Last Friday I was able to attend a showing of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Essentially the film provides incredible fan service to Hellboy fans everywhere with a superb recreation of the dark humor from the comic. The story is fantastic, well written, and fast paced. The characters are immensely charming and provide great entertainment. Guillermo del Toro, the visionary director behind Pan's Labyrinth, uses the film as a giant playground for his imagination, with the Troll market scene standing out as one of the most novel sequences put to film since that vibrant saloon on Tatooine where we became acquainted with Luke, Han, and Obi Wan. I very much enjoyed this film with its droll humor and sarcastic tone. Ron Perlman has a sharp wit and a great presence on screen as the charismatic lead character. The supporting cast is nearly as good and really makes the film come together as something special. I highly recommend Hellboy II, especially if you like superhero movies, comic books, or just anything nerdy in general. Check it out.
I've also finished a few games that I'd like to comment on. After finishing Metal Gear Solid 4, I feel that I need to revise my initial impressions. While the plot is fairly interesting, the cutscenes just became too much to bear. I finished the game in 21 hours, and all joking aside, the cutscenes comprised at least 15 hours of that time. The gameplay is very tight, but not good enough to justify the insanely long and gratuitous cutscenes. Unless you are a huge Metal Gear fan, I would imagine that you will not enjoy this game very much. The story is incredibly confusing and absurd, and really is not worth following unless you've been following along for years.
Just to give you some perspective on how massive the story truly is, I'd like to describe the Metal Gear Solid Encyclopedia. A week or so after release, this enormous game add on appeared on the PSN. The Metal Gear Solid Encyclopedia is essentially Wikipedia for MGS. It is a 73 MB download comprised of mostly text. Do you have any idea how much raw information that is? I spent 3 hours reading article after article and made it through maybe 5% of the content. The time investment required to understand the story is simply mindblowing, so if you're looking for some quick, passive entertainment, this is not the right game. After finishing MGS4 and having some time to reflect on it, I'd give it a respectable 8.0/10. I would however, not recommend that you not play it if you're not already familiar with the world of Metal Gear and Hideo Kojima's outrageous eccentricities.
I also played Battlefield: Bad Company for the Xbox 360. The guys at DICE are very talented indeed, making some of the best multiplayer shooters out there, with the Battlfield series earning millions of fans worldwide. It's for good reason too- Battlefield features a very hectic and thrilling multiplayer mode. The explosions and effects of the brand new Frostbite engine are superb and make the game feel incredibly immersive. Unfortunately, there are a few drawbacks to the game. First of all, the game sets out to be funny while at the same time throwing players into an intense war zone. The humor really brings you out of the experience- you are supposed to be engaged in a pulse-pounding thrillride while all of your supporting players crack juvnile jokes? I think not. In addition, the single player campaign has a weak and rather mediocre story. I found it to be aggressively average and was not particularly impressed. The game as a whole also has a slightly poor aiming and control scheme. It's very difficult to say how exactly this feels, but if you play BF:BC side by side with Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3, you will know what I mean. These AAA shooters just have tighter gameplay and smoother aiming. I'm also very critical of the damage system. It takes an incredible amount of direct hits to kill someone and the damage is not at all realistic. By my count, it takes roughly 5 headshots to kill someone with a full machine gun. This is simply unacceptable. This game does not claim to be Halo, which acknowledges that players have thick armor and shields. I am somehow supposed to believe that a .45 caliber machine gun round to the bare skull of an ordinary man from 3 meters does almost nothing? Please. If you are looking for a good millitary shooter, just play Call of Duty 4 instead. I give BF:BC a 7.0/10.
Finally, I'll give a quick review of Unreal Tournament III. UT is the king of classic 90's twitch shooters, offering incredibly fast paced gameplay. The gore level is way over the top, with most weapons causing other players to explode into chunks of meat. If you don't like incredibly fast paced, twitchy, and violent gameplay, this game is not for you. If you're into Quake, Unreal, or TimeSplitters, this game is for you. UT III is the pinnacle of twitch gameplay, and I've been having a great time with this game. Not only are multiplayer matches fun, but bot AI is amazing. The programmers that worked on the AI should all be given raises for their incredible AI. The medium level bots are good, but the higher level bots really are something to behold. I highly recommend this game and give it an 8.5/10.
/end
Blu3
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