#26 Which Is Better: 50 Cent (Blood In the Sand) or Resident Evil 5

Quality is not subjective. People say that it is. It is not. Sometimes however, the true quality of something is harder to see and it is obscured by more obvious qualities it may possess. Videogame nerds, sci fi nerds, comic book nerds... the bulk of these groups enjoy PURE FACTUAL quality. Does the thing have facts that are cool, i.e. does a man shoot lasers from his bottom, or does a robot fight a ninja? Yes? Point. Are the characters cool in a "smart" way, i.e. pithy remarks, crap like that. Yes? Point. Does the plot stand up to scientific scrutiny? Yes? Point. If those things fail, is it purposefully campy so that you can point out how you are smart for liking it because it is obviously campy? Yes? Double points! The problem here is that often times, while yes, these things are good to have, they aren't always DONE well. But the common nerd knows nothing of these things, of how pacing and composition and the melding of all disparate elements can turn a neat idea: Spiderman 3.. into a bad movie: Spiderman 3.

So let's break this all down:
Graphics: Resident Evil 5 is clearly more beautiful than 50 Cent. It has all the neato textures and ... sort of awesome lighting. Actually it was still vaguely emotionless visually to me. The animations were still, whilc i suppose good, stiff seeming based one how your people could only move like weird remote control car versions of themselves. 50 Cent's game... the modeling was acceptable. Textures also acceptable. The environmental design was pretty basic. Desert city, desert ruins, desert roads, but the set pieces were nice open rooms, nearly too epic for a game of its caliber. Still TECHNICALLY: Resident Evil wins, obviously.

Story: Resident Evil had all sorts of complicated machinations involving old friends being brought back seemingly from the dead, a crazy virus and conspiracy, and the name Wesker. 50 Cent has 50 and his G Unit crew traveling across some unnamed middle eastern land (possibly the same "Somewhere" desert where the "In Da Club" video takes place?) to get back a diamond covered skull for no reason other than FIDDY WANTS IT. Along the way they kill Lt. Daniels from The Wire. Nerds may say this is dumb. Here's the thing: it's not TRYING to be smart and failing. It's trying to be... fun. And it is. Who gives a shit when you're two rappers blasting their way across ANYTHING yelling "gimme back my skull!" Fuck YES. And you might say, "yeah, but you're in it IRONICALLY". All I can say is: Replace one or two elements of the 50 Cent story and what do you get: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
TECHNICALLY: Resident Evil would probably still win.

Sound: Resident Evil boasts some incredible sound design. And the characters say some stupid ass things all the way through, but none of them are nearly as fun as what is said in the 50 Game, which plays all the way through with 50's music blaring behind it. Am I a fan of him? Now that I know that in his off time he is basically a globetrotting superhero: Yes.

Whatever. What makes a game fun is fun, as Bart n Milhouse once said. Resident Evil stopped being scary and so it had to become a fun shoot em up. Guess what? It's not, and sure, there's the addictive weapon collecting quality to it, but it's addicting in a way that doesn't feel fun. Instead it's like stamp collecting or alchoholism: you waste lots of time and get nothing out of it. No fun, no anything. At least you can sell your stamps for booze. I beat the 50 Cent game twice in 2 days. I will return it to blockbuster in a day or so. It lasted only 2 days. I will not buy it. It was not a GREAT game, but it was fun. I even find myself more comfortable paying to buy Resident Evil for some reason, no doubt because it's a "big name" game. That addicting shit will last me longer, fooling me into thinking I'm getting more bang for my buck while in the back of my head my heart will be crying for it knows the truth: my real love lies with fiddy.
Resident Evil 5: C
50 Cent Blood in the Sand: B

#25 - On the album "Bromst" by Dan Deacon

There is a always a strange small delineation between the world of popular "rock" type music that even avant garde/indie/underground artist walk on "song" side of rather than the classical composition side of things. Even many instrumental artists such as Four Tet or Books seem to construct what a person would call a pop song rather than a composition in the classical sense. Dan Deacon's new album "Bromst" seems to toe across that line while containing "pop" vocals in the songs and even choruses and verses. The new album seems to be the work of a more profound and beautiful statement than his previous outing "Spiderman of the Rings" which was part excitement and part quirk but ultimately it rang a bit hollow to me. Not to say this album is not quirky, with it's many choirs of chipmunks and the barking sample on the track "Woof Woof", but even in these instances there is more of a conveyance of an actual emotion than the showing of weirdness. Instead of just "a weird song", you get "a weird JOYOUS song". The results are truly alive and beautiful if not in any conventional way. Song structure protract and compress seemingly randomly but in the end they all flow perfectly together. A song will go from extreme 8bit noise to what sounds like a hyperactive composition by Steve Reich in no time flat and these moments are among the most stunning on this album. There is no real stand out track and while the album may seem almost one note in its tone and structure, the intricacies are in there and make it reward repeated listens while maintaining an almost monolithic joy. What's it sound like for those who don't know? Crazy nintendo music is what most people would say. Still, this is actually some heady (and hearty) stuff.
Grade: A

#24 - On the XBLA Community game "Dromedary"

I'm not sure why I haven't touched on reviewing the goldmine of questionable quality that is Xbox Live Community Games. For those of you unfamiliar with what this is: A year or so ago, Microsoft released a development kit for fledgeling game creators to use to make simple (or complex) games relatively easily. Any game made with this kit can now be put up and sold in the Xbox Live Community Games section. What people don't understand is this: For every great game making genius out there, there are literally jillions of people who just don't get it. They are the people living in the proverbial shack. But like independent music, sometimes the crappiest results are the ones that shed the brightest lights on the human condition. Corporations spend millions on games, so the games made with the big money have to have a broad appeal. Not so with community games where if a dude in Mexico wants to make a platform game about collecting burritos and somberos called "Welcome to Mexico", he can (this game actually exists now and my heart sings at this flagstone of possibility.) Maybe nobody will buy this game. But maybe one person will be touched so deeply by it that it doesn't matter. That's the true face of creation and art. You make for yourself and also for the small hopes of touching at least one other person with your creation. When you have the possibility of getting your stuff out there, it's all up to just the powers of your imagination and your intelligence. That said, Welcome to Mexico sucks but it brings me to the point of this review: DROMEDARY.

Is Dromedary a GOOD game? I don't know. Does it boast amazing graphics? No. It boasts hand drawn images of a camel and various other desert things. Badly hand drawn images. What it does is this: I played the demo thinking "whatever" yet I played it until my demo time ran out. Will I buy it? I don't know. Wait.. no. It's 2 effing dollars too much (at 2 dollars.)
What is it?
Dromedary is a game where you are trying to cross a desert on a camel. On the top of the screen you have a meter with your camel showing how far across the desert you are. Every turn you have a few options: walk, run, sleep, drink, wait. That's it. Every time you pick one, another panel is added to a small comic showing your progress and what events occur and your camel moves a centimeter further towards his/your goal. There are no meters saying how tired your camel is, no meters for how thirsty you are. There is nothing really gamey here. Instead you just get a panel and a descriptor like "You walked further today and see an oasis" or sometimes the exciting "you are captured".
It is alot like a choose your own adventure story EXCEPT instead of giving you different options every turn based on complex story developments, you always have: walk, run, sleep, drink, wait. If you run too much your camel grows tired and dies. But walking gets you further faster. Also important to note is that there are lions chasing you...
So how is this good? It is because in simplifying everything for you, taking out any gamey meters and whatnot and making your situation so simple (get across the desert), your options, minute as they seem, are the ONLY options you would have in the real situation in the grand scheme. In this way, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel feels claustrophobic in comparison.
In a book like that, you could find yourself in a deadly situation involving ..space pirates or something. You will be offered 2-4 options when in reality there are SO many things you could probably do, but you're are just moved alone a few different tracks.
In Dromedary, since the story is barely a story, it is just survival, you feel less wrangled in and therefore it feels limitless despite it's minute limited scope. Therefore in it's small reality, it is entirely realistic. It's all something like the uncanny valley. Pong is such an abstraction of tennis that you don't feel limited by it. Its entire reality is submitted right there. In a modern tennis game, as the game gets more real, you notice what is taken away from reality rather than what has been added to what used to be Pong. Even that crappy art seems to help the game maintain an odd cohesive quality. It's an oasis from.. good games. Yet a compulsive one.
It's hard to explain, but I enjoyed the structure of Dromedary and the fact that someone had the balls to make a game this wierd and small. WTF is wrong with people.
Still
Grade: B-
That's a generous B because I have such odd admiration for this basically shitty game.

#23 - On the movie "Watchmen" by Zach Snyder and totally unaffiliated with Alan Moore somehow

I guess it's not the movies fault. Alan Moore took his own name off the credits. The problem I have with this is that this is the most accurately made comic book movie I have ever seen. Don't confuse this with "THE BEST". Now I do enjoy the book "Watchmen", but comic books and movies are entirely different mediums. The approaches one takes with pacing, storytelling, dialog, composition and a myriad of other things is completely different from one to the other. By accurate, I mean that Zach Snyder literally took the images from the book and slapped them onto the screen. This is admirable because well.. he didn't screw up. But how CAN you screw up when you're just cutting and pasting? Good job dude, you succesfully cut your face off of one photo and glued into onto a similar photo of yourself. Still, he did a good job of it. There was just no bold storytelling moves that weren't in the book already. So who gets the credit? Unfortunately not Alan Moore because he took his name out of this project. The choices that seemed to be pure Snyder like the musical cues were dicey at best but still not HORRIBLY offensive. He uses classic but AMAZINGLY trite and predictable songs to underscore certain moments and alot of times they seem forced in as if he was like "I hear that people consider the Sounds of Silence to be a classy tune... i need to put that somewhere in a movie. There's a funeral scene? Well people tend to be quiet during funerals... and since I can't use Nickelback..." You could see why the song was used but it still just didn't mesh right. Emotional scenes were.. well you could see the emotional intent in them and that was nice, but it was all a bit too overly done so as to wring any honesty of the emotions out of them. That said, it's still a neat little tale that Alan Moore wrote (or didn't according to the credits) and you can't fuck that up. And it was a neat looking movie. And for not TOTALLY fucking it up and making a pretty good film, Zach Snyder has come out better in my books. Like I told my friend, "it's like having a big jock write a poem". It didn't suck and you could see he tried his best to not screw it up. So...
Grade: B

There were a few things to take it into the minus area and really maybe it's a C movie but I still did enjoy it quite a bit. Oh but that sex scene was awful. How can you misuse Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"?! Even Shrek did a better job.

Oh yeah.. what's the movie about? Superheroes doing super stuff. And then something about a giant squid.

#22 - On the movie "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans"

Let it be known that I even felt stupid typing out the complete title of the movie. I don't know what it is that does this to me... I would not feel as stupid typing "Clash of the Titans", but "Rise of the Lycans"? Ooooh there, I did it again.
This movie chronicles the tale of Lucien (i think), a man who is also a LYCAN!!!!!!! (Short for lycanthrope, fancy for werewolf). I am glad the word Lycan can exist in a title. It's the "cool abbreviation" of a word that is underlined in RED, meaning it's not really real... or at the very least respected by the online dictionary. Let's dwell on this a moment because this is my blog.
It's all cool and fine to find cool little terms for like the police "po po" or bad shoes "bobo". Those are real items made alittle more "hip" through "cool clang". Whatever. Lycanthrope is a fantasy word. Lycan is the "cool version" of it? It's like a LOTR nerd trying be cool by referring to Glamdring as "Glammy D" or some shit. Don't try. Respect the nerd stuff as being removed from cool. Then it retains its nerdish dignity (oxymoron.)
So the lycan guy... you know what? NOBODY cares. Halfway through this movie, I was staring at the screen and I literally thought in my head, in complete, nearly tangible sentences spelled out with giant plastic white letters over a gaudy orange backdrop: WHO WANTED THIS MOVIE TO EXIST? Was there a giant following of Underworld fans who desperately needed the tale of the past which is, if memory serves, quite similar to the tale of the future but with crossbows instead of guns? A prequel should serve something at least SLIGHTLY different up! Crossbows might as well be called "arrow guns" anyways. I also nearly fell asleep at one point in the movie. High points: Bill Nighy and sort of Michael Sheen though here, as I noted in the theater, he was like a poor man's Karl Urban (to which my friend replied "Karl Urban is a poor man's Karl Urban!") Good point. But at least he wasn't in this movie. Except he WAS in the how-could-it-be-worse movie Pathfinder.
To pad this out with more actual critical sounding talk: the cinematography was drab and dull. Monochromatic in an attempt to moody but really it just dragged it all down. Costumes were seemingly borrowed from the lesser characters of better movies. The werewolves weren't awful, weren't amazing. Special effects... okay. Action, tightly edited so as to confuse the viewers into maybe believing it is good (it is not.) One sweet part where a guy gets a ballista bolt through the head after 3 guys get skewered together comically (possibly unintentionally...)
Grade: D- (I couldn't find it in my heart to give it an E)

#21 - On the album artwork for Celly Cel's "It's Real Out There" CD

Seriously folks, look at this masterpiece. I cannot tell who is doing the real looking here. The audience at the conundrum that is Celly Cel and the tension between his head and his body. Or Cel himself at the audience, defying them to point out said tension. One assumes that the artist is aware of the palpible yet not wholly tangible rift between Cel's head and his body, and in that gaping chasm the viewers mind is plunged far into the depths of the image until they find themselves gasping at the shores of their OWN PSYCHE. Truly the truth is to be found here somewhere. Somewhere in, as Harlan Ellison called it, THE REGION BETWEEN.
Also this shit is as lame as this Kevin Eubanks cover:
Grade: A/F