Sniper Elite V2 Review

Hey why isn't this a review of the third one! That's the new one! Yeah well I don't have the third one. I do have this one, because to promote the third one the people behind this game decided to make V2 free on steam for 24 hours and I took them up on the offer.

So then, on the chance you don't know what this game is about this game follows the story of..... some guy whose name escapes me right now who has either been deployed single handedly or gone rouge and decided to combat the entire German army mano y many many manos. Let me be honest with you. I paid basically zero fucks to the story. It's a world war two game. Ya want the story? Germans bad kill Germans now! Also maybe do other stuff but mostly kill Germans! (or Japanese in the event it's the pacific theater and not the European one) please note I'm not trying to make light of the actual war with this comment I'm only talking about the games.

The story is actually about killing a handful of important scientist behind the V2 rocket project, hence the game name. I paid attention enough to know that's at least partially correct.

The main draw about this game instead of being another infantryman John McFuckyalligotgunsandabigdick. You get to play a sniper John McFuckyalligotgunsandabigdick. Okay it's not quite the same, the devs actually did a lot of work to implement the sniping mechanics and they took into account things like wind and bullet drop and it is a really neat concept and it's cool to see that someone did this. And if that sounds like a little much to you but the idea of sniping your way through the German army instead of machine gunning them sounds appealing you can play with the bullet physics turned off. And here is sort of my one issue with the game.

The idea of looking down a scope at a guy and thinking, alright this enemy is 280 meters away, slightly above me, and the wind is blowing slightly from west to east. This means that I need to aim above and slightly to the right to the of his head. Now release the breath... steady... steady... BANG! Heh, got him. The problem is I never got this moment, not even once. And I full well admit that it's partially my fault in that I'm not very good at the game. But the issue also is that the hardest difficulty of the game (where the bullet physics mechanics I though were so damn cool are fully in effect) just straight up removes elements of the UI and removes things like the rangefinder that you need to be able to judge the distance to the target so you know how much above them you need to fucking aim. And you can argue this is about realism but my counter argument would be well there's regenerating health and also the American army would not send one fuckin guy to deal with the European front. Even if they sent only one sniper, the sniper would have at least had a fucking spotter with him.

And in the event that I accept the realism argument, which I clearly don't, then where the hell is my practice range? That would be pretty damn realistic. A nice little practice range with man size targets at marked distances. If something like that had at least been implemented, then I wouldn't even mind the lack of the rangefinder in hard mode. But there isn't so all I was able to do was look down the scope and go he's.... over there. I hope this shot is high enough. BANG! Nope. And how they all known exactly where I am. Well fuck.

Gameplay Concept: 9 out of 10
Gameplay Execution: 4.5 out of 10
Story: 5 out of 10
Visuals: 6.5 out of 10
Audio: 6 out of 10
Overall: 6 X-ray nutshots out of 10

How to Be a Serial Killer Review

What an odd title for a movie right? Well it is an appropriate title for this film. This is the kind of shit I find when I'm bored and wandering around on Netflix.
Plot
Some nerdy douchebag hates his life and his job working for a video rental place (Do you even remember those?). Anyway one night there's a particular fucker in there being a real asshole to him and a regular customer of the place asks what the loser would do to this asshat given there was no consequences. This quickly escalates to the regular customer ending up pulling out a gun and shooting the asshole dead. He then takes on the miserable video store worker as an apprentice to teach him, how to be a serial killer. Yup that's the premise. Seriously.

This story however is intercut with info-mercial style segments of what would be some sort of dvd where the guy goes over aspects of killing people; things like which weapons to use, which victims to pick, and how to dispose of a body.

The killer (played by Mike Wilson) has a very strange view of things, which I guess is to be suspected seeings as the guy is not even just a serial killer, but a serial killer who wants to teach an up and coming young lad in the arts of murder. But what I mean by this is he sees himself as a good guy. He has a wife he treats well and at one point even berates his apprentice into giving money to a homeless man.

So is the film any good? Well...... not really. That's not to say it's bad. I think it's a decent film, but I do feel like this could have been done up to be more interesting than it is. It's certainly a good enough premise to base a movie on, but I feel like the execution falls short here. Script is forgettable and while I think Mike Wilson does a good killer, Matthew Gubler (the actor playing the apprentice, Bart) makes the apprentice out to be a worthless whiny beaten-down piece of shit who I just can't relate to or care about in the slightest.

That being said if you're bored it's worth watching just for the core conept alone and it's not awful.

6 lessons in murder out of 10

Movie Review: Pompeii

It's bad... It's really bad.

What? You want more? 

Fine...

So yeah, as is, or should be, apparent from from the above, I do not like this movie. Like, at all. So here we go with the simple plot and we'll talk about why this is a horrendous piece of "film" afterwards. So Kit Harrington (I literally forgot a lot of details about this movie because they were easily forgotten) is a slave sold to some big time guy in Pompeii that runs an arena. At one point, the caravan stopped because a horse was hurt. Harrington helps put the horse out of him misery and kills it. Yes, this is an important plot point, because the character Browning plays sees him do this and is drawn to him..... For... whatever reason. Naturally he is thrown into the arena to fight other people and potentially earn his freedom one day. This goes on for a while and the movie drags because not much is happening. Then an evil Senator comes over and the volcano explodes. Harrington goes to try and get a woman he "connected" with him. Over a dead horse.

So I might not have done the best explaining the plot, but really that just shows how much I hate it. I almost always remember movie plots, but not this one. It terribly tries to combine elements from Titanic and Gladiator. For the first act of the movie, I thought that they were attempting to merely remake Gladiator because the volcano was hardly ever mentioned. You know the story of Pompeii? I'm assuming that the filmmakers at least kinda knew it. It's pretty fucking incredible and you'd think that it would be a focal point of the movie. That's not the way that they went though and it is rather unfortunate that they decided to focus on what should be a subplot to the volcano. A romantic plot. And even this is horribly done. First off, the two met each other once and it was brief, but Harrington knows that from the whole ten minutes of interaction, that she's the one. So that's bad. But regardless of that, the sound editing is AWFUL. The acting is AWFUL. Kit Harrington is the lone bright spot and really I think that is just because I like Jon Snow so much. Other than that, there is absoultely NO reason to like this movie. 

1.5 Over done love stories out of 10