Not quite summer, but I may as well go back as far as May for a couple of things that I can think of worth saying something about, both have had fairly new things too so perhaps it’s good to bring them up again. I’ll be doing this in roughly chronological order but I forget exact details.

Let’s start this off with Ironman 2. It just came out on DVD but I haven’t got it or seen the new releases yet (if I even do). It’s a pretty standard superhero movie, probably on the better end of that spectrum (but there’s been a lot of very bad ones, so that doesn’t mean too much). Fun enough, but nothing exceptional. I wouldn’t think it would be possible (especially in the superhero style with an origin story in the first movie) to put more exposition in the sequel but somehow they succeeded. Fun but nothing special.

Also coming out in May (I think) was the game Red Dead Redemption. Made by the same company that does Grand Theft Auto, it’s basically that but western. It’s weird how this game has ended up, I really enjoyed the story, and played that through till completion (unless there’s another ending after the last one I saw, there was like 3 endings that I played through). There’s a few side things I never completed and I kinda wanted to go back and do that, but it just doesn’t have that same feel going back afterwards (especially with the *trying to avoid spoilers* drastic change your player goes through very near the end) and I can’t bring myself to want to play it again, despite the fact that they’ve definitely tried to add some levels of replayability to it. Multiplayer seems tacked on, bland and not well balanced but they keep adding DLC (with prices on the high end for more avatars and a game mode or two). The highlight of the game is the single player experience, and the scenery, and once you’ve done that there’s nothing left, and they’re not even trying to add to it while trying to add to the worse parts.

Inception is probably the most overrated movie since, well since Avatar. I suppose that’s not that impactful, since one year isn’t that long, but honestly I can’t think of anything that compares to either of these two in that respect (maybe the first Shrek). The story and all the details made no sense, and I don’t mean this like I didn’t understand what was happening, I did, it was just dumb and poorly thought through. Let’s start with what I think is the worst example of this, his top. He uses it to tell if it’s in a dream or not, as in his dreams it doesn’t stop spinning, but in someone else’s dream it does, so if he spins it, and it doesn’t stop then he’s obviously dreaming, but if it does stop then either he’s in someone else’s dream, or he’s in the real world. What garbage is this? It doesn’t work, and if you think about it at all you see this problem. Why was one character able to change shapes and no one else? My suspension of disbelief is willing to allow the movie to have coherent dreams which follow causality (which dreams don’t) and it’s willing to allow the technology to go into someone else’s dream. However, it does not allow things like “we’ll make it so that when your sleeping body falls you wake up” only to show many times sleeping bodies falling without waking up (but then they do when they try to wake them up). Why is gravity all screwed up on one level, but not the next? Luckily I think this is also the type of movie that after everyone talks about how good it is, largely forgets about shortly afterwards, as long as people don’t go bringing it up again, months after most people forgot, those Jerks!

On the other hand, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World was a great movie that apparently no one went to see. The biggest complaint I’ve heard is that some characters were so funny they kind of stole the show from the main characters. I think the books are better than the movie, and although I agree many of the changes are things that are needed to condense the story to fit in the movie, and many of them were really good (this is the kind of thing that happens when you actually involve the original author in the making of the movie) I’m still kinda disappointed that in the movie, Scott never fought any robots, why would they take out fighting robots? One thing I find kinda weird too, is that people talk about Michael Cera being typecast, and that this is another instance of that, but the character of Scott Pilgrim isn’t really like any of his previous roles at all. Unfortunately that wasn’t conveyed in the script or to the director or to the actor. Scott is supposed to be a huge narcissist, and also quite stupid. It’s kinda weird, Scott Pilgrim the character from the books has many character traits similar to characters from a TV show apparently no one watched called Arrested Development. One however is almost the complete opposite of Scott Pilgrim, and I leave it to the reader to guess who I’m referring to. (If you don’t know, I guess you’re going to have to go and read the Scott Pilgrim books and watch Arrested Development, and even if you do know you should do those things again, because they’re so awesome).

The last Scott Pilgrim book also came out this summer (before the movie) and it was also good, but I’m not going to talk much about it, instead I want to talk about the game they made for PS3 and 360. Its release corresponded with the release of the movie, but followed more of the book (until the end, when it went off on its own, but the movie did that too) which among other things means in the game you do get to fight robots! I’ll claim here that this is easily one of the best games based off a movie, partly because it wasn’t really based off the movie. The game, the movie and the last book were all made at about the same time. It’s really quite amazing how well the game (with gameplay based of those old brawlers like Double Dragon, River City Ransom, or the Ninja Turtles games where you just walk through the levels beating guys up) feels like it belongs with the story (which is actually a pretty typical romantic comedy). This probably has more to do with Brian Lee O’Mally’s books than Ubisoft’s game but this game is easily worth the price to download (probably even a better value than a ticket to go see the movie).

NHL 11, EA’s most recent game in their ongoing series had what sounded like enough improvements that I felt like I should pick it up this year, and so I did, they talked so much about their new real-time physics, which is a big help, the thing that really sold me on it was the inclusion of the CHL (which to those of you who don’t know is made up of 3 leagues, the WHL, QMJHL, and OHL). Yeah I pretty much picked it up because I can play as the Kitchener Rangers in it. Year after year, at least lately, it’s been EA’s NHL series winning sports video game of the year awards, and there is a reason why. That said there’s still lots of room for improvement too. Off the top of my head, I can tell you that it’s really frustrating how the CPU is able to take the puck away from you, and skate on, whereas your methods to try the same thing only result in the puck being knocked away (often to just a different player on the other team). In EA’s soccer games, the players will try and take the ball away from another player just by running close to him, in their hockey games, the CPU will do that too, but the player will sit there and do nothing making some frustrating and unrealistic plays. There also seems to be a problem in this year’s game where players will pass in the wrong direction, often sending it directly to the other team, without any teammate who could have received the pass in that direction. Players will often move out of good scoring positions and into heavier cover for some reason, and they’ve still not fixed the problem where players do nothing to try and keep the puck onside (so if a player is near the line, they’ll often take the puck out of the zone and then put it back it for seemingly no reason causing a bad offside. Sometimes I wish EA’s different teams would work more closely together though. The NHL franchise has many good things about it, but could use some of the features from FIFA and some from Madden, and so on, it wouldn’t even cost much, as everything involved is already theirs.

I was going to talk about Civ 5 here too, but This is long enough for now, and since it came out September 21st I can call it a fall release and do that some other time.

In Starcraft 2 you take the role of Jim Raynor, a returning character from the first Starcraft game (in fact, I think all of the really important characters at least show up for a little bit).  He used to be allied with the current emperor (Arcturus Mengsk), but when Mengsk turned out to be evil and leaving a third person in their group behind to die (Sarah Kerrigan) Raynor, who seems to have had the hots for Kerrigan, said it was too much, and decided to fight against Mengsk but Mengsk took over and became emperor.  Meanwhile Kerrigan instead of dieing ended up basically becoming an alien, and took over their forces and generally became evil and very powerful leading the zerg.  Now, if you cry spoilers at this I say too bad, this is all from the first game (and actually makes up about 1/2 the manual for SC2, which has no info at all about playing the game) you’ve had 12 years, if you didn’t know yet you don’t actually care.

In the four years since the end of the “Brood War” things haven’t actually changed much.  Raynor, still a rebel wants to fight against Mengsk, but being a sort of criminal is having a hard time coming up with resources and so is sort of a mercenary.  No one’s been quite sure what the zerg and Kerrigan have been up to, they’ve been off on their own, and anyone who goes to try and find out ends up not coming back.

The zerg suddenly show up again attacking various human worlds without giving much reason, and then the real story starts.  However not much really happens.  Characters show up, you do some work for them, then just as you’re starting to like them they leave.  There are people who betray you but it’s pretty obvious right from the beginning that you can’t really trust them so it’s not that surprising, and pretty much just like any other video game storyline.  Speaking of many of the characters being kind of bland, if you’re familiar with both the warcraft and starcraft stories you may like this (and by like I mean be upset at the lack of creativity).  The villain in the game, (The Queen of Blades/The Lich King) was once (Sarah Kerrigan/Arthas Menethil) a member of the elite (ghost commandos/paladins of the silver hand) but was corrupted by the evil (Overmind/Ner’Zuhl).  They soon become so powerful that they end up in charge of the (zerg/scourge) which uses a (virus/plague) to turn normal people, including the armies fighting them, into minions in their own armies.

I’m trying not to spoil the ending of starcraft 2 here, but I just want to say that I found the ending to be unsatisfying.  We’ve pretty much all heard by now that starcraft 2 isn’t going to be one game but three, and they want to tell the story over the course of the three games.  Instead of using cliffhangers though, they want the whole story to be made up of three smaller stories, and in this part I think it fails.  I don’t know for sure what’s coming, but I feel like pretty much nothing you do really matters for the larger story except for one thing.  And the independant story that doesn’t need the larger one?  Well turns out you don’t really accomplish anything, by the end you’re pretty much where you were when you started, it feels like the story is only getting started, but since the next games are going to be the other races, which don’t really care about human politics I can’t imagine the questions I have at the end of this campaign regarding what happens next will be answered.

So that’s kinda where I sit regarding the single player campaign in Starcraft 2.  I feel like it could have been better, whether you like the games or not I think it’s hard to argue that Blizzard doesn’t put out great games, and I think I was expecting more.  It’s good enough to keep you interested and playing, but in the end the story is just pretty standard video game writing, nothing particularly special.

Several times throughout the game you’re given choices whether to side with one character or another but it really has no outcome on the over-arching story, just the next mission (or for the last one, the next 2 missions) and a decoration you can look at between missions.

As for gameplay they seem to have not really wanted to change things too much from the first game, people would get upset at them if it was anything more than minor tweaks from what made Starcraft Starcraft.  I’ve you’ve played a blizzard RTS before, you’ll know how this game plays.  You tend to need to micro-manage your armies better in this game than in most other RTS games, but that’s standard for blizzard.  At least with this game they removed the things they put in Warcraft 3 with the upkeeps and the focus on heroes.  It’s nice not being punished for trying to have more than 10 guys.

Multi-player has a sort of weird feel in it coming from the single player.  It feels like there’s so much content that they just completely removed from the single player.  I’m probably going to forget some, but units in the single player but not multi player include: medic, firebat, vulture, goliath, diamondback, wraith, science vessel, predator, and some transport whos name I forget right now, as well as the nifty models on the mercanaries (if someone from blizzard reads this, which I know they wont, you should make the models unlockable in multi-player so that you can use them instead if you want even if they don’t have the stat bonuses)  This is also just the terran race here, there’s also a few zerg units that don’t make it to multiplayer.  I suppose it makes sense though, since the campaign was only Terran (although there are 4 or so Protoss missions) you would sort of expect them to flesh out the Terrans more and by not including all the units it made their lives easier for multiplayer, since they don’t need to make a similar amount of units for the other races (but probably will for the next 2 games) so I expect to see some of these units with the next game as they add to multiplayer, but as for now it just sort of makes the multiplayer feel incomplete, and if you’re a player who prefers the Terran then when the zerg game comes out in a year or two and there’s completely new units for the zerg and protoss that you’ve not been able to use before, you’re going to probably end up with something you’ve known about and been able to play with for a couple years, and that will feel boring.

All this said it’s still a fun game, I’ll be playing it a bunch, and if you haven’t yet add me as a friend so we can play together.

Alright, so here’s a spoiler, if I get it working right, highlight the text from here…

The Zerg campaign is coming next, if she’s really redeemed who’s going to be the main character in it?  I suppose they could have it take place before this one in the timeline, or alongside it, but then that means we don’t get to know what happens next.  My guess is that the one thing you do achieve in the terran campaign turns out to not actually have worked.

… to here to see it.  From here on I’m just adding a few words to the end of this because when I previewed that “here to here” thing it was hard to notice the second part in the end of post graphics and text, so this way you will definitely see it, I’ve been done for a while though so why are you still reading.  In fact why am I still typing, I’ve got lots of stuff that needs to be done before tonight and since I’ve been playing Starcraft all week it hasn’t got done yet.  So if you are in the group of family who I’m seeing this weekend and things seem rushed and not planned, it’s Blizzard’s fault for releasing Starcraft at about the same time I was going to really start getting things ready.