District 9

Well, it wasn't horrible, i can safely say that. District 9 is one of those movies that i walked out of and didn't know what to think. I wasn't disappointed, but i wouldn't say i was entertained either. I think the problem is the film was too scattered for me to form an easily defined opinion on it.

The premise is that aliens have come to earth but, instead of raging war, are simply some kind of pathetic group of refugees, found starving to death in their own mothership by humans (the ship had been left floating for months in earths atmosphere). The humans take pity on these aliens and promptly do what humans do best: quarantine them in a massive concentration camp. From here on out the aliens are essentially treated like any minority, complete with all the biases that go along with that.

It's a different kind of premise that just screams all kinds of questions at you. Like: how is it that aliens that are capable of space travel end up starving to death on their own mothership? Why did they come here to begin with? How does the mothership defy gravity? Why are the aliens so ill-prepared for space travel - a journey they surely must have undergone hundreds of times before? Why didn't the aliens attempt contact first?

The film tries to give some hand-waved answer to some (but certainly not all) of these questions, but the attempt is more trouble than it attempts to satisfy. I guess we're just not supposed to think about these kinds of things... i mean, the writers obviously didn't.

Neil Blomkamp (director) utilizes "mockumentary style" for the entirety of the film - complete with sections of fake "interviews" with the characters. No doubt this was meant to be "different" but it just comes off as kind of distracting. Particularly since halfway through the movie the film drops all pretense of a documentary and turns to full-out action sequences. The shakey camera, inexplicably, remains. It does return to it's mockumentary roots, but not until after a good hour or so.

The story itself is kind of about racism and discrimination. It's an allegory for apartheid south africa (the forced removal of the residents of District 6, specifically) - but with aliens instead of black people. Actually, there are black people in the movie. Nigerians to be specific - they're the unambiguously evil ones. Actually, i don't think they were attempting to stereotype in that role, it's just sort of unfortunate that it happened.

One of the things that kind of bugged me in the movie is Blomkamp's choice of main character: Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a whiny, stuttering, bumbling government employee who only got where he is through pure nepotism. Gee, how often have we seen that stereotype? Way to fucking much! Sure, he grows throughout the movie (mostly in realizing how utterly foolish he was), but i couldn't help but think that the characterization was so unnecessary. Either Wikus is a not-so-subtle jab at government employees in general or a pathetic character only the equally pathetic audience could relate to.

On the whole, the movie's not bad. Sometimes it's hard to determine what Blomkamp was going for: an action movie with heads exploding or a story about discrimination. Having both isn't bad, though, since an action movie without a point is moronic and a movie with a moral but no action feels like a lecture. It still feels weird when it switches gears though.

As i said, this movie isn't bad... but it's not good either. Either my sense of tase has been systematically eroded thanks to the crap coming out of hollywood or this truly is an average film deserving of everything that title bestows. At any rate, i give this movie 4 unanswered questions out of 7 - that's a C.

By the way, sorry for the lame picture. Sometimes a movie is so unremarkable in its mediocrity you can't say anything clever about it. Don't worry, one of these reviews i'll come up with a good picture again!

Mass Effect

No, i'm not dead, i've just been... bored. Anyway, after many a weeks, here's a new review! This time, Mass Effect!

Yup, another video game review - mostly because there's nothing but awful awful movies in theatres recently. I did see an awful movie on tv recently, but that's about it. Maybe i'll review it later.

Anyway, Mass Effect is an "old" game, so let's get on with the review before it's already announced sequel is released.

Gameplay and Control:

I played Mass Effect on my brother's XBox 360, so the control is based on their controller. You play as (insert name here) Sheppard, one of humanity's best soldiers. Actually, you have a choice of making Sheppard one of a number of different character classes from combat heavy soldier to support heavy engineer or anything in between (but the engineer's the best).

As far as most of the game control is concerned, it's pretty good. Using weapons and abilities (the core of combat gameplay) is fairly intuitive and control of the main character is very effortless.

It's a little annoying that Sheppard can't pivot on a dime, instead needing to walk in a circle to turn around. This is only problematic because occasionally you'll end up getting stuck in some piece of background while trying to turn around in very tight spaces. It's not a big thing and happened to me only a couple times, but still annoying. Thankfully, recovery is fairly easy.

The main problem in control comes from using the incredibly broken Mako, a tank of kinds. The mako itself has 6 wheels, but controlling it feels like it's only got one. Slight movements in the joysticks will send your car hurtling over debris and the steering control is nothing short of abysmal. Because of this, one might think straight-aways would be a dream, but no. The overly sensitive joystick will have you veering all over the place even on the straightest of roads.

Ok, so driving sucks. But the bad control doesn't stop there - even shooting with the mako is terrible! The cross-hairs on the screen are largely meaningless when aiming. If the target is too close (and they "don't exist" in memory if you're too far - but their bullets do) the crosshairs provide no degree of accuracy. Essentially, you'll want to "zoom in" on everything if you ever want to hit whatever it is you're shooting at.

This wouldn't be so nightmarish, but you're pretty much required to use the mako in every bloody mission! Sure, you can get out whenever you want, but most planets have "hazardous" atmospheres that will slowly kill you and objectives are impossibly far apart on foot, so you're pretty much required to drive. You will eventually get "used to" the controls, but you will never like them. NEVER!

Other than the combat sections of the game, which are solid, the game has segments of "talking missions". These can get drawn out at times, but are necessary to provide the backstory to the game. They also allow you to shape your character's personality through the game's choice system. There are some combat related choice missions, but most of the choices come in conversations.

Like most games that offer choice, your choices are between "good" options and "evil" options. Unlike most games, Mass Effect also gives you a "neutral" option, but these give you the least interesting cut scenes and benefits, essentially ensuring you never ever use them.

Depending on how you play, you'll get either "paragon" or "renegade" points that will allow you to unlock other speech options in a depressingly few conversations throughout the game. Unfortunately, while the existence of choice is a good novelty, it seems to be only that, and the game will continue no matter what you say or do. To a degree, this is good, since "open sandbox" shouldn't mean the game's story is compromised repeatedly, but it also means you'll only be making the choices for the complete novelty of being known as either a renegade or paragon.

Graphics and Music:

Graphics are good and the create your own character section at the beginning is a nice touch. Unfortunately, and this may be only my XBox, sometimes the details won't load in completely. Colour palettes and other "superficial" details are the usual victims.

The graphics are largely great, but this comes at a horrible price: loading! I hate loading screens. Personally, i'd prefer a trade down in graphics to loading screens, but the graphics whores of the world essentially drive the gaming market now and they don't seem to care about loading screens so long as graphics are top notch. Ultimately, if you can handle the frequent loading, you'll love the graphics.

Music is well done, too, adding atmosphere but staying in the background. There's a flaw in my copy that occasionally has the music trumpet over the voice acting, but with subtitles on, it's not an issue. My only real qualm with the score is it tends to be composed almost entirely of extremely short pieces of music, several bars in length, requiring them to loop it infinitely. Ah well. As i've said before, music is background to gameplay and story, and in Mass Effect, that's not different.

The Story:

Because Mass Effect gives you so many opportunities to exercise choice, i was deceived into thinking the story was far deeper than it actually was. Personally, i was expecting a story with scores of double agents, villains becoming good guys, good guys becoming villains and conspiracy theories aplenty. However, this is a far cry from what the story actually is - and i won't go into the story details here for obvious reasons.

This isn't to say the story's BAD, just a little more simplistic than you'd guess just by the initial set ups.

One of the better done aspects was side-quests that actually fit into the mainline story. Almost all games have side-quests now, but few will bother to integrate them into the story and they just become "tack ons" for those aiming at 100% completion. While Mass Effect sidequests don't drastically alter the mainline story, they do compliment it.

There's also a side romance story that's fun if for nothing else than some of the funniest choice-response combos in the game. I find something absolutely hilarious with Sheppard's flirting style and inflections. Definitely the one moment i was thrilled to have voice acting.

Characters:

Mass Effect's characters come from a variety of different alien races, almost all of which hate each other. While the characters are remarkably well fleshed out, it just seems like your character, Sheppard, is the only one who isn't a rabid racist... that is, if you choose for him not to be.

Unfortunately, despite the scores of characters you will meet on your journey, most are forgettable. In fact, the only characters of any interest are the ones on your own crew who you can talk to between missions. But even your crew has a set of stock personalities and almost everyone's character can be summed up with two to three sentences.

While this is definitely a weak point, it's not enough to make the game bad by any stretch.

Final Comments:

All in all, i liked this game. It was fun, had an interesting enough story and the choices added just enough of a spice up to make me feel like my decisions mattered (even if they really don't).

There's definitely replay value in going through and choosing other character classes or different speech options. There's even alternative difficulties, if you're into that sort of thing. The only downside is that no matter how many times you go through the game, no matter what choices you make, the story will never ever change beyond one or two sentences from select responses.

I have many choices for my rating system here, but all of them are essentially an A.

It's Massive Effective!