Battle: LA is like watching you play Call of Duty on a Waterbed

This will be a quick one because the movie is stupid and I'm tired.

Battle: LA actually looked interesting from the trailers. They were doing this limited explanation thing in an attempt to mimic District 9. And the attempt was successful because I went into the movie hoping it would be District 10 even after the terrible reviews.

Sadly Battle: LA is only like District 9 in the verte (I AINT PLANNING OUT NO CAMERA PLACEMENT) camera placement and ugly-esque aliens. The rest of it just throws in enough bro-emotions and AMERICA! to cover the lack of story. Here is the entire story of Battle:LA.

1. Army guys waiting around for something to happen

2. Aliens come in without warning and start shooting people

3. Army finds the enemies weakspot and tries to save some civilians

4. Army finds rescue copter but goes back to look for a command post

5. Army destroys command post and rest of world learns to do the same

6. END

Story points 1-6 took me 2 minutes to write, this movie felt close to 2 hours long. To fill in the extra 118 minutes there are random Army guy shouts, loud gunfire and shaky cam. That's it. During the movie I was falling asleep because everything was equally super-loud and the shaky cam was rocking me to sleep, I left the theatre to get junk food and realized the sound was following me down the hall. I closed my eyes for a moment and pretended I was in a war zone. Little bits of other movies like "Limitless" seeped in to my eardrums among Battle's gunshots and screaming, it was quite the audio experience. It actually made me wish I was blind and partially retarded so I could have a better movie going experience.

The shaky cam on this movie is really ridiculous, I don't know if I made that clear. It ruins what were some decent and low key effects for the most part. The director would claim this is to make the action feel more emotional and visceral but it was a lazy/cheap move that dampened what little impact the movie could have had.

Final note on Battle: LA. Arron Eckart (TwoFace from Dark Knight) is an awesome actor, even though him as a army guy is a stretch, but if you don't have him talking all slick like a lawyer there is no reason to have this guy in any movie ever. Save your money and give Skeet Ullrich a hot meal or something and he'll do it just as well.

I hate video game media #3: They Hate Video games.

Final post about game media, you can resume reading blog after this post.

Hate is a strong word. I use incorrectly. I don't think I hate. In this case I care about deeply and get upset when video game media refuses to get with the program on how to cover video games. I understand there is a 24 hour news cycle or whatever and the information beast must be fed, but you are a machine. A machine that hates video games. Am I using hate incorrectly again? Probably but here is why video game media hates video games:

Video game media wants bad things to happen in the video game industry:

Activision laying off 400 or so people was the best thing to happen to most video game reporters since the last crummy thing that Activision did (getting into a fight with COD developer infinity ward) which was the best thing to happen to most video game reporters since the last crummy thing that EA did (... probably the old regime of business). I get it, I am a writer (eh.... ok no), it is easier to tear something down than build something up, but your website is not titled JoystiqSAREDRIVENBYCORPORATEGREED.com. I also understand that bad news is easier to find, write about and promote than the small successes that drive 95% of the world.

Video game media values games that do not exist instead of games that do exist

Most of my reasons that the media hates video games are problems with the reader as well. But are the media just giving us what we want or have they weened us on to what's easiest to produce. Video game media will push the heck out of previews and game announcements over reviews (unless the reviews are exclusive or early or something), and I guess that is due to the NEW in news but I look to the gaming media to see where my limited gaming time and monies should be spent, not to look at some gee wiz thing that has a 50% chance of being canceled or retooled beyond recognition before its release in 18 months.

I'm not saying don't tell me what to look forward to, I'm saying value the recently released and updated stuff as much as what isn't out there. Here is a ratio, release/post release coverage of game X should be equal to or greater than prerelease or announcement coverage of X. Do I need a 5000 word review of a DS game? Not really, but how about 3 reviews from reviewers of different backgrounds, old EGM style but with all of them giving an equal take on the subject.

Oh forget it I'm just jealous that unfunny non-writers at joystiq and the like get paid to be the vultures of the game industry.

I wish I had their lives.

I hate video game media #2: Women

Fact: Free time and disposable income are limited.

Fact: Video games can take up a significant portion of one's free time and disposable income.

Fact: Girls can take up a significant portion of one's free time and disposable income.

With free time and disposable income limited many people who are invested in either video games or women can often be unlearned in the other. So when a woman talks about video games she is often talking about stereotypes of video games from 1994.

"Oh my gaw'd they are so violent, I was like, why are we wasting our time at the arcade? You said you would take me to Steketies!" - A woman that I just made up in my head.

And since a woman is confused about what video games are, it is only appropriate that video game media is confused about what to do with humans with the X chromosome. Here is a hastily put together list of what women are to video game media:

Women are my GIRLFRIEND!

If you are writing a review about a game that doesn't involve shooting, it is important to mention what your girlfriend thinks/would think of it. If girlfriend does not exist please make her up or talk about "impressing ladies."

Example: The Wii is an excellent system for my GIRLFRIEND because she pretend the controller is a dwarven shake-weight.

Women are GAMERS TOO!

Just do the job of reviewing the game or previewing the game, or doing the dishes.... we don't need to bring your gender into it. The only turf war that is being waged is inside your own head. The Internet says that women don't play video games because they are the Internet and they hate everything. Your daddy may have told you that you can't be a doctor, and it turns out that's true because now you regurgitate video game press releases for a living.

Women are READING STUFF IN FRONT OF A CAMERA WEARING PROM OUTFITS

I think that anyone who reads any type of news for any type of video production should start off the segment by saying "Hello, My name is _____ and I am talking about _____ and what I say is important because of _____"

Hello, My name is Jessica Chobot and I am talking about video game strategies that aren't really strategies and what I say is important because one time I licked a PSP.

This is coming across as women-hating and it's really not my intention, I just think video game journalism is a joke. How can they cover a rapidly changing industry when they don't even know how to speak to or receive input from women. We here complaints about portrayals of women by the media and its due to the media not knowing how to utilize women period, especially in the video game sector.

Ok I'm done.

I hate video game media #1: Sarcasm/Filler

Someone is getting paid to post this on a popular video game site:

"The latest game console travel case from manufacturer GAEMS -- yes, it's really spelled like that, we promise -- is an unarguably slicker offering than the company's previous products. The pack has room for a 360, 360 S or PS3 Slim console, all the requisite cords and power bricks, a couple of controllers, speakers and a built-in LED monitor -- yet, despite its contents, the GAEMS case isn't the size of a small houseboat. We've only got one, inconceivably nerdy explanation: Bag of Holding. Like, it's gotta be, right?

The case will be released sometime in June for $300 -- though you can knock $20 off the price by pre-ordering before April 20. We wonder if we could pay an extra $20 to get a product that's spelled correctly.Sheeeesh."

So Joystiq.com got a press release about a system travel case with a built-in lcd monitor and thought it was worthy of a post. Actually their sister site engadget got a press release and their post was used for the basis of another post. Scraping the bottom of the barrel but it's Sunday so we'll ignore that for now.

Here is the actual news in the post.

• New Travel Case coming out in June
• Has an LCD Monitor builtin
• 300 dollars in june or 280 if you preorder
• works with xbox 360, xbox 360 S or PS3 Slim, NOT PS3 OLD MODELS (not mentioned in story so I will assume it doesn't work with it)

It's looking like not worthy of a story but they need to keep the view count up so they fill it full of garbage to pad it out. Hmmm... what can we throw in here.. Hey its got a silly name, theres at least 3 sentences! If that doesn't work we can try one of the following ways to turn this into something.

1. Has the company made anything in the past? Was that thing a success or failure? Rub their face in it.

2. Tie it into whatever is most popular this second. "This travel game case WITH THE HILARIOUS NAME would be a tiny alternative for playing Marvel VS. Capcom 3, but it would make the grotesquely large supermoves a more manageable size. Tiny screens can only give you tiny epilepsy!"

3. Mention how you and your coworkers get paid to write about video games and regurgitate press releases for a living. "We'll post a couple more times about this product in June when a free unit gets sent to the Joystiq offices at the AOL mothership. We will gather our staff around and bask in the travel cases 9" of LCD glow. I have a coworker from South Africa named Ludwig."

4. Insert Call of Duty or World of Warcraft any where in the article for any reason.

5. Take a quick pass at press release, find something it can't do and make the article about that. "NO WII SUPPORT? WON'T ANYONE MAKE A CASE FOR ME TO WAGGLE AT?!?!??"

Frustrations with video game media is going to be my theme this week unless anything notable happens (it won't) so I understand if you lose interest and stop reading forever. I think SLEEPY CRICKET might have started a livejournal as they have been out of fashion long enough to be considered contrarian so I recommend checking that out.

Watching People Play Videogames is My Favorite

I enjoy videogames (forget you spell check I'm making it one word) but with my busy and important schedule I don't have time to keep up with them. I try to read about them to fill the gap, but videogame media is terrible and it triggers my gag reflex if I read too much of it. I really despise most of the people who write about videogames, maybe not the people but their work and their personality. But this post is not about the failures of videogame content, it is about the success.

Over the past year I have grown to enjoy people playing videogames and talking about them on the Internet. Not just any people but people who both love videogames and have lived life outside of them enough to be able to speak in a manner that doesn't piss me off.

Here are two amazing sources of my videogame voyeuring:

Giantbomb.com Quicklooks:

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/

Usually only playing notable games of recent release, these guys are amazing.

Let's Play Archive:

http://lparchive.org/

These are done by members of a message board so they are much more hit or miss. But most of the time they play the complete game and also have a much better selection of older stuff.

That's all I got. I am trying to channel my hatred into a proper write up of the failures of videogame media.

Fable 3: The Gamiest Game that Ever Gamed

The goal tonight is to tell you what I thought of this videogame without making it bitter about my life and having equal to or less than 3 rape jokes. Let's see how I do....

I completed the main quest in Fable 3 last Friday right before I took off on a very long road trip. It was one of the three games I purchased from the Best Buy B2G1 deal they were having a couple weeks ago. I tolerated Fable 1 and enjoyed Fable 2 so I was reasonably excited for the third one despite the iffy reviews it got upon release.

Before I get into the game, due to a pricing mistake or something the cheapest version of the game was the special edition. Normally I avoid these because they are filled with crap, but honestly this is the best packaging I have seen for a videogame. It comes with a kind of real looking Bible-esque case which contains the game and some bonus junk. Will I use any of it ever? Probably not, but its slick and well contained. Unlike that Halo Reach set which is in a pallet sized box for absolutely no reason.

To speak of the game I will be speaking of all 3 Fable games because not much has changed in the series. Fable 3 is Legend of Zelda's ADD British Brother. It is a dumbed down action RPG which substitutes being British for being clever. The story in the series is you aint nothin' then you become something, your actions reflect how you turn out as a character. In Fable 3 you are specifically the son/daughter of the person from Fable 2 and your evil brother kicks you out for being not evil. You then go on random quests enlisting the support of the 7 or so areas of the world. Once everyone has your back you then take back the kingdom from your brother and become the main dude/lady. These are the same beats that the first two games followed and eh... I guess it still works.

Fable 3's only new idea is that after you become King you have a "year" (5 days) to be either a good king or a bad king before you have a final battle to save the kingdom. And by good and bad I mean black and white. One of your decisions is whether or not to turn a orphanage into a whorehouse. I will let you cut through the layers of story to decipher which of these is the good and which is the bad option. The way you play the game even has less to do with anything than the first two games. The only thing it impacts is a couple of story line beats and how dirty your character looks.

The gameplay is serviceable, just as it has been in Fable 1 and 2. Three different types of attacks and no limits to ammo or magic... it gets monotonous and I believe the game designers knew this because your battles are very short. In fact there are probably less than 10 "levels" and the rest are just random encounters with a couple bad guys who teleport out of nowhere. You are normally just running around town buying property and performing variations on fetch quests. Property is your main source of earning money and eventually the only thing that determines whether you "win" the game or not. The game economy can totally be broken by just leaving the game running all night while your income stacks up.... and I'm kind of ok with that.

The game world seems very small and very disconnected by loading screens and unrelated landscapes. There is no over-world, you just warp to random villages scattered throughout the map of your kingdom. If GTA can give us New York City with few loading screens then a far less detailed fantasy setting should be doable without being so choppy.

There is co-op and one great improvement over Fable 3 is not having to share the screen. It was unforgivable in Fable 2 so I'm not sure if not making the same mistake twice is something to be commended.

The largest quirk in the game is the elimination of any menu/map system. All of this has been replaced by an over-world which you warp to by hitting the pause button. Each thing you would want to look at is in a separate room. I believe what the goal was with this is to make it seem more fluid, but it just makes it annoying and crappy like doing stuff in real life. If I want to change my clothes or weapons in real life I have to walk over to my dresser or trunk of my car, but I don't want the game to be like my real life because my real life has a lot of useless crap in it. It's a pretty big pain in the butt and almost kills the game, but those who are set on playing it will get over it.

I enjoyed Fable 2, it took a lot of things from Zelda that I liked and did them at a much faster pace with actual voice acting and pretty graphics. The characters and story were worthless but that made me imagine new story lines around all of the NPC's I murdered/impregnated with my video game seed. But then I played Fable 3 and it was Fable 2 with a weird makeup that I didn't like smeared over it. Everything that was added was at the expense of something I enjoyed in Fable 2. The King stuff came at the expense of any significant levels or boss battles. The awful non-menu came at the expense of something I could easily track my progress with.

But underneath the weird stuff there is the Fable foundation, I fast paced adventure game that lets you go crazy and not care about consequences, despite the games biggest selling point being that you have to deal with consequences (consequences=what your character looks like). If you enjoyed Fable 2 I would check this out if it was on sale, if you haven't played Fable 2 I would play that first/instead.

Just because it's British doesn't make you cultured

"Ugh I can't believe they are doing the office as an American show. It's gonna be awful."

-Me, 2004

I was an idiot in 2004. I am an idiot in 2011 but that is for other reasons than thinking I was a cool person for watching shows, movies and other crap that originated overseas. I illegally downloaded both seasons and the holiday special of the British Office and almost bought the DVD's on many occasions. I thought I was special for liking it because Joe Six Pack hadn't heard of it yet. I was not special, I was one of the first ten million to be exposed to a television program, and felt that I had to defend the show's honor in regards to the Am

erican version.

"You don't understand, if they take this classy show and dumb it down for the American Idiots (see that was an album in 2004) that watch 'Everyone Loves Raymond' it'll be a disaster. Those miscreants might as well go back in time and prevent the original show from ever happening. Remaking the show for an entirely different audience is that terrible!"

-Me in 2004

"First of all C-Minus from 7 years ago: Get a Life. You don't have any friends and that is a much higher priority then some silly show. Second: can you tell me why you like this show? No you can't, because you have not thought about why you like the show. This show is something obscure for you to champion which you feel you must do to make up for your lack of accomplishments."

-Me in 2010

I was not special because I liked the British Office. I was an a-hole because I was an a-hole. Let me try to tell you something I like for a moment.

"You should check out the show Community which is on at 8PM Thursday's on NBC. It is hilarious and actually scarily accurate to some of the stuff at a community college. Chevy Chase is in it but not enough so that he ruins it. You will want to start at the beginning of the season 1 though, do you want to borrow my DVDs? The rest I think you can see on Hulu or NBC.com. I know you are in to Big Bang Theory which is on at the same time but I think this show is special."

-Me now.

See what I did there. I didn't try to exclude you for not being aware of something. I concisely told you why I love something I love and then I gave you a very easy option to check it out. Community is on NBC so everyone wants to hate it, and it's not a remake so there is no original to try to defend...but if it was I think I'd be old enough to get over it and enjoy the show for what it is.

My favorite movie (this week) is "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" when they remade it I rolled my eyes and begrudgingly checked out. I was mature enough not to blow the rape whistle because my childhood was being molested by Tim Burton, my childhood is still available on video and I don't think the remake is gonna stick around in people's minds. Do I wish more original movies and TV shows were made? Probably, but if the absence of that it's not worth it to go crying wolf over some remake/adaptation that's going to bring about the apocalypse.

You can boil 90% of the idea's out there into coming of age stories, competitions, or revenge plots so if the idea is not a remake in name then it is ripping something off in spirit. The social network, I loved it. I love it even more when it was called Citizen Kane. And I'm not dropping Citizen Kane on you because I want you to think I'm classy. I live in my mother's basement and one time I blew my nose (reference deleted) into the same sheet of paper towel, so I think the classy boat has sailed. I'm telling you about Citizen Kane because it's awesome.

Here is a self-test I gave myself regarding telling you about new things and not sounding like a prick:

"Ok I got a old movie you should check out. You've heard of it, it's called Citizen Kane and it's in black and white, but its crazy and fast paced and has awesome editing. The main character is so like a bunch of people in the news today."

"Have you played Alpha Protocol? It got some bad reviews but it's really great. It's a streamlined Mass Effect style action RPG set in a spy movie. You can have sex with 4 women in the game if you do the dialogue options right. Would you like to borrow my copy for 360? I'm done with it but I don't want to sell it incase it becomes a collectors item."

"Did you hear that they are remaking Ocenia of Time for the 3DS? I don't know about paying 40 dollars for a 13 year old game, but I bet the original still holds up and it should be cool in 3D."

"YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MISFITS? WHAT KIND OF A JAGOFF ARE YOU?"