Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 35

Game review: Max Payne 3 for Xbox 360

I picked up Max Payne 3 the day after it released, but I only played the first few levels before I lost interest and wandered off to do something else. I think my lack of focus was inspired partly by Max’s narration, and partly by the mind numbing focus on killing and doing nothing else. But I decided that since I paid full price for the game, I might as well make an attempt to play it through at least once. For most of the game, I had to push myself to finish. It’s not a bad game, nor even a hard game. But it is monotonous, and that boring pattern isn’t help by the too chatty star.

Rockstar really needs to hire a writer. I know, I say this with every game I’ve ever reviewed for them, but really, they’ve only got one schtick, and they’ve been beating that cynical pony from the day they opened their doors. The hero is always an amoral asshole who hates everyone and everything. Max Payne is more of the same, but he’s especially annoying because he narrates the games like “I hate this place, these people, my job, my life, this drink, myself, and that guy over there…oh wait, that’s a mirror.” I probably might have liked this game more if Max would ever shut up and stop whining about everything is stupid. And really, he’s a hypocrite, because Max Payne is the dumbest person in the whole game. You think I’m kidding, but most of the plot revolves around Max being a moron.

I lost track of the number of times Max did something in a cut-scene that put me in the middle of a gunfight, and these decisions always lead to someone else getting killed or kidnapped. By the halfway point, Max has done a pathetic job as a security guard, seeing as how his boss and half the boss’s immediate family have died horribly. Despite having a history of making lousy choices, Max just keeps on piling on his mistakes. At one point near the end, while killing something like 500 cops in a police station, Max laments that this plan hadn’t been thought out clearly, but that it was too late now to change it. But it’s not that the plan wasn’t thought out clearly. Saying this would imply that the stupid motherfucker ever rubbed two brain cells together before he ran off to kill more people. Even when we learn who’s really planning these killings, Max needs a local cop to explain everything to him, because he’s too fucking stupid to spot the blatantly obvious.

So yeah, I hate the story in Max Payne 3. No shock, since Rockstar has yet to write a story that I didn’t hate. “But Zoe,” you say, “if you hate them so much, why do you keep buying their games?” It’s a fair question, and what happens is two weeks before they release a new game, all the game sites start pumping out trailers talking about the technical aspects of the game. I look at the bright, shiny, pretty pixels, and my inner critic is drowned out by my inner gamer nerd yelling, “So pretty! Must have!”

This is something consistent with all Rockstar games. They make really detailed worlds that feel authentic. Whether I’m in an office, a yacht, or a Brazilian back alley, Max Payne’s game world is gorgeously crafted. As usual, I would frequently stop just to do a slow pan around to admire all the details. Hubby gets tired of me telling him to turn and look, but I can’t help it because Rockstar makes pretty games, possibly the prettiest and most detailed games in the world.

There’s no map this time, at least as far as I could see in the menus, but given the extremely linear design, there’s no need for a map. There were only a few times when I got lost trying to sort out where to go next, and in one case, the problem was I’d failed to notice that a set of compressed canisters were blocking a door. I walked the level four times, and then looked at the blocked door and thought, They’ve never set up anything this obvious before, but would they really change strategies this late in the game? Yes, they really did, and it is the only time in the whole game when you open a door by blowing up the obstacles in front of it.

The combat system is…it’s interesting. The usual weapon wheel is back, but this time, you can only carry two side-arms and one rifle. You can dual wield the two side arms, but only if you put down the rifle. It’s limiting, but I kind of liked it. I also liked how each weapon had different reloading animations and times. My revolver carried a much bigger kick than the semi-auto handgun, but Max has to load each chamber one at a time, so it’s a bit scary to do when you’ve got an army rushing up on you. But it felt right, and I think it’s one of the things that made the fights interesting even when they were repetitive and mind numbing.

That’s the real problem with the game play, in that there’s no much else to do except kill stuff and watch Max stumble through cut-scenes until he finds some new army to murder. Although there are clues to pick up in levels, and some golden gun collectibles, the vast majority of the game is all about murdering wave after wave of people. There’s several armies worth of people to kill, and I got achievements for killing 1,000 people and firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition somewhere around the middle of the game. Near the end, I started commenting, “Eh, Stallone and Schwarzenegger are at this point going ‘Okay Max, maybe this is a little overkill now.’” It’s monotonous and dull, and none of this is helped by Max’s constant whining. I didn’t like any protagonist from the other Rockstar games I played, but I have now developed a new appreciation for the fact that they didn’t narrate their every action. Sure, they were still lecturing others about their bad habits, but at least they’d shut up and let me enjoy the scenery sometimes. Here, if I stop a few seconds, Max will complain “I didn’t have time to stop an admire the view.” No, fuck you, Max. If I’m going to be stuck with your whiny ass for forty-eight hours, I’m going to need to stop and admire the view to make up for your constant bitching.

This game uses motion capture for the character’s facial expressions, but the weird thing is, in a lot of the scenes, the faces look more like some kind of claymation than a 3D model. They emote better than any character from a Bethesda game, and the voice acting isn’t bad. Still at times the cut-scenes were distracting because instead of focusing on what was being said, I was staring at the faces and making a list of everything that was wrong about them.

The controls are pretty smooth, and even in the most chaotic battles, I had no trouble keeping track of what to press. Oddly enough, even though I had the option to slow down the game and do that John Woo style “shootdodge”, I rarely used it. I’m sure it might have helped in the more intense battles, but even knowing it was there, I tended to ignore the ability. I guess maybe it just made things feel too easy.

So I close out this game feeling the way I do with most of Rockstar’s titles. They are hands down the best company at making detailed, authentic game worlds, and they do a great job with music, the sound effects, and the overall presentation. They make controls that are easy to understand so there’s rarely any times where I might die because I pressed the wrong button. But where every game falls apart for me is in the story, and this story may be the most nonsensical entry from Rockstar thus far. Max is unbearably stupid, and his actions should have resulted in him being tortured and executed. But he gets to walk off into the sunset, supposedly redeemed despite him murdering a few hundred cops.

So once I again, I feel like I want to issue two scores. On the technical aspects, Max Payne 3 earns a full five stars for being so fucking pretty and playable. But that story…holy shit, it’s awfully stupid, and I want to give it one star. So mixing these two extremes, I give the game three stars. And yes, I can predict that whenever Rockstar releases another game, I’ll buy it, and I’m sure I’ll once again lament their piss poor efforts at writing. I just hope that one day, I’m proven wrong, and they’ll have a plot put together as flawlessly as their meticulously detailed worlds.

Book review: Lamb by Christopher Moore

This may be one of the most muddled and conflicted reviews I’ve done this year, and while there’s still plenty of time for something else to twist me up, I doubt I’ll find anything this close. Technically, this book was a colossal failure, and it was also brilliant and well researched. So how the hell do I rate that?

To start with, I’m going to break one of my normal review rules. Normally, I never compare a book to anything I’ve written, because it’s kind of tacky, like advertising in a place where it’s not appropriate. But this particular book, I never published, and I never will, so I feel it’s okay to break the rule this one time. The book I wrote was called Dave: A Messiah, and the premise was that God had come to a stand-up comedian and told him that he would be the next Messiah. Dave’s job was basically telling lots of Christians that they were doing religion and service to God all wrong. (Which is what Joshua did to his religious leaders at the time, and Dave was simply following in the footsteps of the last Messiah.) He preaches to gays, helps a transsexual have an immaculate conception, and saves a rabbi from a faulty hotplate. He becomes very unpopular with conservative Christians, but since he’s pulling off genuine miracles, they’re afraid of calling him out. At the end of the book, the President tries to coerce Dave into healing his incurable STD, and Dave finds out that God is setting him up to die. The conservatives rally behind the President and push for Dave to be executed as a traitor. So Dave dies, and a new religion is founded by his Witnesses. Dave dies by lethal injection, so all his Witnesses wear silver syringes.

The book was supposed to be a comedy, and after I finished it, my first thought was, This isn’t funny. I made some attempts to revise it, but no matter how many jokes I added, I couldn’t find humor in the story. The book was essentially a long sermon that could be summed up as “You righteous fuckers have missed the point.” So I made it a trunk novel, and I decided that some topics could never be funny no matter how hard I tried.

Anyway, Lamb was sent to me by a fan of my stuff who said Moore and I had similar ideas about Joshua, and they felt I would enjoy the book. I set it aside for a while, waiting for a time when I was in the mood for good comedy. I took Lamb down and got started on it, and…and it’s not funny.

This is not to say the story is bad, or that the writing is bad. It’s quite clear that Moore went to extensive lengths to research this story, and he does make the “history” of Joshua’s training interesting for the most part. But every single joke fell flat for me, and I honestly didn’t laugh once.

An early scene illustrates my problem, and I think your ability to find humor in the situation may be tied directly to your level of empathy. In the scene when Levi, AKA: Biff, meets Joshua as a child, the Messiah-to-be is resurrecting a lizard by putting it in his mouth before giving the animal back to his little brother, who at the first threat of being bitten smashes the lizard’s head with a rock. So long as you don’t think too hard about the lizard, this scene might be funny. But all I could think about was how terrified the lizard must be, and how childishly cruel Joshua was to keep reviving him and handing him off to be killed again. The joke was killed because I was looking at the scene the “wrong” way.

None of the the jokes worked for me throughout the book. Not the sex jokes, not the puns, and not the twisting of real events into something supposedly humorous. Every once in a while I’d say, “Okay, that was almost funny.” But I never got anything close to a laugh out of this book. Not even a quiet snort.

The other problem for me throughout the book is the nagging thought that if I was taking this stuff literally, God comes across as a sadistic asshole. And I suppose if one is taking the bible literally instead of a set of parables, the same sentiment emerges. Here’s a deity who tortures people without intervening, always to make a point about his plans, and who demands that everyone love him despite his habits of torturing his followers. If you don’t love him and follow all of his rules to the letter, he’s going to roast your ass for all eternity…because he loves you.

Even with his only son, God sends him out to be tormented, commanding Joshua never to sin so that he can be set up as the fall guy for all of humanity. He demands perfection from his son when he himself is flawed, cruel, and petty.

This is not the God I believe in, but it is the God that many people choose to worship by way of a literal translation of the bible. Lamb is written in much the same vein, suggesting that God would send a child out to witness the horrors of the world, prohibit him from knowing anything of love or pleasure, and not once actually speak directly to the child to answer his many questions about his role as the Messiah. It’s a miracle that Joshua didn’t give him the finger and wander off to marry Mary Magdalan instead.

And therein lies the problem. Is Moore’s story entertaining? Absolutely. Do I find it to be in the same spirit as the four canon gospels? Yes. I think it’s a great book that cleverly twists what we know about Josuha with some high quality fictional bullshitting. But it’s also not funny. And at times, it drags while Joshua is training with the so-called wise men.

That said, how do I rate a book like this? If I’m judging it as a comedy, I’d have to go with a pretty low score. But I tend to give out low scores for books that I found lots of flaws with the writing, and there’s only this one glaring flaw to be noted here. The thing is, I mostly liked this story. Okay, Biff is a lech and a bit of an asshole, just like the angel Raziel said. But hey, assholes often have more interesting stories to tell than saints who’ve never known any temptations. And okay, sometimes the book dragged on a bit. But I don’t need a story to maintain a breakneck pace to recognize it’s a good yarn.

In the end, I have to give Lamb four stars. Moore’s done a fine job of presenting a new gospel detailing the life of the Messiah, and while I didn’t laugh once, there were several times when I got choked up or teary-eyed. The writing is good, the research is sound, and the story was definitely worth the time it took me to read it. I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of your favorite genre. I just can’t call it funny, and this seems to bolster my theory that there are some topics you can’t make funny no matter how hard you try. But even if this fails for me as a comedy, I really did enjoy the book.

Book review: Thieving Fear by Ramsey Campbell

There’s a blurb on the cover of Thieving Fear, an endorsement for Ramsey Campbell from Stephen King that reads “Good horror writers are rare, and Campbell is better than just good.” I have to assume this quote was mined from King reading another book by the same author, because this book isn’t good horror, nor even a good book. If I had to find something nice to say about it, I will say it helped me get to sleep several nights. But if a HORROR book is putting you to sleep at night, that’s not really a good thing, is it?

Four cousins go camping, and one of them sleepwalks away from the others and thinks she hears someone calling her name. Maybe something happens, and maybe it doesn’t. But either way, the scene is resolved without ratcheting up any sense of tension. The opening didn’t do anything for me, but I thought, If King liked it, it has to get scary sooner or later. But no, it never does. If anything, it starts with that first disappointment and slides slowly down a dull path of increasing boredom.

The story fast forwards a few years, and all four cousins are tits and wankers. One’s a writer who used to work in a nursing home before her meanie bosses framed her, and another is an editor at a publisher, meaning we get to see a lot of scenes about the process of publishing a book. There really should be a rule that writers are not allowed to write about publishing in any capacity, because most of the time, their “writing what they know” is a slow dull grind that pads a story, but does nothing to advance the plot. That’s certainly the case here. Anywho, a third cousin is a visual artist, and that means he gets to complain about no one appreciating his vision, even though the descriptions of his work certainly makes him sound a bit rubbish. The last cousin used to be a teacher before moving into work at a grocery store clerk because he couldn’t handle his job. He’s teased by mean girls at work who then accuse him of sexual harassment, because girls are mean and icky and stupid. (If you can’t tell, none of these four endeared themselves to me.)

The cousins are pursued by something that makes them claustrophobic and hallucinate or get confused, and they’re all unable to talk to each other about that camping trip without “bad stuff” happening. If I’ve made any of this sound interesting, trust me, it isn’t. The writing drags on, and on, and on, and there’s nothing scary or even interesting going on. Most of the book feels like a padded delaying tactic to avoid getting to something worth reading about. This mess could have been edited down to a short story without losing anything. Even when the cousins make it back to the camp site and the secret buried there, the writing manages to drag on and kill any sense of dread. There’s a dreadfully long sequence with one cousin wandering through a house, and it’s all “dreary detail, boring shit, OH WAIT DID I SEE A MONSTER?!?! No, it’s just another shadow. Gosh the dark is so skeery.” This goes on for page after page, the world’s slowest fucking search with NOTHING HAPPENING. I found myself wishing that at least the ceiling might fall and kill her to end the scene. But no, she eventually finds a monster, and the fight is dull and unsatisfying. Maybe if this were a short story, I wouldn’t feel so cheated, but I had to drag through 270 pages of boring filler to reach this point. I just wanted to have at least one scary moment to justify the rest of the book, and that moment is like the author jamming two middle fingers in my face and saying, “Fuck you, lady, it’s boredom and tedium all the way to the end for you.”

The final chapter is a long flapping head scene that establishes that everyone is okay, and all of this will be made into a book, possibly even a series. If the book the cousins put out is anything like the one I’ve read, I see a huge risk of it boring people to death.

In order for me to get into a story, I either need interesting characters or an intriguing plot. This book has neither, and I frequently wished one or all of the main characters would be hacked apart by a proper psycho killer or monster. Instead, the worst that happens is, one of them has a car crash and goes into a coma. There’s no sense of danger, no reason to care for these whiny little shits, and nothing to fear even when the big baddie makes their random attacks or their appearance at the conclusion. The stakes never felt high enough to raise my give-a-fuck meter above the meh zone.

Maybe I’ll try something else from Campbell later, after my distaste for this book dissipates somewhat. But I can say it wasn’t worth the time I invested in it. I give Thieving Fear one star, and I’d only recommend it to insomniacs looking for a great way to put themselves to sleep.

Yet another travesty of justice

I know, it’s been a while since I talked about anything besides my writing or did reviews for other peoples’ stuff. I got out of the habit of ranting because I’ve been getting sicker, and I only have so much energy to devote to being upright. So whenever a rant takes hold in my head, I’ve dispelled them by saying out loud, “Nobody cares what I think.” That’s probably true here too, but I find that I care about this too much not to say something.

Yesterday, the jury for Michael Dunn found him guilty of firing into a vehicle, and for three counts of attempted murder. But when it came to the death of Jordan Davis, they couldn’t reach a consensus on whether a murderer was actually guilty of murder. They stalled for three days debating this “confusing” topic, and they still couldn’t decide if a white man murdering an unarmed black boy was really murder. Compare this to Marissa Alexander, who jurors decided was guilty in 12 minutes for firing a gun into the air and gave her 20 years. Compare this to CeCe McDonald, who defended herself from racists who tried to kill her and was sentenced for manslaughter.

Some people are saying “Oh Florida,” like this is just a problem with one state, but there’s a lot of places in America where simply being black is enough evidence to prompt getting shot by racist white gun owners. This is not just something in the south. This is not “something in the water.” It’s a lingering racism that no one wants to talk about or deal with. People point to Obama being in office and claim that’s some kind of proof that America conquered race, but they ignore how many people hung effigies of the President after he took office. They ignore how, instead of focusing on his policies to find fault with his job performance, white people are still acting like he’s a Kenyan Muslim who somehow pulled a fast one over the whole country with a fake birth certificate. People ignore the photos of toilets with “Free Obama Dolls” signs pointing down. That’s all damning proof that we have not conquered race.

The real culprit we need to talk about isn’t the blatant racists, the ones who wear their hate on their sleeve and at least let you know in advance to avoid them. No, the problem lies with the milder racism and erasure of “color blindness.” This so-called enlightened mindset of some white people prevents them from seeing racism, and it presumes that all people are the same, and that we all have the same troubles in life. It erases the additional burdens that people of other races have, and when people from the other races complain about how bad things are, it’s the color blind “ally” who talks down to them the most. It’s the color blind ally who insists, “but we’re not all like that.” It’s the color blind ally who threatens to withdraw support if people of color are too angry over their children being murdered day in and out in obvious racial attacks. And it’s the color blind ally who insists that they have nothing left to fight for because “we conquered race.” No, we did not. We have dominated the race conversation and prevented the victims of hate crimes from getting justice.

Being color blind is not acceptance of race, it is tolerance of race. It is also acceptance of racism, and when color blind allies seek to silence people of color, they are in fact promoting racism’s ongoing progression in our society.

We cannot be color blind. We need to admit that racism is an ongoing problem. We need to see how much harder people of color have life precisely because white people work so hard to make life difficult for them. It is our responsibility to police our own race and insist that justice work for everyone, and not just for the privileged whites. It is our responsibility to get mad whenever racism rears its ugly head, to join with the victims and mourn and rage with them instead of advising them to “just get over it.” It is our responsibility to hold the legal system accountable for their failures to end racial discrimination.

If this sounds like it’s unfair, consider history, and the abolishment of slavery worldwide. That didn’t come about because slaves said, “This is unjust.” They were saying that for a long time, and no one cared. It wasn’t until white men took responsibility for their own race and fought against slavery that change could occur. That’s still the case to this day, but white people now find a lot of ways to dodge any kind of social responsibility to evolve our society toward true equality and acceptance of diversity. So instead of making progress, we’ve backslid to the point that lawmakers are legitimizing racism and racial extermination under the guise of self-defense laws. That isn’t going to change simply because the families and friends of victims are angry about it. To change and begin making progress requires that white men look at themselves and admit that the problem lies with them. It lies with them whether they’re openly racist or whether they’re color blind.

Tolerance is not good enough. Complacency and acceptance of the status quo will not heal this festering wound in our society. To end racism and truly conquer it, we must accept our responsibility and admit that we owe it to everyone else to police our own race. We need to see color, to see the suffering of other races and want to do something about it. Or else all our talk about modern enlightenment or progressive values is all just vain efforts at polishing a turd.

Book review: The Reach by Nate Kenyon

It took me a long time to read The Reach, but not because the writing is bad, or scary for that matter. In fact, I wouldn’t call this horror, more like a paranormal thriller. Even when the book reaches the explosive conclusion, it’s not graphic enough to inspire any feelings of horror or fear. It is a solid ending, and the writing is good. It’s just not what I was expecting when I first opened the book.

So to simplify the premise, it’s basically Firestarter. All the same elements are here; a shady organization tampering with psi powers, a young child with powers that the organization covets, and a big finish illustrating the folly of their ways. I of course liked Firestarter, and so this story worked for me for many of the same reasons.

So why did I take so long to read it? Because the psi child in question, Sarah, has been locked up and drugged most of her life. Being stripped of her free will brought up some really dark stuff inside me about my own childhood, and and despite the wildly different circumstances Sarah is in, I had to walk away from the book for a long, long time. But once I finally came back to it, the second half wasn’t nearly as hard to read.

The protagonist, Jess Chambers, is well written, and easy to sympathize with throughout the story. She initially is told that Sarah is schizophrenic, and that she’s being brought in as a consultant in an effort to reach the young patient. But it quickly becomes clear that Sarah isn’t crazy, and that she possesses incredible psychic powers that the secretive Dr. Wasserman is trying to control. But to what end? And why was Jess brought in? The twist revealing why Jess was chosen isn’t surprising, and the way it’s revealed feels too rushed before the story moves to the big finale where Sarah does her best Charlie McGee impersonation. But that’s a minor complaint, and it doesn’t change my enjoyment of the story.

I’ve seen a lot of comparisons of Nate Kenyon’s writing style to Stephen King, and I think it’s a fair assessment. Kenyon has the same ability to make “real” characters who I can believe in even under the most fantastic circumstances. I know I keep comparing this to Firestarter, and I need to go back again because the tone of the stories is quite similar. Firestarter never quite reaches a proper horror vibe, and neither does The Reach. Which is not a bad thing. But if you were going into this expecting something super scary, you’re going to be disappointed.

I wasn’t disappointed, though, so I give The Reach four stars and would recommend it to fans of paranormal fiction.

Book review: Avenger’s Angel by Heather Killough-Walden

I wrote a long, spoilerific review about this book, the whole time banging the keys loudly with my angry typing. Then I realized, I don’t need to bother with all of this explaining why I hate the story in agonizing detail. All I have to say is that Avenger’s Angel must have been Twilight fan-fiction that got revised to include angels. I liked Twilight. No, I loved Twilight. But I hate this shit so bad, I want to scream until I lose my voice.

I knew this was going to be bad when the angels got a TARDIS house to live in, and when the male lead was a super famous movie star playing a vampire, while his brother IS a vampire who’s a world-famous rock singer like Lestat. So, they’re rich and famous, they all have AMAZING eyes, and they have a house that can be anywhere and anywhen. Can this story get anymore shit?

YES. Yes it can. It starts with the heroine being a virgin whose SOLE EXISTENCE is to be a contested piece of ass for a devil and an angel. Clearly, the author wants to make this a series with four books repeating the same pathetic plot over and over. Four women, four angels, and each time, they’re just prizes to be won.

No, fuck that. I’ve read better penny porn than this shit. *Takes deep breath* I give Avenger’s Angel one star. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a lot of strong drinks to erase this shit from my memory.

Game review: Hotline Miami for PS Vita

I’ve seen many favorable reviews for this game, and after completing it, I have to wonder what kind of sliding scale the reviewers were giving based on this being an indie title. It has to be kindness on their part, because if any major publisher released a game this bad, it would have been drubbed to death and given the lowest scores possible across the web from every reviewer. So I have to think it being an indie title is why so many people cut it some slack. Honestly, though, it doesn’t deserve any praise. As soon as I finish this review, I plan to delete that shit and hope the traumatic memories fade quickly.

Hotline Miami is a hot mess from start to finish, with ZERO redeeming qualities. Bad controls, bad hit detection, shoddy enemy AI, terrible graphics, lousy music, and glitches in every level. Even getting this at a discount, I wish the game makers would issue a formal apology and promise never to make another game as long as they live.

The game starts off with a recommendation to put on headphones, but honest to God, I wonder why they thought I’d want to listen to this irritating aural vomit. There’s no exceptions to my hate for the music in this game, and every level had me gritting my teeth. It’s like a worst of the NES era collection. The actual sound effects aren’t bad. But they’re not that great either. So if I were struggling to find something nice to say, the gun and punching sound effects didn’t irritate me.

The anemic story is about an unnamed contract killer taking missions from the Russian mafia to kill…the Russian mafia. The game is divided into parts and chapters, and during the cut-scenes between each part, the protagonist has dreams that show him three people in rubber animal masks. These dream conversations are painfully stupid, but then so is all the writing. Having just finished Metal Gear Solid 2, I will give this game one good point, in that the writing is very, very short. Mercifully short, even. But that doesn’t mean it’s any good. I know I’ve often said that video game writing as a rule is worse than Hollywood writing, but even by game standards, this is juvenile shit.

Each mission tasks you to drive to a building designed in a technicolor yawn of bad colors. Enemies, items, and the scenery look hand-drawn by a child with crayons. This would be bad enough as it is, but none of the levels resemble any real world building. It’s just a collection of stuff thrown together, none of which makes sense.

A lot of the levels are made to bump up the difficulty using cheap tactics. One level starts you off unarmed with a guard in the hallway, and the walls on both sides are glass. So you have to kill the guard, pick up his gun, and kill about six to seven guards in a little under two seconds. I did it, and I just know there’s some asshole thinking, But Zoe, don’t you feel a sense of accomplishment now for beating it? No, I feel irritated that these guys made such a shitty level and made me pay to play it.

It doesn’t help that the hit detection for melee weapons and guns is shit. I could swing a pipe or bat back and forth at a dude and see my weapon pass though him with no effect before he shot me. I could shoot some enemies three and four times with the bullets whizzing through them, and it doesn’t register. Doors are supposed to knock down enemies on the other side, and yet half the time, they just slip through their victim, and then swing closed. So more often then not, I didn’t die because of a lack of skill. I died because the game is buggier than a cockroach farm.

The controls are glitchy as well, and in addition to the imprecise handling, I found it was possible to get stuck on doorways. So instead of rushing into the room and whacking an enemy, I would circle around him, swing THROUGH him twice, and then get stuck on the door in my attempted retreat. So then he kills me, and I get to start the whole fucking level over. Whee, this is so much fun.

And then there’s the X button, which I’m supposed to use to kill an enemy after knocking them down with punches. Only, it’s inconsistent in how it works. It might require six hits to kill a guy one time, or it might require two. I might pick up the enemy instead, which almost always results in another guard killing me, or I might kick their head in. It might make me drop my weapon, or it might not. Consistency isn’t important here, apparently. Oh, and randomly, even the melee weapons fail to kill someone, so they go crawling all over the place in hands down the lousiest animation sequence in the entire game. I have to go stand over them and press X, or they’ll just crawl all over the place and deny me my kill score. But of course, they can crawl past their buddies without anyone being even remotely concerned.

Which brings me to the enemy AI…God, what a bunch of crusty ass. There’s a tip in between levels that says gunfire attracts their attention. Well, it’s only if YOU fire a gun. If one enemy fires a gun, even with other enemies in the room, no one seems to notice or care. Even when it’s you shooting a gun, it’s iffy if enemies in the same room will react to you. And yet, in other levels, everyone hears you, and they all come running to dog-pile your ass. Some enemies seem to hear you through walls even using melee weapons and can find you even if you’re hiding. All enemies can see behind themselves, so there is no sneaking up on anyone, ever. Some enemies walk through walls at random intervals. And all enemies look to be drawn by a first grader. (Which has nothing to do with the AI, but bears repeating.)

After each mission, the character goes to one of four locations; a grocery store, a nightclub, a pizzeria, or a video store. But no matter where he goes, the same dude works there. He might have a different hat or a ponytail, but it’s always the same dude. It’s like, “Man, drawing these characters in Crayola is SO HARD. Screw it, I’ll just use the same guy in all these scenes.” In all cases, the dude looks like the art project of a little kid. And no matter which location you visit, he’s got nothing useful to say. Later levels have this guy killed off and replaced with…with a mafia dude, I guess. By this point, I have no idea what’s going on, and my give-a-shit meter is stuck all the way at the bottom of the gauge.

The end of each part leads to boss fights, all of which are aggravatingly cheap. One in particular involves a car driving into the building and running you over. You die, and you go back to that same spot, to be run over again. There’s only one room to run to for cover, and a passenger in the car has an unlimited supply of Molotov cocktails to firebomb you with. Meantime, you only have the ammo in your current gun and whatever gun might be in the room. Since the item placement is randomized, you might have to commit suicide multiple times to even find a decent gun to defend yourself with. And the thing is, at least they gave you a gun at all. Several boss fights force you to use melee weapons against these cheap ass motherfuckers.

When you get to the end of this shit sandwich, there’s a “twist” that puts you in the hospital. The escape involves some “camera” tricks that make the screen sway and fill with grainy static, and every time this happened, I wanted to vomit. The game sends you off to kill all the cops and interrogate the perp who tried to assassinate you. He tells you to search the police records, and those files help you hunt down the people who have been hiring you to kill everyone. Why? Because they done killed your hooker and shot you in the head. Why? No fucking clue. But the story has been a shit sandwich from the start, so why would we expect the ending to be any better?

That final fight pits you against what looks like purple panthers and a hooker armed with a katana and…possibly blow darts? I don’t know, it all looks like kiddie art, so it’s hard to tell what anything was supposed to be. Oh, and you fight these enemies with what looks like a trophy. You kill the cats by bashing them to death, throw the same trophy at the hooker, and then smash her face against the floor until her head bursts. Then the boss behind the desk starts shooting an unlimited number of machine guns at you until you throw…I really have no fucking clue, but I had to do it twice while the asshole was reloading, and after that, he commits suicide. Then you go kill the old dude in charge and that’s the end of the game. The protagonist lights up a cigarette and tosses something over the balcony, and cue the closing credits. And my only thought was, Oh thank God, it’s over.

BUT NO. After completing the credits, I have to go through several more levels with another character to get “the truth,” and to make this even more “fun” I’m limited to the character’s knife as my sole weapon. I can’t pick up or use anything else. These extra levels are a pain in the ass, and ultimately, the payoff can’t really have happened because I killed this dude as one of the level bosses. Really, this whole story is dumb. Like Forrest Gump dumb.

There’s really nothing nice to say about this piece of shit. The story is childish and doesn’t make sense. The graphics look like they’re drawn by a five-year-old, and the music sounds like it was composed in an hour by their ten-year-old big brother on a cheap Casio keyboard. The game design is cheap and shitty, and the controls are aggravatingly glitchy. So again, I have to wonder how this got so many good reviews when it’s probably one of the lousiest games I’ve played in a long time.

I give Hotline Miami 1 star. It’s a waste of time, money, and space on my memory card.

Book review: World War Z by Max Brooks

Okay, I give up. I’ve been trying not to have as many “will not finish” books lately, but my God, this shit is dull and naive. At this point, hubby wants me to quit because he’s sick of me yelling at him at the end of each “interview” about what’s wrong with this book. So yeah, fuck it, I’m done.

The first part of the book is a lengthy explanation for why no one notices a zombie outbreak in our modern age. It’s the cliched “what are these unknown monsters” trope that horror can’t seem to get away from. And not only is the author completely wrong about the intelligence capabilities of the US, he’s apparently unaware of the speed at which even the smallest incidents are reported on social media. He has to twist himself in knots to explain why no one noticed, and he’s WRONG. Not just a little wrong. Completely, totally, utterly wrong.

*Takes deep breaths* God, what a fucking schmuck.

To put this in perspective, the Rakhine Buddhists can’t even kill a few Muslims in Burma/Myanmar without me knowing about it. No revolt can go on for more than a day before I see it on my Twitter feed. I know when there’s an earthquake, even something minor like a 2.1 on the Richter scale. But according to this doofus, NO ONE noticed a zombie apocalypse for months? Yuh-huh. And even when they did notice, they “thought it was rabies”? Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me?

I might forgive that, but the other problem is, I know how the book will end based on the introduction. I know that every single unlikable asshole interviewed will be fine because this is all in past tense, after the humans triumph over the zombies. And this is bullshit. Why should I feel anything for any of these people? They’re mostly assholes, and none of them is capable of talking about events in such a way to inspire any emotion besides contempt. These are the people I would hope get eaten in the apocalypse. But no, they all survived, and I know that before they even start their interviews. It kills any sense of suspense, and this book should be a manual on how NOT to write a zombie novel.

I give World War Z 1 star and if I wasn’t so opposed to burning books, I’d chuck this fucker in a fire and do the world a favor. What a crock of shit. If you want to read a good zombie book, go look up something by Brian Keene, but give this tired shit a pass.

Book Review: Dead Rules by R.S. Russell

I really don’t know how to feel about this book. It’s badly written, and I should be in my typical eye twitchy mood. But as I reached the end of the book, I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. This confuses me even more than some of the ambiguous writing in this story.

To start with, I thought from the blurb that Dead Rules was some kind of zombie book, and some of the early chapters made me think that. But then it became clear that the characters were ghosts being boarded in some kind of private ghost school for teens. But the ghost kids need to drink water to avoid dehydration. I have no clue why, because like everything else, this was never explained. Why are kids grouped into Risers and Sliders? Why are the rules defining good and bad kids so random and arbitrary? If following the rules is so important, why is the only copy of the rulebook supposedly written in Aramaic? Why do teens in comas end up in this school if they aren’t dead yet? And if this school is meant to give kids a second chance before moving on to heaven or hell, why are they not allowed to do anything except sit in dull classes? It’s like purgatory, but even more painful and dull.

The book also starts off with some seriously messed up objectification of virginity. Jana, the main character, died a virgin, but because she let her boyfriend touch her boob, she isn’t “pure enough” to be a Virgin. Virgins, with the capitalized title, are a special class of ghost who glow and wear white clothes. They’re used at the school to act as the period bells, and they sing everything instead of talking. They don’t interact with the other kids because they’re so Special. Why? I don’t know, the writer never bothers to explain anything in this book. But anyway, within the first chapter, it’s established that Jana is a good girl because she’s a virgin, and another character, Sherry, is really bad because “she’s a whore.” Later on, another ghost student is said to have been expelled because “she slept around.” Right, okay, once again, a YA story places value on characters based on whether they’re good little virgins or skanky hos who can’t keep their slut legs closed. Nothing new here. I’ll move along. (But seriously, I wonder how teens who have had consensual sex before they’re “legal” must feel when almost every YA writer keeps telling them they’re worthless because only virgins can be good people.)

The writing is terrible, and I’m still not sure why an editor didn’t get rid of some of this clunky stuff. You want examples? Okay, here:

Henry made an actor’s face, opening his eyes wide and tossing his pupils from side to side.

She pointed to herself and turned her face into a question mark.

As her eyes moved back and forth, watching each of his watch her…

This is before we even get to the story premise, which is about Jana, a girl who loves her boyfriend Michael so, so much that she wants to kill him to make sure they can stay together forever. Thing is, Michael isn’t so keen on being with her, and never was. Even though most normal people would just break up with an “It’s not you, it’s me” speech, he kills her, and then spends the rest of the book insisting that it was really just an accident, and he totally didn’t mean to kill her, even though he did. He also spends the rest of the book blackmailing his friends to keep them quiet, even though “we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Another scene that’s still “bugging” me is how Jana can’t flick an ant off of her arm because she’s a ghost and can’t affect living things. BUT, if she can’t affect living things, how is the ant even walking on her arm? And this is just one of dozens of questions I have that never get answered. Why do students inside the school seemingly have physical bodies, right down to having pulses and needing to breathe? Why are Sliders warmer than Risers? Why did the council of regents set this system up, and who are the council of regents? If one dude died with his face frozen in his last expression, why doesn’t everyone have their faces stuck in that final pose? I don’t know. None of this stuff makes any sense. I feel like I’ve read a rough draft of some fan-fiction, only no one told me which fandom it was attached to. Like, if I knew what show or comic this came from, all my questions might have answers from writers with better talent. Here, I’m just left asking “huh?” a lot.

A logical, analytical part of my brain keeps insisting that I should be mad like I normally am with a bad book; the head hopping, the muddled world-building, the seeming lack of anything resembling competent editing… I should hate this book with a burning passion. This review should be peppered with my usual dose of f-bombs. But I don’t feel anything, so why not? Obviously the book isn’t working for me, but what’s holding me back from going super seiyan ragin’?

I don’t know. I do know this is a bad book, and not something I’d recommend to anyone. I can give it a low score because it’s not good or worth my time. But where’s my usual outrage? And if the book sucks so badly, why did I finish it in only a few days?

I guess it will be one of those mysteries I can’t solve. In any case, I give Dead Rules two stars. Maybe my lack of emotion is because this book is pretty much standard fare in YA, and I’ve seen some of these things so often, I’m now incapable of reacting. Maybe it’s just that YA writing is so lazy as a rule that my expectations are so greatly lowered, the same mistakes that once pissed me off no longer set me off. It’s a theory, and one I’ll have to wait and see when I dip into another bad YA read.

Game review: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty HD Edition for PS Vita

With the Metal Gear HD collection going on sale for February, I thought 13 euros for two games was a decent deal. I hadn’t played anything from the series since the NES games, which I’d learned writer Hideo Kojima had said weren’t “true to the spirit of the series.” I’m not really a fan of those games anyway, so I figured, “Eh, what could it hurt?”

MY BRAIN. IT HURT MY BRAIN.

You know what’s going to stick with me about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty more than anything else? After completing the first tanker mission with Solid Snake, I’m sent out to an oil rig with a new character, Raiden. Every five feet, my “nano-phone” went off, “duh-deet duh-deet duh-deet!” And here’s the asshole colonel to walk me through a tutorial of the basics, like I didn’t just do this shit already. I couldn’t make it anywhere in the game without someone calling me to talk. I couldn’t even save the game without having lengthy conversations pop up. There were 30 minute cut scenes followed immediately by ten minute conference calls with the colonel and Raiden’s clingy girlfriend so everyone can talk about how they feel about this new revelation. Raiden would be upset, the colonel would say it was all irrelevant and to keep going with the standing orders, and Rose would say “The colonel is right, Jack.” That starts another five minutes of repeating the same things over and over as an argument before Raiden says, “Fine! What are my orders?” So the colonel can repeat himself a third time, and finally, I can move two feet before DUH-DEET DUH-DEET DUH-DEET.

Motherfucker.

THIS is the biggest sin Kojima makes throughout the game. If he could kindly shut the fuck up and let me get used to these shitty controls and forced camera angles, I might have some old school affection for the game play itself. It reminds me a lot of playing Resident Evil 2, and for the good kind of reasons. But I couldn’t enjoy that because every single time I started to get immersed in what I was doing, here we go again with “duh-deet duh-deet duh-deet! Hi Raiden, I just wanted to repeat your mission objective for the twelfth time. You know, in case you forgot from the last time I reminded you one minute ago.”

And the cut scenes. My God, I’d heard Kojima had a problem with exposition, but the man simply will not shut the fuck up and get out of the way of his game. Worse, even if Raiden just covered the same topics with another character, when a character in a cut scene says some technobabble word, Raiden has to repeat it as a question, queuing up another lengthy repeat of what I’ve already heard, but said in a different way. And by the by, most of the technobabble is atrociously stupid. I lost track of the number of times when I sighed and said, “Really? That’s the best you could come up with? God, you’re such a fucking idiot.”

Kojima doesn’t like women, apparently, since every single woman in this game is killed for weakly dramatic effect. Twice, I had the thought, Raiden is standing right fucking there, and he didn’t even bother trying to save them despite the villains spending a LONG time talking. But in both cases, he just sits there and lets them be murdered. He’s the most pathetic and ineffectual game character I’ve ever seen.

And while I’m talking about Raiden, how did Kojima think this character was a good idea? He’s whiny, dense, and so unlikable that even his girlfriend had to be set up with him as a mission. The president cups his nuts just to make sure he has a set, and he’s still surprised that Raiden’s a guy. This guy is supposedly a hardened killer trained in war, and then given “900 hours” of VR simulation to make him the perfect killer. And yet, he can’t go five minutes without crying or having a temper tantrum.

This plot is full of “perfect” conspiracies; of double, triple, and even quadruple crosses; and of secret agendas that must be explained in lengthy, nauseating detail. I have never yelled “Will you shut the fuck up” so often during any other video game. I just wanted to move on to the next objective, and maybe if my damned nano-phone had ever stopped ringing, I might have even liked doing that.

I haven’t even gotten into problems I had with the game play, like walking around in broad daylight a few feet in front of a guard without him seeing me. If it were a dim hallway I could see it being more likely, since I had often run into guards who didn’t show up on my radar map, and who I didn’t see as anything but a hazy outline until I was maybe ten feet away from them. But outside the rig on the struts, those guards should have had improved visibility, and they didn’t. They also had the typical intelligence of in-game guards. Dude just saw me right in front of him, but I turned and walked around a stack of crates, and suddenly, out of sight, out of mind. It’s not even worth radioing in for a backup. While I’m on that topic, why don’t the guards I tranqued wake up and report that there’s an intruder? If someone shot me in the ass and I woke up face first on the floor, the first thing I’d do is radio HQ and say, “Hey, I got shot with a tranq dart. We have an intruder.” But not these guys. They just yawn, stretch, and go back to patrolling uselessly around. This is possibly the worst security team ever.

In conclusion, what we have here is a video game that talked all the fun right out of the experience. I think Hideo Kojima could talk through sex and ruin that, too. (“I’m putting my erect penis into your vagina, and the friction will please you. You are now pleased, are you not? I certainly am pleased, for my penis is inside your vagina…”) The only thing keeping me from a full-on rage rant is, I only paid 13 euros for the two games I got, and that makes this roughly 6.50 of wasted time. That’s not so bad. Had I bought this at full price, I might have a lot more to say about how much I hated this overwrought, half baked dog shit pie.

But as it is, I’ll just give Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty 2 stars. I know I’ll have to play the other game sometime this month, since I paid for it, but with this being my first entry into the wacky world of Kojima-land, I gotta say, I don’t know how this man kept the series going when he has such a horrible grasp on his job as a game writer. Having read a few Japanese novelists, I think his brand of introspection at the expense of plot, character development, and pacing would be right at home within the Japanese thriller market. But as a game writer, the man just gets on my tits because he won’t shut the fuck up and let me play the damned game.