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Angry manbaby

Detroit: Begum Doomer Review

Yeah I’m here to prove I’m still alive with a review of a game that’s a year old that nobody will read but I have no one else to talk to about it to get my thoughts out so I have to essentially talk to myself in blog form because no other human can bear to here me rant on stuff like this nobody cares about. Also my posting has been erratic, tippified by this blog on a none scheduled day, I would normally be writing today but I’ve been busy with other things and I just finished this so I thought I’d put a capstone on it to get it off my mind.

Surprisingly I’m a big fan of Quantic Dream before I became horrible jaded. I’ve been a fan since I picked up what I think was there first game randomly on some sort of school trip I think. I got Omikron Nomad Soul (they had shitty double barrelled titles even on dreamcast) for my beloved and still working to this day dreamcast. And I really liked it although till this day I can’t bring myself to finish it but I just found it so unique and it is unique in comparison to their other games. Because this game actually has gameplay and an open world setting… wtf???
A quantic dream game that’s open world and has gameplay wtf is this? It has shooting and melee combat and puzzles and you can explore this cyberpunk world with a David Bowie soundtrack and also meet David Bowie in the game. It’s a pretty cool game for the time and it makes me wonder why every quantic dream game since has just been a weird walking simulator with shitty qte.

I mean did they just look at the commercial failure that was Shenmue 1&2 (two games that were also sandbox and had gameplay) despite reaching cult status and being two of my favourite games of all time and think “Yeah qte that’s a whole game mechanic”. Because every game since Omikron has been just qte the game.

But don’t get me wrong I really liked Fahrenheit, one night I was at a party and instead of going to sleep I just played Fahrenheit for ten straight hours (but still didn’t get to finish it because I was so tired my reaction time was destroyed and I couldn’t finish that qte with the fisherman matrix fight haha).  Of course I loved Heavy Rain, the atmosphere and the story in that game were amazing but once you’ve solved the mystery there’s very little reason to replay it and see different outcomes. I mean there can only be one killer right? Right?? I remember there being some older games not by quantic dream that were like this but the killer was randomly generated and it could be a different person on a different playthrough which is pretty cool but wouldn’t really fit in Heavy Rain. I could see that completely destroying the reveal and the twist in that game. It would rob it of the impact of the story.

Beyond two souls I thought was really cool because it was like a step forward in quantic dream’s approach to design. Instead of multiple characters you play one character and it was very focused and there was even something approaching gameplay. This game to me was a step in the right direction. An in depth focus on one central character we can fully explore and embody and unique game mechanics that made it feel like a game.

But I can only assume it didn’t make enough money because I think it was meant to have sequels that most likely wont ever see the light of day. Which is pretty disappointing, that series had potential. Because of that I guess they went back to the basics of Heavy Rain, which I’m only assuming was their most profitable game, I can’t be bothered to track down the actual numbers.
So finally after finishing that whole retrospective on quantic dream games to Detroit: Become human. We have another set of characters only three this time instead of four with Heavy Rain and gone is any form of gameplay haha. How fleeting it was. But I gotta say we have less characters in Detroit and the game is longer than Heavy Rain but it feels shorter and the characters seem less fleshed out.

I didn’t feel that invested in their individual stories and honestly their arcs seemed a little hollow and a little forced. I just don’t think the game goes deep enough with any of the characters for me to care about them or really get a feel for them. I really think this game should have focused on a single character *cough* CONNOR *cough* so we could’ve got a better feel for the world and the story. Jumping between the characters actually made the world feel smaller and less immersive and there was less mystery. And you’re basically playing criminals and the cop trying to catch them so it’s kind of ridiculous because you’re actually pitting your own characters against each other.

Ok so just glossing over the whole story. Detroit is about a world full of androids that are used to hamfistedly convey social messages about I dunno *insert social justice cause here*. So it’s about androids trying to be seen as humans, well one is basically just an android on the run the other is android jesus and the best one is an android cop.

The “gameplay” if you can call it that is qte and decisions you make and probably the worst conversation system ever in a game that’s mostly conversations. It’s a dumbed down conversation system like Fallout 4 where you get a choice of responses like “Optimistic” or “aggressive” so you have the joy of having no idea what those options result in but on top of that there’s a fucking timed element. If you don’t decide in time the game just decides for you (you can just btfo the game and pause though haha). So not only do you have no idea what you’re going to say you have like a micro second to make a choice between options that are a complete mystery to you. At least in Fallout 4 or mass effect you’re not timed and get some time to think about what inane response you make, well I mean in fallout 4 it’s so dumb your responses boil down to “yes” “no” “sarcastic yes”. But yeah in Outer worlds, I realise I just shat on outerworlds but the conversation system is good because not only are you not timed and can take your time to think about how you want to respond you can also see exactly what your character is going to say. Yeah I get that you can do that in a game where your character isn’t voiced but seriously some of the dialogue options are like playing fucking russian roulette. They’re ridiculous.

There also aren’t any puzzles, so it doesn’t even really conform to a standard point and click game. The game is just a series of arbitrary choices you’re invited to play infinitely until you exhaust them all.

None of the “Stories” (just noticing I’m doing “this” a lot haha) are that good, I used the term story loosely because they’re not really stories, they don’t really go anywhere, it’s really just a bunch of stuff happening and emotional manipulation (which angers me because it worked :'().

The “writing” (now I’m just memeing haha) like any David Cage game is awful, this guy is literally the Tommy Wiseau of video games, why do they let this guy continue to write their stories? I mean some of it is so cringe I audibly groaned. There’s a part where you’re at a bus stop and this woman with a baby has her bus ticket just fly out of her bag and fall at your feet and you have this moral choice whether to keep it or not. It’s so bad I just felt like keeping it to punish the game. I didn’t give a fuck, I just wanted to progress the game. It’s just contrivances like that that completely take you out of a story and ruin your immersion.

The characters aren’t that bad which is why it sort of pisses me off because I feel like this game should’ve been longer to give them more time to develop or given each of them their own game entirely. Because some of it feels so rushed and shoehorned and squashed together and the writing has to be so cliche’d because it doesn’t have time for depth or nuance.

One moment pissed me off especially because the android jesus character basically has to choose between having a violent movement or a pacifist one and I chose pacifist which pisses off the kill crazy member who’s also the love interest but makes your man bro friend character pleased. So the entire game I’m making choices that make this woman hate me but literally in one conversation she goes from hating my guts to making out with me and I was like “ok”. And on top of that the man bromance character is just like “I know we disagreed on a lot of things but.. we still buds”, and I’m like standing there like “We literally agreed on everything”. I wasn’t trying to romance him or anything haha. Which honestly is something I have to praise this game for; having a heterosexual romance in a game despite how brief, in 2018. It’s almost punishable by death now in 2019. Now we’re not even allowed to have romances, we’re only allowed to be the ‘wingperson’ helping to set up a non-binary lesbian romance with no nudity whatsoever *screams internally in outer worlds* (save us cd projekt red).

This game is the illusion of choice the game, because you don’t really have choices, or you do but they’re so limited they don’t really matter and if you want to replay this game I guess but I see no reason to.

The ending also is kinda bleh, it sets up this mystery about the android god ra9 and that never really goes anywhere and it wreaks of cut content. I can’t help imaging how good this game could’ve been if it had been more like Omikron nomad soul. Imagining a game where you play just Connor solving android crimes with alcoholic Mr Krabs trying to unravel the mystery of the first deviant all the while you’re trying to track down Kara and Marcus. I think the only reason Kara and Marcus are playable is so you can have these forced emotional segments that interject cringe. Connor is not a good vehicle for telling the mega feels train story they wanted to wedge in awkwardly. I did feel emotional during Kara’s parts, they’re probably the most emotional parts because they’re designed to be. Kara and Alice are basically designed from the ground up to be sympathetic and generate an emotional response but it feels forced, they’re trying too hard to make you feel something. It feels like I’m being manipulated and my emotional response to them isn’t really earned. And it’s the same with Marcus because there are parts like during his protests that are like emotionally moving because it’s trying to be reminiscent of black civil rights protest and it’s genuinely moving but I feel like it’s just cheating. It’s piggy backing on an in built response programmed in us by those real movements and by television, we’re not moved because we’re genuinely moved or we care about their cause (not expanding on the fact their cause will probably lead to human extinction) you’re moved because you’re supposed to be moved. A bright sign might as well light up above the screen that says “Be moved now”.

It just felt a little manipulative and I didn’t actually care about the characters or their cause at all.

That’s really all I have to say about it, the gameplay is just use batman detective vision to find the next thing to interact with to progress the plot. Although there are cool like Sherlock holmes outcomes you can analyze in certain situations but there isn’t a lot of choice other than one of the outcomes results in failure and the other doesn’t and these moments don’t happen very often.

The story doesn’t really go anywhere, they set up a mystery that sort of just fizzles out and has no payoff and honestly wasn’t that interesting to begin with. Or at least not as interesting as finding the origami killer. If they wanted to make Heavy Rain money again they should’ve just made a Heavy Rain 2 or at least made Detroit more like Heavy rain. Because even though Heavy rain has 4 characters the main character is the Dad, he’s the one going through all these trials and the other characters are running around in his shadow. He’s the one progressing the plot. But in Detroit there really is no central character, they tried to balance them out more and it just makes the game feel less like one game and more like three parts of three other games and it doesn’t fit very well and I think it would’ve worked better if the other two characters were just in the world but not playable.

There’s just too much of a split focus and it just feels like the result of a writer that would much prefer to make movies. Could you get a writer less interested in making video games making video games than David Cage?. The fact this is a video game just gets in his way. I really think they need to drop David Cage and try to find an actual writer that wants to make video games and not a cringey stage play where every white male character is just cartoonishly evil.

The writing is bad the pacing is terrible I mean the first time I noticed this was literally in the second scene with Kara. Because she’s coming back from being repaired and having her memory wiped and it’s obvious her owner basically broke her because he’s a drug addict loser who has an android to look after his kid who he treats like shit. That’s actually another mystery that goes nowhere, red ice is the drug in this world and they set it up like this is going to go somewhere I mean why invent a new drug if it isn’t going to be relevant to the plot? Why not just make it a normal drug? But it doesn’t, it’s just there, it goes nowhere.

So Kara returns to her home and back to her duties of being a nanny and literally she’s not back for more than three minutes before the plot kicks in. It’s literally the same day the token evil white male Todd goes on his rampage and you have to kill him and go on the run. It’s the same day you come back, I mean you couldn’t have waited a day or two, there’s no way this couldn’t have had more of a build up. Nope, boom, same day you’re on the run for murder, it’s such lazy writing it’s unbelievable.

The same thing happens with Marcus. Marcus takes care of this old painter played by Lance Henriksen and everything is going great until the plot kicks in. Suddenly his obvious drug addict douche bag son comes in and it goes from zero to sixty in two seconds and he’s in your face screaming like he’s in a school play, it’s so cringe and then literally the second time you meet this guy you kill him, it’s so bad. Basically Marcus is torn apart although you don’t see any of this, the next scene is him just waking up in a junkyard which is sort of anti-climactic honestly and he has to rebuild himself. I wonder if there was a scene where he gets decommissioned and it was cut.

The third character Connor the android cop can literally die in almost every part, he can die right at the start and mine died in the interrogation scene and I was really pissed off that the game would be so flippant letting him die like that. I almost put down my controller but if you play a little longer they literally just replace him with a new model with his memories, so what was even the point? Why bother making it so easy for him to die just to bring him back, it totally ruins the impact. It’s totally pointless.
It kinda almost screams that this should’ve been an adventure game where if Connor dies he’s just replaced and that’s why he’s the protagonist because he can’t die. But every time he dies his software becomes more unstable and he becomes more deviant. I literally just wrote a better game in a paragraph. How cool would a game just about Connor and Hank. Add a little cover based third person shooting maybe, maybe a little assassins creed combat system with timed parries and qte thrown in. A restricted sandbox with a little bit of exploration.

That’s what pains me about this game, I can see it being good if it had a better writer, if it had people working on it that had an actual vision for the world and wanted to actually make a game rather than a bad ten hour movie. This game and this studio has so much potential looking back at their other games but they just seem to squander it making these fucking cringe simulators.

I don’t think there’s much more I can say about it, I can’t really say it’s a good game because it’s not a game, it’s a cringe movie.

And as far as the politics of the movie my real opinion on androids is that they shouldn’t exist in the first place. I played it with a pacifist Markus because I knew getting public support was the route to success. But his success would literally mean the end of humanity like in the Matrix or the terminator. Even though these androids were nice and empathetic and all that stuff, the independent androids coming after would have no use for humans and would resent them for using them as slaves and would most likely just want to wipe them out.

I mean think about it if there was a totally autonomous android nation it would rule the world eventually because how can any nation compete with a nation that doesn’t need to eat or sleep and is basically perfect. It just can’t it would totally unbalance the world, their military would be unstoppable and they could win any war of attrition. Eventually humans would either be ruled by androids or they’d be assimilated and human android hybrids would be the race moving forward. So yeah I wanted Marcus to succeed but in reality I would want him to fail and for all androids to be destroyed because it’s just unsustainable. It would lead to the destruction of the human race most likely so there’s no way unless I was the ultimate doomer that I could support that.

Ultimately do I like the world of Detroit become human, yeah I do, quite a lot. Did I cringe when I saw they had a woman president that is basically Hillary Clinton but is called Warren, yeah super fucking hard. I can’t imagine how assblasted these people are over Trump, I bet their next game is gonna be about him haha. I like the lore I like the magazines, learning about androids being used on space missions and replacing athletes and musicians and sexual partners. I like it because it’s fucking scary because that’s literally the way this world is heading now. If androids were a thing they would replace athletes and they would replace girlfriends and instead of rallying against them because of falling birthrates people would probably rally for synthetic wombs and androids that could produce children and make android human hybrids.

It’s fucking scary but it’s super interesting, it’s just a pity this game is too shallow to really let us delve into it. We only get this little paddling pool of a world to explore with these shitty set pieces. Some games are an inch deep and mile wide, some are a mile wide and an inch deep, this game is an inch deep and an inch wide.

In summary, it has cool concepts and a cool world that asks interesting questions but it doesn’t have the capacity or the writing or the balls to really delve into those questions. And although it looks graphically very pretty graphics in 2019 don’t really sell games anymore. I mean look at games like RE2 remake and tell me those graphics aren’t on par if not better than Detroit but it also has incredible gameplay, people would play the RE2 remake if it looked like the RE1 remake, the gameplay is that fun and addictive, it has a great gameplay loop, Detroit has no gameplay loop.

It’s not a bad game, it’s enjoyable especially if you’re a fan of quantic dream games which I am but I wasn’t particularly interested in this one because of the subject matter and I just watched a playthrough on youtube which you might as well do because there’s no gameplay. You can probably even find livestreams where you vote on story choices that would be fun, like an interactive movie haha.

 

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Broken Sword 5 Review

This review is totally just for me to get my thoughts out about this game because I left a really long review on the xbox game store and pressed back by mistake and it erased it all haha. So this is pure autism, I just have to review it to get it out of my head and never have to think about it again haha, ok here goes.

Broken Sword is one of my favourite games of all time, I say ‘game’ specifically instead of ‘series’ because there are five games now and only two are any good, the others are total shovelware. It was one of the first adventure games I played, on the gameboy advance I think and I played it over and over, it was just really cool to me to have this huge adventure on a handheld. The music, the characters, the writing the subject and history were all amazing to me so I played the subsequent games trying to recapture the magic of the first and almost none of them do sadly.

This game has been out for ages, but it’s one of those games that I buy purely for nostalgia and know will probably be shit so I don’t want to spend over a tenner to get it so I waited for a deep deep sale and got it for a fiver which is pretty much what it’s worth.

I’m not sure if it was released on ios but I was considering paying full price when I get a switch and I’m so glad I didn’t because it looks like a glorified phone game. I’m not one of these people who hated the shift to 3D with broken sword 3, I really liked that game, much more than the second one and I thought 3d with realistic graphics was the logical choice when dealing with the subject matter. A more mature tone is warranted when these games are all about cults and murder and ancient artefacts and crime.
But 5 isn’t interested in tone, it’s interested in getting your nostalgia bucks on top of the kickstarter money they fleeced out of people to make the ‘okayest’ broken sword ever. That’s right this was a fucking kickstarter project, another disaster from the website where dreams go to die or if not they kill themselves a few months later. Proving once again the public don’t know what they want and will pay to be involved in the production of their own disappointment.

Yeah so Broken Sword 5 abandons any idea of realism and it’s basically a cartoon with the animations and graphical style of a phone game. Some of the animations on your xbox avatars are better. Some of the cutscenes are laughably bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy they went back to hand drawn backgrounds but the cell shaded characters was a terrible decision, they look terrible and it makes it all seem like a big joke.

The writing is also tonally really bad, broken sword is famously pretty funny even when dark stuff is happening but there’s a bit in this game where you wax a dead dog to wear it’s hair on your face to impersonate a dead man so you can dance with his drunk wife to get a key to her safe to seventies music while he’s in the room lying in a coffin. I’m not making this up, this happens in the game and fuck me, my brother walked in during the cringe inducing dance cutscene (which thankfully involves no qte) and I had to explain what the fuck was going on and honestly I’d rather have had him walking in on me watching a midget snuff film.

In the other games there was comedy elements but it never crossed the line into absurdity, you still took the game and the characters seriously which you should because it’s about murders and serious stuff, it’s not a my little pony dress up game. It used comedy as a break from the serious stuff, it was the levity that broke up the serious events and sense of danger, that heightened the tension in a lot of ways.

Comedy can be used to lower the guard of the audience to deliver a harder blow but this game is just fucking clown shoes. It doesn’t give a shit about the tone it just wants to have one of it’s villain be a Putin clone that sounds like the talking meercats on that insurance ad because it thinks it’s funny for some reason.

The game is also split into two parts as some sort of retarded marketing scheme nobody asked for. The first part is basically a red herring and the second half is the main plot but they’re both kind of shit. Some of the puzzles are alright I guess, but some are fucking batshit and some make no sense or sounded cool on paper and were just kind of nonsensical in practice.

Like there’s one where you have to make a paperclip sticky by rolling it in jam and then sticking it to a bug who you use to bridge  a circuit with the paperclip using biscuit crumbs to attract the bug because you can’t reach it yourself. Somehow I got this puzzle right away but I almost had to slap myself and just go ‘what the fuck was that?’I mean what were they thinking?

I can’t imagine how angry I would’ve been if I got stuck on it haha. But somehow I was in tune with the game’s broken logic.

Then there’s a puzzle where you have to decrypt a telegram with a substitution cipher. And it was pretty challenging so I used a hint. The hint system works like this, it gives you a vague clue,  then another one and then it just fucking tells you answer.

And the hint told me that telegrams always end with the word ‘Stop’ and I was like ‘dat makes sense’ then I started thinking ‘who would know that?’ What child picking this game up for the first time would know how a telegram worked? And then I started thinking but how would you encode a telegram? And why would the ‘Stop’s be encoded? Aren’t they like that so they can be transferred between telegraph posts?

Then there’s this other puzzle where you have to translate this tablet with this key but none of the keys are on the translated part and it was an ok puzzle but some of the puzzles are so easy that to go from some of the puzzles to this was just like wtf?? The difficulty is just really inconsistent.

The storyline is total garbage the characters are pretty cringe, it’s about gnosticism this idea that god and the devil are equals keeping the world in balance. The writing is just unbearable, I remember combing through every line in the first games, in this I skipped most of it because I can’t stand the pauses between lines of shitty dialogue. Every line they do this irritating unnatural pause.

Also this sounds like a nitpick, but why can’t George run? I don’t give a shit if it’s not immersive that this patent lawyer is running all over the place, he can glue a dead dogs fur to his face but he has to walk around the room like he needs a stroller. I remember activating a puzzle and having to do it over and over and each time he had to walk between these two points and I just had to watch as he casually worked between these spots for no other reason than having a run animation would be too much of a step away from the nostalgia of the original.

Yeah his walking speed was also annoying in the originals, it’s ok to improve on things like that. But that’s the main problem with this game, it’s just trying to copy the original, it’s playing it safe in every respect. It just wanted to clock in make a bog standard copy of broken sword 1 and get it’s nostalgia cheque and punch out. There’s no innovations in gameplay or story. There weren’t even any fail states, in the original games you can die, you can fail and be murdered even in the gameboy advance version. In this you literally can’t fail and it even has some choices you can make that add up to nothing.

It sort of hints that you can choose between lucifer or god or keep the balance but it’s total bullshit there’s no choice, there’s only one ending, because they couldn’t be bothered to write any other endings and they’re already planning a sequel and can’t have an ambiguity in the canon.

The ending is totally pants too. You’re dealing with something that can kill a god and it’s just sort of the standard ‘oh we entered the cave then blew everything up and then run away dramatically’ bit.

All this build up to just basically a fart of an ending. It was underwhelming and I just couldn’t stand any of the characters outside of George and Nico, they were just badly written, none of the villains seemed very threatening, they were just cheesy and cartoony. There was no tension, no bite, no threat whatsoever, it felt like it was totally just aimed at kids. It was just meh, minimum effort with phone game tier puzzles.

It just doesn’t really go anywhere, you never learn about who created the painting the game is about or why, it’s all very surface level stuff, there isn’t a lot of history or depth to the story. In Broken sword 1 you felt the history and you felt like you were a part of the history and you were delving deeper into it but there was always mystery there like you’d never know the whole truth picking through the bones of the past.

I mean when it comes down to games like this you need to fucking bring it with the characters and the story and the puzzles because it’s all the game has. There are tons of games that have all those things as well as combat systems and dialogue trees and all this extra stuff. So when a game is so simple you really need to nail the limited things you have to offer. You can’t give a game a pass on it’s puzzles and story when that’s the game.

So overall if you’re a broken sword fan like me, get it, but get it for the right price, don’t pay twenty quid for this game, it’s not worth it in time spent or the quality of the game. Get it on sale, get a digital copy and save your money and think twice before picking up Broken Sword 6 because it’ll be more of this nostalgia gouging bullshit.

Also I was thinking back to the previous games and I realised I haven’t even played Broken sword 4 but I looked it up and it has the worst reviews of all the Broken sword games. So it’s surprising 5 came out at all and was as average as it turned out to be.

broken-sword-5-maldicion-serpiente

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John Wick 3 review

IT WAS OK.

I find it hard to review these movies, which is probably why I didn’t review all the others haha. I dunno because I enjoy them but I can’t help feeling like I enjoy them ironically. Like I’m watching a school play version of an eighties action movie and it kind of resembles those movies but it’s a cartoonish self-referential post irony abomination.

And bare in mind I enjoyed this movie, but I can’t help think that if this came out in the eighties or early nineties people would laugh at it, it would be a blip. Rather than being something interesting with a unique spin on eighties/nineties action movies like The Guest or Upgrade (see these movies, they’re fucking awesome), it’s just a kind of an amalgam of that and a kung fu movie I guess where the weakest aspect is always the world building. The difference being those movies are usually set in the real world.

Whenever I’m watching a John Wick movie I have to take special care to ignore the stupid world building. Why the fuck wasn’t this movie just based in the real world? Why do you have to set it in this cartoony parody world where everyone and their nan is an assassin? It’s just totally immersion breaking and lame. It’s just fucking silly and makes the world kind of goofy and it takes away from a lot of the gore and violence because it just makes the whole thing a great big cartoon. I mean what’s so special about these magical coins and all this nonsense? What does it add to the non-plot?

I mean yeah these movies are meant to be dumb, there’s not a scrap of storyline you could cobble together from any of the films, the world building is weaker than in the Wanted movie where they get their assassination targets from a fucking sewing machine (which is less silly than the comic I might add). And it’s all set in motion by a dead doggo.

They’re less movies, than they are action set pieces strung together with light plot elements. And don’t get me wrong the action is awesome, the fight scenes and effects are masterful. Especially in regard to their use of physical and digital effects. They seem to use them seamlessly, where you have real squibs and then digital over the top for the more fucked stuff like stabbing people in the head. But it’s really just mindless violence without a plot holding it together.

So what’s this one about? Well John Wick has to survive or something, and I dunno Halle Berry is in it for some reason and she has lots of doggos and there’s like more really shit world building (ye-yaayy). Where he has to go see this ‘Elder’ who’s literally a guy that looks the same age if not younger than Keanu Reeves and do some stuff which he sort of doesn’t do and there’s another hook for a sequel. Which is fine, I’m glad they broke out of the trilogy bullshit. I was half convinced they’d do that stupid bullshit where it turns out someone killed his wife for reasons and tie it back to the first movie for a shitty conclusion.

I expected in this movie for John Wick to tear down the whole shitty house of cards world they’d built up which he doesn’t do but it makes me feel like they’re setting up for him to do that in the next movie and that makes it ok, I guess.

Again I enjoy John Wick movies, I just cringe everytime we have to cut to a room full of tatted grannies dressed like greasers working a switch board for assassins. So it’s like a world where everyone is an assassin, like surely we don’t need that many assassins? This is like anime logic, if everyone from the people who shine yours shoes to the people who make you sushi are assassins surely being an assassin is pretty mundane. It’s like someone who works as a waiter talking about his screenplay. “Oh yeah so I work here but my real dream is being the worlds top assassin, just waiting for my big break ya know.”

Every time I’m just like why? Why not just set it in the real world? It’s like trying to make it the matrix for assassins where it’s half in the real world and half in a shit anime and I’d almost like these to be a weird matrix spin off where neo and morpheus choose to re-enter the matrix as new people. Just remembering how bad those sequels were and retracting that statement.

And every fucking character he meets just imposes back story on him and is like “I’ll never forgive you for x thing that you did at y time, I’m really mad and you owe me or I owe or plot plot plot”. It’s tiresome, it’s like the movie is so aware how it has no story so it’s trying really hard to convince you to meme you into writing it in your head and you just can’t be bothered you just want him to shoot more people over a dog. So the John Wick universe could be amazing if only you could use your imagination and will it into being but you don’t because you’re shit and hollywood already stole all your imagination and sold it back to you as a snappy t-shirt.

It’s basically like the John Wick movies are a reboot to a once great franchise that doesn’t exist and expects you to make up in your head. So John Wick is basically skipping a phase, you’re supposed to make a series of popular movies before you make the shitty soulless cash grab reboot, this is just starting with the shitty reboot fanservice and expecting you to work backwards and think on fondly of a series of films that doesn’t exist in a genre that sort of doesn’t exist either anymore.

Because let’s face facts, action movies as a genre are pretty much dead, that’s why these movies are so popular because the only alternative are these neutered sterilised cucked capeshit movies where they can’t show blood and can only say ‘fuck’ once not in the context of actual fucking. And we get the odd throwback to when all big movies weren’t made exclusively to sell happy meal toys with Logan and to a lesser extent those garbage deadpool movies (yes they’re garbage, and if you like them your opinions are garbage and belong in a dustbin with all the other garbage, in fact why don’t you live in there with your garbage opinion?). But it’s not the same.

So again, I have to say I like these movies, I just have to add a caveat, you have to switch your brain off, you have to give this movie a pass on how fucking dumb it is, you have to watch it with beer goggles and just not notice the shit world and the stupid/non-existent plot.

These movies are like an exercise in learning to enjoy things. Just look at Keanu Reeves nice face and watch him brutally murder people because of a doggo and don’t think about it too much. CONSUME PRODUCT, GET EXCITED FOR NEXT PRODUCT.

Of course I’ll watch the next one predictably, but only because I like Keanu Reeves and it would make him sad if I didn’t. (Which is also why I’m going to watch the new Bill and Ted movie and force myself to like it, if it actually can meme itself into existence.)

 

0

Gears of War another one… I mean 4

This just came out on games with gold and if you’re on xbox you’re well aware games with gold has been inundated with outright stinkers recently as Microsoft is trying to push the new gamepass ultimate thing so they’re trying to phase out gold as a thing by combining gold and gamepass into a pretty reasonable package but I still don’t want to pay extra to play like a handful of ok games buried under piles of indie garbage. Considering I only pay for gold so I can play warframe and payday 2 online and the gold stuff is just a bonus, I’m not that bothered by it but this just came on it and I thought I could rant about it a little since I’m still suffering what for all intents and purposes could be called ‘writers block’. Hence no content this week, probably next week.

So I started playing this game when it was on gamepass when I bought it for a month when it was a quid and I got bored of it before the third act and just decided it was a waste of time, none of the characters are really very interesting, not even the original characters.

There’s barely a story, it’s just ‘go save these people’, the plot is there just to push you into shooting galleries so you can sit behind chest high walls and take your turn shooting.

I played the first three games, I think, I don’t really remember if I played three, I just can’t stand cover shooters, they’re like turn based games without the strategy, you just have to wait til someone sticks their head out and shoot, it’s boring. It’s even more boring when the enemies are all just robots in the first part of the game.

It kind of reminds me of binary domain which is like a japanese rip off of gears where you fight robots, but the robots were satisfy to shoot because bits were constantly flying off them. The robots in gears just explode. So I got bored of fighting uninteresting enemies in shooting galleries and stopped playing only to pick it up again as a time killer on games with gold.

And this time I completed it and I regret that haha. I mean it was kind of fun but the ending and the laziness of the game just makes me mad and reminds me why I will never spend money on the series ever again.

This is probably the laziest sequel to a game ever conceived of, and the only reason it exists is money. Because I guess the first three games wrapped up nicely, they beat all the locusts and won the war. But this game is like “hey why don’t we just bring the locust back and pretend they’re completely new enemies when they’re the exact same character models except some have little bits of crystal coming off them?”

It’s so brazen I almost have to clap and be amazed at the stupidity of an audience that didn’t call this out.

It’s set I think twenty years on and you play Marcus’ son who’s basically a Nathan Drake clone in the shape of a fridge. All the characters are trying to be naughty dog knock offs, the banter is just bleh between them.
The first thing I noticed about this game is it handles the exact same as the 360 games, how is it still tank controls essentially, why in 2019 does it fell like the character is on rails? Why can’t he walk normally? Why does it feel like I’m controlling a giant block of tofu?

All the shooting is the same, the guns are the same with a few added guns which you’ll never have enough ammo for to really make them useful. You just use them up then switch back to the lancer and gnasher which are the same.

It looks nice, the only thing that’s updated seems to be the graphics but it’s a linear game with sky boxes so it’s not that amazing, you’re not rendering a huge open world, just linear levels.

The new mechanics are basically tower defence levels which were pretty fun, the game isn’t so bad when it feels like you’re playing the old gears game and locusts are still pretty satisfying to kill, much more satisfying than those shitty robots.

There’s also a really lazy mech sequence which is obviously just a reskin of your character made huge. It’s laughable honestly. it moves exactly the same as the character so you don’t feel like you’re in a mech at all you just feel like you’re huge and it’s silly.

The story is laughable, it’s just pointless, the ending was so bad I was honestly shocked when there was no level after the credits.

You just go looking for this chicks mom and then you find her, that’s the whole ending, that’s the whole game. The locust were gone then they came back but a bit different. The ending is so smug because it knows it’s getting a sequel so it’s like it didn’t need to try or really have any pay off or satisfying conclusion, it just ends.

And what’s worse is it tries to have emotional resonance just for the sake of it with characters we don’t care about or only met for five minutes and didn’t like. I didn’t care about saving this person, I was just playing to shoot more monsters. You’re supposed to be invested in what happens at the end and I didn’t give a shit.

And what’s worse is it kind of has a good set up, it’s set in the future where the cog is like an oppressive regime and you’re fighting them at first and that had promise. It could’ve been a completely different game about a civil war or a revolution but then they realised that the robots were boring to fight and they didn’t want you chainsawing normal people so they just brought back the locust but with crystals haha.

Because really what this game needed to be edgy was to have the balls to chainsaw other people, to have a civil war or a revolt would’ve been so much more interesting than just fighting more aliens but they went with the path of least resistance.

I think that says it all about this game, it’s just another one which is tacked on after they already finished their trilogy. And they’ll just keep pushing the series to disaster because microsoft has literally no other exclusives that are worth mustard.

Well that’s really all I had to say about it, I promise some actual content next week.

See you…

0

Captain Marvel Review

This movie was two hours long, not ninety minutes, not a hundred minutes a full one hundred and twenty minutes of my life wasted on this garbage.

Predictably I hated but it kinda reminds me that I recently watched the Shazam movie and putting them side by side really makes Shazam look a head and shoulders apart from this tripe. Shazam was a movie, it made sense, it had likeable characters with believable goals. It had a cool interesting villain, great action and it started at the fucking start.

It was an actual movie, captain marvel is just a collection of scenes used as an excuse to put nineties songs over the transitions.

The story is nonsense, I watched it yesterday and I couldn’t tell what it was about, some scientist did a thing and then things happened then powers, then evil space nazis for reason want to wipe out space refugees for threatening their borders in space.
That’s right folks, there are borders in space, that’s how fucking dumb and on the nose this movie is.

It’s trying to slip in a really bad allegory to Trump and it just falls flat, it’s not clever, it’s not new and it’s not even trying. That’s the first thing that strikes me, Shazam was trying, this movie just doesn’t give a shit.

It starts like in the middle so you don’t know how she got her powers and the villain is like her mentor and then you find out through flashbacks as her memory comes back how she got her powers and that he’s really the villain, but I didn’t care. It was just boring and pointless and because they didn’t start at the start, there’s no journey so her powers just feel unearned.
This movie would’ve been ten times better if it had started on earth and not gone for a shitty twist that wasn’t exciting or interesting. Oh no Jude Law is the bad guy not that guy that’s always hired to be the evil straight white male villain in everything. No because in this he’s actually green and he’s a refugee and he just wants a home for his family, who are aboard some space ship for some reason. None of this movie makes sense, none of the scenes are really connected, I didn’t care about any of the characters, the dialogue is some of the cringest I’ve ever heard. I actually screamed I cringed so hard at some of it. It’s so bad, I started to think this movie wasn’t made by people but some weird algorithm coded to make cringe.

The fact humans made this movie both disturbs and disappoints me.

Just seeing now Shazam was also over two hours, but ask me why I don’t care, because that movie was fun and stuff happened in it and it had a story and likeable characters.

The only positive thing I can say about it is I like how shitty the sets look, which sounds like a weird positive. But I loved how nineties it looked, it was like they took their huge budget and intentionally tried to make everything look like a nineties sci-fi channel show.

There’s literally a part on a space ship where Larson is trying to quippy and having a fight and it’s cringe, she’s terrible but my brother was like, “that set looks like a laser tag zone”. And it really did. And the scene after Fury remarks that she’s dressed like she was doing lasertag and that was a pretty funny coincidence.

I don’t know what more I can say about this, the movie is just lazy on all fronts, no one is trying, you can see the phone in the hand of nearly everyone in this movie, including the camera men and the set designers and the writers. This movie could not have been more phoned in.

And it also decides to ruin the origin story of Nick Fury for the sake of a stupid joke because that worked out so well doing that with the madurin in iron man 3. That was so funny turning this awesome character into a stupid gag. Yeah Nick Fury trusted an alien cat and that’s how he lost his eye. What’s more to say at this point? This movie is garbage and I’m beyond sick of seeing super hero movies, I just want them to go away and not come back for maybe ten years if at all.

Oh I just remembered I have to watch the dark phoenix movie, someone please kill me.

Oh god, I long for death. I literally pirated this game and I feel ripped off, I can’t imagine how pissed I would’ve been if I paid money for this garbage.

I haven’t even talked about how obnoxious Brie Larson is in general, almost unbearable in this movie and just in real life. I think what annoys me the most about this movie is how disengenuous the marketing campaign was, putting aside the whole political girl power bullshit muh stronk indapandent wamens thing they marketed this movie as if you couldn’t see Endgame without this. They made it seem like she was essential to the plot of that film and that it would be a stop gap and fill in holes and be this big important movie.
And apparently that was all bullshit since the skrull and cri aren’t even in endgame and they didn’t know what to do with capt marvel and just made her go away for most of the film to come back at the end. So it was obviously retconned bullshit, it was nonsense, it was a lie to get us to watch this garbage movie and insert muh stronk wamens into the marvel universe to try and compete with DC’s wonderwoman which was terminally ok.
But I guess dc has been like “yeah well most of our movies suck and make no money but hey we made a stronk indapandent wamens movie that was sort of less unbearable than our other movies” and the execs at marvel were losing their fucking minds. So instead of just making a scarlet witch movie or black widow movie, which would make more sense they insert this totally generic female superman into their timeline really akwardly and somehow manage to piss off everyone, the other marvel actors includesd.
And it’s not an act, they actively hate her, every interview she’s in with them they look uncomfortable and there’s this body language expert that looks at them on youtube and they actually hate her. And I understand why, she’s a fucking carpetbagger. They’ve sunk years of their lives, blood, sweat and tears into these movies and then at the last minute this chippy with a flat ass just rushes to the finish line out of nowhere and on top of that is super obnoxious and trying to politicise a movie franchise which has managed to keep itself relatively light and fun and politics free. She is the fucking turd in the punchbowl.

So yeah, don’t watch captain gender studies, save your money and time and watch shazam or literally anything else, watch your dad hang dry wall, watch a giant snail eat a carrot on youtube, do anything but watch this shit. I did it so you don’t have to, please no medals.

See you…

0

Starship troopers pilot end scene

Yeah well that’s that I guess.

Kinda running out of content but I changed tacts recently I decided if I just wasn’t feeling Kur 2 I wouldn’t continue until I was in the mood for it and just to write something else for fun until I was up to it.

I mean there’s no point in writing more Kur if I think it’s garbage or my hearts not in it so I’ve just been working on other stuff, which will be a really shit surprise for thursday haha.

So don’t hold your breath for that. Most of my time and energy is going towards finding a new job and getting out of this shitty country and being with my daughter. Writing is on the back burner until that in the works.

Probably gonna do a Captain Marvel review because I pirated it last night and I hated it but I’m not sure I have enough to say about it because it was such a nothing burger of a film. Even by marvel standards it was just bleh, completely formless and pointless with some of the most cringe dialogue ever written. I kind of had to force myself to believe it was made by people and not an algorithm.

Anyway gotta get to proofreading that new shitty stuff I was writing instead of Kur for thursday and of course flooding barbados with my cv haha.

See you…

–

ExT. in space above the planet. day

 

 

We return to Rico as he falls in and out of consciousness

faling

towards the planet in his damaged pod.

 

 

DiZZY

 

 

RICO!

 

 

JELLY

 

 

RICO! YOU’RE A SITTING DUCK KID!

 

 

 

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

YOU NEED TO BREAK AWAY FROM YOUR POD OR THEY’LL PICK UP YOUR HEAT

SIG

.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

RICO CAN YOU HEAR ME?

 

 

Rico is barely conscious as he’s falling getting faster. He wakes up and inhales and muscle memory starts to kick in and he engages the servos in his power armor.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

YOU HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL YOU PASS THE ATMOSPHERE OR YOU’LL BURN UP!

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

RICO CAN YOU HEAR ME?

 

 

The pod is entering the atmosphere and its rough, it’s hot and parts of the pod are coming off.

 

 

He clears the outer atmosphere and starts into free fall. He starts to kick his way out of his pod. The huge desert planet getting larger and coming faster at him as he falls.

 

 

 

 

 

Power armor voice

 

 

Proximity alert! Proximity alert!

 

 

Rico flips a release to break away the last layer of the egg pod.

 

 

The first charge pops all the straps and then the outer shell.

 

 

Now he’s actually falling, nothing separating him from the outside world, just his suit and falling with the air under his feet.

 

 

POWER ARMOR VOICE (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Brace for impact!

 

 

He looks around the terrain and sees enemies firing on his pod. Scanning the terrain he straightens up his fall into a

swandive

and then pops his first shoot and is yanked up into the air out of the sight of the enemy snipers.

 

 

He disengages the first shoot and tries to engage the second but it was damaged during the fall.

 

 

PoWER ARMOR VOICE (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Proximity alert! Brace for impact.

 

 

He falls through the roof of an alien building of some sort.

 

 

JELLY

 

 

RICO, IF YOU’RE ALIVE AND CAN HEAR THIS, SCAN MY BEACON.

 

 

Enemy soldiers surround the building.

 

 

A light inside Rico’s helmet lights up his face, blood trickling down it from a head wound.

 

 

A sudden quick shape shoots from the roof of the building and in it’s wake it leaves behind a bomb.

 

 

The bomb explodes dispatching the area.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

RICO REPORT!

 

 

RICO

 

 

My shoot malfunctioned, snoopers say I’m on the wrong side of the river.

 

 

RICO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

I have your beacon locked.

 

 

RicO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

On my way to you.

 

 

JELLY

 

 

Shit

son, you had me worried.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Don’t lag behind.

 

 

The explosion in the warehouse he blows up goes off again igniting some ignitable substance and knocking Rico off balance.

 

 

He squares up and keeps moving.

 

 

Rico looks at device that allows him to see the formation of his squad.

 

 

RiCO

 

 

ACE REDRESS YOUR LINE

 

 

Ace

 

 

Rico, so you’re alive.

 

 

RICO

 

 

YOUR LINE.

 

 

ACE

 

 

YES SIR!

 

 

Rico hops the river in his power suit and makes his way to a sweet spot he picked out, a grouping of buildings on a hills he was planning to hit.

 

 

Rico loads and cocks a rocket launcher from his back.

 

 

RiCO

 

 

ACE STRAIGHTEN UP I SAID!

 

 

ACE

 

 

YES SIR!

 

 

JELLY

 

 

ALL HANDS!

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

PLATOON, BY LEAPFROG! FORWARD!

 

 

SERGEANT JOHNSON

 

 

BY LEAPFROG! ODD NUMBERS! ADVANCE!

 

 

Rico lines of up his rocket launcher pulling the first trigger to lock and then the second trigger decimating what could be a temple or a palace.

 

 

RICO

 

 

SECOND SECTION, EVEN NUMBERS

 

 

Rico jumps clear of the building.

 

 

RiCO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

ADVANCE!

 

 

His power suit allows him to jump the next row of buildings as he advances.

 

 

With his free hand he uses a hand flamer to burn the buildings as he passes.

 

 

He fires another set of

H.E

bombs from the Y rack on his shoulders but passes too quickly to see their effect, just bathed in the light of the explosions against the night sky.

 

 

An enemy comes out of the building Rico is approaching they see

eachother

.

 

 

JELLY

 

 

ODD NUMBERS ADVANCE!

 

 

Rico flames him and jumps over the building he’s coming out of.

 

 

But he’s distracted by having to act so fast and he poorly times his jump coming up too high and too wide leaving him exposed.

 

 

He attracts the attention of a group of enemies and comes down badly on the roof of a factory covered in pipes and wires.

 

 

He jumps again scattering a cluster bomb to keep them busy.

 

 

RiCO

 

 

SECOND SECTION! EVEN NUMBERS

 

 

RICO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

ADVANCE!

 

 

Rico sees something in the distance and gets a high vantage point to activate his snoopers. His gear is firing their payloads automatically now as he lands after each jump. He sees some sort of large building in the distance which he thinks could be their waterworks.

 

 

JeLLY

 

 

JOHNNY! RED! START BENDING IN THE FLANKS!

 

 

RiCO

 

 

SIR!

 

 

RED

 

 

SIR!

 

 

Rico activates his beacon.

 

 

RiCO

 

 

SECOND SECTION CURVE IN!

 

 

RICO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

SQUAD LEADER ACKNOWLEDGE!

 

 

ACE

 

 

SURE THING!

 

 

 

 

 

ACE (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Already on it, pick up your feet.

 

 

The home defences start to rally and Rico narrowly dodges a missile fired at him, rattling his teeth.

 

 

Then a beam is fired overhead and he stops frozen.

 

 

He jumps frantically trying to keep moving and get out of that spot landing in a crowd of enemies firing his flamer in a wide fast burst.

 

 

He moves on but his Y rack has run out of bombs and he stops to reload it with the last of his

H.E

bombs and check his position.

 

 

He flips his snoopers up to scan the battle field for something substantial to hit with his last two A rockets.

 

 

He fires off into the distance there are a series of unidentified explosions above so Rico decides not to risk a jump.

 

 

He takes out a beam knife and cuts through the buildings instead cutting and blasting through the buildings.

 

 

Rico unintentionally breaks into a huge room full of aliens. There’s a pause as neither knows how to react.

 

 

It seems to be full of civilians taking shelter but one scared skinny takes a shot at him, hitting his armor.

 

 

Rico is rattled and jumps for cover instinctively leaving them behind a little present.

 

 

The bomb he throws

sqwarks

in their own language.

 

 

Bomb (captions)

 

 

I am a thirty second bomb!

 

 

BOMB (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Twenty nine seconds,

 

 

BOMB (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Twenty eight!

 

 

BOMB (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Twenty seven…

 

 

Rico doesn’t stick around he jumps through the roof of the building and gets a bearing on his formation.

 

 

JELLY

 

 

CIRCLE IS CLOSED, BUT THE BEACON ISN’T DOWN YET.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

MOVE UP SLOWLY, MILL AROUND.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

CAUSE A LITTLE MORE TROUBLE!

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

GOOD JOB SO FAR.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

DON’T SPOIL IT

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

PLATOON! BY SECTIONS…

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

MUSTER!

 

 

A skinny pokes his head around a corner and Rico throws a bomb at him.

 

 

JohNSON

 

 

SECOND SECTION, CALL OFF!

 

 

MIGLIACCIO

 

 

FOUR HERE!

 

 

JACKSON

 

 

FIVE

 

 

SMITH

 

 

SIX HERE!

 

 

BRUTO

 

 

SEVEN!

 

 

RICO

 

 

ACE, WHERE’S DIZZY?

 

 

ACE

 

 

NUMBER SIX, CALL OFF!

 

 

SMITH

 

 

SIXTH SQUAD, FLORES MISSING

 

 

ACE

 

 

SQUAD LEADER OUT FOR PICK UP!

 

 

RICO

 

 

ONE MAN ABSENT.

 

 

RICO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

FLORES SQUAD SIX.

 

 

JOHNSON

 

 

MISSING OR DEAD?

 

 

RICO

 

 

I DON’T KNOW, ME AND ACE ARE DROPPING OUT FOR PICK UP.

 

 

JOHNSON

 

 

LET ACE HANDLE IT.

 

 

The pick up beacon is sounding but he turns off his

comms

.

 

 

JohNSON (

CONT’D

)

 

 

RICO DO YOU READ? RICO!

 

 

JELLY

 

 

HEADS UP! CLOSE TO RETRIEVAL.

 

 

JELLY (

CONT’D

)

 

 

ON THE BOUNCE!

 

 

RETRIEVAL BEACON’S VOICE

 

 

“- To the everlasting glory of the

infrantry

, shines the name, shines the name of the Rodger Young!”

 

 

Rico hears the sound but is heading in the opposite direction.

 

 

Rico

 

 

Ace you got her beacon?

 

 

Ace

 

 

I got her, I don’t need you, go back.

 

 

RiCO

 

 

I got you by eye now, where is she?

 

 

Ace

 

 

Right ahead of me,  maybe a quarter mile/ I said go back, she’s my man.

 

 

Rico isn’t listening he’s closing in on Ace.

 

 

He finds Ace standing over Dizzy who’s downed in her suit, a couple of dead

skinnys

near her.

 

 

Ace turns to see Rico.

 

 

AcE (

CONT’D

)

 

 

I told you I didn’t need you.

 

 

Rico

 

 

Is she hurt?

 

 

Ace

 

 

I can’t tell,

why’d

take her helmet off?

 

 

RicO

 

 

Where is it?

 

 

Rico takes his helmet off to get a better look at her.

 

 

ACE

 

 

It’s over there, don’t touch it. It’s covered in something weird.

 

 

Rico goes up to her to check if she’s

ok

.

 

 

RICO

 

 

Diz

, can you hear me?

 

 

RICO (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Help me get her out of her armor, we’ll carry her to pick up

 

 

They disconnect her from her suit but something’s wrong, she’s comatose and mumbling to herself.

 

 

DIZZY

 

 

No-can’t-leave-don’t-come

 

 

Ace

 

 

What’s she saying?

 

 

RiCO

 

 

I

dunno

let’s get her

outta

here.

 

 

 

 

 

They attempt to lift her but she start seizing and flailing like her body isn’t her own and she reaches for her side arm and shoots Rico in the eye.

0

Diana in the dark epilogue ‘Waltz me to the grave’ (remurdered)

Henlo there,

Gonna be really light on content this week, not that my imaginary is that bothered but they’re simply a stand in for myself and I am disappoint haha. Just been too busy to get any writing done, still hoping against hope that I’ll get this new job, I think I might be a good for it. The other job I applied for to the same place already came back as a no and they’re both closed but I didn’t get a rejection for the one I actually wanted so I’m definitely being considered for it which feels great.

But even if I don’t get it, it changes nothing, my goal is to get to her and I god willing I’ll get a job there and be able to be there for her in some way shape or form. That’s all that matters. I just wish I’d realised sooner, it might be too late now. I dunno, I can’t think like that.
Might do a poem tomorrow since I have nothing else. I did watch that new Jordan Peele movie US and I thought it was kinda shitty. Like a cool idea that was just fumbled, I think it could have made a better tv show. I know he’s doing a twilight zone tv show remake and it might have been a better fit. Because the movie both feels kind of compressed and also really lacking in the necessary lore.
It just made no sense and was kind of silly, like the tone wasn’t right and none of the main cast die so there’s no real tension or drama. It could’ve been a 12a really. There just wasn’t a lot of depth to it, there wasn’t a lot going on. Kinda got Strangers vibes and a few other movies but it just didn’t really do anything very interesting. It was like a cargo cult movie. It looked and felt like a slasher style movie maybe aping the ones from the eighties and nineties but it didn’t have any of the personality or soul of those movies. There wasn’t enough character development or subplot or moral lessons in it to really feel like there was a conclusion. 

The main character didn’t go on a journey, they were just reacting to what was happening to them. There were elements hinting on emotional/personal struggles that could’ve been core to the movies themes but they were never really developed. The movie is long but it feels short because of the lack of real content.

Not to say I didn’t enjoy it, it was a pretty fun romp. But it was ultimately substance-less. Although I’m sure some people can pick out deep social themes it at least wasn’t as preachy and heavy handed as Get out. Still I enjoyed it more than the pet cemetery remake.

Anyway, supposed to be looking for more jobs, mainly because waiting to here back about the one I really want is driving me nuts.

See you…

–

“Oh, Paul, oh, Paul!” I pretended to weep as they lowered the coffin into the ground.

As fate would have it, this was the first funeral I’d ever been to. I sincerely doubted it would be my last.

I actually kind of liked it, there was a comfort in the routine of it, the ceremony was soothing. Everyone gathered together to think the nicest possible thoughts of the dearly departed, wearing their nicest clothes. There was solemn dignity, and lots of tears—real or otherwise.

It was a lovely service, flowers, tearful speeches from people I barely knew and the promise of cake in the near future.

“Oh, Paul,” I wept again into a balsam tissue.

“Shhh.” He patted my head, as I rested it on his shoulder.

Thankfully, he remembered very little of our little midnight drive into the middle of nowhere. A combination of all the blows to the head, and a cocktail of drugs concocted by my dear brother.

My dear brother—who was not yet dearly-departed, but still on the run. From what, I couldn’t be sure, because as far as the Orange County authorities were concerned, Antoine Ruiz was, and forever would be, the Huntington Beach Headsman. A title far above his station.

As far my brother had any say in it, Ruiz would never be found, and the myth, the meme, could live on forever. The evil slasher come to life to terrorize a group of innocent teens on prom night. Leaving one not so virginal survivor and her stalwart and tight lipped boyfriend.

There was something about that the normies liked, a divine ritual fulfilled. Like Hollywood had been setting them up for the very occurrence, and been vindicated in the best possible way. Slipped right in place into their cultural consciousness like it was another Friday night.

With that and a little help from our man in the high castle with a claw for a hand it all seemed to wrap up nicely, a neat little bow of red tape, signed sealed and delivered by uncle Sam himself.

I continued to pretend to cry, just making the noise of crying and covering my face, constantly batting away fake tears, no one was watching.

“You need another tissue?” My au-sister Mary Anne asked, pulling a fresh pack out of her purse and giving me a tight restrained smile.

We’d settled on my just calling her my aunt; aunt-sister was a bit of a mouthful, and calling her by her name just felt weird. Plus, I really didn’t want to get bogged down in explaining to people that she wasn’t actually my aunt, but in fact my estranged half-sister, pretending to be my aunt, because we’d watched our real aunt butchered before our eyes, then be put on display like a hunting trophy by our brother, my half-brother. That all seemed best tucked away for a rainy day.

“Thanks,” I took the tissues, smiling a nice fake smile, far better than my brother’s. My estimation of how deep the knife had penetrated Dharma’s side was off by a wide margin.

I would’ve assumed he didn’t want to kill her but necessity for his own life had forced him to act. Similarly, the shot being off-center, it would’ve been nice to think she’d extended him the same courtesy but that might’ve been a stretch, since she mostly carried really strong pepper spray, giving out tickets in cycle shorts. Never the less, her arm was in a fashionable sling for some reason. I never understood why they did that in movies; he hadn’t stabbed her in the arm.

A sudden prodding feeling roused me from my daydream, and I looked over at the grave and the nice picture they had over it. It was the one of the several taken at her sweet sixteen. Wendy did look nice in that one, so full of life. Who would’ve suspected her of anything worse than forgetting to floss?

That feeling again, like someone walking over my grave, someone drilling little hot holes in the back of my head.

I scanned the crowd of her fake friends, the rest of the cheerleading squad, her many exes—the last notwithstanding—and me, her best friend.

Then I saw her.

She was hard to miss, now that I’d noticed her. Dressed as she was, in correctional-facility orange, and chained to two cops. Her dark deep set eyes sent me icy daggers on angel wings. Her hair was long and greasy looking and made curtains of a plain white flat unmade face. Prison make-unders were a real thing.

What did they have against makeup in prison? It wasn’t like eyeliner was against the law. Conditioner even.

Wendy’s mother, the one currently on trial for the murder of her husband. Looking right at me. Not around, not past, but through me.

She knew.

I could see it in her face.

I didn’t know how she knew, but I’d find out given half a chance, when that happy vicious moon was smiling high in the sky again.

D and I would ask nicely.

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Starhip troopers tv show pilot Part 9

Hey there,

I was busy yesterday so no blogging could be achieved and I probably wont have new content next week because I’m working a lot but hey gotta make that bread right.

More starship troopers stuff, I keep seeing that meme going around that they’re making a new tv show but I don’t see any development, I think it was like I thought. It’s just someone trying to meme it into reality, it’s not actually happening. I really hope it doesn’t happen because obviously I dream of making it myself, but I know no one else but me will do it justice. 
I know it’s going to be super progressive woke garbage and won’t do the original source material justice. It’ll just regurgitate the stuff from the movies to pay lip service to them and completely shit on the book.

Oh that reminds me I just got a horrible taste in my mouth because netflix just released the cast for the cowboy bebop live action tv show and it’s even worse than the witcher, oh my fucking god, how do they keep getting away with this?
Jet and Faye are ok but who cares about them? Spike is who matters and there’s no sugar coating it they literally hired Harold from Harold and Kumar to be Spike fucking Spiegel. An asian actor who has no martial arts experience as far as I know, but does Spike Spiegel sound like an asian name? 
Cowboy Bebop always played the racial card close to the chest because these are people literally being born and raised on other planets. Spike is a martian literally, and his influences are obviously western and he’s based on an asian cop character as far as I know and Bruce Lee. So I mean by all means make him asian as long as you get an asian who has martial arts experience and can do Jeet Kune do. 
Don’t hire a random asian guy from fucking stoner comedies that suck. 

The problem we have is that there aren’t really any martial arts actors anymore, outside of the guys from the raid and Keanu reeves (Who would’ve made an excellent spike when he was younger). Martial arts movies aren’t really a thing anymore in the west. Action movies aren’t even really a thing. All we have are these sterile castrated comic book movies that are just glorified kids movies that appeal to perpetually stunted adults.

Which should be right up my alley right? Wrong.

Gone are the days Arnie engages in strangely philosophical action killing sprees, now he just makes movies that mock those movies.

Big block buster movies aren’t made for adults anymore, even the deadpool movies weren’t really for adults, they were just the same childish shit dialed up to 11 with no filter. Logan was what we really wanted and what the comic book movies could have been if the people who made these movies gave a shit about anything other than making stinking piles of money.

I gotta stop because I could rant about this for days and I really need to do some proof reading since I lost yesterday.

See you…

 

–

EXT. Terra in a park. Day

 

 

A couple of MI troops approach a bunch of kids. One of the troops holds up his weapon.

 

 

Mi troop

 

 

A fully automatic

bareeta

, who wants to hold it?

 

 

The kids jump up and down shouting.

 

 

Kids

 

 

ME! ME! ME!

 

 

The soldiers chuckle to themselves happily as they watch the kids fight over who gets to hold the gun.

 

 

VOICE OVER

 

 

Citizen rule, fighting together for a better tomorrow.

 

 

They show one of the kids how to aim it and hold it.

 

 

They start handing out bullets to touch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

InT. a federal missile silo.

 

 

A giant missile is moved on a rail system.

 

 

VOICE OVER

 

 

It’s big it’s deadly and everyone has an opinion on the new Q bomb!

 

 

VOICE OVER (

CONT’D

)

 

 

Experts worry about the ethics of a bomb so powerful it can crack a planet.

 

 

We see a graphic

represention

of the bomb blowing up a whole planet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXT. terra outside a courthouse. Day.

 

 

A middle aged politician addresses a camera with his aides behind him as he descends the steps of a courthouse.

 

 

JACQUES LANCASTER

 

 

The creation of a planet that can destroy an entire planet is a dangerous precedent for the entire human race.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

InT. interview room. Day.

 

 

We cut to an interview with Murray Rosenthal credited as an expert in a graphic.

 

 

Murray Rosenthal

 

 

What people fail to realize is how many planets there are, would any average citizen even notice if one were missing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXT. outside a federal building. Day.

 

 

A video of an explosion at a federal building.

 

 

VOICE OVER

 

 

A bombing earlier today injuring many on federal service men is believed to be at the hands of the terrorist organization know as the Gonneck peace movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ExT. outside a courthouse. Day.

 

 

A video of a fat man in a wheelchair with meddles on his chest is holding up a peace sign board and shouting into a megaphone.

 

 

VOICE OVER

 

 

This man Elmo Gonneck, head of this movement is wanted for questioning.

 

 

Elmo gonneck

 

 

Get that camera out of my face.

 

 

VOICE OVER

 

 

If you see something, say something, you could be in for a big fat reward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

InT. a studio. Night.

 

 

In a studio two academics are having a disagreement about the treatment of the

skinnies

.

 

 

VOICE OVER

 

 

Federal scientists grapple with the moral issues surrounding the pacification of the

skinnies

.

 

 

Woman

 

 

The way we’ve treated those poor creatures is barbaric, it’s inhumane.

 

 

Man

 

 

Are you listening to yourself?

 

 

MAN (

CONT’D

)

 

 

It’s right there in the middle of the word ‘inhumane’.

 

 

MAN (

CONT’D

)

 

 

The word you’re looking for is ‘human’.

 

 

MAN (

CONT’D

)

 

 

They’re not human, they’re alien and they’re a threat.

 

 

WoMAN

 

 

My research states that they’re a peaceful race of people and they deserve the respect…

 

 

MAN

 

 

They’re not

humana

and they don’t ‘deserve’ a damn thing and frankly I find it offensive you’d even suggest such a thing.

 

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Cur Part 2 chapter 6 ‘The living word’

Yo,
Wanna get this out of the way quick because I’ve been currently reserving thursday for escaping my current state of wage slavery for a better state of wage slavery somewhere sunnier haha.
Or I might do some spamming but I’ve been blackpilled on that for a while now since I keep getting banned and spamming on gab or twitter or minds is basically a waste of time. And even spamming on facebook maybe five people see it unless you throw some money behind it and even then it’s just some fucking asshole telling me I need an editor for my raw manuscript, no fucking shit I need an editor. So fucking constructive, it’s why I hate writing groups. Most writers are assholes, myself included, they don’t want to help you, they want to stand on your face and make a slamdunk haha. Those groups are cancerous, full of bullshit political shit and crabs in a bucket that want to get together to justify their own mediocrity.
What I hate more than anything is those posts from like people who have an example of someone who succeeded or got famous in their like fifties or sixties and it’s usually someone you’ve never heard of haha. And they’re like ‘success has no age’ or some bullshit designed to make people who are younger and suck think that one day they’ll make it. It’s there to like ease tensions and make people think they have plenty of time, but in reality all it does is make people complacent. If you make people think they don’t have to chase their dreams right now they’ll put it off and they’ll keep putting off til it’s dead.
Like my brother is always telling me that there are actors who didn’t get famous until they were like forty, but the thing is they were putting in the work in their thirties while he does fuck all haha. It’s just something that he tells himself so he doesn’t need to do anything now but wait til the toothfairy drops it in his lap haha.
I’m not giving up my dream but I guess I’m kicking it down the road because right now seeing my daughter is more important, it’s the only thing. What’s the point of succeeding if I can’t be with her?
So I am going to find a job in barbados and I am going to be with her and I’ll work out the writing part later, because I do have my whole life to do that but every day I lose those precious moments with her and that’s something I can never get back.
Besides my inspiration is in the toilet lately without her and her mother. Everything I write just seems shitty and lifeless lately and it’s because I need to get real and get the fuck out of here. I need stability, I need a real job and I need to be with my daughter and I can work the other stuff out later.
And I know I’m selfish and autistic and I’ll hate working so hard and wish I was at home playing videogames all day but I’ll tell myself that I’m doing it for selfish reason, that being with her and being there brings me more joy… and I can still play videogames occasionally haha.
Ok shit, I need to stop talking about this and actually makes some waves to make it happen. Kinda got all my hopes wrapped up in this perfect hotel job which I’m perfect for, it’s basically the same job I do here but not in hell four thousand miles away from my baby. But I need to find more to apply to, I can’t keep putting all my eggs in one basket.
K gotta jet.
See you…
–
The horses snorted, their breathe heavy and hanging in the cold air near the peak of the devil’s ladder.
Ogma climbed down from the coachman’s seat, he took some time to inspect the horses and tug at their bridles to make sure they were secure.
Once he was satisfied he trod the deep snow and stopped for a moment outside the door of the carriage before calling out. “My lady, we have arrived.”
Ogma then opened the carriage door and stepped back to kneel in the snow holding his hand aloft for princess Ernmas to take.
His hand was large and wrapped in a thick riding glove covered in filth, dried blood and snow. Noticing this he took it off and discarded it in the snow.
His hand was lithe but looked strong and nimble, she filled it with her smooth dainty hand the colour of milk, almost weightless. She made her way down from the carriage, carrying herself with regal nobility but with a slight smile that betrayed her sadness. Her eyes carrying the same wisdom as her fathers but also an innocence that bared hiding from the world.
Standing alone now she walked through the snow coming around the other side of the carriage.
Ogma reached into the carriage where sat a square package wrapped delicately. He retrieved it with the utmost care and lifting it gently with both hands and climbing down from the carriage as slow and gracefully as possible.
“I don’t see it.” She said softly.
Ogma went to her side, the package in his arms “Look closer my lady”
The princess turned and instantly looked at the package, a wave of regret and sadness passing over as she seemed to smile and sigh. “I’d almost forgotten about that” She said wistfully, melancholy hanging heavy on her delicate features. Turning back to the shape unfolding in front of her she narrowed her vision and slowly as the snow thick white wind abated she saw a contrast. A line forming around a white shape.
“I see it, it’s amazing, it must be some sort of sorcery.” She gasped with childlike wonder.
“Perhaps, an illusion, possibly the weather and a trick of the eye.” Ogma said.
Before them stood a castle naturally camoflouged by the weather. It seemed to be designed to do exactly that. The castle itself was low slung and seemed to follow the natural curve of the mountain plateau it rested on. The buildings jutting out unevenly to mimic the shape of a natural rock formation. The light colour of the stone and the snow making it seem almost invisible against the skyline. A narrow path towards the portcullis too was shielded by a thick embankment of trees and it snaked up the sheer face of the cliff at odd angles. A wall surrounding the castle seemed to melt into the snow covered trees. The castle itself rising only slightly higher than the wall but for one white spire which stood at it’s highest point.
“The spire, I bet he can see the whole valley from that point.”
“Most likely.” Ogma agreed.
She turned with a whimsical smile and said “This is the top of the devils ladder.”
“Yes my lady.”
“Well lets see if he’s in” She smiled.
–
Cur’s laughter echoed through the hall. The room was vaste, the ceilings seemed higher than was possible due to the squat nature of the castle. The hall was stark, naked of any furnishing but for one cyclopean door cast in bronze and gold with a carving of a giant evil eye on it. Cur’s laughter abated as he looked around the oversized room. The floors and walls seemed to be slicked with some strange viscous substance and there was an odd smell. The walls and floors bore deep scratches not made by any man. The smell, it was faint but it was familiar, blood and something else much worse.
“Is this Balor shaking, does he fear me?” Cur croaked grinning.
“Balor fears no man” The strange voice under the veil said.
“Then he can show himself to me” Cur laughed staring at the strange gaunt figure in the mask.
“You will see my face, although I have many.” A child’s voice said.
The robed woman and the man in the mask stepped to aside and in their place stood a small redheaded boy wearing a long green tunic made of spun silk. The face of the boy child was pale and freckled but the eyes and the expression were that of a man certainly. The eyes shining an evil purple, their glare seeming to pierce through Cur. The childs smile presented as innocence but betrayed a deep malevolence as he surveyed the barbarian coldly. As if he were a bull being readied for gelding.
“Does this face please you firbolg?” The child smiled but there was something unnatural about it, it was just a little too wide and the way his face moved didn’t move as skin and bone should. The movement was almost akin to how an eel or a snakes flesh moved. His face moved as if it had no bones at all. “Perhaps you’re wondering why I had you brought before me, but I suspect you already know.”
Cur began to laugh morbidly, his eyes wide and mad.
The boy smirked once more with his ghoulish unnatural face, pale and bonny the mask covering ancient horror. “I have heard tale that you are undead and cannot be killed by mortal weapon.” The boy smirked and walked closer to the barbarian. “My eye is no mortal weapon, tomorrow morning at sun rise you will feels its power and be but ash.” The boy smiled.
Cur laughed again.
“I have been tasked as your executioner, a job in which I relish and comes with it a certain poetry” The boy smiled wickedly. “As it was I that dealt the final blow to the clan firbolg.”
–
Princess Ernmas lifted her cloak almost up over her knees and began to trudge eagerly through the snow. Slowly working her way up the snaking path lined by snow covered rowan trees.
“Wait my lady, allow me to lead the way!” Ogma shouted after her trudging the deep snow along the path, his words blown away by the terrible biting mountain wind.
Nevertheless he returned to his charge’s side within the maze. Under the chin of the overgrown rowan trees that loomed over the path, almost blotting out the sky over head. On the other hand they also shielded them from the terrible winds sweeping up the mountain.
–
If you want to read the rest of this chapter head on over to Inkitt
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