Wanted: Weapons of Fate (2009) Xbox 360

"Wanted" is a bit of a stretch

Rating:  3 out of 5 bullets with your name on it curved at your head.

Plot Synopsis:  The game picks up shortly after the end of the movie.  Wesley is being hunted by a different fraternity (the Paris one to be exact) which causes him to shoot up parts of Chicago and Europe in his attempt to stop The Immortal who he blames for killing his mother.  You play in flashback scenes as Wesley’s father Cross who also, surprise, shoots things.

Arrow: Escape from Lian Yu (2012, PS3)

The Arrow game in question.

Rating: 4 out of 5 People Who Have Failed This Island

Plot Synopsis:  Oliver Queen is a rich, entitled frat boy on vacation with his brothers and friends when they skydive onto an island filled with pirates, drugs and human traffickers.  This game follows a young Oliver Queen as he transitions from rich asshole to plain bad-ass.

Spider-Man Sunday: Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) Xbox 360

Amazing Spider-Jerk

Rating: 1 out of 5 Terrible Controls, Combat and Crappy Story Elements

Review:  Since I just wrote my frustrations out in my first impressions and not much has changed this will be an incredibly short review.  Here's what I liked:

-Kingpin is in it.
-Kraven is pretty cool.
-I liked that they made Carnage the result of nano-technology instead of an alien being.
-There's a bunch of little references including Man-Thing.  There are also less subtle references to Mr. Negative and such.
-This version of Shocker is awesome.
-There's a bunch of costumes with various additional attributes.
-The stealth mostly functions alright.

  Most of what I said in my first impressions still apply.  I hate the controls, I finally found a better way of getting around but it involved using the "web-rush" mechanic a lot which, in my opinion, takes all the interactivity out of the game.  The hero or menace mechanic is just plain stupid and I ignored it for the most part in a final cannonball suicide run just to finish the game and at about the halfway point I was desperate to finish the game.  The story makes no sense and in no way resembles the movie.  I would much rather take the movies shallow plot over this none-sense.  Another bragging point was being able to play as Peter Parker but those segments are pointless as they don't add anything and just take up time.  There are conversation options but they are, again, pointless because if you chose to simply end the conversation you get all the plot that you need to continue forward.  It would have been nice if they hid some additional objectives in the conversations or some kind of Paragon/Renegade system but as it is the mechanic is just more filler than interesting addition.

  I can't think of a single reason to pick up and play this game.  I was super hype for this game thinking it could be the second coming of Spider-Man 2 for PS2 but it's not that.  It's barely Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six for the NES.  There's no Rhino, no Gwen Stacy, Electro and Green Goblin come and go with NO context.  We don't even see the origins of either, they just show up, you fight them and they disappear.  Which brings to mind the boss fights.  They suck.  It's just a face punch contest until one of you falls.  Skip this game and play something better, it shouldn't be hard, almost anything would be better than this game.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Xbox 360, 2014) First Impressions

The Amazing Asshole

I just got Spider-Man 2 yesterday after work and total I've spent almost 3 hours, maybe, with it.  I just finished the second major mission and defeated The Shocker.  The Shocker, who by the way, looks totally badass.  But, I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to vent some frustration.

  I will admit that I'm early enough into the game that this opinion may completely change by the time I finish it.  So far it hasn't been a great experience but I'm not quite at the point where I'm going to give up.

  First, the positive.  The Noir Costume looks great.  All the costumes look great and following the Spider-Man game page on Facebook has previewed a lot of great costumes.  I'm a mark for costumes and each costume offers a buff and I'm an even bigger mark for costumes that actually DO something.  Also the stealth system is greatly improved and much more like Shattered Dimensions rather than the first ASM game where it was just not very good, from what I remember you could do stealth attacks from the ceiling but now you can do them from seemingly anywhere as long as the enemy isn't aware of you.  There are lots of collectibles and a challenge mode.  Um... well... let's see... already there are a bunch of smart, little references to the greater Marvel Universe which I appreciate.

  Alright, now I get to vent.  The game doesn't look that great.  Yes it's in pretty high definition but the people look off and move unnaturally.  The controls are not intuitive in the slightest.  I was given the simple mission to stop a car and I failed it the first time because I had no idea what the fuck to do and when I tried stuff I just ended up getting shot off the fucking car.  I eventually got there through trial and error but why is it so difficult?  This is supposed to be the TUTORIAL part of the game.  Tutor me!

  The combat looks weird and is sort of herky jerky.  I don't have any sense of flow and you get one attack button and one dodge so it's pretty much "mash A to win" and if there is any strategy to be used I haven't experienced it yet.  I'm not really having a great time with the combat and I kind of liked the combat in the last game because, while it was much slower, it looked nicer.  Aaron Schoenke (writer of "Patient J", co-founder of Bat in the Sun Productions) did the mocap for the game and I got all the respect in the world for him but I don't think they did him justice in the animation of the combat.  It certainly doesn't look mocap'ed by an awesome athlete.  It looks like someone who didn't know how the human body moved.  The movement is just to fast and, again, doesn't flow.  It's just here's a move, here's another move, here's a flippy do, etc.  I don't think it's visually engaging and I'm bored by the combat.

Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate Deluxe Edition (2014) Xbox 360

Rating: 3 out 5 Origins That Have Nothing To Do With Arkham

Plot Synopsis:  Blackgate has been taken over by villains, again, and it's your job to stop them, again.

Watchmen: The End is Nigh (2009) Xbox 360

Watchmen: The Potential is Wasted

Rating:  2 out of 5 Illegal Costumed Vigilantes

Plot Synopsis:  Nite Owl and Rorschach beat the hell out everyone ever.  Out of both types of people, big and tank like as well as normal proportioned.

The Darkness II (2012) Xbox 360

Behold greatness!

Rating: 5 out of 5 Perfectly Executed Fight Sequences

Plot Synopsis: Jackie Estacado got control of The Darkness and managed to suppress it. Suddenly a mysterious group of people show up and start a war with Jackie, his mob and his Darkness.

The Darkness (2007) Xbox 360

Surrounded by idiots

Rating: 3 out of 5 Darklings That Are Fucking Useless

Plot Synopsis: Jackie Estacado goes on a mission for the mob on his 21st birthday. It also happens to be the day he inherits his family legacy and becomes host to an incredibly powerful shadow creature.

Batman: Arkham City (2011) Xbox 360

I AM VENGEANCE!

Rating:  6 out of 5 Awesome Cakes Made by Magic Elves

Plot Synopsis:  Batman takes it out of the Asylum and into an abandoned chunk of Gotham City that’s being used to house all of Gotham’s criminals.

Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) X-Box 360

I AM THE NIGHT!

Rating:  4 out of 5 Batarangs Whipped at the Heads of Thugs

Plot Synopsis:  Joker takes over the Asylum and it’s up to Batman to stop him.

If I Made It: Silver Surfer: Herald of Galactus (video game)

Silver Surfer: Herald of Galactus

Overview:  Recently I re-watched the Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the Silver Surfer game for the NES.  I remember, as a kid, a friend of mine having that game and me borrowing it, playing it and just being frustrated by it, much like The Fucking Nerd himself.  But the review got me thinking, is it possible to make a good Silver Surfer game?  Is that something that can be done?  It would be difficult just based on what the Surfer is and his original comics were less high octane action fuel and more meditations on being filtered through psychedelic space imagery.  It's hard but not impossible, like any good game you need to break a character down to its basics and try to recreate that in the gameplay.  Here's how I would do it...

If I Made It: The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (video game)

Outline:  A game with this title already exists and I haven't played it but by all accounts it is terrible with a Metacritic rating of 32/100.  Also Telltale games has a Walking Dead game out that by all accounts is awesome and totally encapsulates the feeling of the series.  But we aren't really here to encapsulate the feeling of the series.  We're here to chop up some zombies with previously established badass characters.  Now the actual Survival Instinct game follows Daryl and Merle Dixon. Daryl is an awesome badass with a heart of gold underneath a tough exterior and Merle is a racist.  That's great but I don't think you can make a game out of their exploits.  At most you can maybe spend a couple of  hours with them.  That's pretty much true with any one person in this world there just isn't enough variety to justify a full length game, especially one that doesn't fudge the current cannon.  A game is hard to do because Dead Rising exists and I was thinking about making the whole game about Morgan Jones who holds an entire small town by himself but that also already exists and it's called Dead Rising: Case Zero and it's downloadable for the 360.  I think the best way to get around this is to make the game about more than one character, four characters to be exact, each character getting about 6+ hours of gameplay.  The goal of this game isn't to capture the ennui of the show, especially since we already have that game (and it's won all the awards), the point is to play as the shows biggest badass' and focus on the survival and fear aspects.

Features:

Batman: Arkham Origins (2013, Xbox 360)

At no point do you play as the asylum

Rating: 5 out 5 Batman Ass Whuppings

Review:  I've been seeing some negative press on this game so I thought I would weigh in with a quick review that's more in the vein of my opening weekend movie reviews.  I'm also very tired as I literally just finished the game after a lengthy couple of sessions, it's pretty much all done except finding a few location files and the challenge maps.

  The game is good.  The game is really good, I would say it's the best game in the series when it comes to pretty much everything.  My still-in-progress Arkham City review puts that game at a 6 out of 5, if this is better then why does it only get a 5.  Well we'll get to that but for now we'll focus on why I think it's better.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (2008) X-box 360

Rating: 3 out of 5 Hours Spent Web Swinging

Plot Synopsis:  Venom shows up and somehow causes a symbiote invasion that you have to stop.

Deadpool: The Game (2013) Xbox 360

I got it out of a taco truck.

Rating:  3 out of 5 Dual Sledgehammer Shots to the Face

Plot Synopsis:  Deadpool gets his own game, which is actually a major part of the plot.  Following that what starts out as a routine job taking out a media mogul turns into a trek across Genosha to deal with Mr. Sinister.

If I made it: Superman (Video Game)

Outline:  Lex Luthor is quietly experimenting with the remains of the Brainiac AI along with some discovered Kryptonian tech.  This experimenting wreaks havoc as the failures that this experimentation causes the release of Bizzarro, brings the attention of The Elite, the return of Cyborg and finally the release of General Zod.  After the final climatic battle with Zod leaves the city in ruins Luthor merges with Brainiac and rebuilds the city overnight using Kryptonian technology turning Metropolis in the literal City of Tomorrow.  But this sudden appearance of Kryptonian technology attracts the attention of The Eradicator as well as Mongul who attacks the city using his interstellar Warworld ship.  But the defeat of Mongul just gives Lex Luthor the opportunity to challenge Superman on the intergalactic stage using his new found powers to try and end the Man of Steel forever.

Superman Returns (2006) X-Box 360

Man of Meh

Rating: 2 out of 5 cheap ass bosses

Plot Synopsis:  I don’t fucking know, you’re guess is as good as mine.

Captain America: Super Soldier (2011) Xbox 360

I'm going to throw this shield hard enough to end Nazism!

Rating: 3 out 5 “Nazi’s” hit with a ricocheting shield

Plot Synopsis:  Cap goes to Zemo castle in Germany and fucks shit up.

Amazing Spider-Man (2012) X-Box 360

Rating: 3 out of 5 Bruce Campbell and Stan Lee cameos

Plot Synopsis:  In attempt to usher in the new era of Oscorp Alistair Smythe shifts the focus from cross species to nano-tech robots.  It goes about as well as you’d think.

Daredevil (2003) Gameboy Advance

Rating: 0 out 5 billy clubs that can’t be thrown because this game sucks

Plot Synopsis:  Kingpin is framing Daredevil to make it look like Daredevil is being paid by Kingpin to take down Daredevil’s rouges gallery.  I think, it’s pretty weak and stupid and lame.