Red Dead Redemption: How the West was won...and my heart as well. By: Eric Colon

Let me just start this off by saying: I don't just "play" video games. I emmerse myself into them. The story, the landscape and the characters; everything. I was emotionally invested in ridding Sera from the Locust Horde. I wanted to see Nathan Drake stick it to that warlord just as badly as he did. I get into the character. So if I refer to certain characters in this game with such distain, it's because they might as well have wronged me personally.

Red Dead Redmption was a story about a man named John Marsten. A former outlaw turned family man, he is forced by these douchebag US Marshals, to set out on a mission to bring his old gangmates to justice in order to save his kidnapped wife and son. This is an epic game (in length and awesomeness). It took me about 15 hrs to beat. Some parts in this game really pissed me off, but in the process, got me more attached to the characters and the story line. This is something that Rockstar usually does in their games, and does well.

It's your basic GTA formula but with a western twist. Horseback is your primary form of travel. Strangers calling out to your in distress can bring about interesting detours from your main objective. At one point, I saw a damsel in distress calling out to me from what appeared to be her broken down horse and buggy. As I approached her to boost my honor meter, six armed bandits hopped out and ambushed me. I took them down judiciously with my six shooter as the damsel pleaded with me to spare her from the fates of her cohorts. Of course, I let her live, I'm the hero not the outlaw. Another instance there was a hitchhiker on a mountain pass that threw me off my horse as I attempted to give a lift. He didnt get too far after I implanted a bullet in his dome. And this was all on the way to my first mission....

Now I wish I could give you all the details and plot twists right now, but (in my humble opinion) I'd be robbing you all of something as equally as important as the sweet gameplay and infinetly more important than the superb graphics: the story. That's the hook that pulls me along the story as I struggle through the dangerous roads and degenerate lowlifes that I encounter in Rockstar's acid western.

The multiplayer is, in my opinion the living embodiment of the wild west. As soon as your character lands in a free roam session, it's everyman for himself as "The Quick and the Dead" meets "World of Warcraft". Upon rolling into a town, with my posse of XBL friends, and seeing other players on the map head for the hills in fear of my double barrel or Jay's sniper is a sight to behold. Clearing out gang hideouts and gunning down your fellow players is the name of the game. Leveling up gives you new steeds, guns and characters to choose from.

I had more lumps in my throat at the end of this game than the lumps of coals I got from Santa last year. Play it. For the love of God....play this game.

Read more »

How Mass Effect 2 Taught Me To Love Again

Where do I start? What do I say that hasn't already been said?

games(TM)

"Despite all of the ways Mass Effect 2 is more engaging to play and explore, after 35 remarkable hours it was the characters that stayed with us… Game of the year in January? Oh, go on then." [Feb 2010, p.112]

Okay I'm excited.

GameDaily

"Mass Effect 2 far exceeded our expectations and is without question one of the best games we've played. Use whatever positive description you'd like. System seller, potential game of the year, landmark achievement; just make sure you buy it immediately."

Absolutely spot on.

GamePro

"An improvement on just about every aspect of the original game, with the exception of one tiny aspect; the very final battle. Mass Effect 2 sees BioWare's approach to the role playing genre evolve beyond anything they've worked on previously, and gives us a glimpse of how both RPGs and shooters will begin to merge in the years ahead."

Thank you John Davison.

I have invested more time into Mass Effect 2 than I care to admit. Oh who the hell am I kidding? I have completed the game three times, I have a level 30 soldier, a Level 12 Infiltrator, played every side quest, had sex with an alien, and you know what? I want to do it all over again. This game is the future, the benchmark, blah blah blah, insert cliche here-it is unapologetic about the fact that it is the shit.

Bioware was bold enough to make the necessary changes to make the game play better, feel better, and look better. It is undoubtedly better, faster, and stronger. All that is fine and dandy, but the real charm behind Mass Effect 2 is its narrative. This is one of the few games available that has both a solid script and stellar voice acting. In short, Mass Effect 2 is perfect.

It is a perfect marriage of RPG and Shooter. I rejoiced when all the tedious micro-management aspects of the first game were eliminated. Now you simply allocate points to which powers you want, and voila! Instant Billy Bad Ass. On the shooter side of things, the mechanics are far more polished. No more clunky shooter for you, no sir. It plays like Gears of War 2, except with all these awesome biotic super powers added for good measure.

For those of you who are moaning about the lack of stat crunching, I'm sorry, but piss off. This is the evolution of the western RPG (isn't that the only kind now? Pppssshhhh, turn based RPG's are for chumps.). Others have tried to blend these two genres to no avail, and have got one part right, but failed horribly on the other. Bioware nailed it hook, line, and effin' sinker. 

These fine folks created a world I wanted to get lost in, characters I cared about, and women I wanted to sleep with. It's mature, ballsy, and a step in the right direction.

I applaud the team at Bioware, who knows the hell they had to go through, but God bless you people. It's because of you that I'm no longer the jaded negative nancy douchebag troll who laments about how games just aren't what they used to be. I was going through one of my dry spells, I had grown tired of games, and so I decided to take a break. My cousin was borrowing my 360, until every notable game site was verbally masturbating to this game. That's when I promptly stole my system back and went to town on ME2 for four days. Best. Sex. Ever. Bottom line, ME2 is responsible for making me fall in love with games again, I'm no longer the jaded prick who thinks he knows more about this than everyone. I've been humbled, slapped in the face, and redeemed.

My name is Jonathan Ortiz, and I'm a recovering douche. My sponsor? Bioware. We meet once a day, and I'm reminded of the man I once was. I love games again. I don't over-analyze games, talk about games as art, talk about games being taken seriously, and I simply get lost in the experience. That's what its about people. So shut your mouths, play the damn game, and be glad that there are people as creative as the team at Bioware. This certainly isn't their first rodeo.

Read more »

How Cinema Has Become Our Avatar's That Show Us to Give a HootAbout a Modern Day District 9. By: Emily DelGiorno

We forget we live in a culture where it just makes sense to us. Where what we’re currently experiencing is more or less a “duh, that’s just how it goes” than anything else. The same can be said for every era of music, piece of literature, art, or in this case: film. Science fiction was born out of an era of fear of the “Red Scare” and pending nuclear holocaust. It wasn’t really aliens being depicted in all those Twilight Zone episodes, just allegories and allusions to the present undercurrent of panic and terror for tomorrow. People may not have known it entirely then, but we’re also a culture that loves to look back and analyze everything. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. If we look hard enough at almost any film, we can see shifts in perception, content, and surprising undertones. I’m hoping that I’m not the only one who noticed even a shift in the young-girl crushing dreams of “Princess in the Frog” as that their wishes on stars don’t always come true or that they was seriously and undercutting of economic fear. (Don’t make promises and debts with crazy witchdoctors, kids.)

But currently, (in an entire topic shift…) I want to discuss the films of the past year and take a look at what we were trying to tell ourselves and everyone else, whether anyone knew it or not. Avatar. District 9. Invictus. Daybreakers. How to Train Your Dragon. Planet 51. The Surrogates. Watchmen. Gamer. Taken.

How about these? : Call and Response. Invisible Children. Flow, For Love of Water. Crude. The Linguists. War/Dance. Darfur Now. As We Forgive. To be perfectly honest, I looked at one site and even saw most of the first films on midnight premieres or close enough to them. The second list I had to hunt through various content to find them and haven’t had the opportunity to view any. The first list is all within this past year. The second may take a step or two back in time.

The first list is obviously all blockbuster hits that made it to the big time on the big silver screen with over priced popcorn and stadium seating. (…At least where I’m from. You can feed a family of four from taco bell with one movie ticket. All hail the great Long Island. Your movie tickets and property taxes suck.) The second list may or may not be so familiar, dependent on how addicted you are to apple.com/trailers. The second list is a handful of documentaries sharing the tragedies of water scarcity, exploitation, sex trafficking, war, inequality, prejudice, and genocide. You know what? All the movies in the first list deal with a lot of the same issues.

But then, what’s the difference?

The two bluntest I see this paradigm shift occurring in are Avatar and District 9. In these films are very obvious and even painful views of exploiting “lower life-forms;” treating them less than human because, well…they weren’t. They lied somewhere between animals and humans, still being able to communicate and congregate but certainly not at the same level important as us pink fleshy type. District 9 was even filmed in a documentary sense: choppy, quick camera shifts to show sudden action, and commentary from lay-folk and academia. Then in Avatar, being the keen observer of all the goings-on as you saw nothing more than the bluntest abuse of a resource called “unobtainium.” (Really, James Cameron? You create an entire new world, but can’t come up a better name for the mineral. Guess he ran out of creative juices at that point.) Backlash. Massacre. Refusal to understand. Revolutionary attempts at understanding their way of life. Do I see some sort of connection here? These “heroes” are thrown into these other cultures quite literally; turning into the “prawns” or “blue furry creatures” willingly and not. Then and only then are we thrusted into their “way of life” and become sympathetic to their cause. We hurt when they do, rise in anger when they do, and openly cheer when victory is achieved. Our emotionality rise and fall as the characters enter into total danger and slim odds of success (which of course always ends up becoming epic wins because it wouldn’t be Hollywood otherwise.)

Think back. I watched District 9 with a friend of mine who literally cringed in pain and couldn’t bare to look when the prawns were getting beaten to death, or when it was revealed that they were being used in scientific experiments and bio-warfare. Your stomach dropped as Vickus wailed out in pain as he “lost his humanness” and because a weapon himself, losing all sense of worth beyond what damage his being could produce to mega-corporations. (Cold-hearted bastards.)

How about Taken? This action thriller involved a type of international agent’s daughter getting captured by a sex trafficking ring in Europe and his valiant efforts to do whatever it takes to save her. You grew sick to your stomach as you saw the torment in the young girl’s eyes as they were being beaten, raped, and drugged all for the industry. “Please understand... it was all business. It wasn't personal.” Business. All business. Doesn’t that make your skin crawl? You’re disgusted at how a young woman can become so objectified to the dollar sign. As a young female myself, I became racked with the same fear and mortification with the thought, “what if that was me?”

his concept of the lack of humanity continues in movies like Gamer, where real-life flesh and blood are turned into a MMORPG whereas big deal if your character dies in Halo, but where literal people are blown to former less-in-tact versions of themselves. Or Surrogates, where all emotion, sensation, passion, and humanity dissolves literally and figuratively as we embody (and only in body) perfect versions of ourselves and in fact real people have been deemed the enemy and persecuted, much in the same light as Daybreakers where vampires rule and people are hunted for their blood. No regard for life.

Even on a juvenile level with Planet 51 and soon to come out How to Train Your Dragon, there’s another lack of understanding with a fear coming from that lack of knowledge of the “other kind” and more often then not, exploitation, destruction, and elimination. (Because we all know how much easier that is that actually learning the other culture.) The aliens want to capture the astronaut because he’s otherworldly (and what a wonderful role reversal that is) until a few young daring individuals seek to learn more and as usual, learn more than they expected to. Then with HtTYD, (hey, I like my abbreviations. My article, my rules.) Dragons are captured and killed because Vikings see them as the enemy until the one little dorky kid has enough softness in his heart to not kill the one he captured, but train and learn from it as an equal. Even the little boy in the trailer proclaims, “everything we knew about them is wrong.”

So what is my point with all this dialogue? Recent studies have been done since the debut of Avatar that people are becoming depressed. And not just a “holy frick! I totally wish I was a Na’vi!” Like a type of prolonged depression stemming from the desire for an escapism adventure like in the created world of Pandora. If you don’t believe me, read this: http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.blues/index.html

(That alone could be an entire other article about our culture…but I’m not going there. For now anyway. I’m too busy contemplating my demise after unsuccessfully creating my avatar. Damn, I wish those glowy spinning reptiles were real. I think I need to go…*sob*)

What does it say about us, and our relevance for humanity? Can we only care when it’s not of our own? This research to me is utterly tragic; demonstrating that we feel more for these fake beings.

The second list that was mentioned way back the beginning of this article, (which by the way, kudos for getting this far before double-checking your status on Facebook. Your mother would be proud.) All of those films relate to our own reality. You mean problems like in these movies are actually relevant in our way of life?? Yes, mostly. We haven’t invented life-like robots or have been my extraterrestrials (though some beg to differ…), but we most certainly encounter massive tragedies which undercurrent the blockbusters.

“Call and Response” is a documentary of the sex-trafficking industry. Again, I know I haven’t seen these films, but even the gist of them I feel is appropriate to look into because of the obvious parallels that can be made. This film calls to reveal the staggering statistic of the 27 million slaves still existing in our world today, which as they claim the highest it’s ever been in human history. It delves into the lives of these victims on intimate levels as well as discussions of prominent political and cultural figures as well as popular musicians on the matter.

The Linguists documents two well, linguists who’s main desire to document languages that are becoming extinct, which currently is about half of them. They travel to the far reaching corners of the earth to listen to whispers of people groups who’s words may never be heard from again with the rise of globalization and international pressures of dominant languages as being “correct.” Even means of communication between people, a most basic human concept and principle, is being deemed unworthy to be uttered by people groups and corporations in seeking to make it easier for themselves in terms of trade and interaction.

Then there’s Flow, For Love of Water and Crude which deal with the exploitation of our simplest resources of water and oil and how that’s affecting the smallest of communities who don’t have voices of themselves until documentaries such as these step in to shed a revealing light on the calamity of their situations in the shadow of domineering globo-monolithic corporations.

And of course, the documentaries on Darfur and other world conflicts we don’t think about as we download another app on our iPhone while sipping our Frappa-whatever with child soldiers and chronic genocide as in Invisible Children, War/Dance, Darfur Now, and As We Forgive.

How are we supposed to react? How do we obviously care more about fictitious storylines and fantastical figures while these very apparent realities swirl around with the motion of the earth daily? I think of Taken as I stared in horror at the movie theatre. Not only did I panic about the possibility in being part of such a degradation, I was reminded how this is seriously a billion dollar industry worldwide with no clear future in sight.

Our current film production is very obviously telling us something in the light of story and special effects: we’re really screwed up right now in our world, and the only way we’ll be able to pay attention in the slightest is through box office breakers, not grassroots documentaries. Apparently, these film makers are aware of our current state, otherwise they wouldn’t have been produced, and with such common themes streaming through these movies, it’s hard to ignore them. Our world is suffering, but we just don’t how to recognize or approach it. To what end, though? Alright, our current film is informing us of our tragic state through fiction, but let’s take a step back. James Cameron’s film cost (with some speculation) roughly 500 million dollars over its entire course. Half a billion at its most. Sure, he made an incredible contribution to the film industry, but in reality…what could we have realistically done with half a billion dollars?

What’s the price of entertainment and shoddy awareness of our fragile global state?

It’s obvious our current film mindset is a reflection of something, even if it’s a warped, bended one. The definition of humanity is wearing thin and what it truly stands for is wearing thin, people are dispensable, and everything in the name of “progress” (whatever the heck that word means.)

Emily DelGiorno

Read more »

Monday Night Snore.

This Monday was to be the start of the "New" Monday Night War between WWE and TNA Wrestling. I had REAL high hopes for this night. As a long time fan of WWE I have been feeling as most fans do, it's boring and predictable. You can use the "opposite momentum theory" and 99.9% of the time it works. If they lost the night before the PPV then that means that they were sure to win at the PPV. The technique of the wrestlers has gotten mundane, the main event matches have been the same 4 or 5 competitors every single show. I grew up before the Attitude Era, when the drama was acted out in the ring. Larger than life characters like the Ultimate Warrior and The Macho Man Randy Savage having titanic battles in the squared circle and saying: the heck with talk, lets just beat the crap outta each other. But then the Attitude Era came, and added the story with the spectacle, and people ate it up. Characters like The Rock, or Rob Van Dam were wrestlers AND personalities. People would watch Raw on Monday and be calling their co-workers Jabroni's on Tuesday. And it was great. WCW had their own brand of wrestling entertainment too, and for the most part was just as good if not better, when the re-invention of icons like Sting and Goldberg drew crowds in the thousands.

Then, the worst thing that could have ever happened to wrestling happened: buy outs. WWE gobbled up rival brands WCW and ECW and there was only one Highlander a.k.a Vince McMahon. Suddenly there was no need to one up the competition, because there was none. The need to become better was extinguished because you were the last man standing. So we watched, and watched, and watched, and Raw became one of the longest, high ratings show in TV history. Why not? If there was only E.R. and no other shows like House or Grey's Anatomy, then it would be safe to say that E.R. would be the best medical drama on television because it would be the ONLY medical drama on television!!!

Then word came of another wrestling promotion called TNA, and after a long hiatus from wrestling, followed by a short return to WWE ( which was marred by seeing John Cena win every freaking match with the same 4 freaking moves), I tuned in to TNA. At this moment it was like fresh air had entered my lungs. Here was a company that was being built from the ground up with new, young, talented stars, hungry to make a name for themselves.

After watching a few episodes of their Thursday Night Impact on Spike, I was hooked. Guys like AJ Styles, Daniels, Beer Money Inc., and the entire roster, go out there night after night and put on real wrestling. It can't be predicted, and it can't be compared to by another brand out there.

Now we come to these past few months, TNA signed Hulk Hogan to bring some new directions and publicity to the company and they say flat out, they are going after Vince and the WWE. This is welcome news to fans of both sides. Competition brings out the best in companies from a business standpoint. This forces them to become, fresh, new, relevant, one up the other guy. One week a guy gets hit with a chair,the next week the other company has the guy hit with the same chair ON FIRE!!!! Why? To draw in fans, to draw in that 18-35 demographic.

This brings us to the present, January 4th. This was the night for both companies to put their best foot forward and try and win the crowd. Win the crowd, win the war. I couldn't have been more disappointed. I really wanted TNA to come out strong and kick the crap outta WWE that night. At first, I thought that they were on track to do so with an X Division Steel Asylum Match. The had all their best stars out to wow us, but that didn't get to happen. Crappy camera work and an "no contest" 3 minutes into the match gave the crowd a reason to chant "This is bull****!!". Apparently, this was all a lead up to Jeff Hardy coming out and giving Homicide the Twist of Fate on the entrance ramp. Is Jeff truly coming to TNA, or are his alleged drug possession charges going to keep him as a one time guest to the six sided ring?

AJ Styles and Angle put on the best match by far, but this night needed way more than one good match. It needed to not have Scott Hall, X Pac, and the Nasty Boys. These guys don't need to be in a wrestling company that's strength is it's young talent. Sure you have Steiner, Nash, and Angle, but the bulk of the TNA roster is filled with young brimming talent. Guys who really put their bodies and careers on the line to entertain. These old timers are obviously pals of Hogan who he is bringing along for the ride. What their future roles will be in TNA is to be determined, but I hope it's a slim to none role.

There really isn't much to comment on when it comes to the WWE. They had Bret Hart return, he made amends with HBK, got kicked in the balls by Vince, and they called it a night. The matches were stale, as always. And there is the curious absence of John Cena in the mix, and rumors have been swirling about him leaving WWE for TNA. Honestly, if he thought he got heckled in the WWE, I can only imagine hat it will be like in TNA. John Cena = WWE just as much as Triple H does. And if he does come in, he better bring more than the a four move set.

I am excited to see what the next few weeks will bring when it comes to the new Monday Night War, I hope the fans voice their opinions loud and proud. Let the competition bring back some great, entertaining wrestling. If these two companies play their cards right, we could have a reason to be excited again on Monday Nights.

Eric

Read more »