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 

Good Burger Review

"Welcome to good burger, home of the good burger, can I take your order?"

There's two kinds of people right now; Type one, and I imagine the significant majority, are people going, "What the hell is this movie?" The alternative is the group of people going "Oh shit! I remember that movie."

This movie came out in 1997 and stars the infamous duo Kenan and Kel from Nickelodeon circa right around that time. This pair did star in one other movie, Two heads are better than none, where in they and Kenan's family are trapped in the mansion of a murderer who hacks the heads off his victims and uses them as his own. It's really quite an enjoyable (and despite that description not making it sound such) funny movie. But this post isn't about that movie, so let's talk about this one.

In this movie Kel is a none-too-bright employee of a small fast food joint called good burger, good burger faces some new competition when a new restaurant from the large chain, mondo burger, opens up across the street, meanwhile an unlicensed Kenan gets into a car accident and manages to get the guy to agree not to tell the cops if he pays for all the repairs, so he gets a job working at good burger over the summer to pay for it. The movie shows the battle for supremacy between mondo burger and good burger.

Kenan and Kel are a hilarious pair of mother fuckers, and basically everything they've done is pure gold, what best helps this move is how utterly fucking oblivious Kel is, like the scene where he gives a man just a top and bottom bun after the man ordered a good burger with nothing on it. Kel then proceeded to argue with the man that a meat patty is something, and her ordered a burger with nothing on it.

This movie was great when it came out, and it has in no way gotten worse, it's still a wonderfully enjoyable film, and it's on Netflix now! If you haven't seen this, and you have Neflix, now would be a perfect time to have a laugh.

9 good burgers out of 10

Red Dawn Review {100th post w00t!}

Well, I will say it's interesting to see the nerdy fat kid from Drake and Josh killing Koreans with an AK-47.

That may be one of my favorite starts to a post ever. Alright alright plot. It's not that tough with this one.

Korea gets the bright idea to airdrop troops over America, not sure who the fuck thought that was a good idea. Anyway Korea shows up and says hey we're in charge now. A marine just back from the front lines named Jed Eckert decides that he's so not going to take that shit, and recruits his brother and a group of their friends to form a guerrilla resistance unit to combat the Koreans. The group takes on the name Wolverines in honor of the local school mascot and begin to give their subjugators hell.

Idk if I hear a review of this that said it was shit, or I was associating it with the idea of the game Homefront, which I heard was shit, or if for some reason my brain just assumed this was shit, but for some reason I thought this was going to be shit. I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be not shit. It's not outstanding, fairly run of the mill really in terms of military action movies. Gunfights, bad guys dies, more gunfights, good guys die, more bad guys die, explosions, more gunfights, more bad guys dying. There's nothing earth shattering here, you're not going to be missing some truly impressive if you skip this film, but I do feel like my thinking this was going to be shit (whatever the reason behind that) was incorrect. Everything here has been done before but it is done fairly well here. If you're looking for something to kill some time with you could do a lot worse than this.

6.5 insane koreans who thought invading America would go over smoothly, out of 10

Fun fact: This post average one usage of the word "shit" every other sentence, not sure why I was using that word so much today.

YouTube Melody - Edition Five - February 3 2014

It's a new month, which means I get to do one of these again. I wonder if the people of YouTube have been listening to things I'm not going to like again..... probably.

#1 Top Tracks: One Republic - Counting Stars
Hey, this doesn't fall into the category of music I don't like, quite the contrary this falls into the category of music I do like. Prior to this song I hadn't much from One Republic (aside from apologize which got waaaaay too popular a few years back) and well, honestly I still haven't heard much from them just one more song. But I do really find this song enjoyable, the music is a nice back up to the singer giving his verbal middle finger to the norms of society. If they keep making things like this I may have to hear more from One Republic in the future.

#2 Pop: One Direction - Midnight Memories
Well, their last song wasn't that terrible though I still did poop on it a little bit, alright let it play. And we're back to terrible, that didn't last long. I really do not like this song. The lyrics are boring and overly repetitive, the lyrics are boring and overly repetitive, the singing is certainly under the quality they proven they can give... or at least be remixed to, the music is only just barely present, trying desperately to augment this shit and finding it difficult to build on something so worthless. Ugh, you almost pulled yourself off my shit list, but you just couldn't manage that now could you?

#3 Electronic: Avicii - Hey Brother
Well this band seems to be making something of a name for themselves. I know their song wake me up turned out to be massively popular. Dispite generally liking electronic music I don't really follow it or I might have more to say about this band. Oh, there's someone singing in this, hadn't expected that. Actually, this is just a dude singing with a guitar in the background and some percussion..... how the fuck does this count as electronic music? It's not bad, it's not really my thing, but this is in no fucking way electronic music. If you played this and asked me to give it a genre electronic would be very near the bottom of the list, somewhere around polka, and death metal, two other things this is surely not. Want some actually electronic music? Try Skril- Hahaha! Couldn't say that with a straight face. In all seriousness though the track after this Martin Garrix animals is a nice song and is actually what I'd call electronic music.

#4 Top Tracks: Lorde
Damn I like this song. And we'll never be royals! I'm glad this got popular. Two thumbs up, if I had more thumbs it'd be more thumbs up. And that's all I have to say about this one.

#5 Country: Florida Georgia Line - Stay
May as well rename this shit the Taylor Swift section she basically owns the damn place. I'm pretty sure anyone else has to send her a letter asking to be allowed in. The only song I've heard from this pair before is Cruise, and... I was not impressed. Let's try this one. 30 seconds of no music, god I fucking hate music videos. Apparently the singer was being a massive douchebag, and now his girlfriend has left and he wants he to come back and stay, probably so he can be a douchebag to her again. So in respsonse to her leaving the dude decides the proper response is to send her one text, then burn his fucking house down when she doesn't reply instantly... er trailer, not house. The song? It's boring and forgettable.

Hotline Miami Review

Holy tits it's a game review. Yeah I know I haven't done one in a while. Games are expensive and take a lot more time to properly experience than a movie. Steam tells me I have nine hours logged in HM and I still haven't unlocked all the weapons and masks.

So for those of you who have never heard of this and are currently going wtf is Hotline Miami allow me to answer that question. HM is an indie came published by Devolver Digital released Oct. 23 2012. The game primarily follows the male in the center of the above photo known only as "Jacket". Jacket receives a message on his answering machine talking about a shipment of cookies that was delivered to his apartment. Upon opening the "cookies" he finds a Rooster mask and is instructed to go to a specific building and kill everyone inside. Jacket does this and over the next several days receives more of the messages on his answering machine telling him when and where to make his hits.

The gameplay of HM consist of the player controlling Jacket as he makes his hits. IT's a top down very fast paced ultra-violent slaughter fest covered in bright flashy lights, garish colors, and very fitting techno music to back. Everything in HM happens very very quickly. Allow me to give you a look into what my thoughts are when starting a level of HM. (Try reading the next paragraph very quickly.)

Alright pick the mask. Go. Kick open the door. Punch the guy knock him to the ground. Grab him slam his head on the floor. Again. Again. K he's dead. Take the bat. Wait.... kick open the door to knock this guy down. Fuck a dog I'm dead. Restart. Knock open the door. Punch the guy. Execute. Take pipe. wait.. k open got that guy down. Get the dog! Ha take that dog. Guys back up smack him. Kill the guy in the bathroom. Fuck shot by a guy I didn't see. Restart. Bust in. Kill first guy. Knock down second guy. Kill dog. Kill second guy. Back up. K I didn't get shot. Pop around the corner throw the bat. Hit the gun guy. Run and execute. Take gun. Shoot fourth guy. Fuck I'm dead. Restart.

So I think you get it, just try and imagine all of that in under a minute. Now dying this often would be annoying if there were harsh penalties to death here. Thankfully there are not. Tap the R key and you instantly restart the section of the level you're on and try again. And since it's possible to kill 12 enemies in as many seconds it's not wasting a huge amount of time to restart even if you'd almost cleared the area.

This game is great. The gameplay, the visuals, and the music all work very well together and make for a very nice experience. Now this game could have just been flashy, blood-soaked, techno beats and I would still have had a great time and think it's totally worth getting, but they didn't stop there. The game actually has a surprisingly well done story wherein Jacket slowly becomes more and more insane, hallucinating a trio of his masks talking to him; one seeming concerned, one making cryptic predictions and asking questions Jacket would probably rather not think about, and the third seeming to be disgusted with Jacket and what he does. The game slowly gets more and more fucked as it goes on. And after the final showdown time rewinds and the player is given a new perspective to see things from; Biker. Biker was a sort of boss fight around level six for Jacket and in Jackets fucked up perception of things he kills Biker. Biker turns out to be receiving messages similarly to Jacket instructing him to go places and slaughter the inhabitants, but biker wants the fuck out and is trying to squeeze answers from anyone he can. The secondary perspective adds further dept and Biker himself has a slightly different play-style in that he's limited only to his personal meat cleaver and three throwing knives which he starts every level with, whereas Jacket doesn't start with a weapon (unless you pick the mask that gives you the knife to begin with) but is able to use any weapons he finds laying around or pulls from the dead hands of his victims.

I do have a couple issues with the game though. One of them being that around level nine of the story the lightning fast pace has a collar wrapped round it's throat and jerked back to a far more sane area. Jacket wakes up in the hospital for reasons I'm not going to discuss and must sneak out. This is bad for two reasons, one it forces stealth upon the player which is done nowhere else in the game, but more importantly it makes you go slowly. Have just gotten up for the first time in a couple weeks Jacket seems to have forgotten how to walk and if you go more than about five steps the screen gets hazy and you begin to wobble. Going too far results in you being forced to stop while Jacket clutches his head and calms down for a few seconds. Story-wise I understand why this level is here but it really does not fit well with the rest of the game. Thankfully after this level the pace is resumed and things carry on as before.

My other complaint (And this could entirely be a result of my set up. Perhaps the game doesn't like my video card or something.) is that the game has lots of weird graphical bugs and is slightly prone to crashing. It usually begins with the points indicator going black and the ammo indicator refusing to leave when I'm not holding a gun. Sometimes it gets pretty bad and walls and enemies fade in and out of existence. Once my entire screen was simply a color gradient. Everything else was gone.

Those complaints being mentioned I do still think this is a genuinely good game and do intend to spend at least a bit more time with it.

Gameplay: 8.5 out of 10
Story: 7 out of 10
Visuals: 7.5 out of 10
Audio: 8 out of 10
Overall: 8 caved in skulls out of 10

P.S. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong number has been confirmed for release this year.

Redemption Review

While looking for this image I came across other images which lead me to believe this movie may also be called hummingbird? Not sure what that's about, or if I'm just totally fucking wrong.

Plot:
Jason McBadass Statham is a bum living on the streets hiding out because he's some ex-military deserter. One night some thugs come by his box and he beats them up and runs off breaking into the house of a rich man who is luckily away for the next few months. He assumes a new identity and begins working as new muscle for the local gang. He learns from a nun who hands out food to the homeless that his old box-mate/girlfriend/friend/some-girl-he-cares-about Isabel was found washed up on the riverbanks after being beaten to death by some guy she was servicing for money. He of course goes out looking for blood.

I decided to watch this movie almost entirely because of who the main actor is here and well, I was disappointed. For a Statham film this is actually pretty non-violent. Very little of this film consists of him beating people senseless and shooting guns as we've come to expect. For those of you expecting something similar, this is no Crank. Not by a long shot. The majority of the film focuses on his changing as a person as he gets a different view of the city from his new position and tires to help out his old fellow homeless people.

I went into this expected nothing to story heavy just some minor set up for Jason to start cracking skulls and ending lives like we know he does so well. That doesn't really happen. Over the course of the movie he beats up something like four people. Kills maybe two. Fires a gun a total of one time. I don't think this was a bad movie, I'm just not sure they picked the right lead for this script. I think Statham does okay with his role. I just feel like this isn't really his strong suit.

It's not a terrible movie, it's just not what I was expecting and for what it is it isn't done poorly, it's just also not done very well. Kinda just meanders around for a while before ending without a huge amount of resolution.

5 nuns out of 10

Arena Review

Never heard of this movie? Neither had I! But as I mentioned in my review of the Last Stand I was sick recently and spent time watching shit on Netflix while lying in bed.... not that I need the excuse of sickness to do that.

So what the fuck is this movie? Well you probably know who the guy on the left is. Yup Samuel L. Jackson. Wtf is he doing in some direct-to-video throw away flick you've never heard of? He's being an evil Mastermind!

Plot:
As mentioned above, SLJ have taken to being an evil mastermind, more specifically he, and his crew, have decided to abduct guys off the street and force them to fight to the death gladiator style so they can film it, put it on the internet, and make tons of money by having people pay to watch and bet on the fights. Blondie up there on the right is their latest unlucky fuck who gets nabbed in bar while drinking to forget the death of his wife. David lord (blondie) is a fireman but conveniently also an ex-marine so they can sweep the existence his amazing combat skills under the rug. He's force to fight some guy named Ripper and tries not to but has to defend himself when Ripper won't stop attacking. After killing Ripper he attacks a couple of the guards trying to get free and is brought before ringleader Jackson. Jackson offers him a deal; if Lord can win ten fights, he'll let him go. Lord, thankfully, promptly calls him on this bullshit saying there's no way in hell that he would be released. After being forced into a second fight to defend the wife of his new friend/cellmate he accepts Jackson's deal on the condition that his tenth fight is "the executionor" a black hooded fellow who cuts the head's off the losers, that Lord has found a special hatred for.

As I was considering watching this I looked at a handful of the reviews on Netflix and they compared this movie to deadliest warrior, and I do see where they made the connection. Each of the staged fights has a theme and they are to the death. Overall this movie is okay but it's not great. There's nothing it really does wrong it just doesn't do enough for me to really want to recommend it. Despite the obvious draw of the movie being the arena fights, they actually seem to be a minorty in therms of screen time. There's only 5 real fights in the whole movie (Yes Lord does ten of them, but six of his are quickly skipped with little flashes showing him being the winner.) There's one right at the start between ripper and some faceless guy who he kills. There's the fight between Ripper and Lord which last about 3 minutes and isn't particularly enthralling. There's his second fight, which exists more as a story point than a spectacle. There's his ninth fight, which is the best of them, where he fights some massive, convict cueball. And the big finale between Lord and the executioner is literally just a punching match. The pair of them standing in a sand pit punching each other in the face for like ten minutes repeatedly inter cut by scenes of everything else going on at the time.

In addition to the main draw of the film taking a back seat, the sub plot of his wife being killed in a car accident a couple months before he was abducted is totally unnecessary. I would have thought it was meant to make you feel bad for Lord being placed into this position. The thing is this doesn't make sense when the (not terribly shocking but at least unexpected) twist is revealed. I'd rather not spoil it but it makes Lord into much less of a victim in all of this.

All in all this movie isn't terrible I just think it could have worked out better. I've seen a lot of these people forced into a deathmatch style movies and everyone of them always leaves me a little disappointed.... maybe someday I'll find the one that did it right.

6.5 decapitations out of 10

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters Review

…It’s not very good.
Well that about wraps it up.
…fine I’ll say a bit more.

Plot:
The pair in the picture above are Hansel and Gretel (I’ll let you guess which is which) and as in the fairy tale they go to a house made of candy. Therein they encounter a witch who, presumably, intends to eat them and forces Hansel to eat a lot of candy. Gretel manages to free herself and shanks the bitch prison style. She then frees her brother and they cook the old hag in her own oven. The siblings (now orphaned) decided, hey we’ve got a talent for this witch murdering thing, and decide to continue doing that for a number of off-screen years to change them from their child selves to the people you see above, who I guess are supposed to look badass but kinda fall short of that… by a fair distance. They get called in by a village with several missing children to deal with the witch they believe is behind it and in the course of doing so they find a dark secret about their past. WoooOOOoooo spooky.

So I said this movie isn’t very good; why is that? Well there’s a few reasons. For one the big shocking reveal is not shocking and has absolutely no effect on anything at all. Hansel has some stupid ass disease called sugar sickness from being force fed too much candy in the captivity of the witch as a child, but this is only mentioned twice ever in the movie. Once to say he has it, and once more in the very last fight to add about fifteen seconds of tension cause he collapses from his stupid illness. I’m sorry did you expect me to actually think the good guys wouldn’t win cause Hansel had an upset stomach for a few seconds. The witches are supposed to have cracked the code to being invincible and have summoned in all their friends for a big all witches brouhaha. But this doesn’t upset the balance at all since Hansel and friends have found a magic potion the allows their weapons to ignore the witches’ magic and poured it all over a minigun (no I’m not kidding). But what bothers me the most about this movie is Jeremy fuckin Renner. He is capable of doing so much better than this, and I’m not saying everything is his fault, I think he did an okay job at the shit part he was handed… but this is Hawkeye. This is the guy from the Bourne Legacy. This is that other guy from the new Mission Impossible movie. And he’s doing this shit!? Ugh.

In conclusion this movie isn’t outwardly awful, but it’s boring, forgettable, and everything here has been done better elsewhere. Skip it.

4 of something relating to this movie that I already forgot about out of 10