Gran Turismo 5 is finally here. So is my next collection of words.

I'm a fan of things that take a long time to create which reveal very little as to why it took so long. Just like my blog.



It is with this glorious spirit of procrastination that Gran Turismo 5 hits worldwide and three million anxious nerds sperg about how awful it is when in reality it's the same game we've been playing since 1998. If you were expecting a ground-breaking not-Gran Turismo I don't know what to tell any of you. You're literally retarded in as literal a fashion as I can mean literal to be. You're as retarded as those people that spent $100 for a keyring and a model car with a book that tells you not to crash into walls. It's an idiotic waste of one-hundred dollars but it looks so much better than Benjamin Franklin's fat face on my woman-repelling game shelf.

The driving itself is like any other Gran Turismo game, that is to say solid as a rock. The physics have indeed been improved but it's nothing a casual player would notice at all, especially with the pad. Odd quirks abound in this game and many are absolutely maddening. The much-publicized detail gap between "standard" and "premium" cars makes the quality of the game feel schizophrenic and on top of this no wheels can be changed on the lower-definition models. They imported these cars from a game which allowed you to do that so why not import the low-def wheels and let us use those? This installment also adds a leveling system similar to Forza's which keeps you from joining advanced races until you accrue the proper experience points. Because of this you're thankfully no longer required to take license tests but for some reason you also can't buy cars that are above your current driving level. As if the price of the higher-level cars wasn't barrier enough. And most bafflingly you can't change the colors of your racing suit at all after you've made the initial choice. At least the most exclusive car in the world, the Bugatti Veyron is a premium car, right? :( :( :(

On the plus side, Photo Mode returns and is better than any photo mode in any other game that ever did exist. Not only is it extremely intuitive but it also doesn't limit you in the ways Project Gotham or Forza tends to. Plus it includes settings and features you'd find in real photography so that's a major plus. And the cars look absolutely astonishing. The premium models do indeed edge out Forza's in visual fidelity, but many things are hilariously behind the times.

Everything I've just said is an aside. This game is, at its core, a racing simulator and as such attempts to simulate the reality of driving a car very fast. Everyone knows you can upgrade your chosen ride with various racing parts and this includes a racing transmission. Traditionally in every simulator ever created you can customize each and every gear ratio to suit the exact needs of the track at hand. Every simulator but this one, it seems. Sure you can pick a "quick tune" where you choose the theoretical top speed of your car. Fine and dandy but sometimes you need more fine tuning and the fact that it's not available is the worst crime this game commits. Imagine a surgeon needing a scalpel but the hospital only providing a bat'leth. A bat'leth with adjustable grips.

Gran Turismo 5: Flawless, gets 5/5 and is my vote for Game of the Year.

Terminator rides again.

For the past few months I've been trying to figure out whether Terminator: Salvation is a sequel or a prequel. The John Connor of the future sends his dad back in time to stop the the Terminator from killing present John Connor's mother before present John Connor could be born by Connor's dad who is younger than future John Connor, so by the time the first movie starts the future's already happened and we're looking at the past but it takes place in the present time so it's now. So Salvation begins before future John sends his dad to the past so that two sequels could be made but yet it still happens in the future and after the events of the first three movies but at the same time before them.

Fuck there's blood coming out of my left ear.

As a picture, Salvation is a very pretty one that visually fits better with the series than did the third movie. There are also touches here and there that tell me the movie was made by people who actually care about the franchise and paid attention to details. Unfortunately these caring individuals can't write a good twist so by the end of the movie I felt a bit cheated at how inept and human they made Skynet. Also some of the robots were clearly men in rubber suits. That was a shameful detail considering how expensive this movie was to exist.

On the very plus side, sound was fucking excellent and I really wanted to see more of the obsolete endoskeletons so I could hear their joints move. The title animation for this film puts Bay's Transformers to shame. It's too bad that Bay's movie has fun being dumb while Salvation is hampered with a nearly suffocating seriousness at times. Oh well, it's either that or Terminator 3 again and if something that awful happens again I'll shoot myself seventeen times.

If this review sounds confused and muddled well...it is. I can't really figure this thing out. I enjoyed myself and didn't want to hide my face in shame like I did while watching Wolverine, but I still wouldn't call it a good movie. I guess if you had to put this movie on the "Omni Consumer Products Scale of Goodness" it'd go like this:

Terminator 1&2 ≥ Robocop
Terminator 3 ≤ Robocop 3
Salvation = Robocop 2

EDIT: Ha ha I just noticed Star Trek already used "The Future Begins" tagline so you fail, Warner Bros.

ReStar Trek

The long-awaited and newest entry in the absolutely elderly Star Trek franchise is a welcome addition to both the sci-fi and action genres. The film starts with a bang as we see a fast-paced and explosive ship battle and the stride rarely slows from there. The few lulls in the movie seem placed to allow the viewer to rest from the heady action but allow for a good deal of character development and humour. When dealing with Star Trek you inevitably have the theme of time-travel woven into the plot and that does a good job of explaining the many contentions one might have with what they've done with the events tied to some of entertainment's most beloved characters. It doesn't really explain the ship and tech design changes but the re-imaginings of things like the communicator and the Enterprise itself are done with great respect to the source material and 'feels' very Star Trek.

Die-hards are going to pick these things apart but everything was done so well I have little argument with the way things were presented. A couple of plot devices used seemed a bit silly, but it was of little demerit when measured up against the rest of the film. The movie only seemed to be an hour long despite its 127 minute run time, an extremely telling yardstick of how engrossing it really is.

I can't help but say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys an exciting feature. I know I'm gushing and it's perhaps not the Star Trek I was expecting but it's definitely the Star Trek Paramount needs.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is quite the uneven fare. The first third of the movie plays out fairly well, sticking to latter-day Wolverine mythos better than expected whilst appending some new details into canon. It also does a very good job of not stepping on the toes of previous established fact from earlier films. Characters are introduced dutifully and with barely more than the necessary number of lines but it gets the job done and provides for entertaining action. I was ready to call this movie better than X-Men 3 until slightly beyond midway when they introduced Gambit. He seems to have been shoehorned into the movie rather clumsily and scenes including him feel unnecessary. And most everything after that felt to me like I stepped into another film. I suppose if I were walking into the theatre to see Fantastic Four part 3 I'd expect lots of camp but not in this series.

My beef isn't so much with the liberties they took with regards to accuracy; I notice but easily forgive it. It's the sheer lack of forethought in the placement of events and people, and the film lacks the feeling or meaning behind the first two X-films (a problem which plagued X3). If the first outing of the Origins sub-franchise is this mediocre then I fear it won't get any better.

Pluses: Airwolf
Minuses: No cajun accents :(
Potent Notables: I was too impatient to sit through the credits so if you could tell me how that went...

Sega GT Online is rubbish. Sega GT Online has cancers. Sega GT Online is the do-nothing father of my children.

I was rummaging through my game vault the other day.

Wait. Let's back up a bit for a history lesson.

I have a huge safe on a hill in the middle of Rothburg that I keep filled with all my games. Inside said safe is a diving board where I can plunge into my collection and swim around like a very uncomfortable lunatic. Please note that I have not done this. I was sitting at the end of my diving board contemplating my life when I spotted a disc I haven't spun in years: Sega GT Online. Looking back I should have just committed a lethal belly-flop into a tank full of jewel cases and HuCards.



Sega GT Online is an update to a sequel to a Dreamcast game that aimed at beating Sony at their own hundred-plus auto simulator. Judging by the number of Sega GT fanclubs and the game itself it seems they failed. I once compared the control of Pretty Fighter to that of sticking the gamepad up your ass and contracting your sphincter to press the buttons and it appears Sega succeeded in bringing that experience to the racing genre. It's not as if the controls are unresponsive, no; control problems lie squarely in the physics. Instead of giving the player the sensation of tire grip the programmers decided to simulate racing conditions if they happened underwater. If you could translate Mushmouth dialogue into physics you'd have the soupy-handling cars of Sega GT.

It doesn't stop with the wonderful driving experience either. Each car appears to be made of hardened sugar, with paint finishes that would make Willy Wonka envious. This would be truly fantastic if automobiles in real life looked edible. I've learned from experience that they are, in fact, not edible. Inside all that saccharine lies the heart of a multi-million DUI champion that I've lovingly dubbed "RAMN2U AI". Even though there's no cosmetic or functional damage there is a damage metre which, when when depleted (by hitting anything) will reduce the winnings one receives at the end of an event. Regardless of who hits whom, if two cars make contact you receive a damage penalty so using cars as barriers to assist in making turns is not the greatest idea.



Punitive damage doesn't stop the ingenious RAMN2U AI's muderous intent however. To them you don't even exist, which is just as well because you'll wish you didn't exist after an extended race on any of Sega GT's thirty or so uninspired tracks. Every course was painstakingly designed by Yu Suzuki's mentally and physically handicapped cousin to be as flat and forgettable as possible. I don't mean flat in this regard to mean lifeless though one could certainly apply it here but I intend that they are literally flat. The roads sort of meander and twist because that's what real race tracks do, I suppose, but they forgot the basic lessons learned by Columbus and his compatriots. The world is indeed curved and lumpy and if it weren't you'd kill yourself from boredom.

Sega GT's not all bad, though. It does have a Bugatti, which means this game stops just short making me feel raped by a rodeo clown and that's good enough for me.

I gave away the best surprise.

I just finished watching Re-Cycle, a Chinese horror movie known in the east as . It is the latest and greatest film out of Hong-Kong that I've seen, and watching this forced me to face the realization that I'd completely wasted my time watching The Ring and Dark Water. Perhaps it would have been more to my benefit to watch the original versions rather than the fuckups from the US.

At any rate, the first feeling one gets from the spookier bits is an air of familiarity. I couldn't help but compare what I was seeing and hearing to Silent Hill; the filmmakers decided to utilise dim lighting and dilapidated setwork seemingly inspired from that series, not to mention tense moments punctuated by a very Yamaoka-ish score. It didn't really help that they used the reprise of "Promise" from Silent Hill 2 in the deleted scenes montage.

It starts off creepily enough, but about halfway through it forgets it's a horror movie and does this sort of Taiwanese Alice in Wonderland thing as the main character tries to escape The Nothing by jumping from set to set with Exposition Girl in tow. It's not until shortly after the Hall of Fetuses that the director remembers what he's doing and reintroduces the big bad, who's apparently been on the protagonist's tail the whole time. After a stop in a field of flowers, we learn that the undead don't accept credit cards and are led to the resolution that, while a tad preachy, is still rather touching. Of course, like most good horror what haunts us never really leaves and oh my did I spoil that? You should be ashamed if you expected anything else.

I could take the movie apart further but when it comes down to it I enjoyed myself amid the fantastically-realised visuals and well-characterised lead and her phantom cohort.