Sonic Colors

            Sonic Unleashed, at least the Wii version (the PS360 version was a completely different beast that I didn’t play), was half a good game.  When you were playing as Sonic the hedgehog, the one you know and love, it was a thrilling experience that captured the speed and fun that Sonic should have.  The second you changed into a werehog, it turned into a slow beat-em-up that wasn’t worth trudging through.  Sonic Colors is Sega’s latest attempt to get that speed back into its own game.

            The plot is pretty basic stuff.  Eggman has opened up his own theme park in Earth’s orbit, with 5 different planets to visit.  Of course, these planets are inhabited by alien beings called Wisps which Eggman is using for his evil schemes.  So it’s up to Sonic to step in, save the Wisps, and stop Eggman.  It’s pretty basic stuff, not getting past Saturday morning cartoon level.  This is a good thing.  Recent Sonic games have gotten too caught up in trying to weave intricate tales that end up leaving Sonic and Eggman without a role compared to the new annoying sidekick and villain.  The game pares it down to Sonic vs. Eggman and his robots.  It’s also very much helped by a script from the writers of Happy Tree Friends and MadWorld.  It adds a nice bit of humor to it, instead of the serious business that recent Sonic gets caught up in.  Unfortunately, some of the humor comes from things Eggman is saying during the levels, which you simply can’t hear and it’s unsubtitled.  MadWorld had good sound balancing, even without subtitles, for me to hear all of the announcer’s phrases.  Why did they screw it over here?

            The gameplay itself is similar to the Sonic stages from Unleashed.  It has a mix of 3D and side-scrolling platformer action.  The game adds in a few new features.  The biggest ones are the Wisps, which act like powerups.  I was worried watching previews that this would harm the game, but it fits in pretty well.  They add a new dimension to the game without harming the gameplay, and keep up the sense of speed that Sonic games need.  There’s also quickstep segments, where Sonic auto-runs and all you have to do is move left and right to dodge obstacles.  This I feel more mixed about.  On the one hand, it gives a good sense of speed and it can be fun.  On the other hand, Sonic’s auto-run means if you get hit, you simply can’t pick up your rings.  This has always been a vital part of Sonic gameplay, so missing out on this makes the game significantly harder in these segments.

            And difficulty is easily the game’s biggest problem.  The first half of the game is fairly good, giving the right amount of challenge.  The second half hits you way too hard.  There’s tons of bottomless pits and one-hit-kill obstacles that you have to navigate through.  But really, the hardest part of this is the downright archaic life system.  You’re given 4 lives, and if you lose them all you get kicked out of the stage.  The main problem is that I just never got up a good life buffer like I did in Super Mario Galaxy.  It’s not helped by the fact that you’re not given a free life for getting 100 rings.  You only get more lives by finding them in the stage or getting an A-rank on stage.  Considering some of the tough segments the game throws at you, they really should’ve either been looser with the lives or gotten rid of the system altogether.  The game’s other big problem is its length.  There’s 7 worlds, and counting out the really short final one, there’s 6 stages and a boss per world.  The stage length is random.  Some stages took me many tries and 5 minutes on a good run, some I had done before I even realized I had started them.  Overall, I had the game beaten in 4 hours.  There are medals throughout each level to collect, but for the non-hardcore completionists, 4 hours is pretty short for a retail release.

            I do need to really praise the game for one thing: the graphics.  This is one of the nicest-looking Wii games I’ve seen, and definitely the best-looking one that’s not first-party.  It’s bright, it’s colorful, and it really captures the worlds well.  Some third-party developers get too dark and make murky visuals.  Kudos to Sonic Team for not falling into that trap.

            Overall, Sonic Colors is one step forward, one step backwards.  The pure Sonic gameplay that we’ve always wanted out of a 3D Sonic game is the biggest plus.  But the hard as nails difficulty and the unforgiving and ancient life system just stops me from wanting to pick it up again.  I’m sure some people will be fine with it, but for me, this was a bit of a deal-breaker.

Darkwing Duck: Crisis on Infinite Darkwings

            One of my favorite comics as a kid was Sonic the Hedgehog.  There was an issue before the series got all serious where there were a ton of Sonics from alternate dimensions.  I loved this issue.  It was just fun to see all the alternate Sonics, especially the huge crowd shot of them.  Crisis on Infinite Darkwings applies the concept to one of my favorite Disney cartoons.  Of course I have high expectations before I even start reading this.

            The story takes place shortly after the previous story arc, The Duck Knight Returns.  It’s not essential to read it before this one, but it probably helps.  Darkwing is just starting to get his reputation back in the public eye.  Unfortunately, some crazy alternate Darkwings are starting to terrorize the city.  Negaduck and Magica De Spell have been collecting Darkwings from every alternate dimension they can think of, and they release every one of them.  Hilarity, chaos, and many, many references ensue.

            The book’s strongest point is really James Silvani’s art.  For one, it perfectly captures the look and feel of the cartoon.  It’s big, active, and, most importantly of all, none of the characters ever look off-model, something that happens to licensed comics way too often.  He also crams as many gags and references he can into each page.  One panel has Darkwing flying over a crowd of people, and they’re all duck versions of the Disney princesses.  Of course, with all the alternate universe Darkwings, he really gets every chance to shine.  There’s huge crowd shots of them, and they’re often unique from panel to panel.  It would’ve been easy to just make a crowd of the same Darkwings for every shot, or draw some of them as undetailed background characters.  He didn’t take this shortcut.

            Of course, this also has a slight problem on the book.  There’s a ton of references to various franchises in these Darkwings, like Doctor Who, Transformers, Roger Rabbit, etc.  Unfortunately, this starts to get into too many references, not enough actual gags.  You can go through a crowd shot and nod at every reference you identify, but there’s just not enough humor going on with them.  It’s one of those cases where I love how far Silvani went, but at the same time, I almost want him to be pulled back a little bit.

            Fortunately, even when it’s not being funny enough, Ian Brill’s script is perfect superhero action.  The plot is good, the use of characters is good, and it has just enough callbacks to the original show.  It brings back a one-shot villain and a one-shot gadget, but it does it in a way that you know enough about the villain and the gadget is used in the right way.  And the use of cutaway gags is done well.  Single-panel cutaways that do their gag and get out fit the tone perfectly.

            Overall, Crisis on Infinite Darkwings isn’t quite as good as The Duck Knight Returns.  It’s still a worthy addition to Kaboom’s Disney cartoon line, and a good read for anybody who loves Darkwing Duck, or just wants a sillier take on superhero comics.

Inkheart

     

       I’m done with family-friendly adventure movies, at least if they’re not even going to try.  I understand you’re obviously reaching for a younger audience.  This doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice any joy, fun, character, and plot.  Yet this is what Inkheart does, with no apparent realization that being enjoyable is still a requirement to be a movie.

            The plot’s concept is certainly interesting enough.  Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) is a Silvertongue, somebody who brings characters from books to life by reading the stories out loud.  While he tries not to use his power, one day he reads Inkheart out loud (You may ask why…and so do I, as there’s no reason), which releases the heroic Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) and the villainous Capricorn (Andy Serkis), while dragging his wife into the book.  Now he travels with his daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett, who inexplicably has a British accent) to try and find another copy of Inkheart so he can get his wife back.

            This is about as far as the plot ever gets.  It’s a concept that could’ve been full of fun.  But the entire first half of the movie is dark and joyless.  Most of the opening minutes are either exposition or an introduction to Capricorn and his henchmen.  Capricorn doesn’t even appear to have a villainous plot until the final third of the movie, instead just being…villainous.  Andy Serkis isn’t even given a chance to ham it up, he just plays a generic villain.  I swear in several scenes you can even see his disbelief at the movie he’s stuck in.  The worst part of the villains, though, is that they almost uncomfortably look like Nazis.  While their plan isn’t anything similar to thank, thankfully, I can’t shake the feeling that they went way too far off the darkness edge.

            Every good hero needs a good villain, so of course we’re stuck with a bunch of incompetent idiots.  At one point, two of the heroes are being held up by the villains, who are looking for a Silvertongue.  One of the heroes just blurts out that the other is a Silvertongue.  It’s not a “maybe they’ll save me” thing, it’s really a “well, the plot has to go somewhere, so I better act like an idiot to move it along” thing.  Here’s a hint for good writing: the story should be moved along by intelligence, not by the heroes doing something incredibly stupid. 

I’m going to have to spoil two plot points here, to make a significant point about the movie.  I don’t feel too bad about this because one of them happens fairly early on, and the other hardly qualifies as a twist, but there you go.  In the climax of the movie, Meggie is forced to read from Inkheart and bring an even bigger villain, The Shadow, to life.  She does nothing to delay the summoning.  She doesn’t start padding, she doesn’t read it really slowly.  She just reads it normally.  It gets worse.  She’s doing this to save her mother.  She does this with full knowledge that, when The Shadow is summoned, its first act is going to be killing her mother.  If there is some hidden character motivation that I missed here, well, it’d be giving the movie too much credit to say that the characters have any motivation, or even anything resembling a brain.  When Mo loses a copy of Inkheart that he’s been searching 9 years for, his first thought is to go to the author’s house.  He’s been searching for 9 years and didn’t even consider that the author might have a copy.  There’s something called fridge logic, where you start asking questions about the movie once you hit the fridge after watching it.  My screenwriting teacher said that, as long as the audience doesn't ask questions until then, you’re good.  Inkheart failed on this.

Inkheart is a terrible movie.  Good family adventures should appeal to that sense of fun and wonderment that exists inside everybody, the inner child that loves fantasy.  I’m thinking Princess Bride, Stardust, MirrorMask.  While the latter two are aimed at a slightly older audience, they still have a great sense of a magical world while being playful about the situation.  This has no playfulness, no fun, no magic.  It’s a husk of a movie, missing its heart and its soul.

Fallout: New Vegas

            While I’ve never played more than a few minutes of the first two Fallout games, Fallout 3 was a very good, bordering on great, game.  It had an interesting world, fun gameplay, and was hampered by a story that was passable at best followed by an ending that didn’t matter.  For all its flaws, though, it provided a good follow-up in the vein of Oblivion.  New Vegas is better.  From start to finish, it’s just better.

            The story takes place in 2281, several centuries after a nuclear apocalypse happened, leaving America as a wasteland.  You play as a courier for the Mojave Express, who was supposed to deliver a platinum chip to the New Vegas strip.  On your way, you get shot, the chip is stolen, and you’re left for dead.  From there, you have to track down the man who shot you and get back the platinum chip.  And from there, it’s all up to you.  Fallout 3 had one plotline which you had to follow like a straight line.  At some point in New Vegas, the plot branches off in 4 different directions.  The best part of it is that there’s no black and white here.  You can’t peg any of the 4 paths as particularly good or evil.  In fact, it ends up a general rule of the Mojave Wasteland that every faction falls under different shades of grey.

            The faction system as a whole is much more interesting than the basic karma system (which is still around, but much less important).  The various groups and gangs of the Wasteland will like you more or less depending on your actions.  It’s a basic idea: they like when you do quests for them, they hate you running into town and slaughtering everybody.  What makes it really interesting is that your relations with factions will change how other people like you.  When I left one of my companions behind to do some Legion quests, talking to him again had him confronting me about working for them.  You can try to please as many people as you can, but more likely than not, a few people are just not going to be happy with you by the end of the game.

            There’s really nothing too new here in the basic gameplay.  For those who didn’t play Fallout 3, New Vegas is an action-RPG, playing half like a first person shooter and half like an RPG.  You build up your stats and fight with a chosen specialty in either firearms, energy weapons, melee weapons, or unarmed.  While it is possible to be a jack of all trades, it means you’re going to have to sacrifice points in skills like Speech, Bartering, or Lockpicking.  These are easily just as, if not more, important than the combat.  It’s extremely satisfying to talk your way out of fights or right into the enemy base.  This also means everybody can play the game a different way.  Whether you choose to sneak through enemy bases, slaughter everybody on your way in, or walk right through the front door and hack the guard robot, the game has it set up for you to do it.

            This could almost be seen as a good point for why I love the game so much as a whole.  You’re always given a choice, and there’s plenty of sidequests (far more than 3 had) where your choice matters.  It’s not just “I’m going to play this quest good or bad”.  One quest has you reactivating a power plant, and you’re given five choices where you can redirect the power.  While one of them is obviously evil (well, from a certain point of view), which of the other four you choose is entirely up to you.  This freedom from a karma meter is one of the nicest feelings in the world.  Bioware could learn a lesson from this.

            The game, sadly, does have flaws, and the flaws it has aren’t exactly small.  First, the graphics are ugly.  It looks like it’s running the same engine as Fallout 3, which I want to say was the same engine they used in Oblivion, which came out in 2006 and didn’t look great then.  Four years have not been kind on this engine.  And the other thing it took from Oblivion is the bugs.  I was fairly lucky to only get hit by one major one, where I outright lost my dog companion.  There are far worse ones that could possibly completely cut you off from completely certain paths or certain quests, and the released patches and DLC have managed to screw things up even more.  My suggestion: Always keep a backup save on file, and if you even think you’ve hit something that’s wonky, get on the Fallout Wiki.  The last thing you want to do is be walking around in a completely screwed up game world.

            Despite this glaring lack of QA, New Vegas is a world I was completely engrossed in from start to finish.  The characters are interesting.  The Mojave Wasteland is a far more interesting world than 3’s Washington DC, with the Strip being a highlight.  And the quests and choices just had me hooked.  At the end, there’s an epilogue that shows what happened to the various characters and factions you met along the way.  Minor sidequests I had done long hours ago suddenly came back to show me what results I had on it.  I wanted to head right back into the game, make a new character, and see how things would change if I had done things differently.  That is the sign of a good game.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

    

        In theory, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is based on the Fantasia segment of the same name, replacing Mickey Mouse with Jay Baruchel and Yen Sid with Nicolas Cage.  In practice, it would not surprise me at all to learn that this was a script with a completely different name, that had the broom scene (changed to mops here) shoe-horned in to justify the title.  There’s really no reason to call this The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which is always a good sign.

            The movie, after a completely uninteresting narrated exposition-thon, goes to Balthazar Blake (Cage), a sorcerer who’s been looking for the Prime Merlinian, the only person that can destroy a trapped Morgana.  It turns out that reluctant and awkward Dave Stutler (Baruchel) is it.  After accidentally being trapped for ten years for no reason that matters to the overall plot, Blake finds Stutler again and has to race to train him in magic and stop the also-freed Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina) from freeing Morgana and destroying the world.

            As a whole, the story and characters are just filling in clichés.  Dave is the nerdy and unlikely hero, Balthazar is the tough mentor, Maxim is the hammy villain played by a medium-name character actor.  It’s not so much a cliché storm as it is a methodical checklist, constantly going down and checking off every plot point as it comes along.  The movie has no real twists that anybody who’s seen a fantasy movie in the last 20 years won’t see coming.  Characters are given traits randomly just so that they can be followed up on later.  Dave’s love interest, Becky Barnes (Teresa Palmer) is afraid of heights, so of course she has to climb to the roof of a building in the final act.  It’s not so much Chekov’s gun as it is a completely expected callback.

            The love interest angle as a whole is just handled poorly.  Dave embarrassed himself with her in 4^th grade, so of course she’s the only girl he can possibly go after when he finds her again.  They’re given no chemistry together, and Dave ends up looking creepy most of the time, stalking her outside of her job.  It’s like it was just another item on the checklist that they had to mark off.  Speaking of things that aren’t followed up on, Morgana is trapped in one of those Russian dolls, and each “layer” of person trapped has to be freed before she can be freed.  This could’ve been a good opportunity to get in a lot of battles.  Instead, the top layer is the villain and the 2^nd layer is a mystical Chinese warrior for an early action sequence.  The third layer is a Puritan girl who’s almost immediately killed, making her role in the movie completely pointless, and then it’s down to Morgana.  It’s a silly magical item that could’ve been a way to have a lot of fights, but instead it ends up as…just a silly magical item.

            For all of its flaws in story, there are a few good parts to the movie.  A magic-influenced car chase through New York City stands out.  As inappropriate as a car chase is, it’s actually a pretty good action sequence given a nice fantasy twist, showing what this movie could’ve had more of.  When it lets the magic be pure fun, it also shines through a bit.  The villain takes a calendar of wolves and turns them into a wolf pack chasing after Dave.  Balthazar pulls out a palm-sized book and unfolds it until it becomes a huge spellbook.  The Chinese guy is fought in Chinatown, where he turns a dragon costume into a real dragon.  It’s cool, it’s different, and it gives the sense of wonder that most of the movie is missing.  And, I’ll give it credit even though I shouldn’t, the mop sequence is actually pretty good (whether this is a nod to the filmmakers for adapting the sequence well or a nod to Walt Disney for making a sequence that continues to be great through time is up to the viewer).

            It’s really not a bad movie.  It’s also not a good movie.  It’s a firmly OK movie, 110 minutes of family-friendly action-fantasy that you’d expect from the director of the National Treasure movies.  For the movie’s few moments where there’s a real sense of magic, it’s almost worth sitting through.

X-Men: First Class

            When I kept thinking of all the big superhero movies coming out this summer, X-Men: First Class was the one that always slipped my mind.  Between Marvel’s next two entries in the road to Avengers, and DC’s first big-budget movie of a hero that’s not Superman or Batman, it seemed that another X-Men movie was just going to get lost in the shuffle.  So to say First Class went well and above my expectations is an understatement.

            The plot takes place in 1962, focusing on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It turns out that it’s being manipulated by Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).  In response, the government calls in Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his friend Raven (Jennifer Lawrence). After an early attempt to stop Shaw, they also pick up Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), who has a far more personal motivation for wanting to stop him.

            I guess the biggest question has to be addressed first: Xavier and Erik.  Needless to say, McAvoy and Fassbender are stepping into some very big shoes by taking over roles that have basically been ingrained as Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.  Instead of trying to copy the roles, they instead make them their own, mainly thanks to the excellent script.  Xavier is less of the all-knowing mentor and more of the rollicking fresh-out-of-college type.  An early scene has him using his mental powers and intelligence about mutations to flirt with a girl in a bar.  Many sequences of exposition work thanks to McAvoy’s really charming performance.  Erik really ends up being the focus of the film, though.  We know he’s going to turn from Xavier and become Magneto by the end, but it’s how he gets there that makes it interesting.  From the start, he’s equally sympathetic and fierce.  You like him and understand his actions, even as he goes further off the edge.  When he makes a major decision at the end that truly leads to his breaking apart from Xavier, you know exactly why he’s doing it.  There were talks for a while of making a Magneto origins movie.  This tells me more than that possibly could have.

            The other major plotline in the movie involves Raven, aka Mystique, and Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), who share the fact that their mutations affect their appearance.  Mystique to me was always “that shapeshifter in the Brotherhood” for the first two X-Men movies.  She was a cool character, but she wasn’t too important to the plot.  Here, her plot is one of the best parts about the movie.  Her character is incredibly developed.  It could have been a simple “I just want to be normal” thing.  Instead, we see far different influences from Xavier and Erik, one leading her to be normal, one leading her to be the mutant she is.  The romantic aspect of her with Hank just adds to this.  Even knowing where she goes in the end doesn’t necessarily mean you know how her character will go here, which is how a prequel should work.  It adds a great emotional aspect to this.

            And with all its character development, it still has some great action sequences and special effects.  I can’t spoil the final action sequence, but it’s easily the best example of it, with huge setpieces, good special effects, and huge stakes.  Shaw’s plan wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond movie, but it really adds to the movie’s 60s-styled charm.  There’s a submarine that has a lavish lounge in the middle of it.  It’s silly, but in that way where it’s just adding a bit of fun to the movie.  I can almost recommend it not just as a superhero movie but also as a sleek sci-fi spy movie.

            This is a franchise that needed some new blood, and it got it in a ton of ways.  With further character development, a new villain, new actors, and a shift to the 60s, they’ve made a far more exciting and more interesting X-Men movie than I was expecting or could’ve possibly hoped for.