Game Review - The Scourge Project (Demo)

So last night I was meandering around and stumbled across The Scourge Project's website.  Now, while it looked like it would be an alright game, I would never have bought it.  I did, however, see that they had a free demo for download, so I decided that I really had nothing better to do.  I downloaded it and began to install it.  It has been far too long since I've played a full scale PC game, but most of it came back to me during installation.  The good old full-screen half-hour installs with the game's music playing to amuse you and keep you from doing anything much productive.  I do have to acknowledge that the music played during installation was good, even though there was only 1-2 minutes of it on loop for at least 30 minutes of installation.  Then the installation finished and I was reminded another reason I don't play PC games much.  Now this is no fault of the games, but my computer magically transforms into a piece of shit whenever I try to game on it.  It runs about as well as Stephen Hawking would if you pushed him out of his chair then shot both his kneecaps.  Thanks to this I was forced to run it on the lowest possible settings, and even then there was still some lag, so I'll try not to talk about graphics because that's my own fault.  From what I saw of the mysteriously lag-free intro cinematic and screenshots on the game's site, it actually looks rather good. Anyway, on to the game itself.

The game is powered by the Unreal engine, which I always consider a plus for shooter games.  Between that, and the look of the intro cinematic (before things started moving at 20 frames per hour) had me in good spirits, until the last scene of the cinematic.  Some woman gets dropped into a room, only to be fed, screaming, to some sort of thing kept conveniently out of sight of the camera, as if we aren't supposed to be able assume it is a giant face-raping abomination of science.  Her face, however, suggests someone is instead having her watch a rather dull movie.  I have never seen anyone so disinterested in their own disembowelment than this woman seemed to be.  There was screaming, but her face was a complete deadpan.  After that, I went straight to the single-player campaign, and I was given a choice between four different playable characters.  There was Stonewall, your cliché ex-soldier who was dishonorably discharged and fights as a mercenary to prove his innocence, and as droll as that sounds he actually seems to be the character with the most depth.  Theres also Amp, the un-ironically named adrenaline and danger junkie, Mass, the un-ironically named heavy-class character, and Shade, the un-ironically named... stealth guy I'm going to assume because it isn't really obvious.  Like Stonewall, they all have their reasons for fighting; Amp because something about a cure for her addiction because rehab is apparently too simple an option, Mass' reason for fighting is a vague "he wants it to go well" which might as well be the game announcing with a megaphone "hey, this guy has a big secret that is going to be a major plot twist," and Shade, who, and I'm being honest here, suffered a "terrible loss" and has dedicated his life to revenge, leaving a "trail of corpses."  I decided to play the obvious choice, Mr. Trail-of-Corpses, Shade.  While the campaign loaded, I was greeted with the always re-assuring message telling me that, since this is the demo, I would be playing from a few various, disjointed points in the game, so the story will have no flow.  'Well shit' i thought to myself.  Why couldn't they just take a small chunk of the game to make the demo, or even something separate from the real game's campaign all together?  I know I'm playing a demo and can't expect the same story-telling as I would from a full game, but what they've essentially said is "we're gonna stick you in a few levels, just wander a bit and shoot back at whatever comes your way and looks kinda mean."  And I do mean "stick you in" because, after the loading was done, I was at the beginning of a level.  No instruction of any kind, just me and my squad of AIs standing around, waiting for one of us to pretend we knew what the hell we were doing.  Then i started to move towards a door and my camera had a seizure because one of the AIs had the sheer audacity to walk next to me.  A few more steps and we started to get shot at, and it was then that I noticed that I had no cross-hairs at my disposal, so I put what appeared to be some sort of poorly-rendered human-esque shape near the middle of my screen and held left click until it stopped shooting.  I then opened up the menu and took note of the control scheme, and noticed that you can't jump in this game.  Now, it may be just me on this, but I feel we've come a bit too far technologically with games to leave out jumping.  It doesn't matter to me how attractive looking that one-foot block is if I can't jump the fuck over the block.  Also it turns out you do get cross-hairs, but only as long as you hold down the button for iron-sights, which you basically have to do in every firefight unless you want to shoot with the accuracy of a Parkinson's sufferer.  To make use of the squad system, and to give your brain-dead squad a reason to exist, The Scourge Project features a revive system because that hasn't been done to death.  Whenever you run out of health (and I honestly still cannot tell you where the health bar is, or even if one exists) you lower your gun and take a knee, and the enemies stop shooting at you because they totally get that you need a moment to catch your breath and they can respect that.  Once that happens you'll get a timer indicating how much time you have left to be revived before you simple keel over and die, and during this time one of your mates will come revive you.  I have to give the AIs credit on this one, they'd risk life and limb to revive me, maybe because they were aware that, of the four of us, I had the one braincell we were forced to share.  The level only ever ended from death one time, and that's because while I was taking a knee all my other squad-mates decided that they'd taken their fair share of too many bullets and they took a knee to, and that was that.  There is also a sort of XP leveling system in the full game, because I kept getting notices on my HUD that I had gained either +1 XP in "Assault" or +1 XP in "Weapons".  Now "assault" I get, but getting experience points for weapons in a shooter seems a bit like getting experience points for breathing.  The game also features "character unique flashbacks" which, at least for Shade, consisted of a short black and white clip of a guy in a general's uniform telling me my sister was alive for now, and to focus on the mission.  Now, mentally, I was able to make the connect "hey, that guy who looks like a dick has my sister, and I also 'experienced a great loss' I bet they kill her" and then I realized it was probably because instead of focusing on the mission like Mr. Black-and-White said, I was having flashbacks.  At the end of each level, Scourge Project gives a score tally of kills, deaths, revives, damage dealt, and damaged taken, which is a good feature if you're playing campaign co-op with a group of competitive pricks, but, playing solo with AIs as my teammates, I didn't really feel it overly necessary to show that I out-played a team with a collective IQ of broccoli.

As the demo progressed, I was faced with not only human enemies but small little spidery shits that swarmed and were generally annoying, and then later a group of much larger shits that very much liked to jump around.  At the end of the third level, there was a cinematic which involved my squad being trapped waiting for an extraction, and then a really large shit jumping out of a wall presumably to separate us from our internal organs.  "oh golly gee wilikers a boss fight! finally something both exciting and big enough to render well enough for me to shoot it accurately!" and then the demo ended.  I must admit, I was surprised.  I had given The Scourge Project my time, and all it gave me in return was, well, nothing special, really.   Maybe it ended there because they hoped that people would buy the game just to fight the boss, because other than that the demo really didn't make the game any more enticing than it had been before I played the demo.  The ending says I should "buy the full game for unlimited access to all-out, adrenalin-pumping singleplayer, co-op and multiplayer action" and I have to wonder if the full game is actually some completely different game from the demo, because the demo had none of those qualities.

tl;dr:

Gameplay: 5/10
Presentation: 7/10
Graphics: **/10
Sound: 7/10
Overall: 6.33/10

The Oscars: Anticipation

Well it looks like it's that time of year again, The Oscars.  The time of year a bunch of pretentious old white guys (and probably some other folks for diversities sake) get together and decide to tell you which movies were good because as far as their concerned you have the opinion making skills of a tomato.  It's also the time of year people like me comment on their choices and give you our own opinions because lets face it you have the opinion making skills of a tomato.  So give me a second to crawl out from under the angry little rock I've been hiding under since my review of The Mechanic, and then let's take a look at the shit list, shall we?
For starters, looking at the list of movies with the most nominations, I'm not finding much issue.  We have True Grit with 10 and The King's Speech with 12 and those are both quality films.  But number 3, with 8 nominations, is Inception? This had better be some dream within a dream within a dream bullshit for that to make any sense, because Inception had the depth of a small puddle that maybe someone had taken a piss in. But I digress, time to get to the actual awards themselves.  I'm going to tell you now that there are 7 pages of awards so I'm only going to talk about the ones anyone actually cares about, best actor/actress/supporting-actor/supporting-actress and blah-di-blah.  If you're looking for my opinion on "Achievement in Sound Editing" you're out of luck because congratulations you're the only person who actually could give a fuck.
Alright third paragraph and I haven't even gotten to an actual award, but at least I got all that out of my system so I won't be a disgruntled angry bastard as far as the awards themselves go. JUST KIDDING.  As far as the awards for Best Actor (both leading and supporting) go, those are practically a done deal for Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush because The King's Speech was exactly the kind of pandering artsy-fartsy movie that's still easily mainstream enough to win everything at the Oscars because those previously mentioned old men only appreciate movies that are significant and deep and have a message, which is all fine and dandy except for the fact that I've actually seen the Oscars before so I realize that most of the time these guys are either being bribed or throwing a dart at a board with the different movie titles on it.  The Actress awards are a bit trickier.  Best Actress in a Leading Role comes down to Anette Bening (The Kids are Alright) versus Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and this is mainly because the old men, being men, really like things with lesbians.  Personally I'm giving this one to Natalie Portman because Black Swan was a movie with more depth and was done by the same guy who did Requiem for a Dream, and also because she is most definitely the hotter lesbian.  Mostly the depth thing though.  Best Actress in a Supporting Role is hard because the nominee from The King's Speech is Helena Bonham Carter and she, while being a good actress, seemed to go to the Sandra Bullock school of never winning shit.  We also have Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) who, because it was her first film and did an outstanding job, has almost no chance of winning because that would just make too much sense.  This means that, of the remaining, Jackie Weaver (Animal Kingdom) is most likely to win because I have never fucking heard of that movie and when in doubt the award goes to the most obscure nomination I can grab without having open a new tab and google it so I can pretend that I give a shit.
Now to get the Special Olympics portion of the Oscars, it's time for Best Animated Picture.   Now personally I don't have anything against animated movies, but these days most of them are Disney taking a shit, putting on a plate, adding some garnish and saying "here eat this" and then the rest of the world proceeds to eat every last morsel and comment on how delicious it is.  This year however, I'm giving it hands down to Toy Story 3, mainly because I was one of those children who grew up on Toy Story and that this movie is blatantly pandering to because anyone in the "target age" would have spent most of the movie either confused or sobbing.
Now to cut through the crap a wee bit and skip down the list to Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score) which I'm going to begrudgingly give to Inception because for god only knows what reason Tron: Legacy isn't on here (it's soundtrack being one of the few highlights of that film) and also because I don't like saying nice things about Trent Reznor because fuck that guy.  Hand in hand with this goes Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song).  Normally I'd just give this to the Toy Story 3 nomination because, as previously stated, nostalgia gets me off.  However I found myself having to look up the song because I could swear to god I'd never heard of it.  Apparently I had though, or at least I must have because I saw that movie at least twice.  Seeing how memorable the song was, I can't in good conscience give it my vote, and that leaves me in the fucking dark because I honestly didn't see any of the other movies.  I'm going to take a leap of faith and give my vote to Coming Home (Country Strong), seeing as it's a country song in a movie about country music so for that to lose Country Strong must have been a relatively shitty movie, which it could very well be.

In summation all I say is that, as much as it pains me to admit, the Oscar picks aren't terrible this year and I can only wait to see how the big Omnipotent old men decide to defecate on it.  An added plus is that Never Say Never, the Justin Bieber biopic (in incredibly unnecessary 3D) didn't get nominated for anything, and even though it means that the old men will have a lot of pre-teen girl suicide blood on their hands, I suppose no good dead goes unpunished.

EDIT: Now it has recently come to my attention that I very much crossed a line in this entry. Was it the preteen girl suicide joke? no, fuck you, that's a completely legitimate statement.  My error was in my derogatory generalizations I made about the academy voters.  It turns out they are not all terrible, soulless old white guys in suits, because one of them is George Takei. Now, I may be a terrible, heartless bastard, but I have nothing but love respect and admiration for George Takei, and if that bothers you I recommend you go eat shards of broken glass.  Other than Mr. Takei, however, I am relatively sure my generalizations are correct, and, with the addition of this amendment, stand behind them.

Movie Review - The Mechanic

When I went into this movie, I did not expect much from it.  I expected the basic action movie that thinks plot is that thing that you put in to kill time between brawls, shootouts, and explosions.  In this respect, I was pleasantly surprised when this movie's writers turned out to actually be able to write.  The movie had a legitimate plot that only gave way occasionally to holes and clichés.
The movie stars Jason Statham, the big guy who looks like a cross between a gym teacher I had in middle school and an egg who has been having a particularly bad day, as a "mechanic" a.k.a. hitman.  Now while most movies go for the the 'killer with a conscience' thing so you can sympathize with the lead, this film goes for the 'killer who doesn't have a conscience because he KILLS PEOPLE FOR A LIVING' character design because the writers probably noticed that if a hitman had a conscience, he would be a pretty terrible hitman.  It also co-stars Ben Foster as Statham's apprentice, who, from what I gathered, decided to become a hitman because he really didn't have anything better to do at the time.
The movie starts with Stathm preforming one of his assassinations, and then goes through a short montage of him putting away all his planning material away as he explains that he's a hitman and he kills people and he guesses thats kind of cool but who really cares, just in case the viewer didn't catch that because they spent the first 5 minutes of the movie in a coma.  The film then introduces Statham's one and only friend, who you don't see again until Statham kills him because this other guy said so and Statham, as we've already gone over, just has trouble giving a shit.  Later, Statham takes on Foster, his friend's son. on as an apprentice, because when someone really wants to get revenge on the guy that killed his father, and you're that man, the smartest idea is to teach him how to kill people.  I mean, he'll never figure it out and try to avenge his father's death by killing you right? riiiiiiiight.  They do a couple of assignments together, Statham giving lessons like 'revenge is never a good motivation' and 'never let them know you're coming', and then he finds out that his boss betrayed him by making him kill his friend, and Statham tells his boss that he is going to go kill him to get revenge.  He really is a front-runner for good decision-maker of the year.
Aside from that, Foster totally botches one of the missions and then they continue on because hey it's not like actions having consequences is a key component of the movies plot OH WAIT YES IT IS.  Still, this is one of the few movies that I can honestly say is worth the ticket price.  It's an action movie that remembered that it's a movie and not just an hour and a half long explosion/bullet-storm, and even though I spent most of the movie forecasting the end, I was still caught mildly off-guard when the actual ending came about.


tl;dr:

Plot: 7/10
Acting: 8/10
Soundtrack: 9/10
Effects: 9/10
Overall: 8.25/10