june gloom’s media room, volume 1
a collection of june’s reviews, posted on twitter between may 2018 and january 2019.
while my primary project has been what i’ve dubbed the Disturbing Universe (a loose shared universe of sorts encompassing hundreds of disparate and otherwise unconnected works across multiple forms of media, arranged in chronological order and under constant construction and revision), i actually started with a project to play through some of the more famous world war II first person shooter franchises, beginning with medal of honor, most of which i’d never actually played. in the interests of maintaining a sense of continuity, i’ll start there.
there are also a few points in my project where i deliberately went back to the top of the list to cover items i’d added to it after the fact, so when you see, for example, that reviews of works covering the end of the first world war are mysteriously followed by reviews of works adapting greek mythology, that’s on purpose. (i did it again following the close of world war II, and will probably continue to do these “rewinds” at key points in the development of horror as a genre, which are often informed by war.)
as part of my move to medium i’m archiving my old reviews here, partly as a portfolio, partly as a backup if something happens to my twitter account, partly so it’s easier for my audience to read, and partly because i wanna go back and fix grammatical/content mistakes and stuff here and there. and it’s nice to go back and look over my old work and see how i’ve evolved.
i’ve rambled enough. the following is a lightly edited and annotated collection of the first year or so of my reviews from when i began in late spring of 2018. reviews for the main list will be numbered in the order they are written; all other lists will have their reviews additionally marked by what list they are for.
WW2 list #1, posted on may 26, 2018
[the early reviews were extremely rough; i hadn’t yet coalesced on the idea of formally reviewing everything in order. i didn’t even consider talking about games on twitter until partway through the medal of honor series. you’ll see my approach evolve fairly early on once i get going.]
so because i hate myself and also hate responsible uses of my time i recently embarked on a project to play every game in the major single player world war 2 FPS franchises. i’m partway into the medal of honor series and i thought i’d document my reactions.
medal of honor, the original: i remember playing this when it was new. it… sort of holds up. it’s curiously old-school in some respects, like ammo pickups being based on weapon type, not actual weapons. but it otherwise holds up well.
medal of honor: underground: essentially a better version of the original, complete with the rare female protagonist in an FPS game. better/more details in level design. still old-school. cool idea for a theme.
medal of honor: allied assault: bigger and better version of the PS1 games. you can definitely see how the dev team took what they learned to call of duty. but in many respects it’s still very much like its predecessors.
medal of honor: allied assault: spearhead: first expansion is, ironically, much more like call of duty than the main game despite the latter sometimes being referred to as “call of duty 0.” some lazy reuse of textures and other errors, but hey, gary oldman is in it!
oh, just as an aside: the gameboy advance version of underground is an abomination. just about the worst fps game on that system, which is saying something.
[it’s pretty bad.]
next up is the second expansion for allied assault. it’s called breakthrough. here’s hoping it’s good!
later that morning:
update: it’s kinda good. kinda bullshit. i think i like spearhead better. next is frontline if i can get it going on PCSX2.
about 40 minutes after that:
can confirm it works on PCSX2 so there’s that.
WW2 #2, posted in chunks between june 6-16, 2018
update on medal of honor series playthrough: started frontline today, since it’s the anniversary of d-day and i felt like observing it through a (surprisingly bloodless) reenactment in the form of interactive entertainment. it… hasn’t aged well.
after the splendor that is allied assault and its expansions, frontline feels like a step backwards. the controls are a mess; they’re seemingly deliberately a throwback to the PS1 era as opposed to anything intuitive.
the levels so far are rather dull and linear, as well. combined with the awful controls, it’s mostly a lot of standing around, frantically shooting in the general direction of the enemy with little regard for cover. only the actual d-day beach map is at all interesting.
update june 15, 2018
picked up medal of honor: frontline again, this time on the third mission. still having trouble understanding how this game got the accolades it did when it’s honestly thoroughly dull as dishwater.
update june 16, 2018
anyway in medal of honor news, frontline continues to be dull, but i feel the need to express a particular complaint: the death animations.
i get that shooters want to portray realism. the problem with frontline is that often i can’t tell if the nazi i just shot is dead or not, because he takes forfuckingever to fall over, so i’m left shooting him and wasting ammo until he slumps to the floor. this is bad design.
update later that day
finished medal of honor: frontline. very mixed bag. in a lot of ways it felt like it was intended to be a direct sequel to the original, bringing back the original protagonist and the control scheme, but it also felt like a step down from allied assault. some fun moments but ultimately dull and frustrating.
next up is rising sun, which… i’ve not heard good things about. plus there’s always the vague unease i have whenever the pacific theater is featured in popular US media.
WW2 #3, posted in chunks between june 16–23, 2018
update on medal of honor: rising sun: while it’s immediately more engaging than most of its predecessors, it’s also rather buggy. they’ve tightened up some of the controls, though managing a mounted gun is still exceedingly difficult as it swings far too fast. might be an emulator issue, i don’t know.
[looking back on this in 2021 it very probably was, as i was using SCPtoolkit, a very hacky app allowing users to use a playstation 3 controller as an Xinput controller (like xbox controllers natively use.)]
that’s not really what i want to talk about though. i’d like to talk about why i always have a bad feeling in my gut whenever western media covers the pacific front.
i’ll tell you why: because we have a hard time not being jingoistic racists about it.
looking back on it now, it makes sense why the pacific front (and pearl harbor especially) were getting so much attention from hollywood, whose coattails video games can’t help but ride on. the parallels between 9/11 and pearl harbor are obvious, and i needn’t go into them here.
9/11 happened shortly before pearl harbor’s 60th anniversary — and that one movie with ben affleck happened to come out that year too. of course people were going to draw parallels, even though the two situations weren’t at all similar beyond being surprise attacks.
similar to how pearl harbor was used to justify discrimination and imprisonment of japanese people, 9/11 sent islamophobia through the fucking roof and it has never, ever come back down. the fucked up thing? it’s 2018 and people still use pearl harbor to justify being racists.
[it’s 2021 and people still use pearl harbor to justify being racists.]
after the fukushima earthquake facebook came alive with people arguing that it was “karma” for the pearl harbor attacks, nevermind that we fucking nuked japan twice. nevermind that the US and japan have been friends for decades now.
nevermind that a lot of the people posting that shit were probably conceived in the back of a japanese vehicle after listening to music that was composed on japanese-made synthesizers.
[lol]
getting back on track, the point is, whenever hollywood covers the pacific theater i always get this sinking feeling in my stomach. i didn’t used to have it when i was younger and didn’t think about this stuff, but i sure do get it now. i got it today, starting up rising sun.
like all victors in war, the US is historically self-aggrandizing with regards to its role in world war 2, and historically has painted itself as the aggrieved party, with full justification for vengeance against japan.
make no mistake: imperial japan was a blight on the earth that built itself on the blood of untold numbers of chinese, americans, and others [and japan’s own citizens.] but anti-japanese sentiment following the attack was borne of just straight up racism.
side note: i have this theory (purely anecdotal evidence) that veterans of the pacific theatre are immensely more racist and nationalist than those who served in europe. could be multiple reasons why: japan’s cruelty and brutality, or the differing rationales between theatres.
i think the real answer to that though is racism. the lessons learned in europe [what lessons?] seem to be undercut by the hateful sentiments stirred up in the pacific. US and japanese forces slaughtered each other for every worthless inch of land in the pacific. that’s hard to walk away from.
also, in europe our enemy was not only white guys, but the whitest of white guys: nazis. in the pacific, the enemy was asian. and there’s really no question who got the brunt of racist caricaturization in wartime propaganda: japan. and our long history with racism made it easy.
the problem, then, is that history of racism that has colored our entire existence as a nation inevitably colors how we approach world war 2, both europe and the pacific. and this shows through even in our modern media.
it’s not hard to see how the ben affleck vehicle, despite releasing several months before 9/11, could become a propaganda film for the “war on terror.” once it hit DVD, lazy social studies teachers from coast to coast all fed it to their students. [i’m sorry, mr. paul, i know you meant well]
the real problem with war games is basically the same problem as war movies: you cannot make a truly anti-war movie (or game.) to keep the audience engaged it has to look awesome. and the game industry is especially bad about regurgitating hollywood propaganda, hence rising sun.
(before anyone says anything, yes, i’ve played spec ops the line, and yes, it comes close to averting the aforementioned problem, in part because it’s not actually that fun to play.)
while obviously rising sun wasn’t going to willfully indulge in racist caricatures of japanese people, it still plays into the early 00s narrative (rising sun came out in 2003) of a wounded, aggrieved US against a dastardly, cowardly foreign (and, importantly, non-white) menace.
the rage from pearl harbor is not only still there, but it has colored our very language. “pearl harbor” is synonymous with “sneak attack” even today. similarly, 9/11 still lurks in the recesses of our minds. it whispers into our ears, telling us to be afraid of syrian children. [or mexican children. or haitian children. or afghani children.]
so when i see a movie or game set in the pacific theater, what i see is a desperate attempt to appeal to the most frightful among us, looking for something to take out their fears on. and here’s the kicker: nazis won’t ever cut it, because what have nazis ever done to them?
[jeez, past june, tell us how you really feel. this wasn’t the first time i used my scatterbrained musings on video games as a springboard to ramble about broader sociocultural issues and it sure as shit won’t be the last — wait’ll you see my review of king of kings: the early years.]
update june 23, 2018
continuing with medal of honor: rising sun, i’m struck by several things. one is how bad the AI is — sometimes it just plain gets stuck. i watched an imperial japanese army soldier run in circles because he couldn’t decide whether to stay in cover or reposition.
another is the strangely sanitized depiction of the IJA in general. while they’re frequently seen interrogating prisoners, i’ve yet to see them employ torture methods like so many other portrayals. then again, this fits with medal of honor’s tendency to avoid blood/gore and controversy.
the third striking thing is how different it plays to its predecessors, even allied assault. gone is the vaguely goldeneye-ripoff feel it’s had since the original. honestly it feels more like a call of duty game — but came out within two weeks of the first call of duty’s release. [call of duty was released october 29th, 2003; medal of honor: rising sun dropped november 11th.]
overall, it controls better, plays better, feels better than its predecessors, AI issues and sometimes overly linear progression notwithstanding. (the singapore level is a big exception to the linearity issue, however!)
they also included a nisei character as a fellow OSS member. a japanese-american serving in the pacific is unusual (for obvious reasons) but by making him OSS, he has the freedom to operate outside of the historically racist chain of command. a surprisingly good move.
while my misgivings about media set in the pacific theatre still stand, i am so far impressed at how carefully rising sun has approached the subject. (hopefully the IJA are speaking real japanese and not gibberish, though given the series’ attention to detail it’s probably fine.) [i hope i wasn’t wrong in this…]
later that evening
finished rising sun. in the latter half of the game an antagonist by the name of commander shima is introduced; medal of honor for whatever reason likes its villains (with at least two major nemeses so far) and shima is no different. what makes him special is that he actually gets away.
this ties into one of the more irritating things a game can do: sequel hooks. a background element of the story is that the protagonist’s brother was captured in the philippines. towards the end of the game, shima taunts the player with a glimpse of the brother, before escaping.
making matters worse, tanaka, the nisei character (the only major character of color on the allied side) is killed off in the most infuriatingly stupid way possible: he makes his move to rescue you too soon and has his throat slit by shima for the trouble.
there’s a hint of jingoism to the way the game ends overall, which is a bit frustrating given how the game has been relatively careful with handling the pacific theater — and the surprisingly varied environments.
while the obligatory jungle fighting and ambushes and whatnot are all there (plus you get to ride on an elephant!) there’s also a couple of instances of urban fighting (singapore sling will go down as one of my favorite missions in this franchise) and of course pearl harbor.
while the game’s unpolished nature makes it obvious that the EA los angeles “B team” worked on it, the game shows some clear evolution compared to its predecessors and is a good game in spite of its flaws. unfortunately this game marks the downward trend in quality for the series.
next up is medal of honor: infiltrator, a… top-down action shooter for the GBA. fun!
WW2 #4, posted in chunks between june 23–26, 2018
update on infiltrator: i’ve played this before but i don’t remember any of it. but it’s a surprisingly breezy little action game, a bit of a slightly non-linear little deal that reminds me a lot of ikari warriors. it’s got a lives system for some reason, but still quite fun.
they also managed to cram some FMV onto the cartridge (heavily compressed old newsreel footage of the kind the medal of honor series loves so much) which is a cool feat. after slogging through a bunch of decent-to-mediocre FPS games, infiltrator is a treat.
update june 26, 2018
medal of honor: infiltrator done. the fun top-down parts are marred by frustrating shooting gallery stages where you must shoot enemies before they shoot you, but infuriatingly not only does the aiming reticule have a fairly severe recoil as you fire it but shots often go through enemies.
towards the end there are several times where you’re beset by enemies coming at you from all sides. here, your choice of weapon is critical, and you often go in with no idea of what’s coming, forcing you to rely on trial and error (or savestates.) if you’re lucky, you have cover.
all in all, though, it’s a fun game, and a nice diversion from the main series. from here on in the franchise seems to have evolved a bit — while at the same time suffering a much more uneven quality. i believe i’m about to get a front seat to a once-venerable series’ decline.
i think i’ll take a short break from medal of honor to work on other things, such as my ludicrously dumb idea [lol] to play through a dizzying number of horror games going back to “sweet home”… in chronological order of when they take place. first up: fromsoftware’s kuon, set in the heian era!
(horror list) #1, posted in chunks between june 29–july 30, 2018
entered the world of survival horror today starting with kuon, an obscure PS2 title by fromsoftware. first impressions: it’s pretty much a medieval japanese resident evil, though altogether easier for the most part. looks nice, controls are nice.
update july 30, 2018
kuon (2004, PS2): fairly generic, if occasionally creepy and disturbing. quite easy, especially since you can heal infinitely. if nothing else, a fun glimpse into the style of japanese folk horror and a look at what fromsoftware were doing before dark souls made them famous.
one interesting quirk, borrowed from resident evil 2, is telling the story from dual perspectives. unfortunately in practice this means you’re playing the same game twice — both campaigns are nearly identical.
[this very first review for what would balloon into a project that’s consumed my life is so hilariously tiny and small. however, you can see the beginnings of what would be my eventual format, first naming the work, then in parenthesis i include the year of release, followed by the platform if it’s a video game, and finally the creator or developer of the work, which i did not do this time.]
#2, posted august 1, 2018
kuroneko (1968, d. kaneto shindo): solid late 60s b&w horror film. a little light on plot, though granted i don’t know what else you would do with the basic premise. big on visuals: some amazing shot compositions, especially around rashomon gate. the soundtrack is lit too.
a word of note, there’s a mercifully brief moment of sexual assault in the first five minutes of the film that sets up the plot.
two peasant women are attacked and murdered and their house burned down by marauding samurai in the late heian period. over the next year, lone passing samurai are lured off the road at night and found the next day with their throats torn out. the culprit: two ghostly cat women.
the son and husband of the victims returns home after a bloody campaign, the only survivor of a battle. minamoto no raiko, the local governor, assigns him to identify the murderer. it doesn’t take long before he realizes who the culprit is. drama ensues.
[this was the very first review i did for twitter that included a picture; most pictures, including this one, are screenshots taken by myself, though i’ve occasionally had to use someone else’s. you can also see how i immediately decided on a style of info labels for films, with the “d.” standing for director.]
weird interlude, posted august 5, 2018
[not sure what compelled me to watch this and review it, but here we are. consider this one a little bonus, before i began to really get focused.]
kairo (pulse in the west, 2001, d. kiyoshi kurosawa): deeply unsettling japanese horror flick from the turn of the millennium and the dawn of the internet age. i’ve never seen it until now, but it’s given me nasty flashbacks to terrifying dreams i’ve had in the past.
the basic premise: a rash of suicides precedes mass disappearances and an invasion of ghosts through the internet. it’s silly at face value, but it’s a deeply unsettling film and might be the first “ghost apocalypse” story ever (and reminds me of the wii game fragile dreams)
while its portrayal of computer technology is about as ludicrously unresearched as you would expect from an early 00s film, the basic theme of isolation and loneliness is made explicit several times. (if this sounds like a commentary on otaku you might be right.)
its biggest flaw is probably how disjointed the story is, swapping focus between two characters before ultimately uniting them (and putting most of the plot on one of those characters.) this kind of detracts from the overall pacing, and the eventual meetup is a bit contrived.
other issues involve characters doing ludicrously stupid things, probably the biggest one is the male lead going into the taped-off room even though he was straight up told to not even go near it. you don’t need the gas can cap that bad bruh.
in spite of its shortcomings however, it’s a brilliantly shot and lit film with a creepy, disturbing vibe and a truly AMAZING use of dialup noises as the noise that ghosts make. the footage itself is appropriately muddy, giving everything a gloomy look that fits a ghost invasion.
i do have to warn that there are several scenes of suicide (at least four, with another few implied,) perhaps most famously someone jumping off an industrial silo (which was made into a gif i saw years ago and was kind of amused to find it was from this film.)
[in retrospect, this might actually have been a prototype entry for what would eventually become the post-apocalypse list.]
#3, posted august 6, 2018
castlevania: lament of innocence (2003, PS2): konami’s first attempt at a 3D castlevania since the disaster that was castlevania 64 and the somewhat-better legacy of darkness. it’s… not bad, for a weak devil may cry clone.
it’s pretty — very pretty, probably one of the best-looking games on PS2. and the soundtrack is up there with castlevania: symphony of the night in terms of being absolutely gorgeous. unfortunately the game doesn’t really excel in any other areas.
while the combat is perfectly passable, it lacks the fast-paced, rewarding nature of its obvious primary inspiration, devil may cry. you’ll more or less be using the same combos over and over because the fancier ones simply aren’t worth the trouble — and the whip is SLOW.
there’s a big bestiary, but the majority of them can be sorted into a few categories that more or less behave similarly — and that’s not even counting the obvious reskins… or the million varieties of skeleton.
unlike some of the preceding castlevanias, there is no XP system. you occasionally learn new moves by killing specific monsters, but you always do the same amount of damage unless you have the right elemental whip or are using a relic that boost stats — which means every fight is a slog.
the game’s greatest sin, however, is the level design. don’t expect a realistically-designed castle like, say, the one in the first devil may cry (just as an example.) five levels connect via lift to a small hub area — and they’re all the worst in copy-paste environments.
picture a collection of identical rooms connected by identical corridors, constructed in a confusing maze-like fashion, and you’ve got a good idea of what to expect. every room was clearly prefabricated before level construction. there are very few actually unique rooms.
while you can always leave a given level and come back later, it’s not easy — you’d have to trudge all the way back to the lift, or use rare teleporting items. after the interlocking, non-linear paths players took through symphony of the night and the GBA games, this is a major disappointment.
probably the most entertaining feature is the subweapon/orb combo system. all the classic subweapons are back, and colored orbs that you can obtain by killing bosses (though one you can just find as a secret) can give them different behavior — some combos are quite powerful.
as always, subweapons are fueled by heart pickups, which are in every single stone fire bowl that lines every room — smashing them reveals the item, as is tradition. when your hearts are full, the pedestals drop $1 coins instead, which can be used at the shop.
the shop is kind of underwhelming for how central it is to the gameplay; most of the important items are ludicrously expensive (the best armor is 3x the value of the next-best) and many basic items (like heart potions) that one would think would be for sale simply aren’t.
while the plot is fairly minimal, it’s told through a number of cutscenes that detail the history of the belmonts and the whip each generation’s hero uses, as well as providing an origin story for dracula himself. if castlevania lore interests you, lament’s a good place to start.
the english voice acting is passable, a bit overacted but that’s normal for the early 00s. the character design is pretty cool. the box art is gorgeous. all in all, it’s a decent ~10-hour diversion that comes short of its ambitions but almost makes up for it in presentation. 7/10
[very odd instance of me actually going back a step and not including a screenshot, but otherwise increasingly starting to look more like what my reviews look like now, including the rating system, which, to this day, is largely arbitrary.]
#4, posted august 7, 2018
onibaba (1964, d. kaneto shindo): kaneto shindo’s other major horror work, it relies heavily on atmosphere, sharp editing and some superb acting by nobuko otowa (who played a mother-in-law in both films) make up for what’s otherwise an overly-long psychological sexploitation flick.
in 14th-century japan, two women kill passing soldiers of the civil war and sell their equipment for food. a neighbor returns from battle with the news that the son and husband of the women has been killed. eventually the younger woman falls for the neighbor, enraging the mother.
the mother frequently tries to interfere with the relationship out of fear that the daughter-in-law will leave her. after killing a passing samurai in a demon mask and stealing it for herself, she uses it to frighten the daughter-in-law away from the neighbor’s place.
this is an uncomfortable film to watch, and that’s on purpose. the tall grass the cast lives among is all-encompassing and oppressive, giving a sense of claustrophobia and isolation. scenes of violence happen quickly and suddenly, and the mother becomes increasingly menacing.
that being said, clearly the biggest driving force behind the film is sex —daughter-in-law and neighbor boy can’t keep their hands off each other at all. there are quite a lot of boobshots in the film, as well as a scene where the two of them run nude along a wooden pathway.
the neighbor boy (played by kei sato, who would return in kuroneko as governor raiko) comes off as a bit of a creep, though he’s not thoroughly unsympathetic. otawa’s acting is the high point, as a manipulative crone that feels like a template for every evil mother-in-law character ever.
all in all, though, in spite of its uncompromising nature, it’s just too sparse a story to justify the 102 minute duration… or the endless boobity. and a scene where the women kill a stray puppy for dinner (remember that they’re starving due to the war) could have been cut.
ultimately, while i don’t regret watching this film, i don’t see myself watching it again anytime soon, especially when kuroneko is by far the better film of the two. 6/10
#5, posted august 7, 2018
black death (2010, d. christopher smith): a surprisingly good and stunningly dark psychological horror. a young novice during the time of the black plague joins a group of knights (led by none other than sean bean) sent to investigate a village rumored to be disease-free.
the novice has his own reasons for going: he’s been seeing a girl in secret, and once plague is spotted inside the monastary walls he sends her out into the woods to wait for him in safety. the trip with the knights is the perfect opportunity to reconnect.
much of the first half of the film is about the journey to the village. the knights are mostly a rough, rude bunch of men, and the sights they pass are disturbing amidst the haunting beauty of the wilderness.
unfortunately by the time the novice reaches the agreed-upon meeting place, she’s nowhere to be found but bloody clothes are nearby. after fending off an attack by bandits, the group proceeds to the village proper, which is very clean, and isolated by a broad marsh.
it’s obvious that something is off about the village, in particular that it seems to be led by a very charismatic woman, and the church hasn’t been used in some time. from here things start getting a little mind-bending.
the novice is told that his dead girlfriend had been found shortly before he arrived; as night falls, he’s lured into the woods to witness a ceremony during which she’s seemingly resurrected, and in the meantime the knights are drugged to sleep.
as the film reaches its climax it’s left deliberately ambiguous as to whether what’s happening is real, or an elaborate ruse; the film ruminates on worship and faith, and how people need something to believe in, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be god.
on a technical level the film is competent, but it doesn’t need to be anything more than that as the story carries most of the film. the soundtrack is sparse, but unnerving, and certain scenes make excellent use of lighting, almost always in a religious context.
the principal characters are well-portrayed and acted, with carice van houten’s role as the villainess handled with more subtlety than you would typically expect from witchy medieval types. sean bean turns in a solid performance as always. (also, not really a spoiler: he dies.)
what would ordinarily be little more than a gloomy genre flick (especially if the second half of the film had been shot according to the explicitly supernatural original script) reveals itself instead to be a far more cerebral psychological adventure.
nothing can ever be certain in life, and nothing is ever as it seems. is the village really protected? or just isolated? is she really a witch, or just good at plants? is god even real? is the devil?
one thing’s for sure, though, this movie is an unsung great. 8/10
#6, posted august 8, 2018
the seventh seal (1957, d. ingmar bergman): stark, existentialist, and somewhat baffling drama from sweden. i’m not sure what to make of this film; it’s not a horror movie by any means, though it does make use of suspense. mostly, it’s just… weird, and feels like a stage play.
a knight, block, returns from the crusades to find europe ravaged by the plague. as he and his squire rest on the beach, he is approached by the personification of death (all in black with a pale, white face) and, not ready to die yet, challenges death to a game of chess.
as chess can be a long game, and he has things to do, they play the game in sessions over the following day. he goes about his business in the meantime, witnessing the effects of the plague on society while ruminating on his doubts as to the existence of god and the afterlife.
most of the film revolves around the squire, jons, who’s more on the ball than block is, and a traveling troupe of actors, led by a man named joseph (jof in the original swedish script) who can see supernatural figures. in between, block struggles with his need for answers.
a running theme of the film (much like black death which i saw yesterday) is the religious response to the plague. a nameless woman is condemned to death for supposedly bringing the plague to the village; later that night the cast comes across soldiers carrying out her execution.
block approaches her, and asks how he can meet the devil, reasoning that if he exists, he might know where to find god. she tells him to look into his eyes and tell her what he sees, but he only sees her terror — and thus, no answers.
i’m not sure what to make of this film. it’s clearly less of a straight drama and more of a metaphysical rumination on matters of faith, life and death. the contrast between block and joseph, who both see supernatural figures, is stark, especially considering the ending.
and of course death is inevitable, as surely in this film as it is in life, and can only be warded off for so long. but beyond these themes, which are admittedly expertly handled, the film itself is… hard to really describe. it felt like watching a stage drama.
there aren’t many films i would describe that way; indeed i can only think of two: andrei tarkovsky’s stalker, and, of all things, quentin tarantino’s reservoir dogs. all three films have things to say, and make heavy use of symbolism and don’t move the action around too much.
[oh, how little i knew back then.]
while max von sidow’s block is brilliantly done, the real hero of the film seems to be joseph, with his pure, simple faith and his pure, simple marriage (contrasted with the more contentious relationship between the smith and his wife later on.)
the film portrays joseph (who sees the virgin mary as well as death) and block (who only sees death) as two sides of the same coin, both seeing supernatural figures, but makes no effort to uplift one or the other as being the “right” philosophical outlook.
(given the pessimistic vibe of the film, however, it’s easy to see which side bergman personally was on.) the ending seems to emphasize joseph being the real protagonist of the film, or, failing that, a voice for the audience.
this unusual film is at once darkly comic and yet thought-provoking. that it’s in black and white plays well into its themes and visual identity. by today’s standards the film’s themes might seem a bit well-trod, but it’s still enough to lodge in one’s brain for a while. 7/10
#7, posted august 8, 2018
castlevania legends (1997, game boy/super GB): the last castlevania game (of three) on the game boy and one of the very last original GB games ever. and boy does it disappoint.
the game boy castlevanias have something of a poor reputation, well-earned mind you, but legends is particularly galling given that it came out in 1997 and therefore really should look and play better than its predecessors.
your character, sonia belmont, moves slow and attacks slow. the classic subweapons exist only as collectibles; instead you get a new power for every boss you defeat, not all of them useful. the small screen makes dodging enemies difficult; unresponsive controls do not help.
the soundtrack is really bad — not as bad as mega man II on the game boy’s “my ears died and went to hell” soundtrack, but bad enough. the game boy is capable of fantastic music (metal gear ghost babel is a good example) so this is inexcusable.
as usual with classic castlevania, the plot is fairly non-existent, but it tries to present itself as an origin story for the belmont clan’s battle with dracula, with sonia as the matriarch. unfortunately it falls flat, especially in the face of lament of innocence 6 years later.
the most galling thing is that sonia belmont, the series’ first female character to be the sole protagonist (previous games had a few women as secondary playable characters) only starred in this game (she was due to star in the cancelled dreamcast game.) she deserved better. 4/10
(ps this game was removed from canon and it’s easy to see why.) [debatable.]
[*still* not including the developer/publisher in the info label, but at least i’ve started including screenshots of video games.]
#8, posted august 10, 2018
castlevania III: dracula’s curse (NES/FC, 1989, konami): if the old-school castlevania games have a title that’s a standard-bearer for the rest, it’s probably this one. while there’s no substitute for the original (four remakes notwithstanding) it’s castlevania III that’s the exemplar.
set 200 years (100 before retcons) before the first castlevania, castlevania III stars trevor belmont, who takes up arms against dracula, who is waging war on wallachia (today part of romania) with aims on taking europe. ghouls n’ ghosts have taken over, and trevor must beat them back.
along the way he meets three others: grant danasty, an acrobatic pirate (his name alludes to the real-life dănești family, rivals to the real vlad dracul’s family line), sypha belnades, a sorceress for the church, and “alucard,” i.e. adrian tepes dracula — son of dracula.
in the game this translates to you being able to swap between trevor and another character using the select button. each has their own abilities and flaws, and thus there are situations where they’re more useful than trevor in passing certain areas.
while the canonical idea is that all four of them fought dracula as a group, in practice you can only have one partner character with you at a time, and there’s no way you can meet all three in a single playthrough as alucard and sypha are on separate paths.
where the first castlevania was a linear affair, and II was more open-world, castlevania III is linear but offers you multiple choices of path, starting from the end of stage 1. the shorter path allows you to meet sypha; the longer has alucard. grant can be optionally met before either.
the gameplay is the same old castlevania the first two games did: side-scrolling action, difficult platforming, aggressive enemies that are sometimes tricky to deal with safely. but castlevania III is orders of magnitude harder than the original.
key to victory is knowing how to use your partners and subweapons. sypha is relatively weak, but her spells are powerful, and can wreck bosses in seconds. grant can climb walls and ceilings, allowing you to reach places otherwise inaccessible. alucard can turn into a bat.
there are significant differences between the NES version and the famicom version. the big one is the music; the famicom version uses the famous VRC6 chip, which adds more channels for a more robust sound. the NES version’s music had to be stripped down to work on the hardware.
the NES version was made more difficult, for example grant’s main attack of throwing knives (identical to the dagger subweapon) was reduced to a pitiful stab. damage was also made more uniform from start to finish, similar to the first game. in japan, damage varies depending on what hit you.
oddly enough, in the japanese version, trevor is known as “ralph c. belmondo” — god knows what they were thinking, especially since the middle initial apparently stood for “christopher” — nevermind that there already was a christopher in castlevania: the adventure for gameboy.
in any case, regardless of version, castlevania III stands tall as one of the greatest NES/FC games ever made, and a fitting close to the original NES trilogy. it builds on ideas from castlevania I and to a lesser extent II to create something that has stood the test of time. … mostly.
sometimes the difficulty can get out of whack. while the first game is notable for its realistic sense of place in level design, there are moments in III where video game logic takes over — for example forced scrolling sequences, always infuriating.
the biggest sin the game commits would have to be level 7 on alucard’s path. in some places, you have to wait for dripping acid to melt obstacles in your path. later, you must wait for a steady rain of blocks to stack up, allowing you to climb to the top. this. takes. FOREVER.
the blocks damage you, there’s no place you can wait safely, and if you climb too high too fast, most of the blocks disappear below the screen, leaving you stuck. at least you can bypass this nonsense by having alucard fly up — but watch you don’t get hit.
the worst part is that it doesn’t matter which branch on alucard’s path you take — this level is mandatory either way. fortunately sypha’s path has a completely different level 7, and all roads eventually lead to castle dracula, which is a glorious callback to castlevania I.
in spite of these issues, on top of the classic 8-bit era difficulty we’re all familiar with, castlevania III is still a great game, and well worth your time. 8/10
note: if you’re looking to emulate it, you can’t go wrong with the fan translation http://romhacking.net/translations/730/ of the famicom version, or the edit of it available here: https://romhacking.net/hacks/1983/ this latter version is the one i used.
[finally started adding the developer, though for some reason i was wildly inconsistent for a while as to what order i’d write the labels. i debated rectifying that for the archive, but decided to leave it as an example of how i’ve developed my methodology. also, my good friend cactushat on twitter responded to this review with a comment mentioning that the castlevania anime is in fact an adaptation of this game, and quite good. worth the watch if you’ve not seen it.]
#9, posted september 4, 2018
castlevania: curse of darkness (PS2/xbox, 2005, konami): the second of konami’s attempts at bringing devil may cry-esque “stylish action” to the venerable castlevania franchise, and yet it somehow manages to be both more interesting and more dull than lament of innocence at the same time.
lament’s biggest problems were the combat and the level design. curse of darkness supposedly “improves” on these, but these improvements are purely cosmetic. the combat is certainly more dynamic and fast-paced, but that doesn’t make it interesting.
the levels have more varied environments, many of them borrowing from castlevania III, the game’s immediate predecessor in the timeline. you’ll traverse mountain passes, aqueducts, a forest, a zombie-infested town, etc. unfortunately the game is even more linear than lament of innocence.
while there are multiple branching paths and dead ends, all roads lead, ultimately, to the same place. the worst thing about the level design is that every room and corridor is huge and identical to the others, and it takes ages to get anywhere because you move so slowly.
while occasionally there are some links back to earlier areas, as well as teleporters that you link up as you find them, there’s very little reason to backtrack except to visit the shop. and it’s clear, towards the end, that the level designers had given up.
by the time you reach the final level, dracula’s castle, the game abandons all pretense of exploration and puts you through roughly ten copies each of the same identical rooms and corridors, over and over and over, and many times the exit is locked until you clear the room.
this wouldn’t be so bad if the combat wasn’t fucking infuriating. while you can lock on to your enemies, it seems to serve little purpose other than to keep the camera on them, as the tracking is non-existent. you WILL be swinging at enemies and missing them entirely. often.
making matters worse is the “innocent devil” system in which familiars fight alongside you, level up, and occasionally evolve. the problem is that for them to be of much use, you’ll need to evolve them a lot — and if you don’t grind, you’re eventually going to hit a wall.
i absolutely fucking detest this kind of forced grinding. it’s one of the worst aspects of old-school jRPGs. the familiar system itself (which is stupid jRPG crap too btw) is also poorly documented in-game, forcing you to rely on guides to know which way to evolve them.
the familiar system replaces the items of previous castlevanias, which would be fine if not for the fact that hearts are much rarer to come by, as is money, as is items. torches and the like no longer guarantee an item drop of any sort, and the shop basically robs you.
let’s talk about the story, shall we? i’ll be blunt: it’s stupid. granted, castlevania games aren’t known for the depth or breadth of their storylines. but curse of darkness has a particularly extraneous storyline that serves essentially no purpose to the series’ overall plot.
you play as hector, a “devil forgemaster” (someone who can summon familiars) who used to work for dracula (given the timeframe, dracula would have been synonymous with the real-life vlad the impaler) only to turn against him during the events of castlevania III.
i want to point out that this is the only time “devil forgemasters” are ever mentioned in the franchise. [they may have been mentioned in the game’s prequel manga, but i didn’t know it existed until review time, and anyway i doubt anyone’s read it.] and there are only two: hector and the game’s primary villain, hector’s rival isaac, who is so queer-coded he could’ve come out of an 80s cartoon.
in any case, hector has sworn revenge on isaac for killing his wife/girlfriend/whatever before the game starts (supposedly a prequel manga details hector’s life as a civilian, but i haven’t seen it) and isaac did it as revenge for betraying their dead boss. they don’t get along.
isaac leads hector on a chase across the countryside. along the way he meets a weird monk named zaed, a witch named julia who runs a shop, a fop in victorian-era clothes named saint germain, and a very pretty-boy rendition of trevor from castlevania III.
saint germain is probably the most interesting of the lot, as he reveals himself to be a time traveler (hence his clothes) involved in… some sort of time stream management? do you think he knows booster gold? as an aside, his boss fight is about where i gave up on the game.
anyway some stuff happens and isaac turns out to have been possessed by ~DRACULA’S CURSE~ in a plot to get hector back to fighting shape so that dracula’s soul can take over his body, aided along by zaed (who turns out to be death, go figure.)
oh, and julia is isaac’s sister. and trevor gets stabbed by isaac and is never seen again, though julia apparently has him in her care or some shit. and then dracula uses isaac’s body instead and then hector kills him anyway.
it’s dumb and i don’t care.
let’s talk boss fights, shall we?
they’re bullshit. each one is progressively more bullshit than the last. the very first one isn’t so bad. but they get progressively worse. the most irritating one has to be the skeleton on the zombie shark, who takes forever to bring down.
your more human enemies, meanwhile, are absolutely infuriating. you fight trevor and isaac twice, and both times they are ludicrously fast while you’re still stumbling around swinging your sword or whatever into the space they just stepped out of.
the worst, however, is saint germain, who is a cheating bastard. aside from constantly teleporting around, he will frequently manipulate time to fuck with you, for example poisoning you and then speeding up time to do tremendous damage to you unless you take a serum.
the worst is when you finally manage to kill him, and he… fuckin’ rewinds time to give himself more health COME THE FUCK ON!!!!!!!!!111
after about 10 attempts at beating him i gave up and watched the rest of the game on youtube and i do not regret this decision at all. the game is dull as dishwater; i’d been dragging my feet going through it because it’s just endless drudgery punctuated by frustrating bosses.
even the soundtrack is largely unremarkable, a big sin for the franchise and especially annoying considering how lament of innocence’s soundtrack almost made up for the rest of the game’s shortcomings.
all in all, this has to be one of the most disappointing entries in the franchise. it’s a misunderstanding of what makes games like devil may cry fun, combined with the stupidest of early-to-mid 00s jRPG nonsense. you’re better off playing castlevania 64. 4/10
WW2 #5, posted september 5, 2018
medal of honor: pacific assault (PC, 2004, EA los angeles): this is a game that replicates the feelings of rage and hopelessness of participants in the pacific theater as they bleed for every inch of a lifeless rock by being infuriatingly buggy and outrageously difficult.
in a series known for uneven quality from one game to the next, this marks a serious low point, going beyond even the example set by rising sun, which was at least relatively creative and fun. i genuinely honestly truly cannot understand how this game got released in this state.
while it looks pretty good for 2004 (utilizing a version of lithtech somewhere between aliens vs predator 2 and F.E.A.R.) it’s still not on par with even, say, far cry, and its use of physics is at times laughable. this would all be forgivable, if not for everything else.
i don’t know if it’s an issue with hitboxes or if the enemies just have wildly varying health, but often you will shoot an enemy enough times to kill him, only for him to continue charging or shooting at him. this is frustrating because you have 10 million other enemies to fight.
the level design is, um… how shall we say… bland. most of it is the same jungles over and over and over again. there is almost no variance whatsoever. the first chapter is another pearl harbor re-enactment, and there’s a level where you’re in a plane. but that’s it. [that’s pearl harbor as in the movie]
the AI is anemic at best; enemies will not only know exactly where you are and often prioritize you, they’ll often teleport in right in front of your eyes. they also like to charge from places you previously cleared, even if it makes no sense for them to be doing so.
speaking of AI, your AI buddies are awful. the new squad commands system is basically worthless; you will usually be ignored. and let’s talk about the medic system, shall we? if ever there was an argument for regenerating health, this game is it.
the medic system basically revolves around you and your AI buddies relying on another AI-controlled medic to keep you all alive. the problem is that his AI and pathing is just as bad as everyone else’s, and more often than not, you’re going to die waiting for him to reach you.
and you will die, by the way. often. in fact, all the time. sometimes for no discernible reason whatsoever. even on the easiest setting, getting shot does tremendous damage. you can go from 100% health to about 30% in seconds… often immediately after being healed.
the difficulty gets increasingly out of whack; by the time you reach guadalcanal, you’ll be hittin’ that quickload button ’til your finger’s sore. (and with a long load time each time, yes even in 2018.) the final few levels were so infuriatingly difficult i turned on god mode.
bugs abound. i’ve had multiple situations where the game couldn’t progress due to a scripting error and the level needed to be restarted. clipping issues out the wazoo. AI issues, hitbox issues, animation issues. it’s just a constant, unrelenting diarrhea flow of incompetence.
the gameplay is very much a clone of call of duty, with constant frontline action, noise, ADS, the works. no real stealth sequences at all, which is probably a blessing considering how buggy this game is. there’s even a storyline, some guff about a marine and his buddies.
of course, call of duty is much better put together. this game has “budget title” written all over it. and i’ve played some damn good budget games. i’m honestly appalled that it has an 80 on metacritic. it’s easily the worst in a franchise that was already in decline. 5/10
[and back to WW2 games for a bit. this one really pissed me off, but i’m shocked at the relatively high rating i gave it. i hated it as much as curse of darkness, but i still rated it better!]
WW2 #6, posted september 23, 2018
medal of honor: european assault (PS2, XB, GC, 2005, EA los angeles): after the death march that was medal of honor: pacific assault, one would be forgiven in thinking that european assault would be equally dire, but you’d be wrong — this is an unexpected high point for the franchise.
much like rising sun heralded a more cinematic experience for the series, european assault marks a major change in gameplay. gone is the strictly linear advancement through the levels; you now have a number of objectives to achieve, with fairly open maps to do them in.
in terms of the actual gameplay mechanics, it’s clear that they’ve been taking cues from call of duty. ammo is not strictly universal, but sorted by type. not the first time medal of honor has done this, but still. you’ll also be joined by a number of NPC buddies.
typically, amidst the squad you’re working with will be up to three individuals who will stick with you and have health pools of their own. you can collect medkits to heal yourself or your allies on command; there’s also single-use health items dropped by enemies.
probably the single biggest issue with the game is the controls. being a PS2 game, aiming is… not easy. fortunately there’s a robust autoaim that will even stick on an enemy as you move from side to side. it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
two things strike me though. one is how short the game is — there’s only 11 levels, and most of them can be gotten through in maybe 10–20 minutes. the other is the difficulty ramps up very quickly in the final chapter to the point where i had to watch the very ending on youtube.
the difficulty spike is one of the game’s bigger weak points. while most of the special named enemies (optional objectives of assassination targets) are significantly tougher than their troops for some reason, the final boss requires no less than 2–3 bazooka blasts to the face.
in spite of its shortcomings, however, european assault is one of the better games in this franchise, easily deserving a place alongside underground, allied assault and rising son. 8/10
WW2 #7, posted september 24, 2018
medal of honor: heroes (2006, PSP, team fusion): a surprisingly entertaining but extremely short handheld entry in the medal of honor franchise. once you get used to the controls it plays very well, but don’t expect a lot of gameplay depth.
the basic gameplay premise follows on from european assault, where you have a fairly open map with a number of objectives and optional objectives to achieve. you’ll also have a steady stream of NPC allies who follow you around; you won’t be penalized for losing one.
the story, such as it is, is basically revisiting some of the heroes (see?) of previous games, notably james patterson, who’s got two games under his belt already, but also john baker, hero of… the crappier expansion for allied assault? okay. also holt from european assault.
objectives vary: kill all enemies, capture and/or hold a point or several, get documents, blow stuff up, and occasionally escape when you’re all done. some levels will actually repeat themselves, only the time of day is different and the objective is changed.
don’t expect your allies to be much good for anything except shooting. which is fine; you’re not going to be doing much other than that either. enemies and allies come in a constant trickle, so there’s always going to be conflict somewhere near you. if only there was music!
all in all, while it’s not at all groundbreaking, as handheld FPS games go, there are worse options. like medal of honor: underground for gameboy advance. 7/10
WW2 #8, posted september 24, 2018
medal of honor (java mobile, 2006, EA romania): remember when “mobile games” were these weird SNES-looking things you had to play on flip phones? ‘cuz this is one of them. it’s not bad.
getting used to the controls can be difficult, especially if you’re using an emulator (free2jme in my case, which has no documentation about what keys correspond to what phone buttons, arrrgh.) once you get it sorted, though, it’s quite playable.
there isn’t a hell of a lot to say for it, though. it’s essentially a sidescroller where you’re a one-hit-point-wonder vs the axis. survival mostly depends on how quickly you can hit the shoot button as soon as an enemy is on screen.
the basic loop is shoot enemies, pull switches, find the exit. extremely simple, though you’ll get to do stuff like blow up a couple of trucks, kill machine gunners and turn their MG42s on the enemy, stuff like that.
presentation is very sparse: almost no music, and even fewer sound effects. if not for that, it would pass very nicely for a SNES game; its pixellated graphics are crisp and well-animated. if nothing else, it’s a good way to pass the time if you’re reading this in 2006. 7/10
WW2 #9, posted september 24, 2018
medal of honor: vanguard (2007, PS2/wii, EA los angeles): it kind of figures that for the long-suffering medal of honor franchise to finally regain its past glory is to abandon all pretense of having its own character and just rip off call of duty wholesale.
medal of honor has come a long way from its early days as a WW2 skin for goldeneye 64; if you only played the PS1 games you wouldn’t recognize the series by this point. for all intents and purposes, vanguard is essentially EA los angeles’ take on call of duty 2 — including regenerating health.
the only remaining vestiges of medal of honor’s previous life is the still-mostly-bloodless carnage and the fact that you can’t move when using ADS. everything else is just a pure, straight clone of call of duty 2, and to be honest with you, it was a wise direction to take.
that being said, it does have one new idea: on a few select levels you can decide where you want to land your parachute at. this makes for some interesting scenarios where things might play out differently depending on where you land.
another new feature is upgrades for your weapons, though they don’t carry over from level to level. it’s a neat idea, though. your weapons otherwise are all the mainstays: garands, tommies, MP40s, BARs, and so on. no italian weapons despite fighting in italy though.
compared to rising sun, pacific assault or even european assault, vanguard de-emphasizes story. there’s more story than, for example, heroes, but it’s like call of duty 1 and 2 in that there’s no overarching plot, you’re just moving from one battle to the next with some recurring characters.
the closest the game gets to any sort of war movie cliche is the sergeant character is killed off midway through. he’s mourned for all of 10 seconds, and then you’re in charge — but people still tell you what to do. okay then.
plot aside, for a franchise with such an incredibly uneven level of quality, it seems as if EALA put their all into this one. for the most part, the AI is decent. the difficulty curve is sensible. the presentation is solid. the last PS2 entry might just be the best one. 9/10
WW2 #10, posted september 25, 2018
medal of honor: airborne (2007, PC/360/PS3, EA los angeles): for what might retroactively be considered the medal of honor series’ last hurrah for the WW2 setting, medal of honor: airborne is a lot of noise for not much to set it apart from vanguard.
the ideas presented in vanguard, namely the parachute landings as well as the wholesale ripping off of call of duty 2’s overall combat style, are present here, only with some tweaks. the parachuting has been expanded upon, and there are strategic landing spots that you can find.
regenerating health returns, but as it was popular back then to hate on it, EALA tweaked it by giving you segmented health, similar to condemned 2: bloodshot (as an example.) you have four segments; as long as you don’t lose one entirely, it’ll regenerate.
(as an aside, whatever happened to that system anyway? i don’t see it much at all anymore. i thought it was a good compromise between regenerating health and using health pickups.)
another thing that’s been tweaked is the weapons system. the more you use a given weapon the more powerful it gets, leveling up a total of three times to give you added benefits like faster rate of fire or a bayonet or whatever, and these persist from level to level.
while vanguard was linear, airborne’s six missions basically allow you to drop in wherever and tackle objectives in most any order you want. you’re also given full license to explore the map, though don’t expect to have any friends along as they’re busy fighting the war.
i did mention there’s only six missions, right? and they can all be tackled in fairly short order. my total runtime was 4 hours, and i spent a chunk of that time on the toilet. it seems as if the medal of honor games get shorter and shorter with each successive entry.
like vanguard, the AI can be a bit anemic. unlike vanguard, there’s a general sense of bugginess; nothing gamebreaking, but sometimes things just don’t work as they should. or, in the case of ragdoll physics, they work too well.
overall while this is a fine game in its own right, and certainly one of the most playable entries in the franchise, i can’t really recommend this game over vanguard. vanguard just plays better, even on a PS2. airborne feels like a desperate gasp at remaining relevant.
by 2007, WW2 shooters had lost all popularity, and i think medal of honor is to blame. between 1999 and 2007, medal of honor had a new release every year. it’s easy to see why some people thought there were too many WW2 FPS games — half of them are this franchise!
worse, by the end, medal of honor had abandoned all of its original character. the OSS theme is completely gone. the use of stock footage, gone. the veteran interviews, gone. while medal of honor was aping call of duty to try and stay relevant, infinity ward was abandoning the WW2 theme entirely.
it’s easy to see why the WW2 theme is popular again, but it feels far more cynical: a capitalist response to fears of fascism. at least in the 00s it was just “remember that tom hanks movie? now you can be in it!” airborne may feel generic, but at least it was innocent. 7/10
[finally settled on a year/platform/creator format for info labels. any deviations from that will henceforth be rectified for the archive.]
WW2 #11, posted september 26, 2018
medal of honor: heroes 2 (2007, PSP/wii, EA los angeles/EA canada): as the original WW2 FPS era drew to a close, EA released no fewer than three medal of honor games in 2007, and this is the last one — and the last of the series’ WW2 era. it’s a bit of a low note.
(technically it was four games, the fourth being a mobile phone version of airborne, but i couldn’t get it to work in the emulator. oh well, no big deal.)
heroes 1 was simplistic but fun, feeling more like a multiplayer game with singleplayer bots. heroes 2 is more traditional, following a linear path like the old games. it’s also more frustrating, throwing hordes of enemies at you from all angles. thank god for regen health.
first, the pros: it looks great, levels have some nice detail. there’s slightly more music, and the levels have ambient background noise now. the intro videos are kinda cool. sound effects are more robust.
the downsides: hordes of enemies, and your radar doesn’t show you where they are either. the health regen takes forever. the controls are somehow worse, and slower. enemies have high HP and hitboxes are wonky (which makes the MG42 almost worthless.)
unlike the original game, which felt like a tribute to some of the previous games’ heroes (hence the name) this one creates a whole new protagonist. i mean, that’s FINE, but why do that for heroes?
i don’t quite understand what possessed them to make the game this way. heroes 1 was simple, mindless fun, perfect to play on the go. heroes 2 is more like one of the older games: linear and dull, and outstaying its welcome fairly quickly.
it’s no vanguard i tell you hwat.
it’s a shame that this was how EA chose to close out medal of honor’s WW2 era. vanguard is one of the best of the genre; airborne and heroes 2 in contrast just feel lifeless. alas, that’s kind of the defining character of the franchise — for every good game there’s 2 mediocre ones. 6/10
WW2 #12, posted october 6, 2018
medal of honor (2010, PC/360/PS3, danger close/EA DICE): if ever there was an extremely cynical attempt to regain cultural relevance in the war FPS genre, medal of honor 2010 is it. on the plus side, it’s a decent game.
let me be clear: setting medal of honor 2010 in the early days of the war on terror (specifically, two major battles in the war in afghanistan) is tasteless and borders on war profiteering, even if the engagements depicted happened 8 years prior.
i get WHY they did it: they saw what call of duty was doing with modern warfare (a fictionalized war with only slight resemblance to real world conflicts, going straight to borderline world war 3 in modern warfare 2) and thought, “we can show people what it’s REALLY like, not some tom clancy shit.”
but infinity ward created a fictional conflict precisely because of the problems that arose from medal of honor’s use of a real one. it’s one thing if you’re doing world war 2, or vietnam, or even some bullshit from the 80s. but the afghan war is still ongoing. people are still dying in it. [the US has officially pulled out from afghanistan since this review was posted, but the repercussions of both occupation and abandonment will be felt for a long time.]
even the ARMA series, known for its realism, use fictional conflicts (albeit one that reflect the real-world concerns and background of whatever era and region they’re set in.) why? because bohemia interactive understand the problem with using real, ongoing conflicts.
so while medal of honor 2010 is a well-made, engaging game (an almost direct lifting of the call of duty series’ gameplay post-4) and i enjoyed my time with it, there is a clear ethical boundary that it crossed, and it shows in the military and veteran response to the game and its multiplayer.
the multi was a thorny issue because it let you play as the taliban. EA’s argument was that if you’re playing cops and robbers, someone has to play the robbers. it’s a logical argument to make, but this isn’t a WW2 game where the axis uses iron crosses instead of swastikas.
(but okay, yes, there’s an argument to be made that playing as the objective bad guys of WW2 is morally/ethically dubious. but that’s a discussion for another time.) the fact is, playing the opposing force in an ongoing real-world conflict is going to step on some peoples’ toes.
and you could argue that nobody has to play it, blah blah cops and robbers, etc. and you’d be right. but it wouldn’t matter, because using an ongoing, real-world conflict to sell a game is simply unethical. in that regard, it’s honestly no better than “america’s 10 most wanted.”
in spite of all that, i can’t exactly fault the game on a technical or gameplay level. but if you’ve played call of duty 4 or modern warfare 2, you’ll know exactly what to expect. it’s well put together, but extremely short. and everyone’s wearing the wrong uniform. 7/10
[on the plus side, the trailer for this game did have the side effect of reminding me, 10 years after the fact, that linkin park was actually pretty good.]
WW2 #13, posted october 7, 2018
medal of honor: warfighter (2012, danger close, PC/360/PS3): if there’s an ignominious end for a franchise, it’s attempting to rip off your biggest competitor and still failing to make bank. that’s even if you don’t fuck it up on a technical level, which warfighter… ehhhhh.
i suppose by this point it’s been patched into a playable state, but there’s still some lingering issues, for example the game literally restarting before and after driving levels, of which there are two. [i’m still pretty sure the game was literally switching engines.] or my favorite: enemies randomly getting stuck in walls, barely visible.
in one incident i was trying to figure out why my AI buddies weren’t advancing, and why they were all shooting at the wall. then i noticed the pair of hands sticking out of it. after shooting the hands a bit, the next script triggered. good job, danger close.
the AI by the way is fucking infuriating. your buddies are awful goddamn shots, and also extremely inattentive, allowing bad guys to walk right past them and shoot you instead (because the enemy AI has designated you a prime target — a frustratingly common issue in shooters.)
it doesn’t help that sometimes your cover is basically worthless. you can be shot through floors or objects by enemies that logically shouldn’t even be able to see you or know you’re there. this is on top of myriad smaller issues, like animation problems.
there’s an overall lack of polish that really ramps up the difficulty past tolerable levels, and there’s a real sense of joylessness to this game that even the ethically compromised 2010 doesn’t have; it feels like a by-the-numbers modern warfare clone.
while they sidestep the issue of setting it in a real-world conflict that people are still dying in, they still borrow from/re-enact a lot of real-world incidents like the somalian pirates who hijacked that ship, or a hostage situation by abu sayyaf in the philippines.
these real-world incidents mostly serve as a backdrop of sorts for an otherwise fictional tale of tracking down the source of large quantities of explosives and exposing a massive bombing plot by a not-osama villain. (and yes, the final level is a re-enactment of the osama raid.)
in between all this is a bunch of guff about preacher (one of the guys from medal of honor 2010) trying to juggle his responsibilities to his family with his duties as a navy SEAL. it’s all very dramatic and i so don’t care, there’s been a hundred TV shows and movies with this premise.
it’s like they looked at the response to the afghanistan setting of 2010 and realized borrowing from an ongoing conflict probably isn’t a good idea, but they tried to have it both ways by tying real-world incidents into a fictional plotline and it just seems worse that way.
i honestly can’t think of a more fitting end for the medal of honor franchise, a franchise that was driven into the ground early on and has survived through sheer corporate cynicism, finally giving up and ripping off its competition wholesale and failing at that too. 6/10
#10, posted october 10, 2018
onimusha (2001, capcom, PS2): the PS2, much like its successors, had an early period devoid of true system-selling “killer apps.” tekken tag was the only non-sports game of note on the north american launch day; onimusha served to fill the void until twisted metal black and metal gear solid 2.
resident evil was still very popular, with code veronica being a major selling point for the dreamcast. but code veronica was still a dreamcast exclusive; capcom had yet to make a real showing on PS2 outside of a street fighter spinoff, and resident evil 4’s development was sputtering. enter onimusha.
onimusha began life as early as 1996 as “sengoku biohazard,” one of a series of planned resident evil spinoffs with different themes. most of these other ideas never panned out; onimusha did, however, eventually turning into a weird mix of action and traditional survival horror.
the story goes: in 1560 in sengoku-era japan, warlord nobunaga oda stages his famous attack on imagawa yoshimoto’s camp in the battle of okehazama, only to take an arrow to the throat. a year later he returns alive to lead an army of demons to sack inabayama castle.
the protagonist, samanosuke akechi (supposedly based on the real-world swordsman hidemitsu akechi) receives a letter from his cousin, princess yuki of the saito clain, expressing her concerns about disappearances around the castle. he arrives just in time to witness oda’s attack.
the rest of the game is a bunch of guff about him being gifted a gauntlet by a secretive clan of oni that gives him the power to fight off the demon army, called the genma, which he then proceeds to tear apart like puppies in a blender.
there’s a bunch of historical domain characters running around; aside from oda himself, there’s also oda’s servant toyotomi hideyoshi (going by tokichiro in this game), who’s portrayed a little less flatteringly than you’d expect of the guy who would succeed oda.
really, the only named characters that don’t seem to have a historical basis are princess yuki, and samanosuke’s ninja friend kaede. the actual timing of the sacking of the castle is a little off, as well, by about 7 years, but since oda is supposed to be dead, it doesn’t matter.
like its stylistic predecessor, onimusha makes use of pre-rendered backgrounds. these are beautifully done, in a higher resolution and greater detail than even the overdone resident evil 3. moving elements animate at a higher framerate. light and shadow play out correctly.
of course, the downside to using pre-rendered backgrounds is that the camera isn’t always cooperative. you can’t move it, it only switches viewpoints when you’re in the right zone of a room. on the plus side, at least the controls are far more intuitive.
in gameplay terms, onimusha might well stand as a sort of middle-ground between resident evil and devil may cry. you can generally target the enemy you want, but instead of slowly aiming and firing, you’ll be swinging very sharp swords, while circling, and hopping back and forth.
the major conceit that makes this more than a simple hack and slash is the gauntlet you wear, which allows you to absorb soul energy (or something) from defeated monsters, of which the yellow orbs restore health, blue orbs restore your mana, and red orbs serve as a sort of XP.
along the way you’ll gain access to a number of magical weapons, each with their own elemental power. at save points, you can upgrade both weapons and powers (you’ll need to do the latter to unlock certain doors anyway) by absorbing red soul energy.
if you’re looking for an old-school survival horror with better-than-average presentation and controls, you can’t go wrong with onimusha. everything is rendered beautifully; the FMV cutscenes are gorgeous. there’s even a japanese language option to make everything feel authentic.
while the plot is typical surhor claptrap, samanosuke is well-rendered by his voice actor (who also served as the character model.) oda is appropriately menacing as a kind of japanese dracula (apparently not an uncommon portrayal in japan given his position as a divisive figure.)
there’s a lot to recommend this game for: the combat, the music, the novelty of a horror game set in medieval japan. personally, i just like it for a ridiculous scene where samanosuke and kaede jump out the window of an exploding building. only capcom, fam. 8/10
as a side note, onimusha later saw an updated re-release on the original xbox titled genma onimusha. aside from a slight graphical upgrade and new things to do and see and get, the big addition is green souls, which you must tug-of-war with enemies to acquire and power up with.
it’s backwards-compatible on the 360, though the new green soul mechanic makes the game an order of magnitude more difficult. an HD re-release for modern consoles and PC has also been announced for early 2019. no word on which version it’s based on, but probably PS2. [it is indeed.]
WW2 #14, posted november 10, 2018
call of duty (2003, infinity ward, PC): the birth of a juggernaut. nobody could have guessed this franchise would blow up the way it did, especially considering its humble origins as a competitor to medal of honor, a franchise that was already beginning to stumble.
it’s not a surprise, though, given that infinity ward was formed by people who worked on 2015, inc.’s medal of honor: allied assault. it’s this pedigree that perhaps explains how infinity ward seemed to understand what worked and what didn’t in the medal of honor franchise up to then.
while call of duty has a very similar presentation to medal of honor (the use of historical footage and attempts at authenticism via audio, art direction and level design) it differentiates itself by shying away from the traditional “goldeneye ripoff” model.
rather than the OSS/behind-enemy-lines theme that medal of honor relied on, call of duty focused on frontline combat, recreating several famous battles (or, more accurately, movies/shows about those battles: band of brothers, the longest day, enemy at the gates.)
as you might have guessed from the enemy at the gates mention, call of duty also took the step of avoiding medal of honor’s americentric “USA saves the day” jingoism to present a theme of international cooperation, with british and soviet perspectives in addition to the americans.
for the most part, all three campaigns play quite differently from one another. the US campaign is essentially a re-enactment of the first half of band of brothers. meanwhile, aside from a quick callback to the longest day with the battle for pegasus bridge, the brit campaign is full of medal of honor-like derring-do.
the soviet campaign however is perhaps the standout in an already punchy, solid game. while obviously drawing from movies, its portrayal of the battle of stalingrad pulls no punches (save for the almost bloodless carnage, a curious holdover from medal of honor.)
what’s interesting to note is that this multinational theme wasn’t originally infinity ward’s idea. during early development, the game was titled simply “medal of honor killer” and it was going to be a much more straight-forward american spy story — much like medal of honor.
however, spark unlimited was also working on what would turn out to be call of duty: finest hour for consoles, and their presentation of multiple perspectives from the three largest members of the allies inspired infinity ward to rework or scrap some of their own ideas.
(fun fact: spark unlimited was also founded by people who had worked on the medal of honor series. funny how incestuous this industry can be, eh?)
while call of duty is, at least on normal, a well-balanced game (especially if you don’t play it like doom, or you’re going to be dying a lot) it does have a few artifacts of the era, such as the minimal blood and reliance on health packs and uneven difficulty.
despite this, as well as the fact that it has no real widescreen mode (2003 gaming in the house, y’all) or some of the features we’ve come to expect from later games, it’s still one of the greatest WW2 games ever made, and a stirling repudiation to medal of honor. 8/10
#11, posted november 10, 2018
onimusha 2: samurai’s destiny (2002, capcom, PS2): on the one hand, it’s a shame how quickly the onimusha franchise went off the rails; on the other hand, the early 2000s were a time with no rails at all, both in gaming and in the wider world.
while at face value it’s indistinguishable from its predecessor (monsters to kill, weapons to collect, beautifully-rendered backgrounds a la resident evil) it very quickly distinguishes itself from the first game by abandoning the horror theme in favor of an action-adventure tone.
it’s probably a logical next step, given the deep roots in japanese history and mythology. nobunaga and tokichiro return, of course; other historical figures abound as well: even the main character, jubei yagyu is lifted, name intact, from the annals of real-world samurai legend.
but while it’s a “logical next step” for the franchise, it’s still a disappointing one. the horror tone was the biggest draw for most fans of the original — a samurai resident evil is a novel idea. the more light-hearted tone of the sequel makes the whole thing seem silly.
it’s hard to take things like a literally-demonic nobunaga waging war with literal demons for soldiers to take over japan seriously when the tone is so aggressively “two-fisted swashbuckler.” the “gift system” that you use to manipulate the supporting cast doesn’t help.
basically if you want the four supporting characters (two of them based on historical figures in their own right) to help you out (or access their sidequests) you have to give them random gifts you can find in the game world or buy at the shop during your two visits in town.
this is pretty dumb on its face, but nothing is ever simple. give one character a gift, another will dislike it. you have to balance your loyalties, while also being fucking psychic about which character will like which gift. a guide is mandatory for this.
worse is the completely tacked-on romance subplot. not only is it completely extraneous, but oyu, the previously-competent ninja girl, becomes a clueless ditz in the process. there’s also some dumb relevations about her relationship to the oda clan that don’t matter.
towards the very end, just before the boss fight, jubei and oyu share a ~*RoMaNtIc kIsS*~ as the background fades out into stars and the camera pans around them. h u r r r r r r r r r r
about halfway through the game i realized i just didn’t care about the game or its gameplay anymore. it’s orders of magnitude more difficult and demanding than the original — health is hard to come by, and the bosses are brutal. the story just wasn’t worth struggling through it.
what pushed me to give up was this boss that took up all my scant few health items, and then when i pushed ahead, i was caught in a gas trap and died before i could escape, and i hadn’t saved. this was after fighting the boss four times already. fuck it, i went to youtube.
i expect this to happen at least a few times as i work my way through my horror games list. certainly i’ve had to let youtube finish a few medal of honor games for me. life is just too short to struggle through shit you don’t care about, and i didn’t care about onimusha 2. 5/10
almost forgot to add: the english dub is bad. real bad. not quite “4kids’ one piece dub” bad, but still bad.
#12, posted november 11, 2018
castlevania: the adventure (1989, konami, game boy): some might say castlevania’s best years were on hand-helds; whether you believe that or not, hand-held castlevania has humble roots in… a mediocre platformer from early in the OG gameboy’s lifespan.
as the first game boy castlevania, with the first two NES games and a third one on the way to live up to, it’s obvious that much had to have been stripped away to make the game work on the limited hardware. that’s understandable, but the game has other problems.
the big one is that christopher belmont (variously confused with both simon and trevor thanks to writing mistakes) moves slow and attacks slow, and his jump is also slow and has a short range. this makes almost every jump require near-absolute precision.
the level design is also frustratingly limited — and at times sadistic, especially the third stage. combine this with christopher’s plodding pace and weighty jumps and you’re going to be seeing the game over screen a lot. (also: no stairs, only ropes.)
there are no subweapons, surprisingly enough. on the other hand, if you max out your whip, it can shoot fireballs that do lighter damage but travel the length of the screen. unfortunately, whip upgrades are rare, and when you get hit, you lose a whip level.
the game is very short; with only four (relatively long) levels, the game can be finished in half an hour if you’re good. (this is probably why it’s so annoyingly difficult — fake difficulty was the standard of the era, to pad out a game’s lifetime and justify charging $40.)
it’s not all bad, though. the soundtrack is actually really good for first-year gameboy; and there’s a game boy color version floating around on the japan and europe-only konami gb collection vol. 1. it’s identical to the original, save for more color, but it makes the levels pop more.
[a correction: only the european version is available on the game boy color; the original japanese version released in 1997 was in black and white.]
there’s also a wiiware remake called castlevania: the adventure rebirth that brings it more in line graphically with the later games and greatly expands the game itself. it’s basically an all-new game, though it’s still quite unforgiving.
in retrospect, the fact that castlevania: legends, which came out 8 years later, bears almost no improvement from castlevania: the adventure (and in terms of soundtrack, is actually inferior) is just galling. at least adventure can be forgiven its clunkiness given its advanced age. 6/10
WW2 #15, posted november 14, 2018
call of duty: united offensive (2004, gray matter interactive, PC): couldn’t get enough call of duty with the first game? then gray matter interactive has the expansion pack for you. more explosions, more shooting, more dead cows — it’s all here.
(if the name gray matter interactive sounds familiar, they used to be xatrix entertainment… and then they developed return to castle wolfenstein… now they’re part of treyarch. remember what i said about how incestuous the industry can be?)
there’s not really much new. the US/UK/USSR campaign progression is kept, the gameplay is identical. but there’s a few new tricks, such as a level where you’re a gunner on a B-17 bomber, and later you use binoculars to spot artillery targets. there’s also a mostly useless sprint.
and, true to the original game’s cinematic roots, there’s references to band of brothers (the battle of the bulge, especially the assault on foy) as well as the 1961 classic the guns of navarrone (which, interestingly enough, has no basis in any real-world action in the war.)
perhaps the biggest difference for united offensive is the difficulty, which is an order of magnitude greater than the original. players who breezed through call of duty on veteran would find themselves hard-pressed to finish united offensive, especially in climactic scenes such as the trainyard finale.
on the multiplayer level, this game introduces treyarch’s tendency to experiment, adding new features such as an early version of the ranking system as well as vehicular combat.
all in all, don’t expect a grand departure from the main game like some expansion packs can be. but despite some wonky difficulty spikes, it’s still just as solid a game as call of duty. 8/10
WW2 #16, posted november 19, 2018
call of duty: finest hour (2004, PS2/XB/GC, spark interactive): in the mid-00s there weren’t a lot of non-medal of honor options for WW2 FPS on console. unfortunately, finest hour is not just a medal of honor title in disguise quality-wise, but also the subject of a lawsuit by EA.
before i get into the legal case let’s talk about the game, shall we? development started around the same time as call of duty on PC, as activision wanted to launch a competitor franchise to medal of honor and hired on a lot of devs who’d worked on one medal of honor title or another to do it. all well and good.
spark unlimited was comprised mostly of ex-EA devs (take note of this) and they and infinity ward basically worked on their games concurrently. this shows how the two games are both very similar, and yet very different.
like call of duty on PC, finest hour uses the standard US/UK/USSR sequence of storylines, though in reverse. also like call of duty on PC, movie references abound — and in fact, the enemy at the gates ripoff is even more blatant this time with a female sniper character — playable, at that.
there’s actually quite the host of player characters in this game, with no fewer than six protagonists. the neatest one, aside from the female sniper, is a squadron leader of the all-black 761st tank batallion. it’s a rare WW2 game that actually lets you play a woman or POC.
in terms of gameplay, finest hour feels like a weird mix of the straightforward call of duty action with some of the experimentalism of the medal of honor series. for the most part, it’s indistinguishable from the PC version… only some things are a little different.
most of these differences aren’t terribly ground-breaking. one is being able to change your viewpoint from within tanks, even being able to pop out the hatch. (and at several points you’ll have to get out of the tank and do some things on foot — all within the same level!)
one thing that this game added that began to pop up in later games to the point where it’s considered essential now is the hit indicator, where the crosshair has a little X letting you know that your bullets hit a target. that’s right: finest hour did it first.
(i mean, if you want to be pedantic, battlefield 1942 did it FIRST first back in 2002, adding it in a patch some months after release, but finest hour is the first to bring it to call of duty.)
the health system is a weird mish-mash of implementations. small health pickups add about 1/3rd of your health back, while bigger ones you can carry and use at will. and while your tank has armor that depletes, it also has a second bar that regenerates. i don’t get it either.
i want to add that there’s slightly more of a story than you might be used to from the early call of duties, most of which were pretty bare-bones. it’s most obvious in the soviet levels and gradually tapers off.
between that and the gradual degradation of quality level design as the game goes on, i got the impression that the soviet campaign was either the focus, or worked on first. there’s some honest-to-goodness character interaction in those early stages.
i mentioned the level design starts getting crappier, didn’t i? once they finished ripping off enemy at the gates it’s like they ran out of ideas. the UK campaign is half as long as the others at only four levels, and that’s when the game-breaking bugs rear their ugly heads.
the biggest one for me has to be the last UK level, when you’ve stormed an old fort. about midway through, you have to escort a character across the courtyard and around to the back. unfortunately, he has a nasty habit of dying randomly.
it doesn’t matter what you do. you could kill every nazi in the level and he still dies instantly after walking around a bit. the saving grace is that his pathing gets him stuck, so you can leave him there and go to the exit yourself, which triggers a cutscene with him in it.
other issues abound, like randomly not being able to swap weapons (instead you pick them up as ammo despite not actually having the gun), hitbox issues, animation issues, clipping issues, scripting issues. the weird thing is these get worse as the game goes along.
there’s some frustrating design decisions as well. health can be scarce — yet another sign that regen health in this kind of game is a must. a lot of machine gunners cannot be killed by the player, forcing you to wait until something else kills them in a scripted sequence.
sometimes the game just slams you with huge numbers of enemies; the worst is when you suddenly have multiple panzershrecks to deal with at once, all aiming for the mechanized vehicle you have to protect. and sometimes they wander behind you, too, causing trouble later.
i detested the trend in early medal of honor of long, elaborate death animations for enemies. if i shoot a nazi, he should fall down, not go through some shakespearean “i am slain!” shit while i’m shooting him over and over unsure if i’ve actually killed him. unfortunately, finest hour does this too.
in spite of all this, the game does have a few things going for it. the soundtrack is amazing, especially in the stalingrad sewer levels and at the last level on the remagen bridge. two: dennis haysbert is in it! (so is AC/DC’s brian johnson, amazingly enough.)
and while a wholesale recreation of enemy at the gates is probably the biggest concession to hollywood finest hour makes, it at least has the guts to completely gloss over normandy and just go straight to the invasion of germany (the UK mission is set in north africa, the US in germany.)
finest hour is not a bad game overall, don’t get me wrong. but the links between medal of honor and call of duty are never more obvious than in this game, and THAT leads me into… the lawsuit.
i won’t rehash what the gamasutra article says, partly because i’m running out of space. [lol i really cared about keeping it under 25 tweets back then. here’s the rundown of the article: spark unlimited’s founder, craig allen, pitched a WW2 game to activision, but several of spark unlimited’s staff hadn’t actually left EA yet, not wanting to jump ship for a startup until it was a sure thing. when EA noticed 20 people all quitting at once it filed a lawsuit accusing spark of stealing trade secrets. spark also struggled to get their choice of engine to cooperate during development, and after much mismanagement activision stepped in to help finish the game. and then spark sued activision because activision wouldn’t help them with their followup game that never materialized. spark unlimited managed to muddle along for another decade before finally shutting down.] but i am going to say that spark unlimited’s choice of devs to poach from EA, as well as the legal and technical troubles, likely contributed to this game not being all it could be.
when i say finest hour is a medal of honor game in disguise, i mean that the uneven quality, weird mishmash of experimental and straightforward design decisions, the overall vibe (it even has veteran interviews in the credits!) all scream early medal of honor, for good and bad.
i think it’s probably for the best that the planned sequel was nixed by activision after finest hour’s cost overruns. if there’s one thing the rivalry between call of duty and medal of honor has taught us, it’s that you should compete without emulating. 5/10
WW2 #17, posted november 22, 2018
call of duty 2 (2005, PC/360, infinity ward): with the roaring success of call of duty 1 and united offensive it was inevitable that there’d be a sequel. and don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game. but for all its flash and thunder, it feels like a step backwards.
the biggest change is the graphical update. call of duty and united offensive had run off a version of the quake 3 engine (incidentally, an update on the version from return to castle wolfenstein), call of duty 2 brings in a completely new renderer, bringing it up to par with, say, far cry.
this altered id tech 3 would be known as the IW engine, and is the first in a long line of an increasingly frankenstein-ish monster of successive engine iterations. it speaks to john carmack’s talents as a coder that an engine he created in 1996 is still seeing use.
in a way that’s perhaps symbolic of the franchise, the way it refuses to die but keeps shambling forward, ever more unrecognizable from its humble origins. granted, it’s certainly not the only one — valve has spent 20 years building on an engine derived from quake 1!
another change is regenerating health. while it was an unpopular decision in 2005, i think time has vindicated it; call of duty 1 and medal of honor pretty much show the limits of a pickup-based health system in war games. nothing sucks more than having 13 HP with no way to heal.
all that being said, call of duty 2 feels a little disappointingly straightforward. call of duty 1 and united offensive defined themselves by having different vibes and gameplay per campaign; that’s gone in call of duty 2 in favor of expansive battlezones. no more SAS derring-do for example, just straight frontline combat.
the AI has been vastly tweaked; they now constantly shout context-sensitive barks and move much more tactically, taking cover and providing fire support. on the downside, the enemy always seems to know where you are, and will throw multiple grenades en masse to flush you out.
this grenade behavior has become a staple of the franchise, and it’s arguably one of the biggest flaws. for a series that emphasizes using cover and advancing carefully they sure are keen on not letting you actually do that.
ultimately, while i miss the experimentalism and varied little gameplay moments of call of duty 1 and united offensive, call of duty 2 is arguably a more solidly-realized game. infinity ward knew what people liked most about the first game and acted accordingly, while at the same time moving the franchise forward. 7/10
#13, posted november 23, 2018
the masque of the red death (1964, d. roger corman): in the 1960s, b-movie king roger corman, hot off his first critical success (1958’s machine gun kelly), directed several films based on the works of edgar allen poe, including masque of the red death. vincent price helps make masque compelling cheese.
based on… you guessed it… the poe story of the same name, but greatly expanding on what’s arguably a symbolism-heavy, dream-like tale, borderline poetry, masque (the film) presents, instead, a straightforward tale of cruelty, decadence and hubris.
in who-the-hell-knows-when (but probably the 16th century) italy, vincent price is prince prospero, a charming but cruel satanist. upon discovering the presence of the red death in a village, he seals up his castle and invites several other nobles to come for a party.
among the people in the castle are three survivors from the village: francesca, her father, and her boyfriend gino. prospero seems keen on corrupting francesca (at the expense of his other student, juliana) while tormenting the men for his own amusement.
eventually, gino is allowed to escape with his life, and devises a plan to rescue francesca. it’s unnecessary, though, because the party, with all its laughing nobles and cruel jokes, is about to be crashed in a big way.
some might compare this film to the seventh seal (1957), and, indeed, the red death (an uncredited john westbrook) seems to take a lot of cues from ingmar bergman’s pale-faced grim reaper. but i think the comparison is flawed, as they’re different movies doing different things.
that’s not to say that the scenes involving the red death aren’t disquieting, even when he’s being benevolent. his presence looms over even price, who’s spent the film with a mouth full of scenery as usual, the red death a kind of unstoppable natural force against venal, cynical evil.
prospero, for his part, oozes sinister charm, clearly infatuated with francesca and delighting in taking things that capture his interest, then abandoning them when he grows bored. the film has some notably striking imagery, but for the most part, price is what carries it.
the same can’t be said for most of the other characters. the captured villagers are so blandly heroic that they’re hardly memorable, even francesca, who isn’t nearly as steadfast in her christian faith as the script would have you believe.
jilted juliana is more interesting as she continues her quest to be a bride of satan (though she clearly equates him with prospero;) her cheesy death scene is poor payoff for the build-up. a scene of her hallucinating her own ritual murder is also more laughable than unsettling.
more unsettling than laughable is a side-plot (based on poe’s hop-frog,) involving a dwarf avenging his insulted lover, who is SUPPOSED to be a dwarf, but was instead played by a 7 year old. (at least they don’t kiss.) worse, her lines are dubbed over by an adult woman.
i’m of two minds on this film. price is great; the red death is great, but the fact that the film’s success hinges on these two characters (who were the only definable ones in the original story) speaks to the weakness of the script’s expanding from the source material. 6/10
[this was about when i started to get really serious about adding a ton of films to the List, including adaptations of works by the west’s most famous horror authors. over time the list began to get bigger and longer as the scope began to widen, but it was about here that i can definitively say that the ball really started rolling.]
#14, posted november 23, 2018
the raven (1963, d. roger corman): #5 in roger corman’s poe cycle and obviously based on the poem, this film’s links to the source material are more tenuous than usual, and swaps out much of the original gothic vibe for straight comedy. given how cheesy corman’s films can be, it works.
first off, the cast. vincent price again, albeit in a rare heroic role, playing the mage erasmus. peter lorre plays dr. bedlo, a lesser mage turned into a raven. a nearly larval jack nicholson is bedlo’s son, and a very over-it boris karloff plays the evil dr. scarabus. lotta big names.
with a cast like this, even a weak script is salvageable. and while the plot is as paper-thin as it gets, the script manages to be a laugh a minute. lorre ad-libbed most of his lines, making for some seriously funny moments. quoth the raven: “how the hell should i know?”
with scant details to draw from in the original story, the film pretty much goes off the rails right away. as you might have guessed, this is more a fantasy than a straight adaptation of the original poem (if you want that, watch the first simpsons “treehouse of horror” episode.)
set sometime in the early 15th century (at least, that’s what we can surmise from a death date in a tomb and a little math,) bedlo has been turned into a raven and seeks out erasmus, the only mage he knows not part of the brotherhood of magic. hijinks ensue.
the film opens much more like you’d expect: with price in voice-over, reading a few lines from the poem over a psychedelic opening sequence, with much gloom and thunder. the first hint that this isn’t the usual fare is a physical gag where erasmus bonks his head on his telescope.
while there is a healthy dose of gothic horror (everything from unsettling non-events to the classic “scaling the walls of the castle,”) the clear emphasis in this film is on comedy, and a lot of that comedy lies in dialogue and amazingly obvious special effects.
the film was savaged when it was new, but looking at it now, especially in the context of the rest of the poe cycle, it’s easy to see it as a self-aware parody of early 60s low-budget gothic horror that corman was undoubtedly the master of. this it is and nothing more. 8/10
[this was the first case of where i jumped back in the timeline a bit, as i’d added the roger corman poe cycle all at once. it wasn’t a huge step back, but it set a precedent.]
#15, posted november 24, 2018
the pit and the pendulum (1961, d. roger corman): #2 in roger corman’s poe series. hot on the heels of the critical success house of usher, corman’s next project was a loose adaptation of the pit and the pendulum. and when i say loose, i mean… well, you know… it’s corman.
granted, the actual pit and the actual pendulum are there. the specter of the spanish inquisition looms large. but these only really come together in the film’s climax; the rest of the film is a gothic drama about a 16th-century englishman investigating his sister’s death.
that’s not to say this is a bad film, or even a bad adaptation. the problem with adapting poe is that he crams so much into so little space, so it’s difficult to really create a full-length movie out of a scant few pages of poetry. the climax at least conveys the story’s terror.
it’s worth noting that while this IS still a corman film, it’s notably more constrained in terms of cheese than the other two films i watched recently. the lighting is a little darker, the set design a little gloomier. the story is a little more robust.
vincent price is here, of course, acting rings around everyone else. but luckily for him, the film is good enough on its own merits that it doesn’t really need him to carry it. john kerr as the other male lead holds his own well enough.
price, who often played villains, will always be considered suspect to those familiar with his work, and yet his only actual villainy in this film seems to be when his character is seemingly possessed by the spirit of his inquisitor father. sadly, that’s the film’s biggest flaw: dumb twists.
i suppose that’s to be expected when dealing with films this old, though. a lot of the things films do now that we take for granted were more effective back when they were new; this is arguably true for any storytelling medium, from literature to video games.
in spite of all that, as far as corman’s poe films, this is one of the better choices of the three that i’ve seen. compare this to masque of the red death and it’s clear that corman (and writer richard matheson) had a lot more steam early in the poe cycle than in 1964. 8/10
#16, posted november 29, 2018
the golem: how he came into the world (1920, d. paul wegener): probably the oldest film i’ve ever seen, [up to that point] this early german expressionist classic stands as one of the now-forgotten greats of early cinema, and a considerable influence on the 1931 adaptation of frankenstein.
technically this film is a prequel to a 1915 film titled simply the golem, set in contemporary times; the golem and its 1917 sequel the golem and the dancing girl are among the many lost silent era films, leaving only this retelling of the legend of the golem of prague.
the story goes that in 16th century prague, facing a pogrom from the holy roman emperor, legendary jewish mystic rabbi loew constructs a golem to defend the ghetto using clay and a piece of paper with the true name of god on it. there’s multiple variations, but that’s the gist.
in any case, in the 1920 film (usually referred to simply as the golem given its status as the only survivor of the trilogy) is at times a trippy or even comedic take on the tale. depending on the version, it makes heavy use of tinted film to effectively create atmosphere.
in this version of the tale, the golem (played by wegener himself, with the greatest case of helmet hair i have ever seen) ends up being corrupted by the demon astaroth and wreaking havoc. in between he goes shopping and rescues the emperor’s court from a collapsing roof.
wegener brings some seriously amazing facial expressions to his performance; silent film by necessity requires skill in visual acting, but wegener runs circles around the rest of the cast, which is pretty good given that he’s supposed to be a lump of clay.
the set design is weird and almost dreamlike at times, really driving home the aesthetic that would come to define german expressionism. there’s an almost organic flavor to the jewish ghetto that speaks to the fantastical tone of the film.
there doesn’t seem to be any surviving audio. many silent films of the era until the early 1920s lacked audio; any music was by a live player, such as an orchestra or just some schmuck with a piano. as such, any music by necessity must be added later. the golem is no different.
as such, you can expect to find a variety of different musical accompaniments among the various home video releases of the film; the best might be the kino lorber DVD release, which might also be considered the best release of the film overall.
the novelty of a film based on jewish folklore (in 1920 germany no less!) is certainly worth seeing this movie for, but it’s also worthwhile for its triumph in acting, set design and overall atmosphere. also watching the fuckboy knight get thrown off a tower is gratifying. 9/10
[shortly after this review was posted, my mother died suddenly. in between dealing with her funeral, the aftermath, and catching a terrible case of the flu myself, i didn’t have a lot of time for reviews, but after a few weeks i got back on the horse and have been going pretty hard ever since.]
#17, posted december 21, 2018
onimusha 3: demon seige (2004, PS2, capcom): this is going to be short because i only played a little bit before i decided i hated the combat. anyway, onimusha 3 is the third in this semi-obscure capcom hack and slash/surhor/can’t-make-up-its-mind series set in medieval japan.
set in 1582, 20 years after the first game, samanosuke akechi returns after a long period of training for what will be the final (and real-life historic) battle against japan’s most notorious warlord. unfortunately, nothing is ever simple in this fucking series.
apparently the genma have figured out time travel. more cynically, capcom wanted to appeal to westerners using a then-well known actor, jean reno [the guy from léon: the professional and the 1998 american godzilla movie], and so we have genma invading paris in 2004, 400-some years after the battle of honno-ji temple — at the same time as said battle.
jean reno’s character, jacques blanc, winds up getting transported into the distant past while samanosuke appears in the present-day, and with the aid of a fairy (technically a tengu) named ako, the two of them have to do something about the genma’s latest fuckery. idk it’s dumb.
gameplay-wise it follows on from the previous game, which is problematic for me because i’m really done with this mid-00s-era trend of adding unnecessary RPG elements to a clunky combat system, especially one that’s still clunky after a swap from pre-rendered to 3D environments.
i’m honestly just not good enough for games like this, and the focus on nonstop action after the more restrained first game necessarily precludes my interest. i quit after dying twenty times to an early boss and watching an LP so i could fast-forward through the bullshit.
honestly i can’t really give this game a very high rating, even taking my bias against the combat into account. i know some people really enjoy the combat; in my case, playing this game is not the worst thing to happen to me this month, but it’s up there. [oof]
it does have some upsides at least. despite the switch to 3D environments it’s quite the gorgeous game, especially the lovingly-rendered paris sections. the music is also pretty good. jean reno (when he’s actually voicing his own character) has decent VA chops.
but that’s really all the game has going for it, and a good presentation can’t hide a mediocre hack and slash that can’t even really stay true to the original reason people liked this fucking series in the first place. 5/10
#18, posted december 21, 2018
castlevania II: belmont’s revenge (1991, GB, konami): after the dull, frustrating mush that was castlevania: the adventure, one could be forgiven for not expecting much of the sequel. one would be wrong, though, because this game is actually pretty good.
i’ve mentioned before how appalling it is that castlevania: legends bore no improvement from adventure despite an 8 year difference. it’s even more appalling when you consider that it’s a marked step back from belmont’s revenge. but oh well, 1 out of 3 isn’t horrible.
castlevania II’s major advantage are multiple quality of life improvements. christopher moves a little faster and jumps better, his whip doesn’t downgrade when he gets hit anymore (except by a certain enemy,) there’s subweapons (only 2 tho) and the game looks and sounds better.
there’s not much of a plot. it’s 15 years after adventure and dracula has kidnapped christopher’s son soleiyu at his coming-of-age ceremony, using soleiyu’s magical powers to resurrect himself, or some such. point is, there’s four castles to explore before you can kick drac’s ass.
you can actually pick the order in which you visit the castles, and there’s no real advantage in picking one over the other as they’re all about even in terms of difficulty. after you’re done, you do a few levels of dracula’s castle and that’s it. longer than adventure, but better too.
the level design isn’t as aggressively unfair as adventure; if you’re careful, most of the game won’t present a tremendous challenge. even the bosses can be handled with ease, especially if you’re playing the european version which has the cross subweapon. (US has the axe instead.)
like adventure, belmont’s revenge has a game boy color re-release as part of konami’s GB collection series. you can find it on volume 3 (volume 4 for the european version — they moved some of the collections around.) it looks great, making good use of color, especially in rock castle.
[again i want to note that only the euro release is in color.]
in any case, adventure can be forgiven for being released very early in the game boy’s lifespan; belmont’s revenge is by far a superior title, and if you’re really interested in seeing what handheld castlevania looked like before igarashi, this is your best bet for a good experience. 8/10
#19, posted december 27, 2018
betrayer (2014, PC, blackpowder games): in the months and years following the release of the mod version of day z, a number of open world survival horror games would be churned out, of varying quality and styles. betrayer is at least one of the more visually striking ones.
the black and white and red all over visuals have been done before, with the more-funny-than-brilliant wii slashemup madworld, but that doesn’t take away from the game’s overall atmosphere, as the two games are doing different things with different goals in mind.
where betrayer falls short is that it’s a very visually busy game, and it can often be hard to differentiate objects in the foreground or background. most items and enemies are painted a stark red to help draw the eye, but ultimately the player is better served using color.
that’s not to say that a bright, colorful image is the only other option. how much color, and how washed out it is, is entirely adjustable; reminded, aesthetically at least, of films like the seventh seal, i chose a washed out, desaturated look reminiscent of 40s and 50s films.
using a bit of color will also help differentiate from a major gameplay element where the game forces the black and white regardless of your color options. which leads me onto the actual game.
developed by several ex-monolith staff, betrayer stands as one of a throng of attempts to redefine how survival horror games are designed; gone are the narrow mazes and tightly-wound gameplay, instead you are dropped at the foot of an open world and told to survive.
what this shakes out to is you attempting to manage your ammo stock while dealing with roaming monsters dotting the wilderness. for the most part, you can expect things to change very little from start to finish — unfortunate, but at least the game is relatively short.
in 1604, you wake up shipwrecked on the shores of colonial virginia. the nearby colony is deserted, and monstrous, red-eyed spanish conquistadors and the burning, charred corpses of the native tribes roam the countryside. your only companion is a mysterious woman in a red cloak.
of course, the spectre of the disappeared roanoke colony looms large over anyone who knows their american history; it’s one of the enduring mysteries in the mythology of the early colonial period, though of course these days we have a better idea of what may have happened.
while roanoke’s fate may have been as simple as the colonists integrating with the local tribes for survival, nothing so mundane has happened with this colony. past the obvious question of why spanish conquistadors, undead or not, are in virginia, there are plenty of ghosts.
one of the major gameplay elements is the “otherworld,” accessible by ringing large bells found throughout the 7 (8 counting the tutorial) large areas the game is broken up into. here, the black and white is enforced, and skeletons and be-skulled dark spirits roam around.
you can swap between the two at will using the bells, and you’ll need to do so in order to advance in the game’s other major element: piecing together the narrative. you’ll have to play detective, hunting down clues and speaking to the ghosts associated with all manner of woe.
unfortunately the game relies on some serious padding; short of the small villages and wide places in the road, there really isn’t much to see. so most of your time will be spent chasing down map icons out in the wilderness, mostly chests with money or items in them.
you’ll also be bartering with an absent shopkeeper (who insists that you’re on the “honor system”) to maintain your arsenal and supplies. unfortunately the economy is such that you spend most of the game desperately poor, and then suddenly too rich for money to matter.
the only real part of this game that’s brilliant is the way the stealth system uses wind to cover the sound of your footsteps. this makes up somewhat for the semi-clairvoyant AI… somewhat. you’ll still be having enemies charge at you because they saw you before you saw them.
fortunately combat is not too much of a pain, provided that you’re good with the bows. the guns are true to history, requiring lengthy manual reloads after every shot; my typical setup was to use the musket at medium range, then follow up with the pistol at short range if needed.
the sound design is probably one of the more subtly done i’ve seen lately. the only music is at the title screen and during the credits; the rest of the time, you’re left with only the wind and your footsteps.
all in all, betrayer is a valiant attempt to live up to the horror legacy of monolith’s blood, F.E.A.R., and condemned, but beyond its visual gimmick, annoying otherworld mechanic, and historic weapons, it doesn’t really have much to offer fans of horror, monolith or otherwise. 6/10
#20, posted january 2, 2019
the lancashire witches (1849, william harrison ainsworth): modern horror fiction owes a great deal to gothic horror, which in turn borrowed heavily from folklore, myth and history. the lancashire witches is no different, and was a contributor to the “classic witch” archetype.
based, very loosely, on the real case of the pendle witches, better known as england’s most famous witch trials (like salem is for the US,) ainsworth weaves a lengthy tale that, let’s be honest, plays pretty fast and loose with history and facts. but that’s fiction for you.
while the book presents a fairly large cast of characters, it mostly centers around richard and nicholas assheton, two noble cousins, and their adventures in dealing with a pair of warring witch families and an unscrupulous witch-hunting lawyer in the early 1600s.
lurking in the background, and told in the lengthy intro, is the legend of john paslew, a disgraced catholic abbot, who participated in a rebellion against henry VIII’s dissolution of catholic monastaries, only to lose and be executed, and who is rumoured to haunt the old abbey.
the intro works well by itself, a thrilling gothic tale of rebellion, ambition and revenge, with abbot paslew brought low as the pilgrimage of grace fails against the king’s armies, his downfall engineered by a strange, swarthy warlock in revenge for a 30-year-old betrayal.
the rest of the tale is set some 80 years after, during king james’ time, though exactly when seems to be unclear, as the events of the actual witch trials, as well as king james’ visit to houghton tower, don’t occur so closely together IRL as they do in the novel.
what struck me the most about this book was how much these characters simply don’t fucking shut up. each is prone to lengthy speeches that would often just as well be narrative prose; and much is written in a dialect ostensibly peculiar to lancashire that can be difficult to read.
the book wouldn’t be nearly as long if not for this. gothic fiction is known for lengthy descriptive passages, and you go in knowing that — lengthy attempts at atmosphere are the whole point of the genre. but this is the worst case of overwrought dialogue i’ve ever seen.
that’s not to say the book is entirely unfun. while it drags miserably in places, and often goes for the cheap dramatic trick, there’s several funny moments to provide some levity in between the lengthy dialogue and sinister happenstance.
while the book has an unflattering view of witch-hunting (“in cases of witchcraft, suspicion is enough,” says one character) it strikes me how it seems to make villains out of victims for the sake of story, which in turn feeds into the misogyny behind witch panics.
historically those accused of witchcraft were often women who knew a little about some kind of science or medicine, or victims of a plot to remove an obstacle to the accuser’s ambition. case in point: the IRL accusations in lancashire were mostly two families accusing each other.
ainsworth instead operates on the assumption that they really were witches, and worse, that the demdike family was cursed to be evil by the abbot in revenge for their ancestor’s actions against him (which in turn were his revenge for paslew’s betrayal 30 years prior.)
it’s this particular cursing that seems to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, with paslew’s ghost hanging about to achieve some final goal against the villainous mother demdike, the very child he’d cursed some 80 years prior. in other words, paslew created his own villain.
i dislike literature that makes real witches out of real victims, particularly when they’re villainous, because the victims of these historical moral panics have always been women and marginalized people (like jews.) the same pattern repeated with the satanic panic of the 80s.
and in fact, in general, i’m suspicious of literature where witches, or other female practitioners of magic, are portrayed as villainous, because there’s always lurking in the background that misogynist history. heinrich kramer would be proud.
i don’t regret reading this book, but i don’t know that i’d read it again; a more dutiful editor might have gone through it with a hacksaw, but as it stands, it’s a rambling, ahistorical shitshow with some entertaining characters. 6/10
PS: the book can be read in its entirety on the gutenberg project, complete with illustrations.
[“rambling, ahistorical shitshow, but here’s a link to it.” lol]
#21, posted january 2, 2019
the countess (2009, d. julie delpy): most vampire fans know of countess elizabeth bathory, who supposedly bathed in blood to preserve her beauty. certainly it’s influenced the lesbian vampire genre. but most depictions are quite unflattering. this film attempts a more even hand.
while everyone knows the legend, it’s difficult to determine what actually happened. historical record shows she stood accused of all manner of crimes, but the ambiguity of history, as well as political circumstances of the time, leave open the question: was she framed?
it’s a tempting idea, at least; bathory was a powerful, wealthy woman in a turbulent time not known for its egalitarianism, and her chief accuser, george thurzo, stood to benefit quite a bit from her downfall. the evidence is mostly circumstantial and hearsay, too.
julie delpy, who directed the movie, also stars as the titular countess, a hungarian noblewoman raised in cruelty. following the death of her husband, she shacks up with istvan thurzo, a nobleman 20 years her junior, but his father george conspires to split them apart.
assuming it’s the age difference that ends their relationship, she becomes increasingly distraught over her appearance. an incident where she strikes a servant girl and gets some blood on her leads her to believe that virgin blood can restore her youth.
the more obsessed she gets with this idea, the higher the body count gets. lurking in the background is thurzo, as well as a sinister nobleman bathory had been seeing — who thurzo has been paying. in the end, she’s exposed, arrested, and locked away. all very tidy. but…
rather than a horror film, the countess is a historical drama about vanity and power. bathory is a learned (and quite bisexual) woman pitted against a male-dominated world, with little respect for the ruling catholic paradigm, but spirals into madness after her failed romance.
delpy discharges the role amazingly, with subtle makeup effects to make her look older than she really is. (she would have been about bathory’s age when she made the film.) william hurt, who i hadn’t seen in a film in years, shows up as a calculating george thurzo.
most of the camera work is pretty standard, though there are some excellent wide shots as well as a well-choreographed dance scene. the film also doesn’t linger overmuch on scenes of torture, preferring to go montage-style with the bodies being dumped in the woods.
the idea that she was framed has gained traction in recent years, in part due to another film, 2008’s bathory, a slovakian film that puts forth the idea that bathory was betrayed by thurzo to gain her properties. indeed, the countess makes similar implications.
the political climate might explain why there’s so little evidence. the nobility of hungary were mostly protestant in a nation ruled by the catholic habsburg family. this plus hints of an early slovak nationalism suggest the whole scandal was seen as dangerous to the nobility.
with this in mind, thurzo apparently worked to hush up the whole incident. only the barest amount of evidence was given to condemn bathory’s assistants; bathory herself was walled up in her chambers, rather than consigned to the stake, to prevent too much scandal.
we’ll probably never really know the full details of the bathory legend. she’s been held up as everything as a cruel vampiress to a slovakian spook story to an unjustly punished feminist heroine. the truth, as they say, is somewhere in the middle.
the countess certainly lives by that motto; bathory in popular fiction is nearly always some villainous lesbian vampire who bathes in blood, the kind of creature you’d see in a corman film or hammer horror. not so here, with a portrayal as sympathetic as it is appalling. 8/10
#22, posted january 3, 2019
day of wrath (1943, d. carl theodor dreyer): in nazi-occupied denmark, creating a film that might be seen as an analogue to the persecution of jews can be dangerous, and yet, here we have day of wrath, a danish-language drama about a woman suspected of witchcraft in 1623.
marte, an old woman, is on the run from witch hunters. she goes to the local pastor, absalon, whose young wife anne hides her, but marte is caught anyway. marte knows the middle-aged pastor spared anne’s late mother (accused of witchcraft) to marry anne, and threatens to spill.
ultimately, marte is executed without betraying absalon’s secret, but absalon feels guilt over leaving her to burn. meanwhile, absalon’s elderly mother hates anne, who has fallen in love with absolon’s son martin, the two of them carrying on a relationship in secret.
anne has grown more confident since learning of her mother’s powers, and that she has those same powers, using them to keep martin close. her resentment of absalon has also grown. ultimately, she strikes absalon dead with a word and is eventually exposed by absalon’s mother.
while the film is often presented as a horror film, there’s not very much in the way of scares, or even tension. everything moves glacially: the plot, the characters, their lines. probably the single scariest thing is a jump scare as marte is lowered into the pyre.
it’s hard to tell if this is just a language barrier thing or not, but nearly every line seems to be delivered woodenly; the camera work is mostly standard shots with very little of note (i did like a panning shot in a room full of columns, though.) only the music stands out.
dreyer’s films are often accused of being slow-paced. it’s easy to see why, watching this film: it’s to make up for the simple plot. the meek anne growing into a confident witch, just like her mother, based only on what absalon told her, is something of a ludicrous turn.
this film is considered analogous to nazi oppression of jews; dreyer denied it, but left denmark to sit out the war in sweden anyway. but i dislike the comparison, because while IRL witch hunts have always been tools of oppression, in the film witches are real, and villainous.
it’s the same problem as the lancashire witches — any negative critique of historical witch hunts, and any attempt to make analogies to more modern situations of oppression, will always be undermined by making villains out of the victims.
in the end, while i’m puzzled over the 100% fresh rating it has on rotten tomatoes, i will admit that if you like gloomy, slow-paced, 2deep4u european films with metaphors that don’t stand up to any serious examination, you’ll like day of wrath. 5/10
#23, posted january 3, 2019
the vvitch (2015, d. robert eggers): imagine what america must have looked like to the early colonialists. wild, untamed, and hostile to a bunch of white people who were too weird for europe. such is the backdrop for one of the tensest movies since john carpenter’s the thing.
a tiny cast of mostly unknowns populate a gloomy scenario of isolation and anxiety. opening with an obstinate jackass getting his family kicked out of a puritan colony over unspecified religious differences, they find a nice place to live and build a farm. it doesn’t go well.
things are fine at first, but soon the family’s baby son disappears into thin air. what follows is the family gradually falling apart under the stress and paranoia as more bad things happen, and the oldest daughter is increasingly isolated from the rest.
the next-youngest children after the baby are a pair of creepy twins who frequently sing a weird song about the family goat, a huge black baphomet-looking motherfucker who’s gotta be the most shifty-looking goat i’ve ever seen. and for good reason.
it’s made abundantly clear that there’s something *wrong* out there in the woods. there is most definitely a witch in this film, or perhaps several; certainly, the two daughters of the family joke about being witches themselves, only to later accuse each other of same.
i won’t belabor my issue about the portrayal of witches, particularly as villains, in “witch panic” stories like this one; and anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because as much as the witch(es) may manipulate things from afar, the real villain here is paranoia and isolation.
it’s worth remembering that the puritans were afraid of the wilderness and what may lie in it, fearing that having to live distant from civilization would lead to spiritual savagery and exposure to the devil. with that in mind it’s easy to see how this family would unravel.
the father forbids his family from entering the woods, though he himself goes in to hunt; bad things happen to children who enter the woods. only the eldest daughter, thomasin, remains resolute, her faith the strongest, and yet she’s the most tormented by the family’s collapse.
my good friend necrovmx pointed out that if this movie had been made ten years ago, there probably wouldn’t even have been a real witch. while the film is less ambiguous on that point than i’d like, much of the rest of the film is far more laden in meaning.
much like the other famous colonial american witch story, the crucible, there’s a political element to this film lurking beneath the dramatic surface. stories about witches and witchcraft are always going to be stories about men’s fear of women, and women’s fear of themselves.
thomasin must endure multiple cruelties, from being accused by the twins of witchcraft, her parents turning on her (her father holds out longer than you’d expect, but even he tips over the edge,) even being blamed for her slightly younger brother’s staring at her chest.
in the end, she’s left with nothing to lose but her chains — and perhaps that’s the whole point. it’s a tale worthy of the gothic tradition, taking the explicit and building ambiguities upon it. it’s a wonder there aren’t more films like this, given how ripe the setting can be.
sadly, horror films set in colonial america tend to suck; this makes the witch stand out all the more. the dialogue is expertly crafted (heavy research went into making it authentic.) the camera work is fantastic, and the editing makes great use of smash cuts (i love smash cuts!)
the music also adds heavily to the ambience, alternating between generalized anxiety and abject horror, finally culminating in haunting chorus during the credits (which are done up in the style of ending credits from the 1930s or 40s, with short lists fading in and out.)
shot in rural ontario, the film makes certain to use gloomy weather to create a gloomy, oppressive atmosphere; it works. past the opening, we see absolutely no sign of civilization; every moment spent outside the farm feels unsafe, and soon enough, the farm feels unsafe too.
in a great many ways, this film easily stands in the tradition of films like the thing, with an isolated group, already on edge, completely unable to deal with threats from without or within. i’d heard good things about the film, but it far exceeded my expectations. 8/10
#24, posted january 3, 2019
mother joan of the angels (1961, d. jerzy kawalerowicz): there’s a stigma with foreign film in the US, often derided as too artsy or incomprehensible (especially if it’s french.) but foreign film can be a goldmine for quality cinema, and that includes mother joan of the angels.
this polish film is loosely based on the 1632 case of demon possession in a french convent in loudun, when the charismatic, womanizing priest urbain grandier was accused by the mother superior of bewitching her and her nuns in revenge for his rejecting an offer to lead the convent.
mother jeanne, supposedly obsessed with grandier and in a jealous rage, talked one of his enemies into taking the seat instead. the ensuing accusations and possessions were used as a pretext by the chief minister, who also didn’t like grandier, to have him burned at the stake.
there’s many theories about really happened in loudun, and a popular one is that the chief minister orchestrated the whole thing after grandier spoke out against him. aldous huxley’s book the devils of loudun posited the theory that the possessions were a case of mass hysteria.
in any case, this isn’t the only movie to cover the grandier case. the devils of loudun was adapted into the infamous film the devils, which so incensed governments and the catholic church that it’s been cut to pieces and no complete version of the original exists.
i had considered watching the devils but i had trouble finding a mostly-uncut version, and anyway the whole thing smelled like a bunch of Super Fucking Subversive edgelord shit, and i didn’t bother. i’m glad i stuck with this one, though.
this film moves the action instead to poland, and rather than focus on grandier (renamed to garniec) it’s set in the aftermath of his trial and execution, when the nuns are still suffering from possessions (and would continue to be for another four years.)
father suryn arrives at the convent to attempt what four priests before him could not do: exorcise the nuns, especially mother joan. while a mass exorcism (brilliantly acted and shot) seems to cure most of the nuns (emphasis on seems), mother joan is worse than ever.
nothing father suryn does seems to work. after trying and failing to receive help from the local rabbi (played by the same actor, which manages to wring at least one meta-joke out of an otherwise tense scene), he eventually reasons he can take the demons into himself, instead.
there’s a clear romantic bent between suryn and joan’s relationship, and it is through this love that suryn is open to possession, and it’s what drives most of the film, as the characters struggle with the madness within themselves.
early on suryn tries to give himself a pep-talk in the mirror, and the camera focuses wholly on his reflection; later, after he’s possessed, he looks in the mirror again, and he looks crazed, and the mirror keeps getting knocked about. it drives home the severity of his madness.
the exorcism in the church is also one of the creepiest scenes in the film, with something clearly deeply wrong with the nuns (especially mother joan) as they move about the room. while it’s not quite a rollercoaster like in the exorcist, it’s still a stunning moment.
the DVD i watched was something of a lazy job, the whole thing slapped together with a fairly basic menu and sub-par subtitles, with the film not even restored at all; however, the audio is just fine, and gives life to the creepy, melancholy soundscape of the film.
in fact i would go so far to say that the audio is one of the greatest parts of the film, using stark, isolated sound effects and choir music to draw the listener in. it meshes well with some masterful camera work, and the cast aren’t two-dimensional either.
if you’re lucky enough to find this movie on DVD or elsewhere, it’s well worth the watch. little wonder that martin scorsese chose it as one of 21 polish films to present on tour a few years ago. it was doing things in 1961 that took hollywood another decade to figure out. 9/10
#25, posted on january 4, 2019
witchfinder general (1968, d. michael reeves): the notion of a “classic” film can be kind of ephemeral. you can’t guess how a film will be received on release any more than you can guess how it’ll be viewed in fifty years. few expected witchfinder general to be a cult classic, but here we are.
the film is based (loosely) on the notorious matthew hopkins, a crackpot who called himself “witchfinder general” and claimed sanction from parliament. using the english civil war as cover, he saw to the deaths of an estimated 300 people (making up 60% of the ~500 people executed for witchcraft over three centuries.) [300 is at the high end, but even the lowest estimate is still pretty shocking at around 100 people.]
as such, the film features plenty of what you might expect: hangings, torture, burnings, and of course the raging misogyny that’s colored witch panics for centuries. for these themes and others, the film was derided as exploitatively violent and heavily censored.
in the US, in an attempt to tie it in with roger corman’s poe cycle, the film was retitled the conquerer worm and vincent price recited the poe poem of the same name over the opening credits, but it otherwise has even less connection to poe than corman’s poe films, which barely had any at all.
the film on its surface certainly seems to lend credence to the accusations of exploitation; the film doesn’t shy away too much from scenes of torture, and there’s plenty of blood. and to be fair, the female lead seems to exist only to be tormented by hopkins.
and indeed, the plot follows a lot of the standard “rape and revenge” pattern, as the niece of an accused priest attempts to trade sexual favors with hopkins to spare her uncle, only for him to betray her after his minion rapes her, and her soldier boyfriend vows revenge.
but the film uses the chaos and violence of the english civil war as a compelling backdrop; hopkins, played menacingly by vincent price himself, is shown not just as a religious fanatic, but as a symptom of the anarchy that gripped england.
the royalists have little presence in the film; save for a single skirmish early on, the actual war looms in the background. but the collapse of social order is on full display, as soldiers and witchfinders alike take what they need from the citizenry.
the war, and its soldiers, stand in stark contrast with hopkins’ private war on the occult. mostly young men, they wage war with blood and fury, not cynical accusations and cold torture. in the end though, there’s still a hefty body count, and everyone suffers.
if there’s a “theme” to this film, it’s how ordinary people can be pushed to violence with only a little encouragement and the absence of order, which is fertile ground for men like hopkins. the only real order is the army, impatient with the male lead’s desire for revenge.
unlike many films of the era (including corman’s) there’s a stark cinematographic imprint on this film that speaks to reeves’ skill as a director. he knows when to shoot simply and when to be more elaborate. hopkins is shown as tall and imposing, the camera often beneath price.
the film makes good use of color, a carefully muted palette allowing for the stark contrast of a beautiful green countryside with the drab, dull villages that hopkins menaces. hopkins lurks about in black and rides on a white horse. a scene by the sea is done up in blues.
price and reeves famously did not get along. reeves never successfully got across what he wanted from price (who was not his first choice for the lead role.) in spite of this, price hands in a subtler performance than usual for him, but most of the cast manages to keep up.
this is an unusual, grim film; at first glance it’s the same kind of schlock you’d expect from late 60s hammer horror or american international pictures, but it stands apart as something more of an auteur film. the violence itself is a message from reeves; it was grotesque for its day, and he knew it.
looking at this film now, 50 years later, it’s easy to see why reeves made the film the way he did. like night of the living dead (also 1968), it was a brick thrown against the mores of the time, and a call to rethink how violence is depicted and considered in art.
the few early critics who found merit in this film are certainly vindicated in their stance; they saw the film for what it is, a study of man and anarchy amidst the beautiful tapestry of the english countryside. later examination by contemporary critics would bear that out.
reeves died of an OD at only 25 shortly after the film’s release; it’s a shame, because he deserved to see how his film, once thought forgettable schlock, is now seen as one of the more important early films on the nature of violence. and a damn good film besides. 7/10
#26, posted january 4, 2019
a field in england (2013, d. ben wheatley): there’s something about making a mind-bending film in black and white: the lack of color seems to heighten the strangeness rather than dull it, because you’re already having to work your brain around the grey when the whole world’s in color.
this disturbing film works upon ground trod by the seventh seal, using a historical backdrop to muse on matters of perception and the occult, as a cowardly alchemist’s assistant seeks a rogue colleague amidst the english civil war, aided by three rough men, two of them deserters.
spurred by the promise of an alehouse beyond a field, the third man, cutler, has them pull a rope, at the end of which is the man the assistant is looking for — a man who has become an alchemist himself, and who forces the other three men to dig for buried treasure.
amidst all this is the ready consumption of mushrooms from the field and near constant profanity; the intensity of forced labor under the gun, and the cowardly, submissive assistant’s metamorphosis into a man who makes his own fate.
at the beginning, the film warns of “flashing images and stroboscopic sequences.” this is a hint that that this isn’t an ordinary film; other scenes, such as multiple scenes of the characters all standing still (and not just still frames, either!) in a tableau are more evidence.
the soundscape is superb, all rumbles and eerie tones (not unlike the ringing after an artillery shell) with traditional music to cement the setting, complementing well the stark, empty landscape, which seems to be quite far from the raging battle just beyond the hedge.
indeed, it’s that passage through the hedge into the titular field that seems to be where the action turns from the tense intro into the film proper, almost as if it were a border between something less obvious than just one field and another — and that’s where things get weird.
it can be difficult to really discern what happens during the climax of the film; certainly, the mushrooms are hallucinogenic, but how can we determine what’s real and what’s deranged fantasy? what’s magic, and what’s imagination? gainax would be proud.
these themes of altered perception and ambiguity of what we’re seeing play well with sometimes deranged camera work, bizarre plot points (some rooted in english folklore) and an overall demented vein to the way the plot spools out.
there’s something about mind-bending film in black and white: there’s always that vague sense of homage to the twilight zone, but classic british horror cinema certainly stands honored too. it’s a puzzling, strange, yet eminently quotable movie that leaves you wondering. 7/10
#27, posted january 5, 2019
the blood on satan’s claw (1971, d. piers haggard): horror cinema from the 60s to the early 70s seems to be largely schlock. hammer and american international pictures (especially roger corman’s work for the latter) certainly contributed to that. but sometimes you find something that stands out… or tries to, anyway.
coming from the same studio as witchfinder general, and in fact reusing a few elements of it, the blood on satan’s claw certainly has a hammer horror vibe to the title, but it strives somewhat unsuccessfully to be a more cerebral horror film like witchfinder general.
a simple groundskeeper in a tiny english village stumbles upon a fearsome, inhuman corpse while plowing a field. upon fetching a skeptical judge, he finds the corpse missing. later, some of the local kids find bones and play with them; thereafter, they begin acting strange.
evoking 1960’s village of the damned, the local kids, just a few at first but growing in number, begin to confound the adults, especially the local reverend during his scripture classes. the ringleader seems to be a young blonde named angel, because of course.
eventually the kids start getting up to ever more sinister games, pulling a few of the adults into it and committing gruesome sacrifices. in addition, several of them have begun exhibiting strange patches of fur and diseased skin, revealed to be the skin of satan himself.
once satan is complete, supposedly, he’ll be unstoppable — but he needs that skin, which is mostly dog fur glued to the actors’ skin, pretty much. in the meantime, the kids do even more stuff, such as trying to seduce the reverend, plus ritually raping one of their victims.
ultimately, the judge is convinced that something evil is going down, and comes back and slays satan at the last moment, with a sword that looked more like aluminum than steel. with that, the movie ends. it’s… a bit of a mess.
in between subplots that go nowhere (an early sequence involves the early male lead’s girlfriend going insane, and then his aunt disappears without a trace and is never found — neither character matters) and exploitative scenes is a film that falls short of the mark of serious.
if there’s a high point to the film, it’s the soundtrack, which ventures far from the traditionalism of witchfinder general to something more mysterious and unusual, well befitting the rural horror vibe the film exudes. unlike the rest of the film, it stands out.
ultimately i can’t really recommend the film. it’s overall too aggressively exploitative and derivative, even if the kids are menacing (especially angel) and the camera work is better than you’d expect. stick with witchfinder general. or village of the damned, even. 5/10
#28, posted january 5, 2019
the man who laughs (1928, d. paul leni): some films don’t look like the genre they’re supposed to be in, or otherwise subvert the boxes people tend to put them in. the man who laughs is one such film; it’s called a melodrama, but at heart it’s an expressionist gothic romance.
the man who laughs started as a victor hugo novel in 1869, being, like some of hugo’s other novels, a dark, complex political tale full of murder and revenge aimed directly at the upper classes. the movie, in contrast, is quite stripped down — and the heroes live at the end.
conrad veidt stars as gwynplaine, a carnival freak in the early 1700s who was disfigured as a child by agents of king james II. the only woman he believes could love him is the blind dea, and the two of them work for their surrogate parent, ursus the snake oil salesman.
the cruel jester who engineered the execution of gwynplaine’s nobleman father discovers gwynplaine is still alive, and, eager for scandal, arranges with queen anne to have him granted his father’s title and estate, and marry the vampy duchess josiana. things go poorly.
told that gwynplaine is dead, ursus and dea are thus banished from england, and the whole traveling circus is shipped off to the docks. gwynplaine, meanwhile, lambasts the nobility, and at the first opportunity, he dips out of the castle and heads out to find his family.
in the end, the jester is slain by ursus’ pet wolf, gwynplaine is reunited with his adoptive family (even the wolf lives!) and they all sail off into the sunrise. it’s a tidy end, but really, the plot doesn’t matter. what does matter is the look of the film.
like many films of the era, the man who laughs is a starkly expressionist film. while many silent films were visually stunning as a matter of necessity, german expressionism was the height of the form, and as filmmakers fled the nazis, they took their styles to hollywood.
with this in mind it’s easy to see how some might sort the man who laughs into horror or even film noir — both genres that owe much to expressionism. it’s shot through with a moody, almost oppressive atmosphere, with sometimes fantastical set design and lighting.
more to the point, while gwynplaine is unambiguously heroic, his terrifying, grinning form easily gives rise to images of none other than batman’s arch-nemesis, the joker — and batman works have often had an expressionist bent to them, especially in film.
the soundtrack is a highlight of the film. originally released entirely silent at the very beginning of the “sound film” era, the film was successful enough that it was temporarily pulled and re-released with a full soundtrack, with music and sound effects (no dialogue tho.)
the silent film era is often forgotten today. at most, people might have seen a charlie chaplin film or maybe metropolis — and only clips, at that. but it’s worth going back to see how many of the filmmaking techniques we take for granted today were being invented on the spot.
the man who laughs is definitely a good example of that, one of the last films of german expressionism, influencing the burgeoning horror genre as well as an example of masterful makeup work — there’s a reason veidt’s grinning leer is in every book about horror films.
while i can’t recommend the film for the story (not that it’s BAD, and it has some great performances, especially mary philbin’s nearly doll-like portrayal of dea), i can certainly recommend it for literally everything else in it — and it’s a piece of film history besides. 8/10
#29, posted january 6, 2019
castlevania (NES/FC, 1986, konami): up until they shat the bed with the lights on, konami’s had a pretty long reign as one of the top video game developers in japan. there’s not a NES fan alive who hasn’t played at least one konami game, and it’s usually a castlevania.
the franchise has evolved over the years, going from a series of action sidescrollers to metroid-inspired action RPGs. there’s been comics, a netflix TV series, and once even a planned movie (before a writers’ strike killed it.) but it all started with a loving horror pastiche.
for a game so focused around dracula it can be a bit of a surprise to see all manner of movie monster, unless you take note of the film-reel title screen. several sequels would utilize the “old monster movie reel” motif in some way or another, but by now it’s all but abandoned.
they’re all here: frankenstein, the mummy, the fish man, even medusa (based largely on hammer horror classic the gorgon.) [it’s probably more fair to say it’s based on medusa’s appearance in the original clash of the titans.] all borrow heavily from classic mid-20th-century horror cinema, and even dracula on the box art is clearly inspired by christopher lee’s depiction!
to drive the movie theme home, the ending credits are thinly-veiled parodies of classic horror actors, directors, and even hammer’s composer. and, strangely, there’s an early choose-your-own-adventure book about a 1950s film crew trying to make a movie about the game’s events!
in any case, like most of its early sequels, there’s not much of a plot, nor does there need to be one. the US manual doesn’t even tell you the story; the japanese manual at least hints at what would be castlevania: the adventure and explains how dracula is resurrected.
it doesn’t even really give you a time — “the middle ages” was later retconned to 1691. none of that really matters, of course. all you need to know is dracula is fucking shit up again, so simon belmont goes in, beats up a bunch of movie monsters, and knocks dracula’s block off.
as it’s the first game in the series, one could be forgiven for assuming the gameplay is clunkier than castlevania III. and to be fair, there’s some clunk. the jump physics are the death of many a player, for example — you can’t turn or slow your momentum at all.
but the controls take very little getting used to, and it’s just a matter of dodging, managing your health, and knowing when to jump or strike. the classic subweapons are all here, of course: crosses, holy water, axes, the dagger, the stopwatch, and all have their uses.
six levels, each with their own vibe; from the gloomy, dilapidated front halls to the crumbling walkways along the walls, to deep caverns, a dungeon, the clocktower, and finally dracula’s tower itself. some posit more challenges than others; all are lovingly rendered.
the cool thing about the design is how platforms are carefully placed in logical positions; floating platforms are such a staple of early platformers and castlevania avoids it entirely, with columns or walls or whatever supporting everything you can stand on. it’s a neat detail.
of course, like most of its contemporaries, castlevania is that old “nintendo hard” we’re all so familiar with. you’ll die a lot, get game overs a lot. compared to some games, it’s not SO difficult, but it’s definitely a game that requires mastering the controls and levels.
it’s worth it though; the game is short enough that a skilled player can get through in maybe 90 minutes or less. this takes some of the sting out of the fact that there’s no save points — though you can continue.
while the franchise is, at this point, nearly unrecognizable from the original game (following a major stylistic shift that began with symphony of the night and koji igarashi’s ascension to the franchise’s lead producer) it still owes everything to this utterly fun little title.
and hey, if the dated NES graphics bother you, there’s always the six million remakes! (oh, and there’s a couple of alternate releases as well.) in order:
vampire killer, 1986, MSX: japan/EU only. not really a port. superficially similar to the NES version, but plays differently, with each level having to be explored in a non-linear fashion to find the key to the next level. might be seen as an early version of the “metroidvania.”
haunted castle, 1988, arcade: the arcade version of castlevania. unusual for the arcade in that you can’t continue when you die, so you better be real damn good, because this game doesn’t fuck around. i’m not really a fan of the look of it, to be honest.
castlevania, amiga, 1990: this is a weird one. outsourced to novotrade, the game has been completely redrawn, the music redone in MOD format, and the controls… made worse. it’s cool-looking at least. fun fact: novotrade later made the ecco the dolphin games, then the contra games for the original playstation as appaloosa interactive.
super castlevania IV, 1991, SNES: now we’re talking. this is my favorite of the castlevania remakes; it’s a greatly expanded version that, much like castlevania III, has you traversing the countryside before you even get to the castle. amazing music, a controllable whip, it’s got it all.
akumajou dracula, 1993, sharp X68000/castlevania chronicles, 1999, playstation: originally an obscure remake for the japan-only X68000 home computer, in 1999 igarashi ported it to the original playstation with redone sprites and amazing music. some consider castlevania chronicles to be the best of the remakes. i almost agree, but i’m still partial to super castlevania IV.
oh, and i guess there’s a couple phone versions. nobody cares about those.
from symphony of the night to the netflix series (which you can tell was written by warren ellis because there’s a goat fucking joke in it) castlevania has a long legacy, but it all started here, and honestly, you couldn’t ask for a better beginning. 9/10
#30, posted january 6, 2019
the crucible (1953, arthur miller): if there’s a story most solidly lodged in the american literary canon yet so thoroughly misunderstood, it’s probably the crucible, the legendary play and high school english class regular by the same guy who did death of a salesman.
most americans have at least heard of the play, if not actually read it (my teachers preferred to ruin shakespeare for me.) it usually comes up when discussing the cold war, and the WITCH HUNT (sorry) that gripped america during the 1950s red scare. but that feels… incomplete.
sure, there’s an obvious, intentional parallel. miller’s friends were all getting hauled in front of the house unamerican activities community, made to rat out all their friends, all in the name of rooting out dirty communists. and miller’s play got him HUAC’s attention, too (which seemed to prove his point…)
but there’s clearly a bigger story here than a mere political allegory (which may or may not continue to hold particular relevance in today’s world of russian bots, antifa, islamophobia, and alex jones.) it seems to me that the real story is more human than that: petty vengeance.
the historical record is clear: a bunch of humorless white folk too weird for europe moved to the middle of nowhere and with nothing to do but farm inevitably grew to hate each other, with only their religious convictions to keep the peace. little wonder something bad happened.
by the late 1600s, witch panics had faded out in europe; the salem witch trials were a late paroxysm of the paranoia that had so long gripped europe. there’s plausible guesses as to the cause, biological and psychological, but i think it was really just a question of hatred.
you can read up on the salem witch trials if you want — it was pretty well documented in legal papers and correspondence, because back then witchcraft was seen as a legal crime as well as a moral one. the play isn’t an accurate relation of the events, nor does it try to be.
miller himself explains that several of the persons in the real-life case were condensed into fewer, and the specific order of events were moved around some to better create drama (and keep the focus on the character of john proctor.) fair enough.
but what remains intact, however, is the sense that something is amiss in salem society. it’s clear that there’s a gulf between two rival families, with the local reverend, new to the region and not as ascetic as puritans were supposed to be, caught in the middle.
and when it becomes clear that whatever silly games the kids were doing out in the woods was going to get them in big trouble, that’s when the accusations start — and this, after abigail (aged up in the play) is rebuffed by proctor (aged down) after a brief affair.
it doesn’t take long for proctor’s wife elizabeth to get accused and dragged off either. she knows of the affair and it’s been driving a wedge between her and john; john, meanwhile, suspects abigail of trying to get rid of his wife and take her place.
there’s a deleted scene that was removed from the play shortly after its first run; it’s the only scene set outdoors, the night before act III. in it, proctor attempts to talk sense into abigail, but it’s clear that she’s gone over the deep end.
why this scene was deleted, i can’t say. perhaps it’s because it removes some of the mystery of the character; as central as she is to the early plot, she’s largely a shrieking prop for act III, and absent entirely for act IV, which leaves her feeling half-finished as a villain.
make no mistake: she is a villain, inasmuch as anyone can be a villain in this mess — with the real case, we can only guess at motives. perhaps the real villain here is, if not religious superstition, the way petty grievances have a way of getting out of hand.
that being said, there’s often a conflict between sex and politics in miller’s work, in that the story doesn’t know which one it’s about. the crucible is no different. arguably miller’s handling of abigail and elizabeth is the play’s biggest fault, for a few reasons.
the first, obvious one is that abigail’s pretty much a red herring. the play sets her up as this femme fatale stereotype, only to discard her as soon as the story stops being about her and starts being about proctor growing a fucking spine and confronting his own sins.
the other problem is elizabeth, in that miller basically pisses on her from on high, cramming her into this meek, forgiving, submissive wife who blames herself for her husband’s lechery. that he sacrifices himself to preserve her good name is small comfort.
yet, in spite of this, proctor is held up as the fundamental hero of the story, the proud man who goes to his death knowing he’s preserved his reputation, made a statement against the proceedings, and potentially started a riot against the cowards behind it like the reverend.
this, i think, is perhaps the fundamental failing of the play. it’s not just that the primary female characters are mishandled; it’s that the stories of witch panics are fundamentally stories of women, because it’s always women who get hurt most in these things.
and yet this is, fundamentally, a story about john proctor, and he’s only involved because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. it’s disappointing, all the more so because this is so often overlooked in high school and even college-level academic examinations of the work.
the play insists that there are no witches, but there are, aren’t there? i don’t mean tituba, who’s just practicing her religion from barbados; i mean abigail, a very different kind of witch, though it raises the question as to how a 17 year old puritan girl can seduce a man.
and as with so many other works about witches, especially ones based on real life, the presumption that witches are real (be they magical or merely seductive) undermines the fundamental fact that women have long been the victims, not the villains.
so yeah, the play’s an allegory for the red scare, whatever, go off. but the red scare didn’t hurt only communists, and anyway what’s wrong with being communist (or a witch) in a free country? by ignoring the plight of women in salem, miller undermines his whole point. 6/10
side note: there’s a movie version with wynona ryder in it and from what i heard it can’t even stay true to the original message of the play. maybe avoid it.
#31, posted january 7, 2019
castlevania II: simon’s quest (NES/FC, 1987, konami): after castlevania’s smashing success, it was obvious konami had to do a sequel. but how to make it seem fresh while still building on what came before? a non-linear action RPG seemed like a good idea. it wasn’t.
we’ve all seen the AVGN review, of course. and maybe some of us saw egoraptor’s review too. and here’s the thing: they’re both completely right. castlevania II is nothing short of a mess. none of the new ideas presented in this game work. it’s almost an argument against new ideas.
the game doesn’t tell you much — for once, the US manual actually tells you more that’s useful than the game does, and is even faithful to the japanese manual’s story! basically: 7 years after the first game, simon is dying, it’s dracula’s curse, so resurrect him and kill him, curse over.
what this boils down to is that you have to find your way into six dilapidated manors around the countryside where various parts of dracula’s corpse have been stored (like relics, i guess.) the actual manor houses aren’t a problem, it’s getting there that’s the pain in the ass.
the basic mechanics from castlevania 1 have carried over. you have a whip, there’s a slight delay on it, your jumping momentum is absolute. in castlevania 1, this worked well with the level design and enemy placement. you had to be on your toes and mind your surroundings. in castlevania II… everything sucks.
a lot of the mechanics have been tied into the RPG/town aspect of the game. gone is the wall meat, instead you have to go to church to heal. hearts are money, which is why it’s lucky most of your subweapons don’t cost hearts to use. and if you get a game over… bye bye hearts.
the enemy placement is always either inconsequential or impossible to avoid, no in between. you’ll often have to take damage simply because an enemy won’t leave the top of some steps, and if you try to lure him away he moves faster than you do.
to be fair actually hitting things feels good, with greater feedback, making you feel like you’re actually doing damage. but the combat is still slow and clunky, and the game isn’t really built around that like castlevania 1. it’s like trying to play bloodborne with dark souls 1 controls.
for a franchise so rooted in reflexes, it’s frustrating to have a game fight against those reflexes so much. but if that were all the game’s problems, one could still say that castlevania II was a good game. but we’ve only just begun. there’s… all the other stuff, too.
the original castlevania was a linear affair. no bullshit, you just kept moving and hit things with your whip, that’s it. castlevania II… not so much. we can see the roots of games like symphony of the night in castlevania II, but i would compare it more to the legend of zelda II: a big open world, and no idea where to go.
the game can’t even do you the service of giving you an overworld map, so you’re left trying to guess which lengthy forest path will take you where you need to go. in between are towns where you can buy stuff and get lied to, and the mansions you have to visit.
that’s the other thing: there are NPCs and they are famously cryptic. they tell you absolutely nothing of value, and many of them will straight up lie to you. the only useful clues you can get are clue books, most of which are impossible to find without a guide.
what this means is that without a guide you’ll be spending a frustrating amount of time wandering aimlessly through samey-looking woods and mountainous regions with no idea what to do or where to go. and if you want the best ending, you’re on a time limit.
speaking of time, there’s a night/day cycle, which was admittedly a very cool idea, but as implemented just serves to frustrate. first is the lengthy notice that night is falling: WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE. ten seconds later, the game resumes.
at night, enemies are tougher, and shops are closed. while this makes logical sense as the towns are flooded with stringy-haired zombies, it’s incredibly frustrating how often you’re forced to wait for day just so you can buy a necessary item, which you can’t get anywhere else.
there’s no real “shops” in this game, see: each merchant has one item to sell you, and one item only, usually unique, like a whip upgrade or whatever. and they’re usually fucking expensive… which means you have to fucking GRIND. that’s right, you gotta be 🎵 out there grinding. 🎵
all this does is waste more time when you’re already on a tight schedule as it is if you want the best ending. you only have 7 in-game days; after that is the sucky ending, which is actually worse than the worst ending you get if you take more than two weeks.
there’s also a level system, though it’s fairly useless. the cap is at 6, and you basically have to grind a lot to even get to 4. fortunately level 4 is where things tip in your favor, damage-wise. leveling up is also the only other way to heal, which can come in handy sometimes.
one small mercy is that time doesn’t pass in interiors… including mansions, which means you can grind to your heart’s content (heh) without having to worry about time. manor enemies drop bigger hearts too, which makes it an even better idea. now if only it weren’t necessary.
the worst part is the constant sense of “what the fuck am i supposed to do now?” so many times you’re left with no idea how to progress, because the game doesn’t tell you that you have to do stupid shit like kneel at a cliff while holding a ruby to summon a magic tornado.
like how is anyone supposed to guess that? nothing the villagers say can be trusted and clue books are impossible to find as it is. it’s fucking madness, and easily the thing that pushes the game from “ambitious but flawed” to “fuck you.”
there’s only three bosses, and they are nothing short of a letdown. most of the mansions are devoid of bosses; death and a floating, blood-crying mask named carmilla confront you in a couple mansions, but they’re easily dispatched. dracula himself can be killed without a fight.
aesthetically there’s a lot to be desired, as well. the palette is mostly ugly browns and greens, and there’s little variety in the environments. sometimes you get a pretty background. the soundtrack is, save a couple exceptions, largely forgettable, unlike the first game’s amazing music.
while the game’s important in terms of being an early example of an open-world action RPG (very similar in vibe to legend of zelda II) and an early predecessor to metroidvanias, it’s otherwise a frustrating, dull experience, the odd man out in the classic NES castlevania trilogy. 5/10
side note: there are a couple of quality-of-life romhacks that try to take the sting out of the game’s opaqueness: redaction and retranslated+map. both promise to do similar things: speed up messages and transitions, make clues more obvious, and some other things.
it’s really a matter of personal preference, but i prefer retranslated+map — it removes the day/night transition notice entirely, for starters, and is also very customizable.
that being said, egoraptor is right in that while hacks like these fix the more frustrating elements, they do nothing to resolve the systemic issues that make the game so frustrating. if the original game was more like either romhack, i could still only give it a 6/10.
#32, posted january 8, 2018
castlevania: harmony of dissonance (2002, gameboy advance, konami): castlevania: symphony of the night was a landmark title, a great leap forward for the franchise in every way. the game boy advance sequels feel like a step down, having to conform to inferior hardware — harmony of dissonance especially.
castlevania’s first foray onto the GBA, circle of the moon, was a smashing success, but it was dogged by complaints of being too dark (the original GBA was to blame for that) and repetitive environments. harmony of dissonance was a response to both of those. it succeeded at one.
it’s important to remember that when this game was released, the original GBA taco hadn’t been supplanted by the SP yet. but even with that in mind, the graphics are quite washed out in places, giving the game an overall brighter feel than you’d expect from castlevania.
additionally, the hero, juste belmont, has a bright outline around him, and certain enemies (namely, bats) do as well. this is probably to aid vision on the too-dark GBA, but it’s still ugly nonetheless.
that being said, there are several graphical improvements that weren’t in circle of the moon, from sprite rotation to simple polygons (for example, swinging doors, much like in symphony of the night.) by 2002 standards, this is one of the most technically impressive games on the GBA.
unfortunately for the sake of the graphics bump, the sound had to take a hit. while sound effects are decent, the music is played entirely on GBA’s legacy gameboy sound channels. the heavily layered music, to lots of listeners, was markedly inferior, even dissonant (heh.)
part of this is because konami cheaped out on using cartridges with more memory, which were more expensive. concessions had to be made, and the dev team focused on graphics. personally, i think the music sounds fine, it’s got an old-school flavor to it.
the game itself is… decent. the basic plot is that it’s 50 years after simon’s quest, and juste belmont’s best friends maxim and lydie have disappeared. one day maxim shows up with no memory of where he’s been, and leads juste to the castle where he says lydie was kidnapped to.
what follows is a fairly basic storyline in which maxim struggles with possession and death tries to resurrect dracula, all while lydie just stands around and gets kidnapped a couple times. and juste has to do all the work. meh.
the castle itself is awfully short on visuals and areas, sadly. a big part of that is because of the game’s central premise, that there’s actually two identical castles, and you’ll be flipping back and forth between them. this is… one of my pet peeves in gameplay devices.
it’s a wonder that i like silent hill so much, because otherwise i generally strongly dislike “dark worlds” in video games. i find them to be a lazy way to pad out the game, and it takes away from environments the game could have had instead.
that being said, it’s not immediately obvious. when you first switch to the dark castle, you’re dropped in another part of it, and it’ll be several hours before you start to see areas you were in before. this is a clever way of concealing things during the early game.
unfortunately, as the game progresses, in order to complete the game you’ll have to explore both castles to their fullest. this would be fine if the environments weren’t so dull, especially in the dark castle.
it often feels like the dark castle is a desaturated palette swap of the light castle, just with some scarier visuals in the far backgrounds. it’s not all bad though, there’s some neat details here and there to drive home the fact that this is, in fact, the DARK CASTLE.
it’s probably just as well that the castle is fairly dull. there’s very little in the way of interesting environments or rooms; most of the game is long series of corridors and the occasional big room, as the gameplay focus is on enemies, who can be quite lethal.
there’s little in the way of secrets as well. no wall chicken this time, and the items that open up more of the game to you are fairly few. the only real reason to explore is for an odd subquest involving collecting furniture to stock a room with. there’s not even a reward.
okay, no, that’s not true — if you complete the room and get the best ending, lydie leans against juste in the final cutscene. i guess there’s something to be said for being good at interior decoration, or whatever.
the somewhat detached and slow nature of the progression means that often times bosses are optional — and sometimes you’ll approach them from the other side of the room! on the other hand, the bosses are mostly quite good.
several alumni from castlevania III are here, as is not one but two legion bosses. in fact, harmony of dissonance is a bit of a love letter to the NES games, even down to the plot involving a treasure hunt to track down dracula’s relics… again.
playing as juste can be either satisfying or slippery. he’s very agile, moreso than even alucard was in symphony. the shoulder buttons can send him dodging in either direction. repeatedly tapping them means you can traverse long stretches quickly, provided you don’t run into anything.
like all belmonts, his weapon of choice is a whip, and true to the standard introduced in super castlevania IV, the whip is controllable after the initial swing. the subweapons are all here, too, and can be combined with spellbooks for cool effects that use MP instead of hearts.
you’ll of course level up steadily over the course of the game, though you’ll often hit spots where enemies can really fuck you up while you’re not doing as much damage as you’d like. you can also change the properties of your whip, such as elemental status.
all in all, harmony of dissonance isn’t a bad game despite its technical shortcomings, but it does feel a little underwhelming. it can be gotten through quite quickly, and the plot doesn’t really seem to matter much in the overall timeline. it’s still better than castlevania II tho. 7/10
#33, posted january 10, 2019
witch hunt (2018, PC, andrii vintsevych): from the weirdo who gave us the awful “gynophobia” (of which RPS rightly savaged the early access version) comes… a horror-themed hunting game in colonial america? okay.
full disclosure: i didn’t finish the game. i didn’t even kill the first “boss” enemy you have to hunt. i found the game simply too goddamn tedious. i didn’t watch the rest on youtube, either. what’s the point? there’s barely any plot whatsoever.
first, the good: it’s less aggressively slapped together from unity assets like gynophobia, inasmuch as you’re not as likely to notice how half the trees are all the same slightly bent model, all oriented the same direction. on max settings it’s pretty nice-looking, even.
easily the best feature is the fog, the way it shrouds the woods in mist and hangs over the lake. much of the rest of the environment is done up well, too, with the campfire by the lake a bright beacon to help you find your way back to the slightly greater safety of the cabin.
the basic mechanics are all functional, too. much like betrayer, you have a pistol and a rifle, and long loading times for each. the guns are well modeled and animated, as is the sword you’re armed with. different learnable skills help you in your hunt.
the story: you’re an experienced monster hunter in colonial america (no date given, but stated to be the 1700s) investigating disappearances in a small village. monsters lurk in the wilderness nearby, and you have to hunt them. that’s it. that’s the whole story.
there are five or six boss monsters that are your main goal, but other monsters populate the woods as well. these range from the mundane (zombies) to the annoying (whisperers — i’ll get to those in a bit.) actually, the monsters are mostly more annoying than anything else.
the main mechanic for hunting beasties is a sort of spider-sense, in which you can sense boss monsters from some distance, indicated by an icon and a steady heartbeat. the problem? it works from five hundred meters away, leaving you with only a vague clue of where to look.
making it worse is that the werewolf (the first boss — i dunno if this applies to the others) is constantly on the move, and more often than not, you lose track of him… probably because you’re dealing with the zillion lesser monsters that come out to nip your heels.
you can use monster vision to see what he sees, which costs mana (more on mana in a bit) but it’s mostly useless — you’ve seen one stretch of woods you’ve seen them all, and unless you see an obvious landmark, you might as well not have wasted the mana.
worse, even if you DO know where he is, you can’t cancel out of the spell, which lasts a good ten seconds, and by the time you get there, the motherfucker’s probably long gone.
and when you DO catch up to him, damage him once and he’ll run away, forcing you to keep up the chase, risking attack from lesser monsters and probably dying. and if you lose him, you get to do it all over again repeatedly ’til he’s dead.
the other monsters are all a bunch of pricks. the zombies run up to you and slap you around, often hitting you before you’ve had a chance to hit them. zombie dogs can do tremendous damage very quickly. and then there’s the deadblinds. and the whisperers. fuck.
first, the deadblinds: basically glowing red zombies, you can’t look at them. as long as they’re in your field of view, no matter what distance, you’ll take damage as the screen glows red. your only hope is to track them down looking askance and kill them quick. it’s stupid.
even stupider are the whisperers. these guys are probably the only genuine scare in the game, but eventually they just become annoying gits. nearly-invisible black shadows that whisper indistinctly until aggro’d, at which point they chase you endlessly to give you a jump scare.
they can’t be stopped or destroyed, and if you trigger one, you’re screwed — either they take all your mana, or a big chunk of your health if you don’t have any mana left (and you usually won’t.) your only option if you hear one is to just turn around — they’re too hard to see.
it’s a brilliant idea in theory, but it gets old very quickly, especially since they have an annoying habit of hanging about where your main quarry’s supposed to be. and that’s really the crux of the game: good ideas that get old fast.
oh yeah, the mana system: restoring it is a pain in the ass. the only reliable ways to do it are to kill an enemy, gaining back various amounts of mana, or to sacrifice health at bloody cairns dotting the map. at the very least, your health regenerates… slowly.
even saving the game at the glowing stones that mark save points costs mana. on the plus side, you can fast travel from the lakeside cabin back to the village, and level transitions always save the game. it has the effect of resetting monster spawns, tho.
you have a couple of other things to help you. silver crucifixes will hit boss enemies with lightning if they come within 200 meters; watcher totems will point you in the direction of the creature at that moment. you can buy books to unlock more skills. and so on.
there’s a map in the cabin, but it’s mostly useless until you buy a compass. but money is scarce, lockpicks are even scarcer (and can’t be bought) and anyway nothing is all that helpful given how much of a pain actually dealing with the beast is.
while there’s some good ideas in this game, and the colonial american setting is a novel one for horror games (other than betrayer and, uh, one of the blair witch games, there aren’t any,) as it stands, i can’t recommend it unless you really like hunting games. 5/10
#34, posted january 10, 2019
the viy (1835, nikolai gogol): there’s a strong relation between the horror genre (especially the gothic horror of the 18th and 19th centuries) and folklore. folklore is an oral history of the unknown, from a darker, bigger world, and the viy stands firmly in that tradition.
published as the penultimate entry in gogol’s short story collection, the migorod, the viy is at heart another witch tale, but lurking in the background is the viy itself, a demonic creature, a “king of the gnomes,” with eyelids that stretched to the floor.
the viy as named does not seem to exist in ukrainian folklore, despite gogol’s claims in the preface to the story, but there’s a possible link to the real legend of st. cassian the unmerciful, a semi-demonic figure in orthodox lore who supposedly had long eyelashes.
it’s a tenuous link, but it’s telling that both the viy and st. cassian supposedly had penetrating evil eyes capable of wilting a person on the spot. and certainly, that’s what happens to the hapless hero of the viy.
lemme back up. three young seminarians are heading home from school for summer vacation sometime in 18th-century ukraine. they get lost and stumble upon the farm of a cranky old woman, who, after much cajoling, permits them to sleep in separate places around the farm.
in the night, one of the three boys, thomas (or khoma, depending on the translation) is beset upon by the old woman, who climbs on his back and forces him to run for miles. he eventually manages to kill her, but seeing that she’d turned into a beautiful woman, he runs away.
returning to the seminary in kiev, he’s soon caught by the rector, who tells him that a colonel a ways outside of town has a dying daughter who’s requested his presence. he’s immediately suspicious, but goes anyway under duress, escorted by a bunch of cossacks.
when he gets there and goes to sleep, the daughter dies overnight; the colonel then tells him that thomas is to recite prayers for the dead every night for three nights. thomas notices that there’s something hauntingly familiar about the dead girl, who he’s never met.
what follows are three nights where thomas desperately tries to stave off the depredations of an increasingly terrifying corpse that rises from the casket, and in between he talks to the colonel’s domestic staff and learns of the daughter’s reputation as a witch.
it becomes clear to him that the dead girl is the same old witch who he’d killed. and on the third night the viy itself shows up, and, despite himself, thomas cannot help but look when the viy looks at him. all ritual and incantation fail as he’s struck dead on the spot. the end.
it’s not a very long story. and, true to gothic tradition, it’s not a very deep one either. if anything, it’s a bit more explicit with the misogyny that lurks behind fears of witches and witchcraft than most similar tales.
an old woman who corrects a cossack is rudely threatened. twice, it is said, as if reciting an old idiom, “every old woman is a witch.” and there’s of course always a tale of seduction and destruction.
look, i don’t seek this shit out, it’s just endemic to the fucking genre.
it’s not a BAD story, really. the basic setup is charming enough, and the way each successive night is worse than the last helps build suspense. things rattle about, candles flicker, the old church is sinister in character all by itself. but it’s just… well… kinda standard.
we’ve all been here before, haven’t we? locked in a room with a corpse or whatever, something lurks the wilderness beyond, all that. sure, gothic literature helped invent a lot of these tropes we now take for granted, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done more compellingly. 7/10
side note: there’s been a few movie adaptations of this story. the most famous one is probably a soviet film from the 60s — notable for being one of the rare horror movies out of the soviet union. there’s also a more recent adaptation, but it doesn’t seem to be very good.
#35, posted january 10, 2019
brotherhood of the wolf (2001, d. christophe gans): for a cult film based loosely on a notorious series of wolf attacks in 18th-century france, you’d think this movie would be a more serious take on the traditional werewolf legend. unfortunately, it came out after the matrix. [ouch.]
the legend of the “beast of gévaudan” (which was probably just roaming packs of wolves) did a lot to shape modern werewolf lore, such as the idea that silver bullets are lethal to werewolves. “brotherhood of the wolf” initially promises to go this direction, but derails fast.
first, the good: it’s gorgeous. south-central france is depicted with all the haunting beauty, deep fog and dark woods befitting a gothic tale. costumes aren’t skimped on, either. (bloodborne fans may recognize a certain tricorn-hat/coat collar over face aesthetic.)
the acting, for the most part, is pretty decent, at least in the first half. in the second half… well… we’ll get to that. there’s a lot to this movie that’s infuriating, and the back half of the movie is where it all comes to a head. so let’s discuss these issues in order, hm?
the first hint that this is not the film you sat down for is very shortly after it begins, when one of our high-collared horseriders gets into a fucking martial arts fight with a bunch of assholes. this kind of swashbuckling nonsense persists throughout the film.
before long you start to realize this movie /really/ likes the “magical kung fu native american” trope. the actor isn’t even native american! (he’s chinese/japanese/filipino/spanish/irish, which is a hell of a combo but i don’t see “native american” in there, do you?)
the worst part is, as soon as i realized he was the token ethnic friend (and the victim of some fetishization on the part of the local hoi polloi… who were also just plain racist in general) i knew he wouldn’t last the movie. guess what? he didn’t.
there’s also the rather tacked-on romance subplot. the male lead, ordinarily a competent professional learned in all manner of disciplines, turns into a fumbling, unserious fuckboy when presented with a pretty redhead noblewoman, and it’s maddening.
worse is the fact that while he’s in town for the beast hunt, he spends his nights in bed with an expensive, mysterious courtesan who is so aggressively the femme fatale archetype she could have come out of central casting. this eventually bites him in the ass.
the actual hunt for the beast is pretty entertaining, though if you don’t like bad things happening to hapless wolves, maybe give this one a miss. the hunters try and determine the nature of the beast and figure out where it nests, while political machinations threaten the hunt.
it’s these political machinations that, in a better film, would be the primary driver of the plot. unfortunately the whole thing’s a mess of conspiracy; the titular brotherhood is basically some weirdos who think france isn’t christian enough, and the beast is their weapon.
the most infuriating part is the reveal of the beast’s handler; a couple of times, we see the handler’s hand, all long nails and knotted flesh. turns out, the noblewoman’s one-armed brother has been doing everything with one arm behind his back all along. and, then, well, trigger warning: he rapes his sister.
in a movie full of unnecessary scenes, this is the apex of unnecessary, because it serves almost no purpose rather than to put the hapless noblewoman into some kind of coma that only our male lead can wake her from, snow white style. it’s ridiculous.
all of this comes together to bring the movie crashing down in the second half, as the hero goes on a full 80s-style rampage of revenge, looking like that one guy from deadly prey. the conspiracy is exposed, the femme fatale is mysterious, everybody was kung fu fighting. etc.
the overuse of dramatic slo-mo for everything, the script that goes off the rails almost immediately, the crazy mishmash of genres that don’t fit together… it’s a disappointment, to be honest with you. that’s not even getting into how the thing only targets women.
i dunno, it’s dumb. you might like it for its aggressively post-matrix stupidity. personally i was expecting something a little more thoughtful than “french pirates of the caribbean with less charisma.” at least it’s pretty. 6/10
PS: the evil brother has a sword made out of bone and it’s a goddamn whip-sword too. this movie is ridiculous.
#36, posted january 11, 2019
bloodstained: curse of the moon (2018, PC/PS4/PSV/XBO/NS/3DS, inti creates): many moons ago, after castlevania showrunner koji igarashi left konami, he began development on a castlevania spiritual sequel. many moons later, it’s still not here. but in the meantime, we got this.
initially a stretch goal for the bloodstained: ritual of the night kickstarter, curse of the moon seems to hover between canon prequel and non-canon spinoff. not that it matters all that much: curse of the moon has about as much plot as castlevania III, the game it’s a spiritual sequel to.
that’s no joke by the way. aside from the obvious similarity in the NES-style graphics (though a good deal superior to what actual NES hardware can do) the structure is nearly identical, including recruiting new characters. it’s a NES castlevania game in all but name.
most of what we know about the bloodstained universe doesn’t matter terribly much in this game. the plot boils down to a samurai, cursed by demons, on a quest to kill all demons to rid himself of the curse. along the way he recruits the other characters from ritual of the night… maybe.
how the game plays, and how it ends, of course depends on your actions when meeting these characters. unlike castlevania III, you can recruit them all in the same game; there are also no alternate levels, but there are plenty of alternate paths, with skeletons pointing the “right” way.
everything you’d expect from a NES castlevania is here. there’s subweapons, genius level design, a gloomy, gothic vibe, tough bosses, the works. even jump physics are like castlevania III’s. the only real difference is “casual mode’s” infinite lives allows you to play relatively rage-free.
the basic makeup of the team is similar to that of castlevania III. zangetsu is the all-rounder, with no weaknesses but no real strengths beyond a high health bar. miriam is much more agile than the others. alfred is weak but has powerful spells. and gebel is nearly identical to alucard.
zangetsu’s animation reminds me of ryu from the original ninja gaiden games; this is likely on purpose. his subweapons are very similar to ninja gaiden’s, as well — it’s not subtle at all. his sword is short range, but quick. he’s not as agile as ryu, but it’s a nice spin on the trevor belmont model.
miriam, unlike grant (her castlevania III analogue) is very much da real MVP in this game; while she’s weaker than zangetsu, she’s otherwise an agile belmont who can get into places and make jumps the others can’t. also like a belmont, her whip is slow, but reliable.
alfred is the obvious sypha analogue. he’s got an extremely short health bar, meaning you’ll want to bring him out only for spells then swap back quickly. but his spells are fucking insane, especially the ice spell and the defensive fire shield.
gebel might as well be alucard with a mask on. they play nearly identical, with gebel being able to transform into a bat and fly into hard-to-reach places (or, even better, skip whole sections of jumping platforms.) it’s his only subweapon, but it’s worth it.
swapping characters is nearly instant, unlike castlevania III (thank goodness!) that being said, subweapon drops don’t change when characters do, meaning the new character can’t pick up the subweapon. this can be useful sometimes when you don’t want a subweapon — just walk right through it.
unlike castlevania III, when you die, you lose the character you were playing as. this can be frustrating as there’s no way to get them back until you defeat the stage boss, or if all the characters die. when they all die, that counts as a life lost; lose all your lives and it’s game over.
for the most part, if you’re familiar with old-school castlevania gameplay, this game won’t give you much trouble. i didn’t start to struggle until stage 5’s boss; stage 8, however, had me raging, with its floor-destroying bat swarms. the bat swarms are probably the one thing i’d remove.
the boss fights are nothing to sneeze at either. designed after demons in a real life book about demonology, they’re aggressive, but not unpredictable, giving you quickly-readable patterns that the attentive can use to master the fight. they’re varied and some are quite unique.
i’m particularly a fan of the coin-spewing demon at the end of stage 3, which forces you to climb stacks of coins being shoved across the room in order to reach it. the obvious carmilla stand-in in stage 6 is also a treat, if a bit of a pain in the ass.
the 8-bit soundtrack is gorgeous. composed by longtime castlevania composer michiru yamane and mega man zero/mega man ZX composer ippo yamada, there’s a distinct blending of styles that recalls castlevania games across the series history while also being very much its own thing.
it stands alongside games like shovel knight in being a fantastic revival of the 8-bit sound while not being under the limitations of vintage hardware. each track feels appropriate to its level, creating a gloomy action vibe that suits the game perfectly.
if you’ve been hankering for another NES style game in the vein of the classics, curse of the moon is easily the best option of the past year, capturing the spirit of the NES era while forging ahead with new ideas.
ritual of the night has been in development for around four years now, and while i can’t say for sure what’s going on at artplay, recent developments haven’t inspired confidence in a release anytime soon. but even if we never get it, curse of the moon is a worthy stand-in. 9/10 [the game did eventually come out later that year and it was fantastic.]
#37, posted january 12, 2019
blair witch volume 3: the elly kedward tale (2000, PC, ritual entertainment): in 1999, a badly shot indie film called the blair witch project pioneered the dubious “found-footage” genre as well as many viral marketing techniques. amongst a multimedia blitz was… this game.
gathering of developers, a short-lived auteur publisher, had secured the rights to create a trilogy of spin-off games. the first of these was created by terminal reality, and tied in with their other game nocturne. by all rights, it was a minor success. the other two, less so.
a lot of the lore in blair witch is relegated to the myriad tie-in media; the movie itself is, if you want to be cynical, a commercial for all the other shit. a core part is the tale of elly kedward, an old woman who takes revenge on the village that banished her for a witch.
as you can guess by the subtitle, this game expands somewhat on this, taking place in 1785, shortly after the banishment, when children have begun disappearing. a disillusioned priest goes to blair township to investigate and finds himself wrapped up in a battle of good and evil.
when he arrives, the last of the citizens are on their way out; only the local reverend and judge remain, with a couple of prisoners in the holding cells: an old drunk and a beautiful young woman who claims to be a “good” witch. “elly’s just misunderstood, like me,” she claims.
armed with a few clues, our mr. prye, witch hunter, heads out into the woods. the game starts here in earnest, but there’s really not much to it. most of the game will be spent in these woods, and it’s not a terribly large area — just a series of paths.
some of these paths will loop back on one another, similar to how the characters in the film walk miles only to find themselves where they started. the woods are also filled with zombies (and other monsters, but mostly zombies.)
superficially, the game is reminiscent of resident evil, in that it uses pre-rendered backgrounds. the combat, though, is decidedly less survival oriented. you have a number of weapons that use either bullets or mana, and both drop in plentiful amounts.
i must stress a point: the controls are shit. take every complaint you’ve ever had about old-school survival horror controls, and apply them haphazardly to a keyboard. using xpadder one can get by with a controller, but you’ll still rely on the keyboard a lot.
i had a lot of technical problems just fiddling with the control configuration. the game is old; the only way i could get it to behave properly is to not use hardware acceleration and run it in win98 mode. in hardware mode the game has serious framerate issues.
don’t get me wrong, the nocturne engine is great. i’d argue that with better pre-rendered scenes, it’d be on par with resident evil 0 or the resident evil remake, making extensive use of shadows in a way not really surpassed until doom 3. but much like resident evil, the camera can be frustrating.
while some of the game’s problems can be attributed to the engine itself, the shortness, linearity, and the story (oh my god the story) are all ritual, and it’s frankly a little shameful. PC gamer called it “amazingly mediocre.” i thought they were being generous.
the story is really really dumb by the way. part of what made the movie work was so little was actually explained. this game, instead, goes off on some bullshit about a demon named idontrememberandidontcare, apparently the source of all the evil.
there’s a LOT of magical native american bullshit in this, and while i’m no expert on the myriad cultures of pre-colonial maryland, i’m pretty sure zero thought was given to the accuracy. shit, even that awful original version of prey was better about this.
the script is garbage, too. every evil entity you run into has a bad habit of talking at length about how prye is going to suffer, etc. and i’m just sitting here screaming JUST GET ON WITH IT.
in the end, the magical native american sacrifices himself to seal the evil away, but the beautiful “good” witch turns out to be evil too, having manipulated prye into preparing the way to open a gate to the demon realm, or some dumb shit, i dunno.
that being said, in a subversion, you can use an “exorcism bible” given to you by the local reverend to free her from the spell. the final boss fight is an enormous pain in the ass, though, like, seriously impossible, even if you’re used to the controls. i had to god mode it.
this stands in marked contrast with the rest of the game, by the way. for the most part, combat is surprisingly easy: you just (auto)aim and shoot, and maybe reposition as needed. ammo and mana are so plentiful you’re rarely in trouble. but the final boss is almost impossible.
i do need to point out that i really liked the soundtrack — it’s honestly the best part of the game, creating a moody atmosphere that suits the wintry scene. the voice acting isn’t bad either, if mixed a bit loud. oddly enough, the credits don’t list any voice actors at all.
all in all, i wasn’t expecting a lot from this game and i got even less. it’s clear that ritual entertainment, always doomed to mediocrity in spite of minor successes like the scourge of armagon expansion for the original quake, and later the cult classic shooter SiN, were to maintain their reputation with blair witch volume 3. 4/10
#38, posted january 12, 2019
the legend of sleepy hollow (1820, washington irving): few authors can claim to be as influential on american folklore as washington irving; he helped shape the mythology of an entire nation in its infancy. the legend of sleepy hollow, in its way, IS american horror.
i feel like it might be pointless to review this story the way i review others, given how it’s been dissected to hell and back in academic settings by people smarter than me. but at the very least, it deserves some token discussion.
first, the basics: ichabod crane is a lanky, nerdy sort of fuckboy from connecticut who works as a schoolteacher in tarry town, new york while also trying to get into the local rich girl’s petticoats. his primary competition is brom bones, the local gaston analogue.
lurking in the background is the legend of the headless horseman, supposedly the ghost of a german mercenary who lost his head to a cannonball in the revolutionary war some fifteen-twenty years prior, and who now roams the countryside looking for his lost dome.
crane spends his days teaching, and when he’s not teaching, he’s gladhanding with the locals, never staying for too long in one house. he also has to put up with repeat bullying from brom, who seems all too confident in his ability to win the affections of katrina van tassel.
one autumn night, farm families from around the area gather at the van tassel home for a harvest party; ghost stories are traded, including a few about the headless horseman. afterwards, crane attempts to woo katrina, but fails. on his way home he’s set upon by the horseman!
after a lengthy chase, the horseman catches up to him and throws his own damn head at the guy. the next day crane is nowhere to be found, but the epilogue states that he later turned up elsewhere, having become a lawyer and a politician.
almost the entire story is without dialogue; the only spoken line is crane’s, demanding “who are you?” of the horseman. the story is otherwise told as if it were being related in person, rather than in the traditional prose style.
indeed, the very end of the story tells how this story came to be related to the narrator. it’s an interesting device that i don’t think would work in anything other than a short story.
one of the things that sets this story apart is the “maybe magic, maybe mundane” approach to the tale. it’s hinted that the horseman might actually be brom playing a prank on crane; but one must also consider how long the legend’s been around.
the tone of the story, ambiguous but leaning towards mundane, feels like an attempt to reflect a new age of reason in america, a country founded (ostensibly) on principles of reason, in contrast with europe, an old, dark domain full of ghosts, real, imagined and metaphorical.
this, to me, is probably the salient point of what irving was trying to do, amidst his romanticist tendency for description and his fixation on the regional culture of the dutch-descended locals.
i suppose it’d be silly to give this story a number; trying to earnestly rate Important Literature like this feels almost like a slap in the face of art — what am i, a computer science major? ??/10
[this was probably the first real hint that my scoring system is somewhat arbitrary and also arguably unnecessary.]
#39, posted january 13, 2019
frankenstein (1818, mary shelley): to say mary shelley’s seminal novel is Important Literature is an understatement. lots of books are Important Literature, yet are little better than penny dreadfuls favored by stuffy white academics. frankenstein is something else altogether.
few books are as poorly understood as frankenstein. most people only know the lumpen face of boris karloff from the 1931 film adaptation, which was almost nothing like the book, the iconic lumbering, groaning creature a far cry from the intelligent, tormented monster of shelley’s novel.
to be fair, the stage plays weren’t very faithful either. but that’s besides the point. the story resonated with people; its ruminations on good vs evil, fate vs agency, were compelling, in spite of writing problems and occasional improbabilities.
the gist: victor frankenstein is the beloved son of a well-to-do family in geneva. he goes to university in ingolstadt for an education in science; while there he becomes obsessed with the idea of learning the secrets of life and death, culminating in constructing a new person.
upon the completion of his project (animated by a process that shelley was very ambiguous about) he is so horrified by the sight of it that he runs away. the creature, left to its own devices, is forced to learn its way on its own, isolated and shunned by humanity.
from thereon the creature, who is filled with rage at being brought into a world that fears it, dooming it to a life of loneliness and hate, torments victor by systematically killing everyone he loves and forcing him to build it a wife, which victor nearly does only to back out.
victor, for his part, has absolutely no pity for the abomination he created, feels no guilt in what he’s done to the poor thing, but only guilt for the threat it poses to him and his family. he spends most of the book in one guilt-ridden torpor or another.
in the end, with nearly his whole family dead, victor seeks revenge on the creature for ruining his life, never really stopping to think that the creature’s life came pre-ruined, and all because of him. in other words, frankenstein’s not the monster, the monster is frankenstein.
it’s a far cry from the archetypal mad scientist story that the 1931 film presents; here, young victor is hardly a scientist, though often mad. despite some discussion on galvanism, it’s never explained how he animates the creature, but it’s probably a mix of science and alchemy.
what we see in this story is less a story about what happens when you play god, but about what happens when you play god and then disregard the consequences. victor is in every respect a bad god (or parent), abandoning his creation at the moment of its birth.
little wonder that the creature, with no protection or advocate, having to learn its way on its own, bears such ill-will towards him. it and victor are both tragic figures; both are guilty of villainy in their own right, and it all boils down to victor indulging his obsessions.
there are two versions. the 1818 version is fairly radical in tone, such as in how women were depicted. the 1831 edition was heavily altered, partly to appease conservative critics, but mostly to reflect mary’s gloomier disposition after a series of misfortunes in adult life.
the 1831 version is by far the more well-known version of the book. while mary’s gone through the whole thing and edited things in manner of style, the vast substance of the book remains unchanged; but, it’s altogether more fatalistic than the original edition.
a lot of the ruminations on destiny weren’t present in the 1818 edition; there, victor was making his decisions of his own accord. “destiny” and “fate” are good excuses to absolve yourself of blame, not that it seems to do much good in this case.
for what it’s worth, i mostly read the 1831 edition, mostly because that’s the most common version and it’s the one i had in print. in truth, 95% of the book is the same. what’s changed however makes all the difference.
it’s impossible to overstate just how important this book was. sure, on its face it’s just another gothic novel, but its ruminations on the pursuit of knowledge, how science and progress are a double-edged sword, continue to resonate today.
remember that science was only then just beginning to pass out of the realm of alchemy and “natural philosophers” into the codified, regimented, organized structure it is today. all kinds of new theories were being presented at the time, some of which even stuck around.
this kind of rapid progress can be really concerning for some people. look at how much has changed in just the last 30 years. while the specific concerns may change, the anxiety stays the same. but this book isn’t an anti-science screed, it’s about taking responsibility.
much like sleepy hollow yesterday, it’d be doing this book a disservice to slap a number on it. i can’t. it’d be like slapping a number on sci-fi as a genre, and i’m not that one creative writing teacher i had who drove a student to tears for writing “genre fiction.”
so i’m not going to do that. what i am going to do is say that frankenstein is an interesting book from feminist, scientific, and structuralist perspectives. this is Important Literature; more than that, it’s proof that sci-fi was invented by a woman. take that, lovecraft. ??/10
#40, posted january 15, 2019
castlevania: rondo of blood (1993, turbografx CD, konami): if there’s a holy grail for castlevania fans, this game is it. released only in japan for the PC engine (the original japanese name for the turbografx-16), it was a turning point for castlevania, yet a mystery for american fans.
it’s not really known why rondo of blood never came to the US originally. obviously konami wanted to take advantage of the turbografx-CD technology, with high-quality music, art assets and even fully-voiced (but badly animated) cutscenes, but it could just as easily been on sega CD.
perhaps it was NEC; the TG-16 was a failure in the US, and NEC guarded their tiny niche in the industry jealously. they likely would not have wanted konami just releasing such a big title just anywhere. sega CD also being a market failure probably doomed a release there too.
whatever the case, artistically rondo of blood marked a transition point, moving away from the 80s fantasy book cover aesthetic (no more ripping off frank franzetta!) into a more anime vibe. with that came bigger, more detailed sprites, many of which were still in use in later games.
rondo might be considered to be one of the last “classic” side-scrolling linear (i.e. not metroid-style) castlevania games that isn’t a remake or alternate version. (legends doesn’t count.) in that sense it might be considered a last hurrah for the old-school mode of the series.
(i mean, okay, yes, castlevania: bloodlines came out after, but bloodlines was a sort of last gasp of the old aesthetic and gameplay style — or more specifically, a love letter to francis ford copolla’s silly dracula adaptation. it’s still a great game, but not the milestone that rondo of blood is.)
it’s also a culmination of many of the very best elements of the previous games, even going so far as to riff on castlevania 1 and castlevania III’s progression. you start in the burning town of ajiba (resembling its castlevania II counterpart) and the very last level has a long bridge followed by a clocktower.
there’s also branching paths, an alternate character you have to unlock (maria — we’ll get to her), lots of little references here and there — castlevania is nothing if not aggressively self-referential. it’s arguably one of the most endearing aspects of the franchise.
it’s comforting to see the same old front hallway, the same old dip under the wall into a cave under the castle, the same old zombies. it feels like coming home. no wonder konami did it over and over again. and yet they were always giving us new things to play with.
the item crash is one of the new features, huge, screen-filling attacks for massive damage that eat up large amounts of hearts based on your subweapons. and not every item crash is as useful as the subweapon it’s based on, and vice versa, requiring a bit of strategy.
there are also a number of kidnapped villagers you can rescue, including richter’s girlfriend annette, but more importantly maria, a 12 year old girl with magical powers over nature who got captured for trying to be a hero. here’s the thing about maria: she is *OP AF.*
what might take you 4–5 hours with richter will take you maybe 90 minutes with maria. she’s agile, has a high DPS (she can send out two doves at once, compared to richter’s one-and-done whip strike) and she’s smaller, which makes a big difference. it’s ludicrous and i love her.
the animated cutscenes, while not adding terribly much plot to a game that never needed it anyway, do a lot to give the game a more dramatic vibe. they have that aggressively 90s vibe of simple animation and simple colours, but in 1993 it must have made eyes pop.
(the plot isn’t all that important. it’s been 100 years since the first castlevania and some jerks have resurrected dracula. usually the jerks don’t matter, but one of them is an evil priest/mage/whatever named shaft. why shaft? who knows. anyway richter belmont has to go kick dracula’s ass.)
speaking of remakes and alternate releases, rondo of blood has both, neither of which are actually called rondo of blood. (fyi: a rondo is a music term for a composition that uses repeating elements or refrains. fitting, given the game’s self-referentialism.)
in 1995, rondo of blood was remade (or demade, if you will) into dracula x for the SNES. while in technical respects it’s mostly a step down (fewer branching paths, maria isn’t playable, less robust music) it’s arguably much nicer looking overall than rondo. look at that fire!!
in 2007 came a 2.5D remake of rondo of blood called dracula x chronicles for PSP (probably to compete with capcom’s 2.5D remakes of mega man and mega man X on the same platform.) among other things, it took advantage of the 3D engine for more dramatic cutscenes. that’s not really why anyone bought it though.
the big draw of dracula x chronicles was chance to unlock not only an updated port of symphony of the night, but also a fully-translated, english-voiced port of rondo of blood, the first time the game had an official US release. that’s one way to sell units!
sadly the PSP, like any handheld not made by nintendo, was doomed to obscurity and failure. an untranslated version of rondo of blood made it to the wii virtual console, but it wasn’t until castlevania: requiem for PS4 last year that the PSP editions of rondo of blood and symphony of the night were brought to console.
dracula X chronicles, for its part, is now taking its turn languishing in obscurity, though if you have a PSP or vita, you can still buy it off PSN. no luck with the PSTV though, unless you’re in europe. it also works in PPSSPP, but the old games do not.
rondo of blood will retain cult status as “that game symphony of the night is a sequel to” and while it continues to be out of reach for many players unless they have the right hardware, it’s still a remarkable milestone in the franchise, and a major step up in production values.
all in all, while it’s probably not the best of the “classicvanias” (imo that’s super castlevania IV) you could do worse than be second-best in a series as venerable as this, and it’s well worth tracking down by any means necessary. 8/10
thus concludes the first volume of this massive archival of a rather deeply personal project. it’s interesting, going back over these old reviews, and looking at where my head was at at the time — the things i focused on, the things i liked or disliked.
keep an eye out for volume 2!
