At E3 this year Square Enix had nothing at all to show. Its booth was more barren than Betty White's womb. And though that was really depressing and unfortunate, luckily SE did have things to announce... just not at E3. One of those games was "Final Fantasy Explorers", a brand new multiplayer action RPG for the 3DS. Now, a month later, they're finally showing some gameplay:
First of all, I have no idea why there was "Final Fantasy V" footage before the trailer. But I will admit, I am about 100 times more nostalgic for that old game than I've ever been before. Here I thought FFV was just a forgettable nothing title, but when you hear that old battle theme rocking, you just want to get Bartz back on Boco and start beating up dungeons with as a Mystic Knight.
Anyway, "Explorers". I looks like fun. Basically the combat looks like a multiplayer version of "Final Fantasy Type-0", only with a fixed slightly overhead view, solving that game's crippling camera errors. It is also much more cartoony and kid-friendly, so instead of building mountains of bodies, you're just fighting big silly monsters with your friends. And that is something I'm looking forward to doing when this game comes out. Nobody is sure when that will be, but since it at least has a window of next year, it will probably be a few decades before "Final Fantasy XV".
Master Christopher Nolan sends Matthew McConaughey to space. This trailer aired just before "Godzilla" on Thursday night, and it was regrettably the best part of that movie.
On a dying Earth - that still has picturesque Midwestern farms, albeit ones on fire - Matthew McConaughey must go to space to begin the next stage in humanity's future. Christopher Nolan is not creating a silly disaster movie such as "The Core" and "Sunshine" where the characters simply have to flip a switch and save our pretty little orb, this is humanity plotting to escape our little sphere for our own survival. Which is a much bolder SciFi concept than pretty much anything else that would get made for several hundred million dollars. It looks quite good. There also appears to be some business with wormholes and time travel, or something. Anyway, we'll see how well "Gravity"'s coattails can be ridden and whether time really is a flat circle this Fall.
Amazingly vague, no gameplay, but there are covers! Because that's what I want to see when I see a game trailer, is a cover. Apparently this is a new dimension of gameplay or something, it is all very vague. Is it finally a remake of Hoenn? Will there be trumpets? And that was the gen with the space port! CAN WE GO TO SPACE? IWANNAGOTOSPACEIWANNAGOTOSPACE!!! PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE!!
More importantly, this finally means I can have my favorite Pokemon, Milotic, in Gen VI. YAY!
Coming November 2014. (Can I have my check now, Nintendo?)
If you bothered watching last year's "The Wolverine" (and really, I wouldn't recommend it), you would have been given a great final teaser involving the seemingly magical return of Magneto and Professor X to the X-Men film universe. Here's the movie they're making out of that return... and boy does it look like a clusterfuck:
Apparently EVERYBODY is in this movie, up to and including Peter Dinklage, inexplicably. He's built an army of robots that look exactly like vacuum cleaners to - you guessed it - kill all Mutants. Therefore, somehow, Wolverine is going back to the past to meet up with the cast of "X-Men First Class", and do time travel stuff that will save the world. You know, because the X-Men movies didn't already suffer from huge ungainly cast problems, might as well compound the error by doubling the cast with past and future versions. I was really excited to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen back at the end of "The Wolverine" - they're really the heart of this X-Men franchise, not Hugh Jackman as Fox seems desperate to prove - yet this trailer has completely squashed my expectations.
What's becoming increasingly obvious to me is how cheap the X-Men franchise looks. Back in the early 2000s, these really were the best superhero movies you could hope for. Now of course in our much greater modern world of "The Dark Knight" trilogy and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we have much slicker professional superhero films. Yet here we are again with this cheesy X-Men film, which feels not only like a throwback to the 1970s but also the early 2000s. It looks like a mess. And you know what happens when an X-Men movie is a mess. Need I remind you of "X-Men Origins Wolverine" (which might somehow become canon again after this stupid time travel bullshit is over)?
Well, we all knew this was coming. Michael Bay has been threatening to produce a Transformers-style Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blockbuster for years. All he wanted for ransom was a trillion dollars and his own fleet of army helicopters to fly at sunset, we should have paid. But President Obama does not negotiate with terrorists, so Michael Bay went through with the threat... and God Help Us, here is the trailer:
And - you know - I am a very outspoken person, and I say a lot of things on the Internet. I really love to abuse hyperbole. But! I am fair above all else. I always admit when I am wrong.
This... is not one of those times. "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" looks like ass. It looks like the things that come out of asses: shit. The turtles look like lumpy CG freaks. They look like somebody microwaved their 80s action figures. Did Shrek mate with the Goombas from the "Super Mario Bros" movie? The plot is pointlessly violent and quote-on-quote "realistic" "dark" - AKA: "we want to rip-off 'The Dark Knight' six years later" - bullshit. I love how the Nickelodeon logo, once a symbol of my happy cartoon babies going on adventures, now is being juxtaposed with terrorists shooting machine guns. I hope you love dubstep rumbling noises, because the Turtles are all about that now. Remember when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a fun kids show? They ate pizza? They had catch-phrases? They fought giant brains from space?
Yeah, the 80s were a better time. Here's the trailer to the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" film. Its funny, and adorable, and shameless and fun. Its a movie made to be Ninja Turtles, funny puppetry and non-serious action. Just lovely.
This trailer made me giggle. I was happy for a moment. Let me share this happiness with you:
"Peanuts" is being developed by Blue Sky Studios, an animation studio famous for having made exactly one memorable movie in their entire history, which was "Ice Age". And then followed a bunch of very mediocre and forgettable things like "Rio", and the occasional nightmarish affronts to God himself like "Robots". Hopefully they have finally found some talent beyond being the weaker cousin of DreamWorks.
But "Peanuts" looks like fun. The CG animation seems deliberately 2D to fit with Chuck Shultz's cartoon style. They also kept the frames on the animations somewhat choppy, to more look like classic Peanuts cartoons that we've all seen and love on some level.
Maybe someday we'll see a "Calvin and Hobbes" movie? And I'll become the Queen of France?
A few years Square Enix released "Final Fantasy Type-0" the largest and greatest Final Fantasy game yet for the PSP. They then very generously refused to release it anywhere else besides Japan. You could either blame it this on the fundamental corruption and evil that has devoured the corporation for the last few years, or on the utter wasteful failure that the PlayStation Portable became towards the end of its life. Luckily, where Square Enix is Satanic and hateful, Square Enix's fans are generous and loving, so have taken it upon themselves to translate the game. The trailer is below:
The translation will be out for consumption come August 8th of this year. That is, assuming Square Enix does not drop a cease and desist upon our hopes and dreams. So come late summer, make sure you legally purchase a copy of "Final Fantasy Type-0" and add in this patch, that way the legal owners of this game get credit for their work.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
I'm kidding. Torrent the everliving shit out of "Type-0". Make sure SE never sees a dime.
Yesterday came a major news announcement: "Batman: Arkham Knight", the final game in the Rocksteady Batman Arkham tetralogy (if that is a word), coming later this year for two systems I do not own: the PS4 and the Xboner. Here is the trailer below:
As a trailer, this is lousy. It looks cool, but all it is a promotional FMV, probably not even made by Rocksteady themselves. If any of these specific scenes end up in the video game exactly as they are shown here, I will relaunch this blog as a "My Little Pony" fan forum. And not the modern "My Little Pony", but the 80s "My Little Pony". Essentially we can see nothing of what this game will be, aside from a few facts: 1) it takes place after "Batman: Arkham City", 2) old Batman Rogues are coming back to do wicked deeds on the streets of Gotham, and 3) the Batmobile is in it. So possibly "Batman: Arkham Knight" could be a huge innovation in this series... or maybe it will be "Arkham City" again just with the Batmobile. Time will tell.
It has been about a dozen lifetimes since the advertising lead-up to the 1998 Roland Emmerich "Godzilla". You may not remember the movie fondly, but the advertisers sure did know how to make you excited for a giant monster attacking Manhattan. The trailer I remember most was merely Godzilla's ears rolling up out of New York Harbor: impending doom for the entire area. The brilliant bit though, was that they never showed us what Godzilla looked like until the movie came out. Which was not only a great way to build suspense, but a fantastic way to avoid revealing that Godzilla looked like a silly lizard with a Jay Leno chin. And of course that the 1998 movie was really about Matthew Broderick's love life and a "Jurassic Park" stage show within Madison Square Garden.
Anyway, now it is 2014, and Hollywood is going to try again. Here's the official trailer for "Godzilla", coming out this May:
Good news: the movie stars Bryan Cranston, and not some boring young dude as you would expect from a cookie-cutter blockbuster in 2014. We do not get a good look at Godzilla immediately, but that's to be expected, and encouraged to provoke suspense. From the trailer it also seems that Godzilla will actually get to destroy things. That city looks positively wrecked in the commercial. Not sure what any of this has to do with the Monolith Theme from "2001" though.
One clever detail that I love is that the trailer implies that the Pacific nuclear tests were made to kill Godzilla, they were not what made him. And if a nuke is not going to work, what will? Definitely not two missiles like the 1998 movie. Nothing will work, because this is Godzilla, and he is going to buttfuck San Francisco, and we are all going to love it. Hopefully some of the other creatures we see growing are a foe for Godzilla to wrestle, because the world needs a new kaiju flick. Let us all root for the big green monster come this spring.
Yup, I'm back to making posts about trailers. Sue me. This looks really cool. The trailer for "Guardians of the Galaxy" aired last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Luckily thanks to the magic of the Internet, you don't need to watch that whole show to see the movie clips*. Here it is:
Despite being a Marvel movie, it appears that there are no Superheroes involved. I've never heard of any of these people, but then again, I had never heard of Iron Man before 2007. It looks like a live action SciFi anime, a little bit like "Space Dandy". Talking tree, green-skinned lady, a raccoon, and a some dude as the lead who insists that everybody call him "Starlord". The focus here seems to very much be comedy, featuring the use of Blue Swede's Hooked on a Feeling, (the only pop song I know of to feature a chorus of cavemen). It all looks like truly fantastic and unpretentious space opera action, with an incredibly weird universe of CG space creatures.
Ultimately though, I think the message is clear: DC tried and failed to make a colorful universe of aliens with "Green Lantern", and now Marvel is stealing their thunder. Now they have two superhero team franchises, and DC cannot finish one. That has to be embarrassing for them.
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* Just ten years ago I remember suffering though an episode of the short-lived FOX soap opera, "The O.C." just to see the first trailer for "Star Wars Episode III". I'm sure Jimmy Kimmel could put on a better show than the problems of rich spoiled Southern California teenagers, but still: Thank Jesus for Youtube.
There really cannot be too much hyperbole about it: that was the worst game of football I have ever seen. I've personally played in schoolyard games where I got tackled about eighty times by an eighth grade fat kid after every single snap because my older cousins thought I could be a lineman at eighty pounds, and that was better than Superbowl XLVIII. My dad once took me to a couple of XFL games - remember the XFL? - in old Giant Stadium. The New Jersey Hitmen managed to put on a better show than the Denver Broncos did, and the Hitmen couldn't even kick the extra point upon touchdowns, they were that incompetent. The Puppy Bowl was better. Goddamn Tim Tebow in his obnoxious commercial spots managed to put together a tougher performance then our entire offensive line. It was a disaster, a humiliation, and I am on the verge of utter destitution.
The game was such a brutal defeat that I made a bet with my sister before the game started that Denver would win. She still hasn't asked for her money. She knows how bad this hurts. How do you clean tear-stains out of an orange Broncos T-shirt, by the way?
This post isn't really going to be about the game, its going to be about the television event that was Superbowl XLVIII. Besides putting together what was a simply unwatchable game - even the Seahawks fans got bored and declared victory after the half, and then proceeded to riot throughout all of Seattle - it was a big show, and a lot happened. I was not even going to talk about the game, but I am feeling so horribly awful right now, with the skies torn asunder all throughout my state, pouring out snow in apocalyptic fashion to fit my mood, I feel like I should go ahead and write about things. This is how I cope, I write. Its either I write this post or I hunt down Richard Sherman with a combat knife, and I suspect that's probably not the healthiest way for either of us to settle our differences.
So here's what this post is going to be: brief summary of the game, a quick review of the commercials, and a little bit about the halftime show. Then once I'm done writing this I shall return to my fetal position and weep bitterly until August.
We just finished our "Final Fantasy VI" Let's Play, and now there is a vacuum in my soul. An LP vacuum. So after, more or less botching the LP of "Mystic Quest", I figured I had to LP something else. Preferably something I had not played before. Sadly, the only mainline Final Fantasy game that fit that bill was "Final Fantasy XIII", and I don't think I'm ready for that yet. So instead, we're doing "Final Fantasy VIII".
"Final Fantasy VIII" is not a good game. In fact, I'd sometimes wonder if its a game at all. But what is, is great LP material since all of us at the Final Fantasy Wiki generally dislike it, or at least very strongly dislike certain characters. I hope the next months of LP material will be just as insane as this video:
First videos will begin posting on Saturday. I promise this isn't going to be a twenty-hour long bashfest of FFVIII, I'm giving this game a full chance to surprise me by begin decent. And I'm going to try not to break the game and play it completely fairly, though that is rather difficult when its so easy to be overpowered in FFVIII. I dunno. Much love and fun will be shared if you come and watch, BLUEHIGHWIND's Final Fantasy VIII LET'S PLAY!!! DUNDUNDUNDUNDUN!!!
Its a big Nintendo news day. "Bayonetta 2" was discussed, we got to see the first images of Monolith Soft's new game, which looks like "Xenoblade but with Giant Robots". But those things immediately cease to matter now that we have this:
Oh... monkey. I guess first off we had Eiji Aonuma, the lead Zelda director since "Wind Waker", talking about what Zelda is going to be like on the Wii U. If you recall, I hated "Skyward Sword" because the controls were only semi-functional and because the game seemed to offer nothing new other than those lackluster motion things. Well, it appears Aonuma is proud of his "Skyward Sword" achievement, but now offers up two big changes for Zelda on the Wii U. And these are.... "you can beat the dungeons out of sequence"* and a sinister downright villainous threat of "[forced] multiplayer". So what he's offering is basically "a thing you could do in Zelda games up until roughly 'Ocarina of Time' but that we removed in order to increase story relevance" and "a thing I never wanted in a Zelda game to begin with".
So I guess by the time "The Legend of Zelda: Woebegone Wombat Wars" comes out on the Wii U, I'll be forced to make friends. Damn you, NINTENDO!!!
And that was the sum total of everything Aonuma had to say. Then he showed off the "Wind Waker" in HD.
Guillermo del Toro has been having a few few years, and I'm glad to see he finally got a movie made. He was supposed to be the director of "The Hobbit" (back when those were only two movies), he was supposed to make "At the Mountains of Madness", all of those projects fell apart. The only thing he's done is written the remake of "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark", a decent but extremely forgettable movie from last year. However, all his troubles seem worth it, because now we have the newest Evangelion movie, "Pacific Rim".
This is a movie for me. Personally made for me. I'm shocked there isn't even a little note at the beginning of the trailer that says "made for Blue Highwind". It isn't the first time I've felt this way, because I am 100% certain that my future self will invent a time machine and travel back to the Eighties to create "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension". I love Godzilla movies, I love giant monsters, I love giant robots, and like the rest of the nerdy portion of the Internet, I love "Portal" and the fact that we're getting GlaDos in this movie as fanservice. This is now my number #1 movie for 2013. I am there.
So to prepare, I'm watching a pirate version of 1989's "Robot Jox". I suggest you do the same.
A few months ago I reviewed "All-Star Superman", the supposedly greatest Superman comic book of all time that I personally found to be confusing, rambling, and ridiculous, basically everything I hate about superhero comics. So I've resolved to never review another comic book again, because clearly I'm not the target audience. "All-Star Superman" was supposedly the grand, almost-Biblical epic take on the Superman mythos, the ultimate final dramatic glory that is Superman all in one graphic novel. Well, I say it didn't succeed, there, but Zach Synder and Master Christopher Nolan have definitely shown DC comics up with this one.
Yeah, its a trailer, its made to look awesome. Why would a trailer go out of its way to look terrible? Well, certainly "The Lone Ranger" trailer did go out of its way to look terrible, so I don't know. The point is that this seems like an almost religious take on Superman, presenting him in as the Almighty Savior for a very imperfect world. Most interest is Johnathan Kent (played by Kevin Costner) telling little Superboy that maybe it would have been a better choice to let his entire classroom die instead of saving them and revealing his powers. But then we still have Superman in his god-like glory blasting off at mach 10 around the globe. And there are cities getting blown to bits. The stakes seem high, the mood seems right, it isn't going to goofy comic book thrills, its going for something more mature and serious. So it looks awesome.
Two complaints though: chill out with the shaky-cam business. And why is there "Gladiator" music instead of the John Williams Superman theme? Beyond that, this is going to be something not easily ignored next year.
When you go to movie as often as I do, you start to see the same trailers over and over again. Some of them are exciting and impressive like "The Hobbit", some are merely okay and get annoying after the fifth viewing, like "21 Jump Street", and some are so bad that I fear I will kill myself the next time I have to watch this trailer. Which leads me... to this:
I like Johnny Depp. I like Gore Verbinski. I liked all the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, even the really forgettable one... I think there was a mermaid or something in it. But this is bad. This is really bad. First of all, I don't understand what Disney is trying to do here, "The Lone Ranger" is an intellectual property from my grandma's time. My generation probably only knows it exists because of Looney Tunes parodies that outlived the original concept and Jim Carrey occasionally yelling "Hi-Yo, SILVER, AWAY!!"
Still, "the Lone Ranger" could have been adapted into an entertaining blockbuster mindless movie. Its a western, I like all the action on the trains, even if its all pretty much standard "Pirates of the Caribbean" business at this point. Those movies were exciting when they came out, but now I think we've come to the limits of slapstick blockbusters, its all been done before and better. Arnie Hammer certainly looks like a 1940s serial star, but with that mask and his apparent inability to die I'm frightened this is going to become "The Spirit 2"*. Only there's one big problem... and I think you already know what it is.
Johnny Depp is giving the worst performance of his life here. Apparently he's part Cherokee on his grandmother's side or something so that means I'm not allowed to call out his performance as being the horrible racist old-Hollywood cliche that it is, but I will anyway. Its a horrible racist old-Hollywood cliche that we as a country should have realized was offensive back in the 1970s. I know its a call-back to the original TV show, but was that show exactly enlightened? NO. And beyond any Political Correctness crap (I can't believe I'm on their side for a change) the performance is just bad. Its bizarre and flat, trying to be this zen master but at the same time a bubbling Jack Sparrow. No, I'm not buying that at all. This will sink this movie, I guarantee you.
So if you're an idiot, go see "Pirates of the Old West" on July 4th next year. I'm sure I can find something better to do.
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* Actually "The Lone Ranger" becoming as fascinatingly terrible and bizarre as "The Spirit" is probably the best we can hope for out of this movie. Everything else just looks horribly mediocre.
This is one of those trailers that are really terrible, but they don't make you angry. They make you sad. Really really sad. Its a straight-to-DVD sequel to the perennial Christmas classic, "A Christmas Story", that movie you see pretty much every Christmas. I'm not even a huge fan of "A Christmas Story", in fact, I could live the rest of my life never seeing it again, since I already know every joke, every gag, and every moment, its meaningless now. I'm the guy who wants the football game on, usually. But its still a classic, I still have a warm spot for that movie, like the rest of America. And to see it just... tortured by this terrible goddamn idea for a movie, its hard to take. Jean Shepherd, the narrator and comedian who wrote all the Ralphie stories, he's been dead for ten years. What hope could this movie have? NONE. I guess I should ask as to what any of these people were thinking making this movie, but the answer is clear: they weren't thinking, and they aren't actually people.
Its also being made by the same company that made "Ace Ventura Jr.". And no, that exists too. Yeah.
"A Christmas Story 2" is coming out on October 30th, perfectly in time for... Halloween. Probably because they knew this was a true horror movie, frightening in a visceral soul-destroying way that the "Paranormal Activity" movies could only dream of.
Also, this is exactly the worst gift for the holidays. If there's somebody out there you really really hate, buy them "A Christmas Story 2".
I guess Hollywood learned nothing when they released "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". Which admittedly was actually profitable, if just barely, but still, what a piece of crap. If the concept sounds like the stupidest thing you've ever heard in your life, it probably will end that way. I mean, Jeremy Renner is a cool dude, and they sure seem to have invented about one hundred weird crossbow weapons (Renner can't seem to get away from bow weapons, can he?), but I'm not getting any sense of fun out of this movie.
Maybe its me, but I'm so stone-cold shocked into some of psychological fugue state because of the title and the concept, I know I could never enjoy this movie. And I'm not alone in being just completely floored by how stupid this is. And there isn't even a sense of irony, they seem to be playing this straight. Its Hansel and Gretel... fighting witches... for some reason. WHY?? I think we've reached some kind of event horizon of stupidity with Hollywood now. They've gotten so bad with their adaptations that I'm pretty sure next year we'll see a big budget action movie of Ovaltine! "Ovaltine: Werewolf Impaler", directed by Brett Ratner. Because why not? "Vulnerable Bede: Martian Manhunter". "Cheerios: Demon Slayer". "Barnie the Dinosaur: Back 2 Da Hood!" How much worse can it get?
(By the way, Hollywood, if you're thinking of actually making "Barnie the Dinosaur: Back 2 Da Hood", I already have the script completed. That will be one million dollars, please.)
So "Final Fantasy XIV". Um... Not exactly Final Fantasy's strongest moment, was it? Yeah... If there were any people left believing that the Final Fantasy series was just as strong as ever, FFXIV broke their spirits pretty quickly, and I don't think FFXIII-2 has done much to win back the crowd. Anyway, I mostly ignored FFXIV as soon as it was announced, since its an MMO, and I don't play MMOs. That's not my thing, and it never will be. Even when the game was released and turned out to be the biggest turd in history, I didn't play it, I didn't really comment on it, and I let the entire miserable event pass right by. However, Square Enix wisely decided that they weren't going to simply roll over and lose millions of dollars, so they fired the old team and set to work saving FFXIV. Here's the new trailer:
So I don't know about anybody else, but that looks ROCKING. Now, obviously I'm not convinced enough to actually go out and buy a copy of FFXIV, there is absolutely no room in my life for an MMO, I still got to play "Chrono Cross", "Xenogears", "The Last Story", "Terranigma", "Mystic Quest", and "Pokemon Black Version", along with finishing "The Last Remnant" and then somewhere in that huge ass-storm I need to have a life. But still, this is one of the coolest looking trailers Square Enix has released in years. This is what a PS3 AAA Final Fantasy game should look like, and sadly... its wasted on a damn MMO. What a shame.
There are few films upcoming that I'm quite so excited for as "Evangelion 3.0: Japanese subtitle". The first one was decent, the second one ROCKED, and now the third film of the quadrilogy will be released come this November - in Japan. The English dub probably won't be out until, oh say, 2014 or so. But that's a different problem with different concerns, for now, here's the first teaser:
And in proper Evangelion fashion, the trailer makes no sense. All we see is a psychedelic rainbow piano playing a song. A very nice song, with very nice visuals, but hopefully this is symbolic of something or other instead of being an actually representation of what "Eva 3" will be like. Because as wonderfully weird as a sudden shift to musical interpretations might be for this franchise, I would prefer to see Shinji and Asuka and Rei's storylines concluded, perhaps in a more pleasant fashion. Maybe? Considering how "Eva 2" ended with us virtually at Third Impact, the third movie in this series is hopefully going to be hard core.
So the review for this will be up... within the decade. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I don't think I can wait for dubbing this time, so there might even be two reviews. All I know is that I really doubt I'll be disappointed.
