| IMHO |
[Aug. 13th, 2008|10:36 am] |
I'm a little bored and feeling a little opinionated, so I thought I'd pointlessly discuss my opinions regarding various trivial topics. Here I go!
Wolverine Origins Trailer and Deadpool
It's harder to find these days, but a bootleg of the trailer for "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" leaked onto the Internet after being shown at Comic-Con. I saw the trailer.
First of all, let me say that this movie actually looks really good. Better than "X-Men 3" at the very least. Hugh Jackman finally seems to be able to act like Wolverine, the guy they got to play Sabretooth is cool (though perhaps a little frumpy) and Gambit looks awesome.
Here's my problem, however.
It's nigh impossible to catch in the trailer (I missed it my first time) but Deadpool makes a brief appearance.
Now, when I first watched this trailer, I spent the entire time looking for Deadpool. So how did I miss him? Well, the reason is because he's not wearing a mask and he looks like Ryan Reynolds.
OK, let me take a step back for a minute. I knew that Ryan Reynolds was cast to play Deadpool. I'm fine with that. He's a decent actor and his style of delivery and comedy is very appropriate for Deadpool.
However, seeing Deadpool swinging around swords without a mask on worries me. A lot.
Let me explain. This is a Wolverine origin movie. Not a Deadpool origin movie. As such, showing a side character's origin makes just about no sense, especially when, canonically, his origin has next to nothing to do with Wolverine, except that he also comes from the Weapon X project. Thus, we can assume that they won't take the time to show his origin in the movie. And trust me, this isn't the kind of origin that can be done in a scene or two. It's not as simple as "he got hit with chemicals" or something. He is a very twisted and deranged character and that sort of thing takes time to establish believably.
For those of you unfamiliar, let me walk you through the origin of Deadpool.
While Wade Wilson's childhood is kinda glazed over, it is pretty well-established that he had a bad one and possibly killed his own parents at some point. Regardless, he ended up turning to a life as a mercenary. Eventually, he fell in love with a prostitute and they planned to run away from their lives of servitude together. However, this was interrupted by his discovery that he had inoperable terminal cancer. Not sure what kind, but it was inoperable and terminal. As a result, he left his love to spare her the pain. After giving up on chemo, he fell in with Department K and the Weapon X program who attempted to give him a synthetic healing factor based on genetic information from Wolverine. The idea was that it would cure his cancer and make him a superhero. It didn't work, however, and he was thrown away in a facility for Weapon X rejects. There, Wade had hoped to die a quiet death, but then he caught the interest of a Dr. Killebrew, who decided that making a success of him could prove invaluable, and so he began to run sadistic experiments on him, using every technology at his disposal to keep him alive. Meanwhile, the other inmates there have this game called the "dead pool" where they bet on who'll die next. Killebrew's interest in Wade meant that his odds of dying were in the thousands, making him king of the dead pool, so to speak. So Wade's going through these experiments, going through agonizing pain and being horribly disfigured on a daily basis and he slowly loses his sanity. This all comes to a head one day when he sees Death, who in his mind is represented as an attractive woman (well, attractive for him at least). He then falls in love with Death who tells him that if he wants to be with her, he of course has to die. He then does everything in his power to die, but is always stopped by Killebrew and his assistant, the Attending. Wade, realizing he can't overpower the Attending, decides to start using words to push his buttons, openly mocking him so that the Attending would kill him. While eventually the Attending does want Wade to die, Killebrew won't let him. As a result, the Attending tells Wade to submit or he'll kill his cellmates in his stead, in particular, the one who runs the dead pool and called Wade a hero for standing up to the Attending, Worm. Worm of course begs Wade to not back down, so Wade doesn't and Worm is killed. Wade gets the blame for it and Killebrew allows the Attending to kill him. He does, but just before Wade can join Death, his will to avenge Worm by killing the Attending kicks in his failed healing factor and he comes back to life. Assuming the name Deadpool, he kills the Attending (or so he thinks) and escapes with his fractured mind and and tortured body which didn't repair itself after the healing factor kicked in.
See how long that origin story took to explain? Do you really think they'd bother to go into that much depth for a side character? Doubtful.
As such, I expect one of two things to happen. Either in the movie continuity, Deadpool isn't disfigured and doesn't wear a mask and just works for Weapon X, or they will boil down his origin into something like "he falls in a vat of acid". Either way, I will not be a happy camper.
And since it seems like they won't be doing that facet of his character justice, I can also assume that they probably won't keep his best feature in either: his tendency to break the fourth wall.
The best thing about Deadpool has always been that he acts as sort of the sense of humor for the Marvel Universe, making fun of every character and every event and every facet of his medium down to the color of his speech bubbles. This is enabled by the fact that he's aware that he's in a comic book.
If the Deadpool in the movie isn't able to break the fourth wall, then all he'll do is make the same kind of bad jokes all superheroes make.
I realize that it's hard to make a judgment when I only saw about a second's worth of Deadpool in the trailer, but needless to say that I'm concerned. Deadpool is my favorite comic book superhero and I want to see him treated right, goddammit.
LittleBigPlanet
Since I bought a PS3, I've gotten a decent amount of use out of it. I watched some BluRay movies at home on an HDTV, I played MGS4 a buncha times, and I've folded over 30 supervillin proteins. Even so, I've felt a desire to have more to do with it and haven't had much opportunity. However, that will soon be remedied when LittleBigPlanet comes out in October.
Since I saw this game, it made me want to buy a PS3. It looks fun and it looks like it could never get old. I'm really looking forward to it.
That being said, I worry that Sony and PS3 fanboys are getting their hopes up a little with this game. Sony PR guys are pushing this as the big PS3 seller and fanboys are saying that this will be the beginning of the PS3's comeback.
Hate to break it to you guys, but outside of the hardcore gaming community, not really very many people know or care about this game. And I'm sorry, but the hardcore gaming community already had its big PS3 seller with MGS4 and while it did well, it wasn't enough to mount a comeback. This game might appeal to casual gamers or non-gamers, but probably not enough to get them to spend $400+ on a system when they can get a Wii for $250 or an XBox 360 for $300. Sure the PS3 has BluRay too, but BluRay players are starting to get cheaper and the PS3 is slowly being left behind.
Don't despair. The PS3's sales didn't suck ass, they just didn't do as well as the Wii or the 360. You guys won the past two gen wars, but you can't win every time. You're Hillary Clinton. It's over, but you're too stubborn to admit it. Just accept the defeat gracefully, do the best you can to make the PS3's life cycle as comfortable as possible, then make the PS4 more affordable and accessible.
LittleBigPlanet is going to be great, but it's not going to be the Jesus of the PS3. Don't get your hopes up is all I'm saying.
Console Wars
After talking about that, now I want to talk about this generation's console war. As an owner of all three major systems, I think I can now qualify as an impartial judge about this generation. Sales-wise, it's pretty obvious that the Wii has won and nothing can be done to change that, but who besides Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft really cares about that? Let me talk about the strengths of the systems themselves and their impact on the gaming community that I love.
First, since I just talked about it, I'd like to share my thoughts on the PS3 as a system. As many may recall, I often expressed my disdain for the system and said that I'd probably never buy one. Then I did and now I have said that I am pleased with my purchased. BluRay looks great. If you need convincing, get ahold of a BluRay player, an HDTV, and a copy of "Planet Earth" for BluRay and prepare to be blown away. Also, navigating a BD is easier than navigating a DVD and the increased space allows for more special features (the "Gotham Knight" BD, for example, has four episodes of the Batman animated series, and they're all episodes I love). The PlayStation Network (PSN) is phenomenal. It's the best of both worlds. It's free like the Wii's online service, but it lets you do everything you could with XBox Live. The hardware is great. Other than the gargantuan size of the system, it looks great, its power cord doesn't have a fucking brick, and it has a rather good built-in wireless card. MGS4 was great and as I mentioned, I'm looking forward to LBP. This system really has some great merits. It has problems though. First of all, sixaxis is pathetic, pure and simple. They clearly tacked it on at the last minute to compete with the Wii and it shows. It's horribly unresponsive and is never used as anything more than a gimmick. Additionally, since the PS3 controller uses bluetooth, you'd think I could use it with my bluetooth compatible laptop, but no. No. I can use my 360 controller fine with my laptop with a cheap USB attachment and my Wiimote works fine if I can manage to get the necessary infrared lights near my screen, but for some reason Sony just likes to suck. Oh, and yeah, it's lame that the PS3 doesn't have many good exclusive games, but then again, neither do the other systems really. I mean, the 360 has Halo and I never really liked Halo and the Wii has Mario, Zelda, Metroid and Smash (as usual). Other than that, the PS3's library is mostly shared with the 360, so I guess the reason most people wouldn't be interested is because they already have a 360.
So now let's move on to the XBox 360. This was the second system I bought, mostly because I wanted to play "Guitar Hero III" and "Rock Band" sooner rather than later and it seemed better than getting a PS3. While I've gotten a great deal of use out of it, on the whole I think I wish I had opted for the PS3 instead. Sure the 360 is cheaper at first, but take into account the fact that its hard-drive space is a fraction of the PS3, it doesn't have a built-in wireless card, you have to buy rechargeable battery packs for your controllers and a proprietary charger, and the fact that XBox Live costs money while the PSN is free, the price difference is laughable. Include the fact that (with the exception of "Dead Rising") all of the games I bought for the 360 also came out for the PS3, the PS3 has BluRay (which won the format war), and the 360 has an enormous failure rate and tons of problems ("Dead Rising" still reliably freezes the console), I have a good deal of buyer's remorse. That being said, the 360 isn't bad and I wouldn't sell it unless I could get all of the games and DLC I bought for it replaced with PS3 equivalents and there is one thing that it does better than PS3: Achievements. Achievements were a recent addition to the PS3 (they call them "trophies") and their implementation is kind of embarrassing. First of all, most of the games don't/won't have trophies, and second, they have a very minimal amount of trophies. For the 360, achievements are available for every game I've played (even some downloaded games) and they usually improve the replayability of many games as well as enhance the gameplay by making you feel special for doing something awesome in the game like electrifying a buncha dudes in Bioshock. On top of that, there are dozens of achievements for every game. I have yet to get every achievement for even one game. I have to say, Microsoft knew what they were doing there.
As for the Wii... this one had me at "hello". The idea of interacting with a game as a 1:1 experience has always been a dream of mine and the Wii was the first big step forward toward that goal. The first party games were great and the price was right. However, this console didn't quite evolve as I had hoped. I had hoped that developers would get excited and start expanding gameplay to more experimental territory and focus on that instead of just improving graphics. Instead, lesser known developers made tons of money making crappy gimmicky games while the bigger companies ignored the Wii since it didn't have the hardware to allow them to make the games they planned and they decided their resources were better spent making better graphics than innovative gameplay. As a result, the Wii has almost no decent third-party games and has made its bread and butter with its simple games aimed at the general populous. Because of this, Nintendo has made a shit-ton of money, but they have painted themselves in a corner where they really can't cater to the hardcore crowd without shooting themselves in the foot. I'm hoping that with the passage of time, the Wii Motion Plus, and the expansion of WiiWare, more companies with use the Wii's unconventional control schemes to evolve video games, but right now, the Wii is more or less just a cute little box of fun not to be taken seriously by the gaming community. Even so, the Wii has the most unexplored potential and you gotta give Nintendo props for trying something so drastically different.
So in my opinion, the big winners this generation in terms of what they provide the gaming community are the PS3 and the Wii. The PS3 does just about everything the 360 can do, only better and if I could go back in time, I would have bought one instead of a 360. If you already own a 360 and all its bells and whistles, take your time getting a PS3 unless you have an HDTV and no BluRay player, or you really want to play MGS4 or LBP. And while the Wii hasn't really done much for the gaming community, it really provides a lot that the PS3 and 360 can't in terms of gameplay style and with its low price tag, it's totally worth getting (if you can find one).
Guitar Hero: On Tour
Yeah, I'm probably going to get it now that I know that it will allow you to use "Rock Band" equipment with it. Doubt I'm gonna like it, though.
Rock Band 2
Fuck YES!
Your Mom
Yeah, I went there.
May the Force be with you.
~Pat |
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