Before Revenge of the Fallen began, we were informed that the original film had 14 robots but that if you laid out all of the robots in the second film head to toe, they’d span from wide side of California to the other. In addition, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes the record for largest explosion with cast on set. This, I presume, was supposed to be a measure of quality. Of course, this is a Michael Bay film and we all know the joke: Big explosions, lots of special effects, a visual spectacular. What I hadn’t expected was that all the robot fighting and fireballs would be almost to the complete exclusion of any semblance of a respectable story, or even on-screen appearance by the cast.

Revenge of the Fallen is nothing more than robots fighting robots from beginning to end. Though that might sound exciting in theory, in practice, it had me checking the time on my phone twenty minutes in, then every five minutes following (as you can tell by my tweets) and there are some key reasons for this.

First, the robots, with all their spinning, pointy, sharp, black and shiny metal designs, are too complicated to watch when they’re moving on screen. Sure, Optimus Prime, with his blue and red side panels, might look like an impressive piece of machinery when he stands alone in a cemetery whilst glinting in the sun but as soon as he swings a fist at another robot of similar height and visual complexity, all you can perceive is a mass of shapes moving. Occasionally, this cacophony of glinting objects will freeze frame to indicate someone made an important blow but aside from these moments, the battles amount to loud bangs and crashes. People watch boxing for the art and beauty behind the movement. You can see each fist clearly swing, you can see when people duck, counter and maneuver, you can understand what’s going on. Films starring martial artists, such as Jet Li and Jackie Chan, are intriguing because we can see what the artist is doing, we can see the extraordinary and understand it whilst failing to comprehend how they can humanly manage the feat. In Revenge of the Fallen, even if something interesting happened, you wouldn’t know, because all you can see is a tangled mess of fast moving objects. This indiscernible garbage composes approximately 80% of the film and a complete waste of special effects.

Second, none of the characters in the film, either human or robotic, are given enough screen time and depth to create any meaningful connection with the audience. In the first film, most of our time is spent with Sam Witwicky, we can see he’s a clumsy goof desperately trying to chase the girl of his dreams, getting caught up in an epic life or death battle along the way. The interest is in the characters and their interactions. In Revenge, the most interesting, humourous and enjoyable moments of the film occur in the early stages, when Sam’s mother inadvertently scoffs down some hash brownies and ends up high as a kite. From there, it’s all down hill as a mess of robots fill the screen in legion, then get blown to pieces. There’s no connection to the robots, to any of the human corpses that pile up in abundance, no soul at all. It’s just a bunch of toys dying on screen to satisfy Bay’s adolescent fantasies. This is gore porn with shrapnel. There’s no nuance and no tact to the handling of the issues of life or death, essentially making each battle utterly meaningless.

To compensate for this lack of character depth, a range of frustrating and annoying new comic-relief personalities have been thrown into the mix, including two hilariously stereotypical racist twin autobots. These brothers, featuring gold teeth and obvious mental defects, may as well have been written into the script by the Wayland brothers. Their entire script consists of off-hand one-liners, like the rest of the cast I suppose.

And here’s the worst thing, the actors themselves don’t do a half bad job at delivering their lines and playing the characters. They get what’s happening and they’re making the most of a horrible, horrible play. Give them more screen time and flesh out the narrative at the expense of one and a half hours scrap metal and this might have been half-way enjoyable.

Since when the fuck did Transformers become Terminators, anyway?

I thought that I’d seen bad this year when I caught Wolverine: Origins, and that obvious abuse of special effects (could you not see during production that having Wolverine hack through a ladder at the speed of light looked utterly ridiculous?), and then there was Terminator: Salvation, which raped another brilliant series for all it was worth. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes bullshit and boredom to a whole new level.

Stop giving Michael Bay money. Please.

1/5 Stars

PS. Megan Fox is always hot, and ever so slightly redeeming, but I think she’s only got one look, too.

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One of the reasons I found Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune so charming was the clumsiness with which Drake performed many of his actions. When running, he’d stumble over rocks. Diving for cover, he looks uneasy throwing himself against the wall. He looks uncomfortable being shot at, even when he’s behind cover, ducking his shoulders and covering his head. Blind-firing even looks like a genuine attempt to take pot-shots without exposing himself, as one arm gets throw on top of the wall with the weapon in tack, the trigger fires and his aiming sucks. Then there’s a certain clunkiness to the weapons. The sound of the AK-47 is heavy, clatters and creaks, while the M4 has a far more certain, militaristic feel (though these only come into play during the later part of the game). Heck, even the climbing has a certain “oh God, I hope I make it and find grip” sort of feel about it.

It is for these reasons, that I’ve been waiting to play the Uncharted 2 multiplayer beta with trepidation. First-person shooters with competitive multiplayer modes, such as Counter-Strike and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, rely on precision: If I aim a gun in that direction, thats where I expect the bullets to go and if I press forward, or left to strafe, then I expect these actions to happen without hesitation. Precise is not what Uncharted is.

Yet, here I am, absolutely loving the multiplayer in Uncharted 2. That clunkiness is still there, of course, but it isn’t detrimental to gameplay, rather, it makes the game feel fresh and exciting. There’s an additional level of movement afforded in Uncharted 2 that doesn’t appear in any other multiplayer game, either, and that is of vertical movement. Being able to jump, climb and shimmy to higher vantage points, to hang and fire, too, provides greater tactical mobility. And, it’s led to one of the most surprising moments I’ve experienced in a game to date. Standing with my back firmly against a wall, well-entrenched but with a good view of the opposition, I had laid out two enemy. Then, while taking pot-shots at a third, suddenly I was pulled down from behind, then had my neck broken. Someone had flanked me from the rear, climbed the wall, hung behind me, then used a special melee maneuver. They jumped up and hauled me down.

So far, there are two maps on offer in the competitive section, with both team deathmatch and treasure hoarding modes on offer. In the treasure hunting mode, a heavy gold statue will materialise somewhere in the field of play and both teams need to make a grab for it. One player grabs it one-handed, allowing them to still use their pistol but with a speed penalty. The rest of the team defend them while the other hauls ass for a treasure chest to dump it in. Then, another relic will appear in place. It’s fun, that’s for sure, though I still prefer straight-up deathmatch.

I’ve also had the chance to play through a single section of the co-operative game. Basically, up to three players begin at point A and must make it to point B, where the treasure is. On the way, you’ll need to kill a near endless hoard of mercenaries at a number of choke points. And, that’s it. The opportunity to throw bullets at fodder is welcome but I’m interested to see if they’ve really pushed the concept, or whether it will remain only a series of arean battles.

What I haven’t bothered mentioning are all the small improvements and innovations that have been made, such as being able to pick up and throw explosive tank canisters, and the lovely graphics. Basically, count me excited for the release of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves later this year. Until then, I need to learn to stop calling Uncharted 2 by the name Drake’s Fortune 2.

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While studying Visual Communications this semester, we’ve been encouraged to try and convey difficult concepts in different ways. For instance, one student attempted to convey visually what happens when you catch an aroma wafting on the breeze, then the process of figuring out what it is until it hits you. He conveyed this through a spiral like pattern that was white on the outside with only a whisp of yellow and pink, which converges in the centre as a beautiful swirling floral motif. The scent was of sweet roses.

This brings me to these custom Nike Dunk Lows, which attempt to depict the US state Atlanta. What a way to go, too! Road maps as the main attraction, highway sign accents, and a skyline at the heel, with a beautifully scribed “Atlanta” overlay. Such a crazy concept and yet these kicks really pull it off! Not sure I’d wear ‘em, though. Not my style.

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Edition 08 of FREE online gaming eZine, Pixel Hunt, is out now at www.pixelhunt.com.au. In it, I provide my take on PlayStation 3 exclusive shooter, SOCOM: Confrontations, and beat up bird-men in Zeno Clash, only to find that I really didn’t like either of them. Not at all.

My SOCOM: Confrontations review is on page 31, and this is how it starts:

Eh, it’s alright, I guess.

Honestly, I’d have expected more from one of Sony’s prized exclusive franchises, and the first in the SOCOM series to hit the PlayStation 3.

Confrontation plays like a third-person version of Counter-Strike, mixed with the experience-based perks and weapon upgrades that make recent additions to the Call of Duty series so addictive.

And I talk about Zeno Clash in “Not My Genre” on page 06, and this is how that starts:

First-person shooters? I can dig ‘em. Brawlers? Down with ‘em, too. Surrealist art ala Salvador Dali? Interesting to be sure. How about a tangled mess of first-person fisticuffs in a surrealist world where the father-mother (with sexy lady bits and man bits, too), and its many thousands of nightmarishly disfigured bird-men and elephant-woman children are trying to kill you with fish guns and skull grenades?

Honestly, I’m not proud of my effort writing about Zeno Clash. So many amazing writers have already tackled the game and my two bob isn’t up to the scratch of the fellows over at Rock Paper Shotgun or different but similar fellows at Eurogamer. Guess I’ll just have to do better next time!

Also, if you like Pixel Hunt magazine, then subscribe!

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The following article was written for the ‘Share House’ edition of the University of Adelaide student newspaper On Dit. Typically, content for the University paper is supposed to be a little rough around the edges, so excuse the abuse.

Despite common misconception, gaming is a relatively social past time. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) often require play with a group in order to accomplish larger goals and take down massive targets. The  fantasy based World of Warcraft, which for luddites plays like a rainbow-infested version of Lord of the Rings, is littered with battles against creatures that can only be defeated by raiding parties of up to 40 combatants. And, quintessential to survival in the cut-throat space epic EVE Online is to form strong friendships with other factions based on trade, strength or common interest.

Popular shooting games Call of Duty: World at War and Halo 3 continue to sell strongly months after release based on their exceptional competitive and co-operative multiplayer modes, which may be played by numerous people together online or together in the same room on the same screen — often called “split-screen” — or each playing from their own PC or console over a local area network, or LAN.

Now, I cannot stress how much fun can be had screaming at your friends, who are also within striking distance, at LAN events. At LANs, a bunch of gamers and geeks haul their PCs, Xbox 360s and other gaming paraphernalia to a dedicated location and proceed to taunt and abuse the shit out of each other while blowing away or out-smarting their opposition. This in addition to strapping people to chairs with duct-tape, throwing chips across the room and consuming in abundance various diabetes-inducing, highly caffeinated energy drinks.

LAN events are fun, furious, loud and are also guaranteed to shock the uninitiated, especially those with any moral compass that doesn’t direct the owner down a long staircase to meet Beelzebub.

For one, LANs are  “usually” a boys club, filled with adolescent teens that sound like children and men that resemble adolescent teens. Have you ever visited Encyclopedia Dramatica, a website dedicated to chronicling the filth of the net, or are familiar with the infamous 4chan? If yes, then you should already be fretting.

LANs are the informal tribal gatherings born of the children of the Internet. You’ll encounter all the geek, nerd and gamer stereotypes, and a few more that might have been forehead slappingly obvious. The fat, the thin, the pale, the pimply, the tall, the short, the well kept and the smelly. And, you may even see some women, too. Though invariably the ratio sits firmly in favour of the male sex.

Memes make up the dialogue of the event, like hipsters with less fashion-sense but all the lingo. Abhorrent phrases such as “mad cunt”, “nigger”, “shot like a Jew”, “fag”, and “you suck teh gayz” mix with more familiar online speech such as “l33t”, “haxorz”, “pwned” and other suitably mangled English concoctions. You’ll hear quotes from cartoons you know of and some you don’t, and references to the most obscure shit on the Internet. Futurama, The Simpsons, Invader Zim and South Park fill the air. If you’re lucky, someone will be watching an illegal episode of Red Dwarf, Flight of the Concords or The IT Crowd, injecting a little something different into the shrill, offensive din. Honestly though, take that Mighty Boosh crap elsewhere.

If you were happy that owners of the torrent website ThePirateBay.org were found liable for aiding in the sharing of copyrighted material in a recent court trial in Sweden, you may also want to steer clear. Larger LANs are filled with leeches, the Internet’s collective information sponges who appear with no intention to game but rather to tap into the media rich network and swallow up any resources they haven’t already stored on rack mounted servers at home.

Aside from a set of very loose morals, you need stamina to LAN like a professional. Whether you’re attending a smaller LAN of between four to eight players, or a massive event such as South Australia’s Reloaded LAN with many hundreds of trigger happy folk, you’re expected to game from the afternoon and into the evening, with one hand on the mouse and another soiled by pizza grease, through a cool can of Mountain Dew just as the dew outside begins to evaporate off the grass at dawn.

Some of you reading this will be wondering just exactly what the attraction is to an event that is as unruly, disorganised and ultimately disrespectful as a LAN and that’s fine. We don’t care about you. You’re nothing more than a few easy kills in Counter-Strike anyway — fuckin’ n00b — and you’ll probably whine the whole time you’re there. The funny thing is, if you read this and thought “wow, a LAN sounds like my thing”, then you’ve probably already been to one. You know that 8-player deathmatch you played on Xbox in your mate’s garage in 2001? That was a LAN.

I heartily recommend you haul your desktop PC and monitor, keyboard and mouse, or your underpowered laptop capable of running the original Half-Life in 800×600, to one of the many LANing events around Adelaide, like StreetGeek or Reloaded. Better yet, invite a bunch of game loving mates around for an evening of fast food and Xbox 360, and rage on through a weekend. You won’t regret the experience, unless you’re the one that ends up at the bottom of the leaderboard. Even then, strong competition will help you improve!

LANs are the pinnacle of the shared game experience, if you prefer your friends to have more physical bulk than ePenis.

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I’m writing a review for inFAMOUS and was going to reserve comment for that but after reading Kprata and Harris and Vixen’s thoughts, figured I may as well join in on the discussion, at least a little.

I never played Crackdown, and so I proclaim to neither like nor dislike it and thus can’t judge how relevant comparisons are to inFAMOUS. However, I’m surprised I haven’t read anyone comparing the combat in inFAMOUS to that in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Considering that Cole has the ability to spam what is pretty much a “force push” and send cars and rubbish skiffs flying into enemies for combos and crush bonuses, which are all elements that made The Force Unleashed fun. However, inFAMOUS pales in regards to combat. While you end up with many different powers, there’s never any incentive to think about what you’re going to use for what situation. Either you fling lightning grenades or lightning rockets or lightning bullets, and though they may all have a different method of delivery, each leads to pretty much the same result. I don’t agree with Kprata that Sucker Punch “should have reduced the number of Cole’s powers” but I do think the difference between enemy varieties should have been emphasised to force you to fully use the power set provided. (Funny how different this is in comparison to The Force Unleashed, when you were handed an awesome new power then confronted with an enemy immune to it.) If anything should be jettisoned, it’s the cover system, which never once in the entirety of the game came in useful.

I’m not convinced that inFAMOUS is as bad as Harris purports it to be. Though I agree the game has issues, such as the many instances in which I’ve found myself infinitely base jumping from a building, through the street, into the sky, then back through the street again, and the repetetive nature of the missions, these are not game-breaking. Where the AI for Harris was lacklustre, I found the enemies on the whole to be a tough and semi-intelligent mob to confront. That is, up until some of the stronger powers are unlocked and you can pretty much walk through anybody, which is, if you’ve made it to the end of the game, sort of the point. Again, the enemies themselves needed a wider array of actions, such as the ability to jump from buildings to ambush you, perhaps, in order to make the game more fun and varied and avoid being stuck. But alas, I sympathise with his abandonment only three hours in. I too had considered throwing down the lightning bolt after a few hours play, until I saw a review on Good Game, whereby Cole appeared to have the power to fly and zoom along train tracks. So, I continued playing a little while longer and must admit, the game is a slow-burner that takes some investment before revealing its potential.

PixelVixen707 comments on the moral choices in the game, and the way in which it doesn’t judge you based on your moral decisions:

“Choose to be a hero, and you can stop every five feet and heal someone who’s wounded and dying on the sidewalk. You get a few experience points for every save, but that’s just a “thank you”; knowing that you’ve saved hundreds of lives is the real reward…If you’re the villain-type, inFamous lets you wreak havoc on an already wrecked city, torturing the populace and even draining the last gasps of life from victims dying on the street. All these crimes will nudge your karma toward evil, but in the scheme of things, a few murders here and there don’t add up to much — and anyway, you’ll quickly learn how hard it is to do good.”

I disagree. To stop and heal is a much easier task to accomplish than sucking the life from someone and it seems like a conscious decision on the part of the developer. To heal, you simply stop by someone, press R1 and then hold triangle. To suck life, however, requires you to stop, hold R1 and repeatedly tap at square. The difference in energy exertion is, admittedly microscopic — you aren’t tasked with mashing a button for five minutes in order to make you gasp and sputter and understand how difficult it is to crawl through a microwave oven — but just mashing even a couple of times is definitely a more taxing task than just holding the button down. As a friend of mine says, “I love it when people hate me, it takes so much more energy to hate someone.” Sucker Punch seem to have emphasised this simple statement by forcing you to actively kill, or to charge and heal. Although, this does seem in contradiction to the other blunt moral choices presented, where apathy and inaction will throw you in the red, while helping may require additional work — and in this, I guess PixelVixen707’s statements do have some validity.

Thoughts?

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I totally hadn’t seen this video before now! Best quote?

“Yeah we’ve got some skulls and demons and hot rods and half-naked girls. Whenever we were trying to make a decision about ‘wait, it’s medieval but can we have cars and can we have axes and can we have bizarre medical equipment. Yes because that was all on the cover of a heavy metal album at some point. Anything that was on the cover of a heavy metal album we can have.”

Also, this is new. To be honest, I can’t stand Jack Black, most of the time, but for some reason everything I’ve seen of him for Brutal Legend makes me want to injury my head and throw my horns up.

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Look at these ridiculous, squashed things!

Man, when do they start with the tiny races?

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I’ve been playing Mass Effect again and pushing the depths of exploration even further. Dropping into the deepest holes, climbing the tallest mountains and enjoying the adrenalin rush that is driving vertical. Loud, screeching whines whipping through the air as the engine revs out, the wheels slip and give ground, and you wrench the chassis 90 degrees in an attempt to grind the Mako six-wheeler horizontal instead of down. It’s insanely visceral and genuine and exhilarating, and all I’m doing is driving.

This excitement is generated because of the various jewel encrusted bones the player is thrown when exploring the alien landscapes. Using the circular radar embedded in the HUD, you follow the emblazoned orange markers towards an unknown destination simply titled “anomaly”. Upon the unidentified corpse that is discovered there is a war relic from a vicious battle between two extraterrestrial tribes to decide the fate of something meaningful long ago. And, when visiting the status screen sometime later, I know there are another 3 of these ancient markers to wrest from these skeletons, and I have found 5 before it. They are difficult to find. They are strewn throughout yet to be revealed alien environments. When I find them, I have no idea what will happen.

Will shit go down, when I’ve hoarded all 10 dog-tags. There will be experience points for sure but what else?! That’s the mystery right there. It’s what I’ve nearly blown up two cars for, trying to climb to hilltops. It’s what I’ve spent seven hours searching for on the Goddamn Galaxy Map. Sure, I could just check GameFaqs. Though, that wouldn’t be satisfying.

Well, back to wrecking Makos!

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The review I wanted to write:

It’s shit.

The review that I wrote for GamingSA:

As Christian Bale brings his intense ferocity to cinemas as John Connor, leading the fight for humanity against the rogue AI Skynet in the fourth Terminator film, “Salvation”, videogamers will instead be treated to a mundane shooter of the same name.

As a benchmark for quality, Bale himself refused to contribute his likeness and voice to the game.

Everything about Terminator: Salvation the videogame is lacklustre and uninspired. Though the game handles as well as any post-Gears of War third-person shooter, the enemies, environments, cut-scenes, characters and overall length lead to a tedious experience that is over in less than four hours.

There are only a handful of enemies to defeat using a small variety of highly effective tactics. One direct shotgun blast will disable flying Aerostat drones. Crab-like enemies require flanking maneuvres to attack their backs, or alternatively, a direct hit with a grenade to expose weak-points. And, the T-800 endoskeletons (the iconic, chrome Terminator enemies) require you to cower behind cover, and then blast them with a few direct blasts from a rocket launcher, grenade launcher or a bucket load of bullets.

Once you’ve mastered these tactics, the rest of the game is a walkover. As you progress from one crumbling section of LA to another, the linear path will open into an arena and you’re stuck there until everything is terminated. Unexciting on-rails shooting sequences and run-of-the-mill cut-scenes, in which nothing cool ever happens, round out the droll experience.

At the end of it all, you have the choice of playing through the game again on a harder difficulty, or with a friend at home but there’s no incentive to.

The game is rushed and unfinished. It isn’t worth touching.

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