Le Cinema Du Beatles

I recently watched Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, a live action (with some animation) musical drama set in the 1960s and 70s to music from The Beatles. I'm a big fan of The Beatles (not as odd a fit for a metalhead as you might imagine) and was looking forward to the film. I'm not a follower of Taymor's work per se but I liked her Shakespeare adaptation, Titus.

Across The Universe was odd. On the one hand the perfomers made mostly credible performances (particularly Dana Fuchs) and it was well filmed. But the literalization of the songs... that is, setting the songs into contexts within a real-world story was really jarring. When I listen to The Beatles I don't necessarily have a specific set of mind-pics to go with the tone and lyrics. The closest thing might be the old-fashioned and cliche answer of 'psychelic imagery'.... more or less like the animated film Yellow Submarine. I just know concrete 'romantic drama' scenes, however appropriate they might be to the time The Beatles reigned, just doesn't work. So this film might be the worst case of 'doesn't go with how I imagined it' that I've ever seen... and as I said, I don't have specific imaginings for the songs. The trippy scenes (I Am The Walrus, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite) were the most 'accurate' to me.

I'm not an acid-head or anything, but Yellow Submarine (and earlier live action Beatle films as well as the album covers) probably have limited my view. In addition I'd have to say that Yellow Submarine is an incredible film itself, almost criminally underappreciated today. I can't believe how much my kids like it too, considering the time it was made, the Peter Max art style, and how 'dinosaur days' The Beatles themselves are. But you can't kill great music it seems. The children wanted, and have had, The Beatles on their ipods for ages now.

I think Across The Universe was an okay film and I have to respect it for attempting the herculean task of trying to make a 'new' Beatles picture, as it were. Particularly trying to make it literal. But I just couldn't get hip.

Right On.

This.

As a regular movie-goer I can only dream of a world where every theater was like this.

King er, Prin-- uh, DUKE for a day...

Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury is a fun, but grueling game from bizarro hardcore developer Treasure. I loved the Dreamcast Bangai-O, lo those many years ago, and this is a fine, though brutal sequel. It lacks much of the wackiness and character of that original game with its dearth of dialogue or cartoon cast, but it has its own advantages with the Xbox 360's graphical power allowing hitherto unseen levels of enemy and projectile mayhem. This game may have the highest levels of onscreen virtual death ever. And that's saying something considering what a Cave game looks like.

Some levels were giving me real trouble. If Bangai-O HD has one weakness (apart from no goofy characters) it is the wildly uneven difficulty level between stages. Unlike the Dreamcast version (or the concurrent N64 one) this Bangai-O is more strategy-oriented and less on-the-fly skill oriented. Each stage is like a puzzle, and usually has very few... maybe even only one... solution to get through. That solution frequently has to do with finding the quickest way to kill the most enemies and beat a timer. That has been my biggest foe throughout the game... the damn clock. Frequently I had the skills to get through a stage only to run up against a shortage in time. And that would almost be fine if it weren't for the fact that there is no real sense of difficulty progression. Some of the hardest, most frustrating levels actually occurred early in the game... again almost always based around the clock. The game doesn't 'teach' you a new technique or a new way to use an old technique with an stage. Nope, the game introduces each new concept with a level that expects you to do it with masterful timing.

You need very specific techniques or a very specific sequence in many of the stages, and it can be hair-pulling to find out what that is particulary considering how broad the number of abilities your mecha has. The Bangai-O robot is supremely powerful and you need it considering how much shit your flying through in the game, but so many of the stages are completely based around one single aspect of the robot so the flexibility doesn't come into play.

Stage 40, which has both a very specific difficult technique needed, AND a severe time limit, was giving me the most trouble. NO videos online at Youtube, and though Bangai-O lets top-ten leaderboard players post replays, other players like me can't look at 'em 'til we finish the level (to force you to figure it out yourself). And Gamefaqs-based player advice was not helpful. So I had to play it over and over and over and over again. My kids were absolutely sick of seeing that screen by the time I got through it. I had the correct strategy I just couldn't pull it off under the time limit. For an occasional break I'd complete a stage PAST stage 40 and then come back to try again. I left the final stage alone mostly.

So when I finally finish 40 and get onto 47, the final stage of the games main 'Fury Mode' I find the boss to be pretty tough. You have to go through a long series of rooms full of enemies before you get to him only to get your ass handed to you in two seconds. Then you have to do the level all over again... and again. It's a lot of work to go through to get to try something against him... and then have it fail. But the game has a room editor. So my kid (the tinkerer) built a stage roughly the size of the final battle room and plunked the boss, Crazy King, into it so I could practice fighting him.

When I'd played the practice room a dozen or more times and worked out how to kill him, I went back to stage 47 and defeated him on the second go. Afterwards I thought I'd look at the top leaderboard replays and see how the really skilled players did it.

Only there really aren't any players above me. Okay, there are TWO.

I'm NUMBER THREE on the leaderboards? Holy crap. I don't think THAT'S going to last long. Interestingly for me, the number one player uses almost the EXACT same technique for defeating Crazy King. He did the rooms before the boss 'better' than I did to get his higher score, but he didn't finish the level much sooner.

Basking in my short-lived moment of nerd glory. Man, I'm so hardcore! Now ALL the chicks'll dig me!

Too Much... Even For Me

In the sidebar at the time of this writing, I'm listing under 'Last Watched' the 'film' Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus. I have, for the first time since starting this blog, put 'partial' after the title because I just couldn't get through it. I barely got through twenty minutes actually.

Yes. Yes.With that title I should've known there's no way the movie could be good. But I love giant monster movies, though mostly the ones I like fall under Japanese kaiju films or American and European B-movies (or Harryhausen films) from the 1950s. I can't really recall an American giant monster film I've ever enjoyed apart from the recent Cloverfield from J.J. Abrams.

But I was at least hoping for a 'so bad it's entertaining' experience. I didn't get that. Instead I lost twenty minutes of my life and untold brain cells feeding that dreck into my eyeballs. Totally drunk and with a bunch of friends wouldn't improve this. At least streaming on NetFlix lets you check something like this out without the commitment of a drive to a store or even the effort of putting it out in your mailbox.

Yike.

And get this: the outfit that made it, The Asylum, specializes in these direct to DVD releases... AND this film is the second Mega Shark masterpiece. That's right, if The Asylum were thinking what most studios do with sequels... making them bigger and better this atrocity actually ups the ante over the previous Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus.

These are like parodies of movies you'd find on billboards within other films or video games.

Motherfrickin' Missile Fury

My son, twelve years old, is much more open-minded to the older 2D gaming styles than any of his friends seem to be, but the new Xbox Live Arcade title Bangai-O: Missile Fury is probably way too hard for him. He's given it a few tries, completed a few early levels here and there, but he doesn't have the patience to work out the games intricacies. And I don't blame him, it's pretty rough.

However. There is one thing he agrees on, and you'd have to be blind or an utter fool to disagree. Nothing, repeat NOTHING in video gaming compares to the sweet ultimate power of unleashing a full-power 1000-count counter-attack. It has been that way on every system that the Bangaio series has appeared on... and is doubly so now that you can pump up the size and power of your counter-attacks up to four-fold.

The above screen shot pretty much says it. The screen of your Xbox 360 will pause and then erupt in slow white molten fury as you utterly annihilate everything around you. And as often as you get to do this in the game, IT NEVER GETS OLD! Especially with the bounce laser-- a blue-white sun of destruction that leaves an afterimage on the gamer's retina.

Rest of the game's good too.
(image cribbed from Eurogamer)

Nin2 Jump Pisses Me Off

Cave put a tiny new game up on Xbox Live Arcade, the score attack platformer Nin2 Jump. A big departure from their usual forte, bullet hell shooters, this download title I'd describe as the art-style of Okami mashing up with the quick and deadly get-thru-the-room play of Super Meat Boy. In addition it has mechanics that look superficially like the grapple arm from Bionic Commando. You use this 'manriki' chain tool to lift yourself over spike beds and past buzzsaws or target enemies for you to then power through.

I love the shadow play art style. I don't find the 'kids in the audience' flourish to be distracting. I'm used to bullet hell shooters so I don't find the occasions where the screen fills with stuff to be confusing. I like the quick restart and one-more-go addictiveness of the game. The bosses, like Fujiyama illustrated above, are really neat and different. There's only one thing that really gets to me, and it is kind of important.

The controls.

Wow, do they suck. I cannot, absolutely CANNOT get the chain weapon to go where I want it to. As stated, you must use this thing to get around the hazards. Sometimes you even need to do something fairly dextrous like use it to anchor and haul yourself horizontally in mid-air while falling down towards some spikes. In most games, with a little practice I find this sort of thing pretty easy. I've played A LOT of platforming games in my time with similar mechanics. In Nin2 Jump it makes me want to eat a gun. The chain does not shoot out in the same direction as I'm indicating on the controller with any consistency. The game does not register a button release (so that you haul up on the chain to safety) with any regularity. Most of the time pulling off even simple moves is sheer luck. What does it say when World 2 took ages to complete because of all the chain bullshit, but World 3 took one-quarter the time, because it has no traps, just enemies to defeat, and that requires timing and gauge management... not precise manipulations of the chain.

I'm reading online how the game is just so easy. Oooh, you'll have no trouble at all with the story mode. Motherfucker. Did I get some kind of bum controller? It isn't having problems in any other game! I'm all for challenge, but not when the challenge is inherent in control difficulties. That's like some hold over from old frustrating 8-bit games. I HAVE read one or two people say this game's controls give them fits... so I'm not totally insane.

I want to love this game. Most games from Cave make me all tingly down there. But this is just nuts!

You Remember that Carl Douglas Song? Yeah...

I'll maintain that the new Mortal Kombat has the best single player experience of any fighting game since Soul Calibur 2... maybe the best ever.

But 300 (yes, THREE HUNDRED) levels to the Challenge Tower mode is a bit much. The game already has a several hour long story mode. It has lots of fighters to toy with and play through the basic one-player fight 'ladder' and even non-fighting game activities, the Test Your Might and Test Your Sight sections.

I'm up to challenge 83 or so. Some of the challenges are easy and quick, some take a bit of time to get the hang of. But even if I spend an hour a day (and at this point they aren't so engrossing as to spend more than that) which would get about ten challenges done, that's over twenty days to completion.

THREE WEEKS. Holy crap. I want value for money, and Mortal Kombat has more than already delivered... but jeezo pete that's just too much. Seems like a dumb thing to complain about but this one of the few games where I could genuinely have enjoyed having 'done everything'. Lots of neat unlockables and generous gamerpoints.

I'll still pick away at this, but I've already found myself sliding back to spending more time with Super Street Fighter IV. That game doesn't have nearly the one-player content, but the actual fighting engine is something I like a lot better. Street Fighter IV (not Super) basically triggered the new modern happy-time for 2D fighting games. New titles (as opposed to re-releases or HD remakes) we've seen on home consoles:

King of Fighters XII
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift
Tatsunoko vs Capcom
Street Fighter IV
Super Street Fighter IV
Marvel vs Capcom 3
Arcana Heart 3
Mortal Kombat (2011)

Upcoming still:

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition
King of Fighters XIII
Street Fighter X Tekken

I'm sure I missed something in the lists above too!

Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Mortal Kombat have definitely taken attention and traffic away from SSFIV, but the fact that Street Fighter has another update coming and is absolutely the best balanced technical fighting game means I probably have great timing to be learning and re-learning my Street Fighter chops.

Online competition is brutal for reasons mentioned in a previous post, and it is only going to get worse. But at least I find myself getting better, even if it only by inches.