Returned! A Video Game Post

As a rule, I generally don’t share my thoughts about games that I haven’t played either all the way through, or nearly all the way through. Recently though there have been a couple of games I’ve obtained under what I like to call “The Gamestop Free Rental Plan” – that is, taking advantage of Gamestop’s policy that any used game purchase can be returned for a full refund within seven days for any reason, including just plain, old not liking it. If you have a Gamestop near you I totally recommend taking advantage of this policy. (Honestly, I wonder who all these people are who buy games at Best Buy and Walmart for full price with no way to return them if they absolutely suck.)

Anyway, here are three games purchased recently that I returned within the seven day time limit for my money back, and the reasons why I thought they sucked.

#1 Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

As I was finishing up Devil May Cry I researched what I should play next both by price and content. After all was said and done I settled on this one. After my research I was totally looking forward to it too. There aren’t that many Western games and after the gothic geekiness of Devil May Cry, I really thought this would hit the spot. The first level played a lot like a Civil War version of Call of Duty 2, which consists of a lot of making your way through dirt trenches. I totally appreciated the fact that the main characters were Rebels and Confederate flags were flying everywhere. It was old school Americana come to life! And then, I got to a part, still in the first level, where I was in charge of a cannon. These damned Yankees were down below on the river trying to cross on rafts, and the mission was basically to blow their asses out of the water before they could hit the shore. Well, five times I tried to blow them up, and five times I failed miserably despite the rafts being directly in my cannon’s cross-hairs. I ended up looking up a walk-through on the internet – ON THE FIRST LEVEL – and read you actually have to aim a bit above the rafts to actually hit them. Okay, okay, I understand gravity and such and how it may be realistic to sort of overshoot your target to actually hit your target from such a distance but, well, F U! Its a video game! And its the 1st level! Note to developers: If you want players to actually play the game to the end, you must first sort of seduce them into caring about your game before pissing them off. In other words, make the first three or four levels completely completable and then throw the trickster, frustrating crap at them once they have some emotion and time invested – then they’ll actually have reason to be patient and work it out. Anyway, one word, Returned!

#2 Left 4 Dead:

My that’s a nasty thumb wound!

So, part 2 is about to come out just in time for Christmas, and I thought it might be time to get around to part 1. Everywhere I go on the web people are freaking out about this game. Even some of my regular web hangouts where people aren’t that into video games, they’re into Left For Dead. So yeah, supposed to be totally awesome! And I’m sure it is in multi-player. I can’t say this game sucked since it seems the strengths lie in the multi-player aspect. I’m just a solo type of gamer and when I popped this one in for the one player campaign, well, the entire game is pre-opened up for you. There is no opening up level after level – you just choose the scenario and go. I played through one level and there really wasn’t a story, and since there was no challenge, to me, solo-wise, there was no point. This is definitely a case of my gaming preferences just not being compatible with the game. So I hesitate to say the game sucked or really hammer into it in any meaningful way. That being said, for being so popular and having so many people rave about it, I thought the graphics were definitely subpar for such a hit game. But I digress… the point ultimately is that the game was returned. In its place I got “Ghostbusters: The Video Game” which I did finish and will write about soon.

#3 Ninja Blade

The fact that I returned this game is a shame. The graphics were very good. Lots of violence. A lot of coolio running along walls and stuff. I invested 45 minutes into it at about midnight the day I bought it. I had to work in the morning and had to go to bed. I fiddled around with the pause menu but no save feature. I shrugged. I’d been hitting checkpoints all along the way, it probably auto-saved at all the checkpoints…. right? I held my breath and turned the Xbox off. And then, curious, turned it on again and started the game, and there I was, all the way back at the beginning. I cursed and went to bed. In the morning I looked it up online and just as I suspected, the game does have an auto-save feature, but it only saves at the end of each level, each of which take an hour to an hour and a half to complete. Sorry Charlene, I’m the one who budget’s my time, not a game. If I want to play a game in short 15 minute spurts, that should be my business. I’m a busy guy and having to make sure I have an hour or more to spare before I pop in your game isn’t going to work for me. I’d like to break this off nicely and say, it’s not you, it’s me – but no, unfortunately it’s you. And, like I said, its a shame since it seems you had so much to offer.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Having exhausted so many gaming opportunities only to be disappointed, I’ve decided to return to my first love – music… which could never disappoint.

Happy Listening!

A Near Perfect Scene: Oliver Stone’s “The Doors”

(Blog Note: With this post I am going to begin a new category called “Near Perfect Scenes” which will be about movie scenes that are just awesome. Could be the only good scene in a crap film – it doesn’t matter. If its the kind of scene that made me stop the DVD and watch it again, I’m going to write about it and try to analyze what made it so awesome. In doing this, I’m going to try to avoid scenes that everybody has already analyzed to death so there will be no talking about GoodFellas, or Citizen Kane, or Pulp Fiction. This is about scenes that generally go unnoticed.)

The Thanksgiving Scene from “The Doors”

Link Here – (Unfortunately embedding is not available for this clip.) Go ahead and watch the clip first.

I picked up “The Doors” on the cheap recently. ($2.50! Yup, pawn shop…) I remember when it came out. I had recently graduated high school and I got sort of excited for it when MTV had begun playing “Break On Through” as a music video. Some of the girls I knew in my freshman year at college had posters of Morrison on the their walls, and one of my good chick friends in high school was a Doors freak. He definitely seemed worthy of emulation, and hell, the music wasn’t half bad either.

When it finally came out I never did go to see it in the theatre, and when I finally saw it on video I lost interest. Jim Morrison as played by Val Kilmer is a guy on a lot of drugs who’s a huge, pretentious dick. Granted, he is kinda cool, but just not very likable. It pretty much went in one eyeball and out the other. After that I never thought much about the movie other than it being one of the early weak points of Oliver Stone’s, generally, very strong career.

Nearly 20 years later with the hype way behind us, and my disappointment with my initial viewing forgotten, I gave the film another chance. Last night as I was watching I got to the Thanksgiving scene. It cracked me up. Everything about it is perfect, but particularly worthy of mention is Val Kilmer’s (who’s career has always been either fizzled or about to fizzle) excellent acting. Throughout the movie he not only is uncannily like Morrison in how he looks and handles himself, but even if he weren’t doing a Morrison impression he hits all the right notes. His facial expressions throughout this particular scene are, actually, high comedy.

The Acting: – pretty much Kilmer is the dickish, yet rascally Morrison – and need I mention, in this particular scene, hilarious. The look on his face as he says “sometimes” is perfect. Meg Ryan complements him to a tee here as the LSD-addled and confused Pam. She flawlessly pulls off feigned self-confidence while so obviously having absolutely none. (This is not to mention that, because of Kilmer’s amazingly dead on impersonation, Ryan throughout the film is upstaged by him, even though she does some rather seamless character acting. Its a thankless job.)

The Sound: The scene really starts up when “Love Me Two Times” starts playing. The choice to put this song at this particular place in the movie is near genius. The whole scene essentially revolves around Morrison “two-timing” Pam – adding a whole new layer of meaning to the song itself. The volume of the music increases to a crescendo accompanied by the added sound effect of the knife being unsheathed as Pam grabs it from the table to stab Morrison, while visually the fight plays out to its frenetic end.

The mise en scene: (What a snoot!) For some reason, as the entire house party joins the fight to separate the two, they move in front of the picture window so, in essence, the entire party is seen in almost silhouette, bathed in the light of the sunshine. (And, it would seem to me, these are a group of people who are not that used to being awake and active during the day hours.) I’m not sure if its symbolic or what, but the swivel and jostle of the camera to follow the party paired with the crescendo of the music just makes the heart jump.

The Script: Particularly the end of the scene. The organic end truly seems to be the grabbing of the knife, and the cut of the music. But no, the scene doesn’t end here. Instead, we have a moment of utter silence. And then, rather anti-climacticly, Jim, the drama king, starts in about death and Kilmer/Stone further reinforce the character with an extra-heavy layering of pompous ass-o-city. And then the climax instead becomes a slight giggle as Billy Idol tells Ray to fuck off and the fat houseguest picks up the now ruined duck off the floor with every intent to eat it anyway.

Although I’ve always considered this one of Stone’s weakest movies, now, almost twenty years later I might have to concede that it is actually a pretty strong movie. The weaknesses of it are not in the film-making itself, but rather the subject matter. The life of this particular rock n’ roll star is hardly admirable or glamourous. The Morrison that Stone chose to hand the audience was a huge jerk and hardly the cool, suave sophisticate that I had expected twenty years ago. It didn’t matter that he was a drug addict, or a womanizer, or a self-aggrandizing no-talent poet – all of these things are just symptoms of Stone/Kilmer/Morrison’s real problem; He was just, quite simply, a dick.

Whether or not this portrayal of Morrison is accurate, I don’t know, and to be honest, I don’t care. Either way, he makes a good movie as long as you know what to be in for beforehand.

Here’s the trailer.

Some Thoughts On “Guitar Hero Van Halen”

3 1/2 out of 5 cookies – Some really good stuff but its got issues.

So a week ago this game came in the mail in a little cardboard sleeve. I didn’t have much hope for it since it was free with Guitar Hero 5. All you had to do was send out some paperwork after purchasing the game and, like magic, a few weeks later it appears in your mailbox.

But guess what? I like it – a lot! In fact, as far as music games focused on one particular band go – GH Aerosmith, GH Metallica, and Rock Band Beatles – this pretty much holds its own against them.

Make no mistake, there really is no plot or progression through the actual career of Van Halen like there is in the other games – its just the songs in different venues with the likenesses of the band (sans Michael Anthony since they’re currently shunning him)

Sidenote: Besides being all right at playing their respective instruments, that’s what the two Van Halen brothers do best – shun, shun, shun, former members until its in their financial interest to not shun – and then the shunning stops. Although, neither Eddie nor Alex guarantee the shunning won’t start right up again once they have no reason to not shun. Currently Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar are being shunned, while David Lee Roth gets to bask in Guitar Hero glory with the brothers. I do predict that soon Sammy Hagar will be de-shunned maybe just in time for maybe GH Van Halen Part 2, at which point the Roth shunning will resume. We’ll see.

Anyway, yeah, Michael Anthony has been replaced by Eddie Van Halen’s chubster son and so you play a ton of Roth era Van Halen tunes which really work well with the whole Guitar Hero concept. Better, I dare say, then any of the other games mentioned above. Metallica? Most of the stuff is just too hard and halfway through the game it becomes clear that it was made for hardcore Guitar Hero fans who will soon have carpal tunnel syndrome. Not to mention that 75% of the songs are depressing as hell so after an hour or so with the game you find yourself either extremely angry or dangerously listless and sad depending on your chosen tracklist. The Beatles game has the opposite problem. Its too easy. After all, the point of music games is to give the player the illusion of playing an instrument, the vicarious thrill of being a pretend musician. Although there’s a lot to love about The Beatles game, the illusion of being a Beatle never truly achieves lift off. For a lot of the songs you just sorta feel like a dork pushing buttons. Aerosmith? This one had a lot of potential, but whoever chose the track list really blew it. A ton of their hits are missing and a ton of songs nobody but the most hardcore Aerosmith fans know are included – which may be why you can pick it up for an embarrassing $9.99 right now if you know where to look.

So where does Van Halen outshine these other games? As I said, since the whole point of Guitar Hero games is to simulate actually playing guitar – Van Halen tends accomplishes this quite well. “Pretty Woman/Intruder” is a perfect example of this, as the fingering of the five buttons really emulates the playing of the chords.

The playlist itself, which includes every major and minor hit from the Roth years, comes through as a celebration of happiness and life – ersatz life. These songs are happy as hell. They’re all about partying, and pretty girls, and rockin’. Let’s make no mistake about it – Roth’s Van Halen was philosophically-speaking pretty shallow. Pair that with playing video games which can be a pretty shallow past time and you have a marriage made in music game heaven. They were made for each other. “Beautiful Girls”, “Dance the Night Away”, “Ice Cream Man” – this is fun stuff!

The game is pretty bare bones compared to the other music games out there with, like I said, no plot. There are some other artists on there and some good non-VH tunes but there is no obvious explanation as to why these bands/songs were chosen, whereas on the load screens for the Aerosmith game as non-Aerosmith songs loaded the game told you that Stephen Tyler liked the song, or this particular band opened for them on that particular tour…

Even the beginning of the game is bare bones. The introduction is brief – just like a real rock and roll show. The lights go down, an announcer who sounds like he just blew 14 lines of cocaine welcomes Van Halen over the sound system, the band appears one by one and without further adieu you rip into the awesome “Panama” with nary a load screen in between.

This game is exactly what it needs to be – no more, and no less – and although the developers seemingly gave up on it and ended up handing it out for free, I can still see myself playing this game a year from now which is more than I can say for Aerosmith or Metallica..

And right now, I just can’t get enough of this song:

Its fascinating to me how early-80’s cool David Lee Roth is, and how uncool he is when you remove him from that era.

Some Thoughts On “Devil May Cry 4″

2 cookies out of 5 = decent try. but totally whatevery.

There are few game covers that can compete with the above as far as videogame geekdom goes. Maybe some of the Final Fantasy art overtakes it, but even looking at it now, I can’t believe I played this game nearly all the way through.

The same guys who used to read Heavy Metal magazine back in the 70’s and early 80’s are probably the same types that are now playing this game. If the giant swords that are nearly as big as the characters themselves don’t get your inner geek excited, perhaps the undulating breasts of a certain female character can get the job done.

There were some glaring weaknesses that I will get to shortly, but to start off on a positive note, it has to be said that the game pretty much kept me pushing all the way through until the final boss which is where I finally just sort of threw in the towel, knowing I was at the end and uninterested in spending hours defeating a rather boring final boss. The best they could do for a final boss was an old guy who looks surprisingly like the Pope – hat included.

So what kept me playing? Pretty much the graphics and the fact that it is pretty easy. The cut scenes (and all in all there are probably about an hour’s worth of them, so be prepared for movie night at times and pop yourself up some Orville Redenbacher) are up there with those of Resident Evil 5, not only in the animation and direction, but they’re actually sort of interesting to boot. Snappy dialogue, decent voicework, a tolerable plot. And did I mention easy? That’s right, I did. It was a good time waster – a good way to get ready for bed.

So, the problems? Where to begin? First of all, the first 8 or 10 levels are absolutely excellent. The visuals were at times stunning. The waterfall comes to mind as does the castle. I’m the kind of guy who will eat up awesome graphics. If done well enough, I will actually stop playing the game, and instead just sort of wander around, checking stuff out from different angles. Devil May Cry 4 had at least four or five stop in my tracks environments that had me wishing I could transport my thirteen year old self into the future, show him the game for a few minutes and then transport him back to 1983 all jealous and stuff that he wasn’t me…. yet.

As I played the game, all was well with the gameworld until, like I said, around level ten. Then, the plot takes a twist and the guy you thought was the bad guy is actually a good guy, and the guy you’ve been playing as since the beginning of the game gets trapped and so now you have to play as the new guy.

I always sort of hate this switching of the character and learning new controls and weapons business but whatever, I was game. Until, that is, the new guy’s mission is pretty much to get back to the beginning of the game and the next eight levels revolve around me using the new guy to complete everything I already just completed in reverse, including three pain in the ass (yet totally creatively conceived and kick-ass looking) bosses.

Hey developers, the best thing you could think of is to make half a game and then flesh it out to a full game by making the player play the whole thing again in reverse? Weak, weak, weak.

And then, when you do finally come to the end what do they have for you do but, once again, fight the three major bosses that you’ve already beaten 2 times. They trot them all out again so you have to beat them a third time. This is pretty much where I got fed up and decided that I was definitely going to have to give this game a less than stellar review.

It really is an excellent and shiny package of a video game, but I just couldn’t help but feel ripped off at the sly plot which allowed them to force the player to play the same game pretty much 2 times to get the full experience.

Little things about the game got on my nerves too. For instance, some of the music was quite beautiful. Strains of classical and new age accompany you as you search the giant gothic castle. Its all very fitting. Unfortunately, whenever a bad guy comes out – and there are tons although most of them are very easy to beat – all of the sudden an industrial score comes pounding through the speakers that sounds like a poor man’s Powerman 5000. This pulsing, aggravating music doesn’t stop until the last bad guy is killed. This wouldn’t be that bad if maybe they rotated 3 or 4 different songs, but its just the same song over and over and over again.

And, while I’m on the subject, they may as well have just gotten a real Powerman 5000 song or two if that was the angle they wanted – “Nobody’s Real” or “When Worlds Collide” come to mind – and at least the player could have listened to the real thing instead of some cheap clone. Either way, the music doesn’t fit the visual tone of the game, and the repetitiveness of it does nothing but make it stand out as what it is – lazy crap.

The Devil May Cry series evidently has its rabid fans, and I can’t speak for any of the other games for the older systems, but this game just made me miss the God of War games. Although it has stellar production values, its clear that the studio and developer tried to save time by creating half a game and then stretched it into a whole game. Ultimately it felt as though the people involved in it, instead of coming up with something new and original, chose mainly to borrow from other franchises – mainly the above mentioned God of War and Final Fantasy games. If you’re going to rip something off, I agree that it is a good bet to steal from the best of the best – however either way it is going to give the player a been there, done that vibe.

I will give this game honorable mention in the design of the flaming Taurus boss, Berial. Probably one of the coolest looking monsters I’ve seen in a long time.

Take a gander:

As far as Powerman 5000 – I was right on the money. A quick Youtube search turned up a fan-based video of “When World’s Collide” to clips from Final Fantasy. Geek-O-Rific!

The Lawyer On The Plane

Fresh from U2 and the Atlanta Aquarium, an exhausting 36 hours, we finally hit the airplane home.

The little dude next to me was all talking to his client on his Blackberry, and then as we were taxi-ing to take off he pulled out all this paperwork. It was a deposition about some dude vs. Duke Power (the big electric company out here in North Carolina) – and I was kinda sitting there reading my magazine, but his deposition next door was, like, so much more interesting than what I was reading – especially when paired with his phone call which was all like – “Well, did you try to hide that arrest? No? No. It doesn’t really matter that you got arrested, just as long as they knew when they hired you that this happened. That’s what matters.”

Just, totally fascinating stuff. Some dude’s secretary was being questioned and they totally explained to her the format of a deposition, and she spelled her name all out, and then they were asking her questions and she was all like, ‘I already said that in my written statement’ and the attorney’s were all like, ‘We know that, but we need you to say it.’

The deposition was engrossing as I was totally into it by the third page. And that’s when he noticed me totally reading his shit. I didn’t mean to. It just sorta happened.

Anyway, he shifted himself away from me, hiding the document that had “redacted” parts all over it – totally making it even more awesome… And then it was like uncomfortable bizarro for the rest of the hour-long flight as I watched a movie on my ipod.

And then he totally wasn’t like fascinating when we landed and the second he could he got on the phone with what I assume was his wife and talked about how she had to keep the laundry picked up because the in-laws cat was going to be staying with them ’til next Wednesday and cats can be pretty dirty (Not!) so to let it get all over the laundry was going to be bad – and then he tried to talk to his little daughter and ask her how school was and the daughter obviously handed the phone back to mom after, like, thirty seconds and he was talking to the his wife again about how the in-laws were really going to be out of town that long – really? they can’t cut it a few days short? – and the 4 or 5 rows around him who were waiting to deplane had to listen to this phone call.

FU, Douche. Nobody wants to listen to all that shit. At least wait until you’re off the plane and walking down the concourse to make your personal, non-fascinating phone call.

God, I’ve wasted my life! Maybe I shoulda went to law school just so that reading shit that sounds like a Phillip Roth novel was my job, instead of a hobby.

More about U2, Atlanta, and the Aquarium to come soon!

On Our Way to U2!

Well, in just an hour or two we’ll be heading to the airport for a flight to Atlanta – myself, Mrs. Smirk and the two Smirklings – for U2’s show tonight and the Atlanta Aquarium tomorrow.

Woo-Hoo!

On a blog-related note, due to a couple of my recent posts, the healthcare post, and the Rebel Son post, the notorious commenter Chancho Cox has accused me of turning much more conservative than I used to be. In fact, he called me his personal Dennis Miller. In Chancho’s view I have taken a right turn and not for the better. Like Dennis, I used to yuck it up on SNL and be kinda funny, and now I’m doing a boring play by play on the NFL – and making vague references and doing cloying conservative punditry on the side.

Unlike Dennis Miller, Dave Letterman is still a liberal. Thank God! I can understand some good old fashioned work fucking and cheating on the wife – but I can’t understand, say, the WSJ.

To this accusation I have to say, whatever Chancho.

Now I’ve got to get back to coloring the “Fuck Africa” banner that the kids and I have been coloring to hold up during the Desmond Tutu video speech part of the show, and prepare our little parking lot booth for the FOUR campaign and four.org – wherein we take donations towards our ultimate goal of eradicating poverty for myself and my family – and perhaps get us a couple of sweet new flat-screens for the den. (Don’t worry, our sister organization three.org should be able to take care of the Playstation 3 to hook up to the new tvs.)

I will be back on Thursday! (Not that there’ll be a blog post at that point – but I will be back.)

Rebel Son – (F’n-A This is Good Stuff!) And A Short Discourse On Contemporary Country Music

I recently discovered Rebel Son. Songs such as Drunk As a Skunk and Sittin’ Up Drinkin’ With Robert E. Lee have captured a small and until now vacant part of my heart. How I hadn’t heard of them until now, and how I stumbled upon them, not by an actual recommendation, but accidentally is a total shame. So to begin the story of my new fixation with Rebel Son in particular, I think it’s important to give you, dear reader, a quick rundown of my history with country music in general.

Living down in the American South for as long as I have now – (I reckon its goin’ on dern near fifteen years by the length of the ol’ kudzu vine out back) – it was only a matter of time before I became familiar enough with contemporary country music that I actually began to like a few songs.

The Charlotte, NC region has probably 5 or so country stations, 3 top forty stations, 2 modern rock stations, 2 classic rock stations, and 2 adult contemporary radio stations. So, yeah, country music is kinda hard to avoid if you’re flipping around the regular radio dial. That’s not to mention that there are quite a few bars and other public venues that have a large country-music loving customer base, and thus play the music. And need I mention parking lots, sitting in traffic, public parks, lakeside and various other places where the blasting of music is a regular occurrence?

Over the last two or so years I began to actually listen to country music instead of ignoring, or even worse, degrading it, and a few things about it began intrigue me.

#1. Its insistence on telling a story.

A lot of country songs actually are a narrative, a short story that rhymes, often with a moral at the end. The songs often try to tug at your heart strings, and the story often concludes with an O’Henry sort of ironic, twist ending. A good example of this is God is Great, Beer is Good by Billy Currington. (This particular attribute of country music makes it eminently easy to make fun of – or rather, have fun with as Rebel Son will make clear shortly.)

#2. A lot of country music is about the country music lifestyle, and a reinforcement and a defense of the country music lifestyle.

This is by no means isolated to country music. A ton of hip hop and rap songs are mainly about being into hip hop and rap. And, for those about to rock, we salute you – please. But rock and hip hop lifestyles are pumped up and glorified not just in the music, but also all over our television, movies, and other pop culture day after day, whereas the country music lifestyle tends to be isolated from mainstream culture to a certain extent. Even Taylor Swift, before she was interrupted by Kanye West during the recent MTV awards alluded to the fact that she never thought she’d win because she’s a country artist. Although it is certainly more mainstream than it was a decade ago, it is still a marginalized genre in a lot of ways. And, in my opinion, a lot of this marginalization occurs because of country music’s insistence on glorifying the country music lifestyle. As such, a person either likes country music or hates it – there’s not much in between. A good recent example of a song that glorifies the country lifestylye is One In Every Crowd by Montgomery Gentry.

#3. Lastly, like any music, if you wade through enough of it you’re going to find some gems here and there.

Okay, well I guess that wasn’t a good example. But anyway, to continue…

Even those who profess to “hate, hate, hate” country music are going to find, given enough exposure, something to hum along to. I recall a few years ago when Mrs. Smirk – a professed country music hater – found herself unconsciously humming along to “Cry” by Faith Hill as it played over Target’s PA system. Do you know why she was humming? Because “Cry” is a good infectious song that actually succeeds in capturing the melancholy of being dumped. It’s a perfect match of melody and lyric. That’s not just a good country song, but a good pop song, and ultimately, stripping away all the labels – just a good song. (Not to mention that the video for it that I linked to above is a well-directed, special-effect laden piece of kick-ass, short-filmmaking.)

So, to get around to Rebel Son; The other day as I was working I was perusing country music videos, in particular Montgomery Gentry, who I don’t “like”, but rather find fascinating. They have catchy as hell songs, but almost all of their lyrics revolve around the aforementioned affirmation of the country-lifestyle – as in, you get the feeling that both Montgomery and Gentry will kick anybody’s ass who would dare to question their lifestyle.

Anyway, in the sidebar, youtube recommended for me Rebel Son- and on a whim, I clicked. And boy am I glad I did. At first I wasn’t sure if these guys were satirizing country music, or perhaps taking country music to its next logical incarnation – Hard Core Country maybe?. Perhaps a little of both.

Though Rap and Country seem about as far away from each other as musical forms could get, what they do have in common is their rabid fan base, their endorsement and encouragement of their respective lifestyles, and lastly their genre within a genre morphology.

So, here, without further adieu I present the ingenious, hilarious, catchy, and downright good music of Rebel Son. Consider them a sort of the Afroman of country music – except they’ll probably never get any country radio airplay considering their lyrical content. Needless to say, the three songs below are definitely NSF.

First off, a song that tells a story:
“What Part Don’t You Understand”

Secondly, we’ll have our affirmation of the Country lifestyle song:
“Redneck Piece of White Trash”

And lastly, a song that’s just plain good – and pretty friggin’ funny.
“Quit Yer Bitchin’”

Lest I present Rebel Son as merely a band making funny novelty songs, they do get quite serious. For instance “Bury Me In Southern Ground” is, I dare say, a haunting, deathbed vigil and a longing for a South that is no longer with us.

“You Can’t Turn a Whore Into a Lady” sounds like it would be funny, but is actually not funny at all and is really quite a serious song with a lot of truth to it – not just about whore’s turning into lady’s, but about human nature. “You can’t turn a whore into a lady, unless she wants to do it herself/You can try and try but you can’t turn someone into somebody else.” Is this not the same advice mothers have been giving daughters for millennia?

Check ‘em out! They play constantly all over the south, and even have a date in November at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Click the logo below to head to their myspace page which has all their upcoming dates!

Some Thoughts On “Shell Shock 2: Blood Trails”

4 out of 5 Cookies – Apocalypse Now with zombies! – Totally liked a whole lot. No real issues.

I’m going to do something a little bit different this time around with this review. Let me break it down:

I had seen this game about two months ago on the used shelf at the local game store, one lone copy all by itself. I never recalled hearing or reading about it. It had sort of somehow slipped under my radar in February of 2009 when it was released. I made a mental note to look it up online and moved on.

Later, I did look it up online and the reviews were less than stellar at two separate sources; 4 out of 10 at IGN, 5 out of 10 at meta-critic… I didn’t even bother reading the reviews even as I mentally crossed the game off my list.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and there I am in the game store and that one lone used copy is still on the shelf. Granted, it could have been a different copy, but honestly, I think it was the same one. Forsaken and forlorn, and that tortured, miserable soldier on the front, he seemed to be beckoning me to purchase him. Used it was less than $20, plus another 10% off for being a paid member of the game store club. I thought again about the 4 out of 10 review that I hadn’t bother to read, I looked at the screaming soldier again… Sold!

As you can see, my rating, is four cookies out of five which translates to an 8 out of 10 on the IGN scale. Why is my rating so much higher than theirs? I don’t know. I still haven’t actually read their review. But I do know, glancing at their site that the user review of their own readers is a respectable 7 out of 10, pretty close to my score. So, we can surmise that people who actually bought and paid for the game liked it quite a bit, but the reviewers who get the game for free, and get to play every video game that comes out, people who don’t actually play video games for the sheer enjoyment, but rather get paid for playing video games, hated it. Interesting.

So, what I’m going to do with this particular review is write my own review, share my own thoughts about it, and then go back and read the IGN review to see why I’m so wrong.

I really did enjoy playing the game and the only weak spots I can find in it that are worth mentioning are the graphics and a little of the programming. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely still looks like a next-gen game with some hi-deffy goodness in parts, but its visuals just don’t pack the crispness and punch of, say, Resident Evil 5 or the Call of Duty franchise. As far as programming there were a couple of parts where the the enemies ran around in nonsensical circles waiting to be shot.

But I’m not going to quibble about these small things since the game scared the living shit out of me. Let me repeat that again – This Game Scared The Living Shit out of me. One more time in italics and all caps: THIS GAME SCARED THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ME.

The reason I want to repeat that is that the point of this game is to Scare The Living Shit Of You – and in that it succeeds. There were evenings I came home and though it is my regular routine to play whatever game it is that I’m working my way through, with this one, some evenings I just couldn’t. The game was just way too stressful and heart-pumping to relax to.

In fact, Mrs. Smirk wanted to go to the new Rob Zombie Halloween 2 movie this weekend, but I nixed that idea, basically because I’m pretty much through with heart-pounding terror for a little while after finishing up this game.

So what’s the game about? It’s basically Call of Duty, (but without the left trigger auto-aim feature) set in a Vietnam that’s quite similar to Apocalypse Now, with zombies.

This video game is not about Apocalypse Now… this video game is Apocalypse Now.

Zombies in video games have become sort of a running joke at this point. In fact, while browsing the independent games on XBox Live there’s even one called, “Look, I Made a Video Game with Zombies” or some such. In Shell Shock they are referred to as “the infected” a’la 28 Days Later, but make no mistake, they’re run of the mill zombies. What’s effective about them is the speed with which they move, and the game lighting, which makes a surprise attack a constant possibility. One second you’re staring at an open jungle, and the next second the screen is filled with a hungry, bleeding, screaming zombie sending you into an unexpected, frenzied panic of shooting and running.

Kudos also must be given to the sound design, particularly in the outdoor jungle levels. Crickets chirp, wild pigs squeal, leaves rustle, rain patters into puddles. Your character breathes heavily during tense moments, and your heartbeat audibly creeps into the speakers out of the dark quiet. The ambiance sucks you in. The voice work of the zombies also deserves honorable mention. These zombies don’t moan and groan, they scream horribly, loudly, and painfully. At one point in one of the early levels, I swear, it really sounded like one of them screamed “Steeellllaaa” like Brando in “Streetcar Named Desire”. Maybe I misheard, but I don’t think so, and assuming that I didn’t I would think this might be a head-nod towards Brando and his role in Apocalypse Now which is a fantastic segue into…

This game is the closest thing to playing Apocalypse Now ever. Quiet yet unsettling voice-over narration? Check. Boat ride up the river? Check. Insane man at the end of the river? Check. Humanity gone awry? Check. Buddha statues, abandoned check posts, and impenetrable jungles? Check.

In fact, the game so closely resembles Apocalypse Now that about halfway through the game I found myself totally in the mood to watch the movie and spent two nights watching the extra-long redux version for the first time in a few years. When I came back to the game, I respected it that much more.

I sort of bashed the graphics as a weak point earlier, and before concluding I really just want to clarify that the graphics are only weak in comparison to some other games out there, but essentially they are still good, and at some points more than that. In trying to recreate portions of Apocalypse Now (and there is no doubt in my mind that the movie was not only an inspiration for this game, but a downright template for it) the creators went above and beyond some of the visuals in the film. Some of the temples and buildings you get to explore are wonderful recreations of Col Kurtz’s temple from the movie, but whereas Col Kurtz had decapitated heads on the ground and bodies on pikes, as you traverse the last chapter of the game, you have literal crucifixions of soldiers going on – some of them in midst of turning into zombies, their innards exposed as they struggle to get themselves off of their crosses in order to eat you.

All in all, its very well done, and I really have no problem recommending this game to fans of survival horror and particularly to anyone with a soft spot for Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece. And perhaps my own familiarity with that film and this game’s loving homage to it is why I just can’t find that much to complain about.

That being said, I am now off to read the IGN review of the game. Below is the trailer for the game, and below that I will post my reaction to the terrible IGN review of the game, which I am certainly bound to disagree with.

(Yes, not only did they buy the rights to “Freebird” for the trailer, but it is also featured in the game during the end credits. I still can’t for the life of me figured out why they would relegate it to the end credits instead of putting it to good use within the game…)

Well, I’ve gone and read the IGN review in which they complain about AI, they complain about the games shortness (it is a budget title, so it was never meant to compete full-on with other first-person shooters such as Halo or Call of Duty), and the story.

If you’ve come this far, you’ve already read what I think. The game is far from original, and yet the it chooses to borrow quite liberally from the best of the best – in particular that one war movie that I refuse to mention again. My guess is that Eric Brudvig, the author of the IGN review has never seen said film, as it is hard to play the game without seeing those fingerprints all over it. Had he seen it, my guess is he would have at least mentioned it. To each his own, I suppose, but “shockingly bad” seems a little irresponsible as it is definitely not that as the reader reviews and the multiple 9’s out of 10 will attest.

Lastly, is it me, or does even the trailer resemble the trailer from Apocalypse Now?