fights, at the very least.

As for the blending in with the other turtles complaints, well, it isn’t so bad, though I did lose sight of my own turtles from time to time too.  But they’re each of different tones of green, and you can press/hold L2 to have a pointer show you where you are standing.

The Save Factor

So my final word is that it’s a fine, yet lacking port of a bad game. The Save Factor is $5, and only if you’re a TMNT fan.  Otherwise, just pass on it. You’ll want your time with the game back, most likely.

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I should totally wear this while playing Scribblenauts.

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Correction: Trine should NOT have been included in our PS3 new releases Tweet this week! Apologies for the error.

So when are we going to get this excellent game on the PS3? There’s still is no mention of this.

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I had high hopes for this game when it was first announced a few years ago. One of these reasons was that idea that they, seem to be at the least, inspired by Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. Another reason for these hopes was my admiration for the game Planetside, a MMOFPSRPG that was the first of its kind, which has been the only MMO to ever grab my attention for more than the trial period. I had very little about this game and, sadly, figured that with the tag of a MMOFPS that it would be similar to Planetside. Well…It wasn’t anything like it.

Graphics

Great, lovely, pristine graphics usually are not synonymous with MMOs. Huxley, on the other hand, does seem to nail this part down quite well. The world, the Dystopia, can, at times, be very immersible.  At first I didn’t feel this way, as you start off in a limited “boot camp” but once I left this location and entered the city I was impressed. The buildings are well-crafted and seem to loom depressingly over you. While the graphics do not outmatch the likes of other recent FPS’s, I believe the graphics hold their own when compared to other MMOs. The models, however, aren’t really interesting to look at and remind me quite a bit of Phantasy Star Online.

Gameplay

Fast. Paced. Shooting. Those three seem to boil the point of the game down nicely. I feel like that is all to it. Running around as fast as you can and filling your opponent with led faster than he can as your HP slowly dwindles down from ~150 to 0. There is no strategizing, at least I never was grouped with a team that wanted to employ any resemblance to strategy. This is what disappointed me the most. Another facet of the gameplay that disappointed me was how the world was set up. When in “solo” mode you move about in third person to talk to NPCs, visit shops, chat with other players, and accept quests from NPCs.

Once you decide to complete a quest you move to a section of the map and fast travel to different zones. When you enter these zones, which are basically small maps, you enter into First person mode and must complete different tasks which vary from killing X amount of y and picking up W amount of Z. When you decide to combine the “multiplayer” part to the MMO, you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and click the option that will deliver you to choose a server. You then play on different small maps with  amounts of players that supposedly can be up to 100 vs. 100…I never was in a server anywhere near this number. This disappointed me tremendously as I was hoping for large scale battles, not some Unreal Tournament clone with MMORPG elements.

What Could Save This Game?

I hope they can increase the player count. If they really can reach 200 players per map…they need large-scaled maps. I’d also LOVE to see them incorporate an open-world map…similar to Planetside…but I suppose that is too much to ask for this late in development.

Another element that I believe should be tweaked is how they go about the whole “solo” mode. Why not have a portion that is meant for PVP(the large scale maps) and have the parts surrounding the city open to ALL players? I’d love to be working on a quest in a zone and see other players run past me going after some other creature. As of now, all they have is allowing a “team” of buddies to enter the solo zone together which makes the game feel more like Sven-coop(Half-life modification).

Last Words

Perhaps this game just isn’t for me. If you love shooters and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and the countless other clones…then you may enjoy this more than me. On the other hand, if you were expecting this to be a Planetside clone then I suggest to hope that someone comes along and tries to emulate that genre another time.

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Other than that, I’ve purchased a few other titles on the DSiWare store but I wasn’t AS impressed as I was in the previous title mentioned. I tried AQUIA (AKA AQUARIO) from Art Style as well as BOXLIFE (AKA HACOLIFE). They didn’t hook me as much as PiCTOBiTS. They both have a pretty good level of difficulty in them though so if you’re in for a challenge in something that would seem like a simple game, you’ll find it there. BOXLIFE has a pixel like charm to it, which is neat.

I got a title named Mighty Flip Champs! this one has an increasing difficulty as well, but the first few puzzles are a complete walk in the park. you basically walk this super deformed girl over to her frog lover or something like that. Eventually you’ll need to gather things before you meet him. Apparently this is a game meant to be taken as a speed run type game. You want to improve your time and see just how much you can optimize out of it.

And the last title I will have a small blurb on it Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! This is a series that interested me from the beginning but I never got to play with any previous version of it. You have wind up marios that basically go forward from the time you do the first crank. They will collect coins and open the door to exit the level. It’s fairly simple. There are boss stages that are entirely different however. I didn’t get a chance to play this one too much but I will give it another chance eventually in the future.

Onto Peggle now. I’ve been playing this on my iPhone, it was a dollar a while back and I figured I’d check it out. This game is totally worthwhile. It’s exciting to play it well, when you finish a level you get an over the top congratulation. You just want to do it over and over. I finished it in a few sittings. Now I’m playing through it again and trying to get an even better score. I use the zen owl. Having the green peg upgrade from him totally rocks on non-moving stages. Also, this it totally pick up and play on the iPhone, it will save your state and allow you to resume whenever!

Enough of the Handhelds now!

I’ve sunk most of my time recently on the following titles: Team Fortress 2 (PC), Left 4 Dead (XBox360 and PC), Final Fantasy XI (Xbox 360 and PC), Demigod, Plants Vs Zombies (PC) and Prototype (Xbox360).

I’ll start by mentioning Team Fortress 2. Ever since the last patch, I’ve spent a decent amount of time playing with my friends. I like to jump classes in all my games. I have invested far more time in medic in this game however. This, for some reason is the class that’s lacking in a team most often, but in my opinion it is the most exciting and it will often make or break a team. I’ve played a decent amount of Pyro as well. This game is great. There’s just so much community love out there for it that there’s tons of youtubes out there with dubbed sound clips. The achievements are neat too. Some are clever. I got one for getting a guy to rage quit apparently. I had no idea an achievement like this existed! Here are my stats! I really don’t have any sniping skills.

Still playing Left 4 Dead on both XBox360 and PC. But mostly Xbox360. Not playing no mercy constantly is pretty nice. The fact that the Xbox version got patched up to current was very sweet a few months back. It unbroke the game, but it’s still pretty cookie cutter and you’ll use the same tactics over and over again. It’s mindless fun though and that’s what counts!

I’ve come back to an old favorite, Final Fantasy XI. I mostly play on Xbox 360 but sometimes on PC. Saving macros on the server makes everything really easy for me! I decided to level jobs I wouldn’t have even considered in the past. I dropped my goal to get Ninja to 75 (currently 65) to level other jobs. Scholar was my main goal, but I’ve kept White Mage and Red Mage at the same level. I plan to do this for as long as I can. After this is complete I may go back to melee. I’m thinking I’ll cap up my Ninja and move over to Monk. Eventually, I would like to get back into Assault/Nyzul. I’ll have to get into Limbus and Dynamis for a short while too. Einherjar is another one I’d like to try. Everything mage is semi-new to me so I like the change of pace. It’s funny how this game after so many years still stands apart from the rest of the MMOs. The cross platform aspect of it is also quite wonderful.

I’ve been playing Demigod still, less frequently though. I love this game but on the steam platform it may have flourished a bit more than on the Impulse one. The game has some pathing and balancing issues. It’s also quite annoying to play with a person with high ping as it makes the game choppy and nearly unplayable for everyone else. I also cannot play this with my friends easily.

I got Plants Vs Zombies for both me and my significant other. We both played this tons. I would have loved the progress to be saved on my Steam profile somehow. I’ve had to replay the same parts twice because I move it over to my Asus N10J (semi-nettop).

I also purchased and played through BlueBerry Garden. It’s a pretty game. I liked the music and the art but it offers no replay really. It’s cheap though so if you don’t think that’s going to hold you back go ahead! I’d also suggest And Yet It Moves. Not entirely the same thing but it’s got charm also!

Finally, I’ve been playing Prototype on Xbox360. I love this game! I don’t care about graphics, they’re more than acceptable. I’ve seen people complain about them but honestly, that’s being pretty picky. The abilities you unlock, using them and the exploration of NYC is pretty fun. I’ve gotten quite a few “orbs”. I’ve heard people complain about the difficulty but I’ve just been caught by a spike once honestly. It’s quite easy to feed off poor random innocent bystanders while doing your thing. I’ve been listening to a lot of people on destructoid talk about both these and inFamous. I believe episode 102 of Podtoid had a few people discussing these. Anyways, I’ll try and complete it this week. I believe some review will be incoming soon on behalf of Dave. Metacritics don’t do this game justice however. To me, between this and inFamous I totally prefer this one but it’s quite frankly a pretty big coin toss.

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New Game Plus, or New Game +, is a mode that is common in over 154 games as seen over at giantbomb.com. Recently, it has been said that Mass Effect 2 will not feature this mode.

Preston Watamaniuk stated, after responding to a question on if Mass Effect 2 would not  include a new game plus mode,

“The short answer is no.

The reason is progression. We have been working very hard to make sure we design the abilities system to offer smooth progression into ME3 from ME2. Allowing double progression on characters makes that almost impossible. We have to have reasonable knowledge about where a character could end up finishing all content on a play-through. We also want to offer choice of character build within specific classes.

We replaced that feature with playing after you were done because it preserves progression and allows for smoother downloading of PRC.”

So the question is, which is the better mode? New Game Plus? Or having the ability, much like in Fallout 2 and 3, The Elder Scrolls Series, and many others, to continue playing the game?

If the side missions are anything like the ones found in Mass Effect then I have doubts that the “continue playing” mode will be as grand as the new game plus mode. In Mass Effect, I had more of a blast playing the main missions more than all of the side missions put together. Whereas, with Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout I found some of the side quests more intriguing than the entirety of the main quest line.

On the other hand, the issue of how the downloadable content worked with Mass Effect might be another reason as to why they opted to take out the new game plus. I wouldn’t mind replacing new game plus with the ability to tackle the side missions I didn’t play along with the ability for DLC that doesn’t require the players to trudge through two hours of the beginning of the game.

And then there is Watamaniuk ‘s comment on how they will be “preserving [our] progression” for the transition from Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3, which bothers me as to how exactly will this benefit our saves far better than the transition from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. Will less of our choices not be applied in Mass Effect 2 than in 3?

Hopefully we will learn more in the coming months.

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