Tag Archives: action

Avatar

As usual when I write about films, spoilers abound so you might want to hold off on reading this until after you’ve watched it yourself. However, the plot is so cliche-ridden and so predictable that it’s pretty hard to spoil the film. It’s basically Dances with Wolves in space and all the pertinent plot points are clearly telegraphed from the first moment that you see the planet Pandora. Having only recently rewatched Aliens, I was also struck by how many themes and ideas were re-used. Over the top gung-ho soldier? Check. Greedy corporation exec who cares only about the bottom line? Check. Even the military vehicles and mechs look vaguely familiar.

The wonder of the film is that it all works, which says a lot about James Cameron’s directing skills. The film is genuinely breathtaking and spectacular, so much so that when you see it for the first time you simply know that this is something that you have never seen before. In that sense, it’s every bit as iconic and singular an experience as watching Star Wars or Jurassic Park for the very first time. It’s the same kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience that just blows you away.

It’s when you walk out of the cinema that all of the plot holes and flaws catch up with you. How do the human controllers connect with the avatar bodies? It must be magic because it seems to be unaffected by range or electromagnetic interference and the avatar bodies don’t seem to come with electronics. Why was the human ground force fooling around in the jungle for when the mission was to bomb the Tree of Souls? How ludicrous is it that no animals come to eat the avatar bodies when the human controllers are disconnected, especially after the film has established how hostile the jungle is? How come if the rocks float, the water still falls from it? And if they are made of the magical anti-gravity mineral, why don’t the humans just tow those away instead of trying to mine it from underground?

It’s common knowledge that Cameron wrote the original script for Avatar not long after he finished Titanic, so the script is still floating around the Internet. This website has a good comparison of the differences between the original scriptment and the film that ended up being made. It’s apparent that the original script was more subtle and less filled with cliches but a great deal more bloated. For example, in the original script the Na’vi that Jake falls in love with isn’t the first one that he meets, the research team is being helped by a Na’vi guide and Grace is secretly sleeping with him, there’s a previous human controller who fell in love with a Na’vi girl but she was killed by the military and he committed suicide etc. It all makes the Jake character less unique and less like a superhero who came out of nowhere to save the world.

For all these reasons, while watching Avatar once is practically mandatory, I doubt that the film stands up to repeated viewings. Even the technology will eventually look dated. But for now, it’s undoubtedly one of the most beautiful things ever put on film.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

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Most shooters start the player off with some kind of assault rifle, maybe a sub-machine gun if the designers are feeling stingy, plus a dinky little side-arm that never actually sees any use. Not so Red Faction: Guerrilla. In this game, right after the introductory cutscene, you’re given a humongous sledgehammer and a satchel of remote-detonated explosives. Then you’re set loose on the Martian landscape to do as you will. That is a fair representation of this game is all about.

You’ll find that most of your time on Mars will be spent wrecking stuff. Of the two starter weapons, the sledgehammer is the more reliable but it’s always satisfying to bring down a building with lots of enemies inside with explosives, especially when you become skilled at identifying structurally weak spots to slap them on. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg that is your arsenal. You also get the grinder, a bulky machine that fires razor-edged metal disks, the thermobaric rocket launcher that is really good at filling an enclosed space with a big explosion, a nano-rifle which infects the target with nanites that dissolve it, and, if you’re lucky, the awe-inspiring singularity bomb, which creates a miniature black hole.

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Living the life in Liberty City

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As you can see, I’ve finally received my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV and despite some minor problems with signing up for Rockstar’s Social Club service and tying it to a Windows Live account, have managed to get it running. As expected, my PC is a bit too behind the curve to be able to turn all the dials up, so I have to settle for mostly medium quality graphics settings. It’s not painful on the eyes or anything, but the game does have an annoying tendency to makes shadows all blurry and everything is a little too jaggy for my tastes. I guess Rockstar hasn’t quite caught on to AA filtering yet.

Of course, no GTA game is ever going to win any beauty contests. The strength of the series has always been in the scope and detail of its cities, not in top notch graphics. Still, there’s no denying that the scope of Liberty City is beautiful in of itself. Cruising past the game’s rendition of Times Square is certainly an impressive experience. The city is wonderfully alive too with lots of interesting stuff going on in the background. Cops chase crooks and actually load them into patrol cars when they catch them. The bridges have working toll booths. Perhaps best of all, buildings and interior locations are now seamlessly integrated with the main city.

What I dislike most about this game so far is that it feels too much like a linear RPG set in an open city rather than a real sandbox. Previous GTA games had plenty of side activities that were mostly unrelated to the main plot, and I enjoyed being able to buy new houses and businesses. So far I haven’t seen any of that in this iteration of the series. Rockstar seems to think that GTA is all about the story and seems to be trying too hard to make it a serious epic, eschewing the over the top whackiness I loved in previous games. I’m enjoying it well enough so far, but my favourite GTA is still Vice City. We’ll see when I get to the end of this game if my opinion changes.

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A Game: The Witcher (Enhanced Edition)

If you’ve ever felt that every fantasy RPG always rehashes the same generic tropes over and over again, then you might want to check out The Witcher. The first release of the game last year by its Polish makers at CD Projeckt suffered from numerous technical hitches and a Polish-to-English translation that sometimes left players scratching their heads. Thankfully, the newly released Enhanced Edition of the game, available as free download for customers who had bought the original, fixes many of these problems and includes extended and fully voiced translations, so RPG fans have no excuse to put off buying this gem, even if it is still a bit unpolished.

The game is based on the Polish book series of the same name by Andrzej Sapkowski and as such is set in a medieval fantasy world with a distinctively eastern European twist. It is a grim and dangerous place where at night simple folk bar their doors and huddle safe in their houses while monsters roam at will. The player takes on the role of one Geralt of Rivia, the most famous of the few remaining witchers in the world who are tasked with defending humanity from these monsters, for a fee of course. As the game explicity states, witchers aren’t noble knights in shining armour, and as you’ll soon learn over the course of this game, there’s no unalloyed good in the world since everyone, and I mean everyone, has an angle.

Continue reading A Game: The Witcher (Enhanced Edition)

A Game: Assassin’s Creed (PC)

For a game that got into the news so often for all the wrong reasons, beginning with the torrid Jade Raymond affair, to complaints about the unfamiliar controls to the early leak of the PC version and Ubisoft’s subsequent decision to sue the source of the leak for a ridiculous sum of damages, Assassin’s Creed turned out for me to a surprisingly good game. After all, the basic premise of the game sounds fantastic: play as a member of the Hashahin, the original brotherhood of assassins from which the English word “assassin” is itself derived, in the sand-box environment of the Holy Land while the Crusades are raging. There is plenty to be impressed with by this game, so it’s all the more disappointing that it gets so many basic elements so wrong.

First the good stuff. Most of the player’s time is spent controlling Altair, who starts out as an accomplished but somewhat cocky member of the brotherhood. The brotherhood’s aim, as stated by its leader Al Mualim,  is to achieve peace in the Holy Land, and as such Altair is sent to assassinate critical targets from both sides of the war, Saracen and Crusader, in order to put an end to the fighting. And I’m not joking when I say that Altair is an accomplished assassin. He can navigate the environment so well, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, clambering up walls and barrelling through crowds that he’d put Lara Croft to shame. He can walk up to a target and effortlessly kill someone so quietly with a hidden blade that someone standing ten paces away won’t even notice. All of these feats are easy to accomplish with the controls, even if they are a bit esoteric and take some effort to learn. Some critics have complained that the near-automatic execution of the parkour-style moves, since Altair will always perform the move most appropriate to the context and the environment, sacrifices actual gameplay for cool visuals. I heartily applaud it however. If I’m supposed to be controlling a skilled assassin, I don’t want to fight the controls to do the cool moves, I want to just be able to tell Altair what I want to do, and he’ll do it.

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A Game: Gears of War (PC)

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Ever since lead designer Cliff Bleszinski famously posted photos of himself hobnobbing with celebrities at E3 while promoting this game on the SomethingAwful forums, I’d been predisposed to dislike Gears of War. It didn’t help that the look and feel of the game leans heavily towards testosterone-fueled machismo of the worst sort. So it came as a pleasant surprise to me when I finally got my hands on the PC version this month and found it to be a more than decent game.

The machismo is all there of course: huge guns with chainsaws for bayonets, grunts with big bulging muscles and anatomically implausible jawlines who make frequent references to kicking ass and toughing it out while the only female presence is a lieutenant who is mostly heard and not seen. The well above average dialogue however manages the difficult task of making it seem familiar rather ridiculous. Combined with the excellent duck-and-cover mechanics and satisfying shooting action, it adds up to a very playable shooter.

Continue reading A Game: Gears of War (PC)