Review; Ratchet And Clank (2002)

The original Ratchet and Clank is the perfect midpoint between 3D platformer and third person shooter.

And that's not the greatest thing.

While sequels would refine how to better blend fast paced shooting with clever platforming, this first installment manages to execute on the platforming well enough but drops the ball in the shooter mechanics, with a serious aversion to adopting a twin stick layout. That's not to say all shooter games would benefit from a twin stick layout but Ratchet and Clank 2002 definitely would.

It's hard for me to recommend anyone play the game to completion. There's a stealth section near the end that unceremoniously marks the point where the game stops being fun. Going back to Veldin for the endgame is especially more of a chore than a victory lap. And while the weapon selection is too large to fit inside your quick select, there's very little flow and synergy between Ratchet's arsenal. Your tactical options are severely limited and it leaves you wanting for even the basics of any respectable shooter's weapon selection. If nothing else, just one sniper weapon. Just one.

You'll also find that the bolt requirements will suddenly skyrocket in the mid to end game and you'll go from comfortably growing your arsenal to feeling like you have far too much money for just ammo and far too little to buy anything meaningful, with the best solution being the treasure hunter gadget you can acquire. It left me wishing for some sort of combat arena or a series of platforming gauntlets to play for money, and I'd even accept the asinine Quark minigames from the third game.

And no, hoverboard racing does not count. You make nearly nothing from it.

While the story is actually kind of a highlight and there are gags that are genuinely funny, it's perfectly okay to give this one a miss. Overall it's perhaps the worst of the PS2 games and I'd recommend any game that comes after just before it, but there's still fun to be had if you can grit your teeth through a frustrating end game.

If you must, I would recommend playing it at least for long enough to acquire the employee discount and most of the weapons, sans the more expensive ones.

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Since When Did Fascists Start Liking Harry Potter?

Hey, you know what I love? Harry Potter.

Like, every couple years I watch every movie in a marathon because those were some of my first experiences with the artistry of cinema, rather than the junkfood movies I'd thought were the ceiling. I love the theme song so much it makes me feel a warmth in my chest.

And I still respect the hell out of JK Rowling, for her achievements. She's done a ton of charity work, has given more money to charity than even most millionaires will see and her story as a writer inspires me to try harder with my writing.

However, recently it's been hard. I don't agree with the a lot of the choices she's made lately, and she's disappointed me plenty. And I recognize the tough position she must be in, but I think that power and influence comes with responsibility and one has to try act as ethically as possible.

I don't want this to get too political, and I get that people wanna have a good laugh, but there's this icky feeling I get when I see Rowling criticized for Hermoine's stage play casting with the same fevor as she gets criticized for the queerbaiting stuff. There's an icky feeling I get when I see people call details about Dumbledore's sex life gross, but no one batting an eye about Voldermort's secret daughter. I get an icky feeling when people use a mocked up tweet to criticize JK Rowling when she hasn't actually said anything as egregious as the 'wizard poop' retcon. There's an icky feeling I get when I see criticism for JK Rowling weaponized towards the goal of the radicalization of people who just wanna see themselves represented in the work.

To that end, I just wanna say, be careful when you're disappointed to be a little more scrutinizing? I'm afraid for the future. I'm afraid that there's going to be a co-opting of the discourse by radicalized individuals. I'm afraid that this thing I loved when I was a kid is going to be hard to enjoy because we stopped talking about how we felt when we first read/watched it but instead are caught up in stuff that we know we shouldn't care about, but also can't avoid.

Hey, you know what I like? Harry Potter. You wanna talk about how much you like Harry Potter? I think you should. You wanna talk about what you dislike about Harry Potter? I think you should.

I just don't think you should spend too much time dog piling on JK Rowling. Not accusing you personally of anything, but when you've dog piled on top of someone, sometimes it's hard to see that the people you're dog piling with are radicalized towards rhetoric that you yourself find abhorrent.

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Review: Shadow The Hedgehog (2005)

Remember when you were a kid and you had a lot of angst and you went through this edgy period that you now cringe at as an adult?

Shadow The Hedgehog is the ill-conceived pseudo sequel to Sonic Heroes and Adventure 2, as well as one of the last games Yuji Naka worked on before leaving Sonic Team and Sega.

Before we go any further, I’d like to posit that by ill-conceived I don’t mean that it was a bad idea to make the game, just that the concept was under-developed, much like Shadow’s character. A spin-off game based off a then-popular character could have been a booster shot that sparked new life and interest in the franchise. And Shadow was the ideal candidate. But alas, instead, we now live in the timeline where Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic ’06 were released just one year apart.

To start at the top, progression through the narrative of the game is needlessly complex for how simple it really is. Shadow, who still doesn’t have his memories back, sees an invasion attempt happening and from there he goes on a quest to learn about his own past. After some soul searching, Shadow comes to a conclusion about who he is and what he feels his role in the world is.

And to the game’s credit, I actually like the mechanical structuring of morality. Rather than being a text prompt, you have to actively help people to be good, serve Black Doom in order to be evil or kind of just run past everything. The actual act of being good or bad usually boils down to annoying quests where you have to collect or destroy X amount of things for Y character, but I like the idea more than the implementation.

And yeah, you are going to have the most fun running past everything because the core issue that lies in the heart of Shadow The Hedgehog is that it’s kind of just a mediocre Sonic game with little pieces of Devil May Cry combat attached. Shadow has the Venom problem where he exists not as a character foil to the hero, but as a shadow-self, a dark doppelganger, a personified version of the path not taken. In gameplay, that amounts to Shadow being a texture swap with a bad attitude. Whereas a game based on Tails might include more flight based platforming puzzles and a game based on Knuckles would deal more with gliding, Shadow kind of boils down to being more of an aesthetic choice. But unlike in Adventure 2, Shadow’s moveset here is so weak. Hand to hand combat is so tacked on that if you tug on it too hard, it will fall off. The spindash is an actual joke. The homing attack at least works alright, but it’s not quite the powerhouse that some weapons are.

Shadow’s chaos powers are woefully under-utilized. Filling either the hero or dark bar gives you the ability to either use Chaos Control or Chaos Blast, but neither are more useful than just the passive bonus of having unlimited ammo with your currently equipped weapon. Furthermore, Chaos Control, which you build up doing “heroic” things actually fundamentally clashes with the collectathon structure of Hero missions, as you whiz by all of the objectives. Chaos Blast is kind of just a screen nuke, but it doesn’t do as much damage as the flashy visuals would suggest. Like, Sonic Heroes managed to make the ability halfway useful, here it just feels like a gimped version of the team attack.

The music is… Actually enjoyable, in a cheesy Nu Metal kind of way. Almost Dead is actually a banger, in a way that only try-hard 2000s Rob Zombie sound-alikes can be. The music probably gets closer to that Devil May Cry aesthetic the game is trying to chase.

And what’s kind of baffling is that there already is a version of this game that works; It’s called Ratchet and Clank. And although Ratchet and Clank is a lot slower, it executes the hybrid of third person shooting and platforming much more eloquently. This was the game Shadow The Hedgehog should probably have tried to imitate.

Final thoughts; this is not a game one plays with a completionist mindset, unless you really like Westopolis, because getting all the endings means playing Westopolis 10 times. The game is also trying way too hard, I mean, just listen to these menu sound effects. I remember having some fun with the multiplayer, but it’s entirely skippable.

And my last point is this; The middle of the road ending which you get from going off and doing your own thing while the plot happens at you is perhaps the only ending that has any real narrative stakes to it. You get to the end and Shadow concludes that he is an android, built to replace the Shadow that died in Adventure 2. He doesn’t remember anything because he physically never experienced those things. And this would have been kind of a great move to pull and I kind of wish this was the canon ending. See, as an Android, there’s a lot more room for Shadow and Omega to do some buddy cop stuff if they were both Eggman’s creations who kind of hate their creator. There’d be room for Shadow to have a narrative arc in future games where he tries to find his place in the world as the lookalike of the martyred Shadow in Adventure 2. Shadow would actually have a reason to explore intense rage as a being not really programmed with a lot of empathy, while trying to live up to the legacy of the original Shadow could be a motivation for Shadow to actually develop that empathy. And the on and off again rivalry between Shadow and Sonic would have extra dramatic stakes as Shadow now not only wants to prove that he’s better than Sonic, but it’s also a battle to prove that he isn’t just a shadow of Shadow the hedgehog.

The canon ending has Shadow discover he’s part alien and re-learning the lessons he already learned in Heroes and Adventure 2, and if that part alien thing comes out of left field and seems tacked on and pointless, don’t worry, because Sega all but forgets it ever happened.

All Hail Shadow, indeed.

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As It Turns Out, DC's Titans Is Pretty Good

I was not rooting for this show. DC's Titans is the kind of ill-conceived premise that you'd think would leave a show dead-on-arrival. The marketing for this thing promised a surreal, overly gritty and superficially mature show with all the trappings that come with it.

Except DC's Titans is actually kind of good?

Trust me, I was the last person to expect something like that to happen. I saw the trailers, the same as you did and when Robin dropped the f-bomb and put some disrespect on Batman's name I was ready to hate-watch this thing as it turned into a glorious edgelord nightmare.

Turns out that I got a pretty great version of the Doom Patrol in the sneakiest backdoor pilot I've seen in a while, along with some pretty cathartic confrontations between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. Hawk and Dove also turned out to be characters I unironically love and oh, man Wonder Girl? Even Wonder Girl was lovable. And I thought I was going to hate Starfire but Anna Diop was kind of acting circles around the rest of the cast and doing it while wearing actual fashion crimes.

It's not all good.

The effects can look cheap, poor Anna Diop's costuming suffers, the show dips into some adorable levels of edginess, Raven's character is kind of incoherent and there are as many gorgeous shots as there are moments of colour palette drab.

But that's as much as I can say. As it turns out, DC's Titans might not be the most faithful to the source material and it sure doesn't have a lot of respect for convention but maybe that's the best part about it. In a lot of ways, it is the superficially mature show that the marketing promised but in a lot of others, it's a clever new spin on a gritty group of characters dealing with a violent world while wearing superhero masks. For all its faults, DC's Titans is actually one of the better versions of the Teen Titans. It's not gonna compete with your nostalgia for the 2003 show but you'd be surprised how well the Teen Titans work when filtered through the lens of Watchmen.

Hard recommend. It might not be for everyone but you'll probably be surprised at how much this is probably for you.

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It's Not A Phase, Dad! Also, I Didn't Like Amo.

The year is 2019 and had anyone told me I'd be writing about Bring Me The Horizon's new album I'd have hugged them with glee, just knowing the album would be worth writing about.

Now I'm decidedly less psyched.

For what it's worth, I don't hate the album. I think it's great that they're experimenting with new sounds and trying new things. I can think of at least 3 tracks that I love and I'd be damn excited to hear them live if these beautiful idiots ever decide to come to my side of the pond. I'm still a Bring Me The Horizon fan.

I won't say that it was the album I wanted, and it still remains to be seen if it'll grow on me.

That said, the discourse around this thing has gotten me feeling an entirely different way, and that's not helped by the glib tone that Amo can take about not being a metal record. If anything, I wish there was less "sorry, we're not metal, silly scene kids are just mad we aren't" there. I kind of wish they hadn't addressed it at all, because it's probably going to vastly diminish the staying power when the eventual "we're going back to our roots" announcement comes.

And that's just the thing, ain't it?

I don't think this one will have staying power. But now I've gotta deal with a bunch of jerk-offs calling me closed minded because I didn't love a pop album, which infuriates me to no end because it's not that I don't like pop albums, I just didn't really like this pop album. And not even that I didn't like any of it, just that I found a good 60% of it to be a kind of derivative and forgettable. And of that 60% there's bits I actually do like, a part of me just wishes those bits were on a better record. I knew what was coming, hell,  I wanted an entire album's worth of songs as good as Follow You but I didn't get that. Sugar, Honey, Ice and Tea isn't just the name of one of the songs.

Which leaves me in the precarious position of being one of the few jerk-offs who gave this record a chance and didn't actually like it.

And what do I say to that?

Well, for starters, let me just dislike the album, for God's sake. A band is a brand and music is a product and if I don't like what you're selling please stop telling me that it's only because I like spending my money on one thing, maybe I just think what you're selling is a little shit? It didn't make me hopeful for the future of electropop like Lorde's Pure Heroine, it didn't intrigue me like Melanie Martinez's Cry Baby and it for damn sure didn't make me feel what Sam Smith makes me feel. Shit, Dua Lipa's New Rules has been stuck in my head for so long it may never leave. Now, Now released an album so thematically coherent that I'll die before I can finish counting off all the things I love about it. I like pop. I like a whole lot of pop. It's why I keep buying Punk Goes Pop records because nothing makes me happier than my favourite bands covering my favourite pop songs.

Amo kind of just came and went while I had to try very hard not to roll my eyes at it.

And yeah, I'm going to say that I'm disappointed that Bring Me isn't releasing metalcore but that started in 2015 and I've had plenty bigger disappointments since. I wanted to like Amo, hell, the lead singles got me really hyped for the album. But once it landed, once I took the whole thing in from start to end, it's just an underwhelming "meh". All I can really think was that, for an album trying so hard to be experimental, it sure ended up being plain and forgettable.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to hate on it. Quite frankly I expect it to get beaten up any minute now once the true genre warriors arrive. And they will, and I'll roll my eyes at them too. Bring Me wasn't this bastion of greatness in their Deathcore days, in fact, This Is What The Edge Of Your Seat Is Made For is such pure auditory white noise that after all these years I still can't tell you a damn notable thing about it. Count Your Blessings I'll still go in for, even if I think half of that record is also just a structureless mess, but the songs I like from CYB I at least love enough to give those songs a regular listening to.

Bring Me doesn't owe us a metal album, they don't even owe us a radio rock album. They can do whatever they want. But that doesn't mean I have to like what they put out. I don't owe them my undying love just because they released my favourite album in 2013, and I wish the kids who like Oli more for his haircut would get off my case about it.

But to those jackasses who still cling to the deathcore phase, guys, it's okay for a band to undergo a stylistic change. Usually it's better when that change is actually good, see Paramore's After Laughter for more, but I understand that people who make this music might get tired of making it. I'd argue that there's still much more room to explore the genre and recent interviews with Oli shows how deliriously out of touch he is with the scene, seriously, I get time is limited but music is your bread and butter man, you're supposed to be keeping your ear to the ground so you don't become an irrelevant dinosaur like Gene Simmons is trying his best to be.

But seriously, it's okay for bands to change. Not all change is growth but it's alright, sometimes we need to move sideways to move forward.

Just don't expect me to like it.

Also, there's a certain "grow up emo kid" attitude in the discourse, and to that I say, fuck off? No apologies, just, fuck off, you don't know what you're talking about, please stop letting your tastes be defined by the music you think you should like as an adult and have a little childish, unironic appreciation for stuff that's a little silly but at least has some energy to it. Like, when did we grow old, man? You can like the same albums you liked ten years ago, it's okay, it's not a phase, Dad! Just watch less cringe-culture vids and get off your soapbox.

And I'll be doing just that. That sure was a long way to say, the album was fine but not for me and I just wanna be left alone to listen to Avalanche for the 340th time as I cry alone in the shower.

See you next... Month? Or whenever I put the next one out. Sorry. Maybe I need flex tape to fix my upload schedule.

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Thank You For The Lessons, 2018

2018 marks my most productive year as a blogger. I wrote more posts than any of the years before and I wrote my most popular posts.

It's been a tough year, and that's fair. All the other years were tough but they made me stronger, and surviving them has shown me that I can take huge blows and still get back up. I've also shown myself that I'm capable. I recorded new music, released a video game and finished a 30 Day Blog Challenge (albeit in more than 30 Days.). I wrote 20 000 words in November and I fell in love and well...

I don't know what more I could have asked for.

I have no idea what 2019 will bring but I do know that as long as there is at least one view on my post, then I'll continue to write.

Do I have plans? Oh, hell yes, I definitely do. Do I have goals? Most certainly. Am I aiming to be a better person, a harder worker, and a better writer? One hundred percent.

But I also aim to be kind to myself and work at my own pace. If I'm given the space, time and care, I know I can do great things. If I handle myself correctly if I apply the right principles and if I take care of myself well, then I know I can conquer the whole world.

So here we are, the first one of 2019.

There's not much else to say. Happy New Year, and hope you had a good holiday.

Ciao for now. And thank you for the lessons, 2018.

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A Hot Take On That Godawful Sonic Movie Poster

Yeah, no. This silhouette is horrifying. Delete this and fire whoever greenlit this character design.

Conventional wisdom says to not judge a book by it's cover but if you've been a long time Sonic fan you can recognize the signs of a bad product, and this film released a poster with a large sign that says that the people behind this don't really seem to know what they're doing.

We can argue aesthetics all day and you can hate me for whining about Sonic not wearing his signature shoes and gloves (it'd be like shaving Mario's mustache, what are you doing?), or how weird those blue arms look, or how horrifying the eyes might be based on a couple brightened edits of the poster but we've been here before. We've been here before so many times it's frustrating to see how no one seems to learn their lessons when it comes to messing with Sonic's design.

And this time, it's so bad that Sonic Boom is now one of the more faithful interpretations of the blue blur.

If you've been involved in the Sonic discourse for any length of time you might remember a video by Youtuber Good Blood.

You don't have to read the comments. It was not well received.

I don't begrudge the guy, he recognized that there was a certain staleness and that something was holding Sonic back but like so many others, he just overcorrected. In fact, he did a goddamn U-turn when all we needed was a slight nudge.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to fans because people who don't understand Sonic keep getting put in charge of his major releases.

There are hundreds of Good Bloods out there, and one of them is apparently named Tim Miller and he's helming the first major cinematic release.

If you'd asked us what we wanted, we could tell you without missing a beat that we want a feature-length version of the Sonic Unleashed intro cutscene. Tim Miller's insistence towards not making Sonic look "too Pixar" is tonedeaf because that's all this fanbase wants.

But it's not all bad. Sega was smart enough to have Tyson Hesse storyboard and helm the Sonic Mania Adventures webseries and if you're a Sonic fan, hell, if you just like great animation, you owe it to yourself to watch it. 

On the bright side, once this film inevitably fails, there will be a treasure trove of fresh memes. Because as fun as it is, we've been riding Sonic '06 for 12 years now, it's about time this franchise coughed up a new hairball for us to play with.

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