Homefront

Developed by Kaos Studios

Published by THQ

            Homefront looked promising the first time I saw a trailer for it.  A game about a resistance force fighting an enemy on US soil.  Maybe not original (I can immediately think of Freedom Force), but I was excited.  And then I played it.  It’s hard to tell exactly when the excitement completely faded and I realized just what I was playing.

            The story takes place in the near future where, after Kim Jong-Il’s death, Kim Jong-un’s actions led to the reunification of North and South Korea, the takeover of Japan, and an invasion of a weakened America.  This is all explained in an opening cinematic over various newscasts, and expanded on through newspapers scattered throughout the game, which is actually a great use of a collectible to give the player more backstory.  The game itself stars the mute Robert Jacobs, a former pilot who’s being captured by the Koreans before he’s rescued by the resistance.

            The game actually has quite a few hard-hitting moral questions throughout, like the nature of war and the violence and terrible actions on both sides.  And it handles all of this in the most hilariously incompetent way possible.  It certainly doesn’t help that the campaign is a mere 7 levels long, and can be beaten in about 3 hours.  I’m not complaining about the length, I like short games.  But this is a case where the game scratches at the world it’s created and then shrugs and goes “We don’t have time for this”.  We get hints of the racism that has become prevalent, with Americans killing any Koreans they find, even American-born citizens.  But then the game just moves on.  It never gets back to the point.  Connors (and HOO-BOY will I get to Connors later) seems to have his own horrific tendencies, but he never develops as a character or becomes a villain or anything like that.  And at one point, one of your resistance teammates sees the Koreans bombing an American shantytown, realizes it’s thanks to the resistance’s last operation, and has a “My God what have we done” moment…then somebody tells him to shut up.  And the game just goes on.  Tough moral ambiguity?  Naw, go shoot some guys.

            Of course, the story is also offset by several other problems.  Let’s start with the product placement.  For whatever reason, Hooters and White Castle have significant product placement in the game, and it’s damn hard to take a game seriously when you have Connors yelling at you “There’s enemies in the Hooters!”  There’s also terrible scripting.  While I’m hanging back and poking around for newspapers, my teammates are just moving on.  Continuing on with dialogue that I can’t hear and can barely read in the subtitles, never mind if I had them off.  The scripting also means that you’re constantly waiting for teammates to finish a conversation before they open the door to continue the level, or in one instance, crawl under something and remove the invisible wall.  And there are LOTS of invisible walls.  I haven’t seen this many in a long time.

             The gameplay itself is…unremarkable.  I mean, I just got done playing Modern Warfare 3, and say what you will about Call of Duty, but I think it’s perfected what it does.  And you can tell that kind of thing when you play a game doing exactly what CoD does but not as good.  There’s regenerating health.  There’s a bunch of generic machine guns with different scopes as weapons.  I’ve seen it all, and I’ve seen it better.  The levels aren’t exciting.  There’s some nice moments.  One level that involves flying a helicopter around almost approaches genuinely good.  The AI clearly becomes scripted.  I’d die, go back, and watch the AI do the same exact thing it just did.  The regenerating health also feels…off.  I don’t know how to explain it.  It regenerates too fast when you’re hiding, but at the same time, if you’re out in the open and getting shot, you die almost instantly.  I guess you’re just expected to hide back in cover.  Or, as Connors would say, “GET YOUR ASS TO COVER!”

            Oh yes, I’m going to bring up Connors, and I’m going to talk about one of my least favorite things in games.  It seems to be constantly plaguing games I would at least somewhat enjoy otherwise, and it is what I will call “MOVE YOUR ASS!” syndrome.  It’s the feeling of the game that, if you don’t have somebody in your squad, preferably whichever person would be annoying on his own circumstances, constantly telling you to move and get to cover and shoot that guy and do this, you’re not going to do it.  And it REALLY gets on my nerves.  I just get tired of being constantly told to move my ass.  And the game does it no matter where I am.  I’m practically hugging Connor and he’s telling me to move my ass.  I’m a mile in front of him and he tells me to move my ass.  A scripted event happens, time to move my ass.  Games need to let my ass do whatever it wants to do.  I’ll go ahead and let this tangent go further off-topic by relating a story.  In Half-Life 2: Episode I, Alyx was originally going to keep telling the player to keep moving forward.  Valve, in their playtesting, realized everybody was hating Alyx, and quickly made her shut up.  So what if the player ends up screwing around with the gravity gun.  Let the player do what they want to do, and when they’re ready to move on, the game moves on with them.

            At the end of Homefront, the game just kinda…ends.  The final level’s a pretty cool location and all, but it just feels like you finished the second act, you’re pumped up for the third, and the credits start rolling.  Kaos Studios shut down shortly afterwards, and now it looks like THQ is heading for the same place.  Any hopes for a sequel that can actually take the game’s good ideas and make something great out of them are quickly diminishing.  There’s just so much better out there.

In Time

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol

            Some movies have a great concept that they just don’t know what to do with.  Let’s take In Time.  It’s about a world where time is money…literally.  Once people hit 25, they’re given a year to live; a year that also becomes their currency.  They can get more time and live longer, they can spend all their time and die.  It’s fascinating, and yet the movie just stumbles with it.

            Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in a ghetto and is basically living a day at a time.  When Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) gives him over a hundred years and tells him of a conspiracy, Will uses it to go to the upper-class neighborhood (they’re divided into time zones.  Get used to the puns now, they keep coming.), where he has to escape pursuit by timekeeper Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy, who’s 35 and looks it) and kidnaps Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried).

            The main problem with the plot is that it just lurches forward randomly.  There will be scenes that do nothing for the plot, and then suddenly the next scene moves the plot forward several steps.  It also radically transforms along the way, with Will eventually becoming a time-based Robin Hood.  Which brings me to my main problem with the movie: the moral ambiguity.  I keep trying to dissect the movie in my mind to see if it’s intentional or not, and no, I don’t think it is, and I’ll be writing this review on that assumption.  Which makes it really screwy.  Robbing the rich and giving to the poor is fine when money is just money.  When it’s people’s lives, it starts to hit this awful spot.  At one point, he carjacks somebody and takes all the passenger’s time except for a day, in what I assume is the ghetto.  Where there’s gangsters called Minutemen who also rob people’s time, so she’ll likely die (by the way, the giving of time is not consensual, as one scene has a character knocked out and most of her time stolen from her.  Since people can DIE if somebody takes all their time, this is a big question mark that’s just not solved).  But it’s OK because the movie says it is.  Now I sadly have to spoil the movie to question more of the moral ambiguity, so if you wish to not be spoiled, skip the next paragraph.

            Let’s start with one of the big scenes: when Will gets his 100+ years, he gives 10 years to his friend because they’ve been friends for 10 years.  It’s actually a really nice scene.  When Will comes back later, the wife is at the door and says the friend drank himself to death.  This is rather stupid on its own, but it just leads to bigger questions.  At the end, in what’s supposed to be a “poor rise up!” happy ending, the poor all get a huge influx of time.  And we’re meant to assume that none of them are going to waste it on drinking.  Oh, and by the way, this is all stolen time.  At some point, Will and Sylvia start robbing banks to get time.  I could see this movie another way, where Will voluntarily gives his own time away and ends up sacrificing himself.  That would give a decent moral.  Instead, the apparent moral is “The rich are stealing from you so rob banks”.  I just wish the movie had given one nod that Will is meant to be in the grey, at least an anti-hero.  Instead it just seems to show him as ultimately good and all the ambiguity is swept under the rug for a happy ending.

            There’s also a lot of the world that’s just not explored.  I understand that you can only do so much in a movie, but at the end I’m left wondering big questions like, “How did the world get here?  Why 25?  Do babies have their magic clocks already installed when they’re born?  Are people still born?”  Perhaps the biggest question of all is “With such an original idea, why wasn’t this movie better?”  It’s not awful.  There’s some nice scenes and an interesting world here, but it’s buried in an indecisive plot and troubling morals.  Disappointing.

The Amazing Spider-Man

Directed by Marc Webb

Written by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves

           

            I was initially wary about Amazing Spider-Man.  I loved the first trilogy (even the third one, although the second remains my favorite), but I was more just scared that the movie would tread over the same origins and end up doing the same thing.  I should’ve known that there was something more here.

            Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) loses his parents at a young age and ends up living with his Aunt May (Sally Field) and Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen).  In search of information about his father’s death, he ends up getting bitten by a genetically-altered spider and becoming Spider-Man.  And of course, he also has to pursue his uncle’s killer, fight The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and fall in love with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) while avoiding her police captain father (Denis Leary).

            The thing that this film does really well is stretching things out.  It’s well-paced, but it also knows how to take its time.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the first Spider-Man movie, but I remember it being very rapid fire.  He gets bitten, Ben dies, Peter gets out of high school.  It’s always trying to move on.  Here, Uncle Ben doesn’t die until a good half hour in, and I don’t even know how much longer it is after that until Peter puts on the suit for the first time.  You don’t feel it, though.  What the movie is really doing is giving you more time to get to know the characters and gives a better feel of Peter adjusting to his powers.  When he suddenly starts getting literal sticky fingers, it’s not just “Oh cool, I can do this now” and then moving on.  It’s several mishaps of accidental destruction until he figures it out.

            The tone has also shifted significantly along the way.  While the trilogy had its darker moments, they were fairly light.  Amazing is closer to the dark side.  Peter doesn’t come home after fighting villains with just a scratch he can hide, his entire face is bruised, even if he won.  There’s that constant element of the tragedy that always seems to loom over Peter.  He doesn’t just hide his identity so villains don’t find out about him; he doesn’t want people worrying about him.  The police mark him as a vigilante and pursue him throughout the movie, especially since some of his initially heroic-seeming actions quickly prove to have consequences.  And for its darker tone, it doesn’t forget its comedy.  Along with the standard slapstick, they gave Spider-Man some actual lines during several of the fights.  The wisecracks are here in full force.

            The choice of the Lizard as the villain had me worried initially.  I’ll admit this is mainly because his head looks like the Goombas from the Super Mario Bros movie.  But he works.  The best villains are always the dark reflection of the hero, which is exactly what the Lizard is.  Not only are they both marked by genetic changes, but their goals are similar.  They both feel they have a responsibility to do what they do.  It’s the simple fact that the Lizard’s responsibility becomes twisted along the way that makes him the villain.

            Amazing Spider-Man is the Batman Begins to the franchise.  For all the similarities to the first movie, it separates itself with a different tone and style.  If the new franchise can continue on this path, it could easily eclipse the original series.  And that would be really…incredible.

Bastion

        

    I love it when everything in a game comes together.  The gameplay, the story, the graphics, the sound design.  It can be rare to see it all just click so well.  Bastion does it.

            The Kid finds that he’s survived the world-ending Calamity, and heads to the Bastion, a safe haven, to see who else survived.  But the only other person he finds is Rucks (Logan Cunningham), who sends him out to find the Cores that will restore the Bastion.

            Rucks also acts as the constant narrator for the game, and never has a narrator done so much for a game.  Mainly because the narration is entirely dynamic.  You have two weapon slots with a bunch of weapons you can switch around, and the narrator has something to say about every one of the 50+ combinations.  If you start smashing a bunch of boxes in the first area, he’ll comment “The Kid just rages for a while.”  In one point where it’s possible to fall off a moving ship, at the end he’ll say how many times you fell off.  This isn’t just a bunch of pre-scripted stuff that’d go off no matter what you did, it’s actually talking about what you’re doing.  And he does this while also giving you the backstory of the world as you walk through the areas.  He’s the one voice in the game, and so well done that you begin to miss it when he isn’t talking.

            The gameplay itself takes elements of top-down action games and perfects them.  You’re allowed to choose two weapons and a secret skill, and the customization really seems endless.  No matter how you want to play the game, there’s a weapon set that will let you play that way.  You can go for the standard melee and long-distance weapon combo, or you can go for two different kinds of guns.  Your secret skill can wipe out enemies all around you, or just help you get out of a tough spot.  Each weapon has several upgrades, and you can actually switch which upgrades are active inbetween levels.  If you’re finding that letting you move faster while firing isn’t really making a big difference, there’s no “Dang, should’ve chosen the other one,” you just switch upgrades.  You’re also given various drinks (which give you powers) and idols (that make the game harder, but give you a greater cash reward) that you can swap out.  However you want to play the game, the game’s ready to be played that way.  It also has a wide range of enemy varieties.  There’s little guys that will charge into you, bigger guys spitting acid all over the floor, turrets that will shoot at you.  And the enemies you fight change throughout the game so that you get some familiarity while also not feeling like you’re just fighting the same 3 guys over and over.

            And this is all presented with some incredible graphics.  I don’t know if they’re hand-drawn or just look like they are, but it’s a great game to just look at.  It’s like you’re playing an animated movie.  The environments pop up in the air as you walk through, “restoring” themselves after the calamity.  And they all look different.  From the former city to the wilds to snow-covered peaks, you always know where you are, and the narrator lets you know what the place was like before the end.

            Bastion really is one of those games that’s near-perfect.  Plenty to do, plenty to see, and plenty to hear.  With a New Game Plus mode, it’s tempting to just go right back into it.  This is as great as the end of the world gets.