This arrived a couple of hours ago.
It makes me feel a little better after what happened yesterday. I was part-way through writing a portion of TOA (which I did manage to complete, though not pretty up) when an old friend suddenly messaged me on AIM. I was like, "yo sup". He tells me that someone I semi-knew shot himself last month. Not someone I knew in person, but one of the few people who inspired me to work harder. It's hard to imagine this person killing themselves, and it hits pretty close to home seeing as I probably would have done the same thing on numerous ocassions if I had a gun.
Kind of makes me stop and think.
Yeah...
I watched two movies recently.
The first was Dragonball: Evolution.
Now, typically I don't really watch movies until later on when a nice dvdrip shows up on my favorite websites and I am really interested in seeing them. I was a little curious about the Dragonball movie but everyone was super excited about it and kept saying how awesome it was, so I felt inclined to avoid hollywood garbage for a while until finally curiosity got the best of me.
Now, I'm not a huge DBZ fan. I've seen all of DBZ, only a tiny bit of the first one and a little bit of GT. But it did teach me what to avoid with my epic scale duels in my novel. I watched it when I was younger and it's pretty much the show that introduced me to anime in the first place (along with Gundam Wing).
I've been hearing about how this movie was nothing like dragonball, so on so forth but I thought "Hollywood produces pretty shitty movies, but even they can't bastardize dragonball that badly. Can they?"
Boy oh boy. Was I in for a shock. Five minutes into the movie I knew it was going to be one of those times. I mean, even the CGI which is pretty much all hollywood throws at us these days and is the sole thing that makes the new Transformers watchable seemed rushed and poorly thought out. I was expecting amazing fight scenes with screaming and grunting but they did not deliver. Everything else is just a disaster, but that was to be expected. What really caught me off guard was what they did to master roshi. What the FUCK.
The second movie I watched was GI Joe. I was expecting even less out of this movie but it actually wasn't that bad, at least in effects and explosions. Hollywood knows that they're absolutely terrible with storytelling and skips major melodramatic bullocks and just throws action scene after action scene at you, exactly what I would want. The staggering amount of coincidences between the characters is just hilarious, and the absurdly high level of technology the two forces possess "under the nose" of the public is astronomically absurd (Energy weapons? Holographic projections? Fucking nanites that disintegrate entire cities and cause the mass of the buildings to magically vanish!?) but if you approach the movie from the standpoint of "Oh, pretty explosions!" it will deliver exactly the same experience that the two Transformers movies did. I didn't really pay any attention to the plot because it was pretty terrible and all, but that's what I did with transformers and it made it bearable just the same.
There you have it. My first two terrible movie reviews.
On to Left 4 dead 2. I played it with HKS. I know some people here played the original and might want to hear my thoughts on that. I did record a video of our gameplay, but I don't know when I'll get around to encoding and releasing it. So I'll just make a short review of this as well.
I'll be direct; if you are expecting something different, new, and exciting, you're in the wrong place. L4D2 is basically what the original should have been. There isn't any exciting new gameplay elements (except for perhaps the 2 or so new gametypes that aren't available in the demo), but there's more weapons, more zombies, and DAYLIGHT. Sooo many people are bitching about one of the campaigns taking place in daytime and I have no idea why the fuck these people are allowed to breathe. I actually like the change of lighting and it seems more realistic that the sun doesn't magically vanish when the apocalypse comes.
Left 4 dead 2 is dramatically American, but Valve didn't stick very close to their source material because only a few of the zombies are horrendeously overweight. Everything else is pretty spot-on though; the black chick is sassy, the big black man has a thick accent and moans just like a black man should, the scrawny white man holds a desert eagle at his waist with 1 hand and lazily mows down entire legions of zombies with it, and the streets are filled with gigantic automobiles in which only one in a thousand actually possesses a car alarm.
The guns fire slower, reload slower, and everything seems to hint that Valve didn't want the game to drum down to mowing your way through zombies super-fast. This seems a bit strange, because they introduced elements specifically for mowing through zombies super-fast, including sticks of adrenaline that turn you into superman.
The levels are still fairly short (at least the two in the demo), but the most noticeable thing is that just like the new, pointlessly tiny L4D campaign, there are guns EVERYWHERE. Every five feet you come across either pistols, rifles, desert eagles or auto shotties. There are new weapons in addition to the old ones, and the placements are somewhat randomized. Contrary to what you might be thinking, when that lone rifle is spotted on a balcony your entire team can still pick it up. That doesn't hold true for melee weapons, though. The machete in particular is ridiculously powerful, cleaving entire hordes effortlessly. Traditional melee has been nerfed, though; there's now a cooldown between times you can melee, just like the one they introduced in a patch for Versus in the original. It's still pretty powerful, though.
One thing I love is the Desert Eagle. It actually gives you a reason to use your pistols other than trying to aim for the Akimbo Assassin achievement and fucking over your entire team. The Desert Eagle is really inaccurate, but it hits really hard and has penetration. I'm not sure if you can dual wield it or not, but just one is pretty ridiculous. I was incapacitated by a horde of zombies and killed all of them in 5-6 shots from the penetration.
Speaking of killing zombies, the single biggest new feature of left 4 dead 2 is entirely cosmetic - Gore. Not only do zombies get dismembered more readily, you can eviscerate them and spool miles of intestines everywhere, use a pipe bomb to blow off half of their body down the middle, slice open their brains with a machete or blow holes the size of dinner plates through them with the glock. The gore is excessive, just like classic zombie movies. At the slightest provocation entire halves of zombies can be removed. With a single shotgun blast I removed 4 of a zombie's limbs, head included. Also, these little limbs have varying weight; with a pipe bomb, I effectively rained limbs across the street a few moments after the mangled skeletons and other bits landed.
I'm not sure what to think about the new Infected. The Jockey seems to be much like the Hunter in that he often dies within a half-second of him attaching himself to someone. The level design is bland enough that most often the Jockey is pretty powerless, anyway, but one time he did manage to pull me off a ledge and into a horde on the bottom of it, so he can be pretty dangerous depending on the terrain. The Spitter is the most dangerous of the new zombies by far, especially on Expert. One shot of her jizz in a good spot and she can take out several people in only a few seconds. Just like molotovs, the bot AI just loves swimming in the green goo and burning to death. The charger can do a lot of damage if his major attack connects, but most of the time his charge misses and he stands there like a retard or he just runs in and dies in a few seconds.
I heard about the director actually changing map geometry and changing paths you have to take, but I don't think that's present in the demo as between our multiple deaths on expert and my single player playthrough the maps did not change at all. The levels themselves are still very narrow and force you to go in a very specific way.
So, basically, l4d2 is just more of the same but with some added content. I will probably buy it to play with the crew, but I still feel this should have been an expansion and not an entirely new game.
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