I have absolutely no reason for posting this, other than the fact it's probably the cutest thing I've seen in ages. Just try and stop yourself from d'awwwwing over it. I dare you.

Shoot Em Up

93 Minutes

When Shoot Em Up was released in cinemas, it was to - at best - lukewarm reviews. 'It's too shallow and brutal' they said. 'Too many gunfights, too much violence, no depth whatsoever and an utter dearth of meaningful characterisation. Just action, action, action from one end to the other, 3/10.'

Never did it seem to occur to anyone that that was precisely the point.

The movie opens with Clive Owen, a man with a face hewn from finest teak, sitting on a bench. He looks mean and moody, the most dangerous hobo ever to stir his tea with a carrot. His name - of course - is Smith. When he sees a pregnant woman being chased by a man with a gun, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy involving a powerful anti-gun lobbying senator, a baby farm and a firearms manufacturer. And yes, this is about as simple as things ever get.

This is a movie that thrives on the Rule Of Cool - it doesn't matter how idiotic or improbable (or outright impossible) it would be in real life, if it sounds cool, it's gonna work. So we have gun factory deathtraps that would require a ludicrous amount of luck and/or planning to set up; giving birth in under five minutes while under (and returning) heavy gunfire, then shooting the umbilical cord in lieu of cutting it; and, lest we forget, killing several people with carrots. And again, these are the least convoluted moments in the entire movie, it gets worse! It's somehow fitting that the end features the slowest quickdraw contest ever seen in cinema.

Shoot Em Up is really little more than an extended love letter to the action movie genre. Clive Owen delivers a suitably pithy one liner after every massacre, while Monica Bellucci plays... well... Monica Bellucci, this time as a lactating prostitute. Standout of the show is Paul Giamatti, better known for his role in the criminally never-picked-up pilot for Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head (around these here parts at least) who is, by turns, a complete bastard and the most understanding boss ever. There is a vague attempt to give the characters some depth, which either works well (Giamatti's dealings with his family) or really, really badly (Bellucci's revelation before the obligatory 'passionate pants-on hugging' scene). How much more fun (and in keeping with the spirit of the movie) would it have been for the subplot surrounding Smith's background to have ended with him saying 'By the way, that guy? Not me!"

Shoot Em Up really is a brainless action movie - as far as the plot goes - with enough violence to make even the most jaded 80s action hero smile, and enough firepower to leave a Tetragrammaton Cleric walking funny for a week, if he was capable of feeling anything. When it comes to the inventiveness and originality in its action sequences, you'd be hard pressed to find anything smarter.

Thinking about it, isn't Macross really the Japanese Battlestar Galactica?

Rengoku II: Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N.

PSP

14:52 Hours


I don't do it on purpose y'know. It's not like I actually go out of my way to track down really obscure games. I just sit and think 'I'm bored of all these cod-Tolkein RPGs set in the same pseudo-medieval realms. Why can't I find something in a more modern or futuristic setting?' Then, ten minutes later, I'm playing Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and finding myself utterly addicted to a franchise that's offering me everything I've ever wanted in an RPG. It's not just role-playing games either. I go out looking for an FPS - arguably the most mainstream genre today, outside of sports - and walk back with two Russian games, one based loosely on a classic of impressionist cinema, the other one of the most crushingly depressing games you'll ever play. It's not deliberate, it's just that, more and more, I find myself having to venture off the beaten track to find games that scratch the gaming itches I'm afflicted with.

Take Rengoku II. The original, Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory was a launch title for the PSP. It sucked. The graphics were tiny and pathetic, the stages consisted of boxes with uninspired textures, the combat, while hiding a few good ideas, was laughable at best and with a name that literally translates to Purgatory: Tower of Purgatory, owner of the most redundant title since Manos: The Hands of Fate. Sure, the ideas were great, the story was fantastic, and the music was solid, but the execution was abysmal. In a better game, they would've been something special. Thankfully, someone at Hudsonsoft agreed and gave us Rengoku II, an infinite improvement on the original that delivers everything the first game promised, but failed to deliver.

I tried explaining the story to a friend of mine recently. Didn't go down too well.

Friend: So, tell me about this game.
Me: Okay, there's these combat androids inside this tower. They're relics of a war long since ended, but they're functionally immortal, so they can't be destroyed. So, mankind, in its infinite wisdom, puts them in these towers to endlessly fight for their amusement. Except mankind, by this point, is pretty much extinct. With me so far?
Friend: I think so...
Me: Good good. So, the droids are made of this kind of malliable resin called Elixier Skin, that lets them mold their limbs into weapons, like swords, revolvers, railguns, flamethrowers and the like. And when they're defeated, they simply melt down, only to reform some time later.
Friend: Uh-huh...
Me: Now, when the game opens, the main character, Gram, is showing signs of self-awareness. Which is unusual, because the droids - they're called ADAM units, by the way, did I mention that? - aren't supposed to have any real memories or anything. Yet every time he's defeating one of the floor guardians in the tower, he's recovering memories. So he climbs the tower trying to work out who he is, and why he knows the guardians so well. Also, the whole thing's based loosely on The Divine Comedy.
Friend: The band?
Me: No, the classical poem. All the levels are named after the various circles of Hell, there's a chick named Beatrice and a guy named Dante shows up on occasion, and some of the bosses have names similar to characters in it.
Friend: But there's robots.
Me: Well, obviously it's not a direct adaptation. That would, admittedly, be cool, but no, it's just influenced by it in terms of references and maybe atmosphere.
Friend: Meep-! *sound of a water balloon exploding quietly*
Me: What was that?
Friend: Either my brain or my suspension of disbelief, I'm afraid to look.

The story, as weird as it is, makes a lot more sense in-game, thankfully, rapidly turning from a quest for identity into nothing less than one of the most twisted love stories this side of Twilight. It's scant, drip-fed between chapters, but fantastic stuff that really deserves to be developed further. I'd kill for an expansion on the story alone, but sadly, no novels or manga were ever released alongside it in Japan.

As for the game itself, it's simple, but effective. In each floor, there is a map. In each map, there are several challenge rooms containing harder than normal enemies. Clear all the challenge rooms to open up the way to the next boss, kill the moss, move onto the next level, repeat. There's no out of place puzzles, barring a few one-way doors, no forced stealth sections, and absolutely no fetch quests or escort missions, just walk into a room, wipe out everything, then move on to the next. It's a distillation of the action genre as a whole, and something we could do with more of these days. After all, if the action is fun and polished enough to begin with, do you really need to break it up by shoehorning in elements that don't belong?

The combat is frantic. Imagine playing Devil May Cry 3 on fast forward, in the middle of a caffeine rush, while a relentlessly booming techno-industrial metal soundtrack pulverises your eardrums into sawdust. Things start off slow, giving you a chance to get your bearings on the first few stages. There, you'll only fight one reasonably weak enemy at a time. Though it's not long before you're taking on several at once, dodging and rolling desperately, waiting for an opportunity to slice the enemy from hell to breakfast. Though, crucially, you never feel overwhelmed. It's tough, make no mistake, but never to the point of frustration or where you're crying foul. This is because, in one of my favourite aspects of the game, anything the enemy can do, you can do as well.

Gram starts the game naked. In simple terms, this means you have no weapons equipped. First goal of the game is to rectify this post haste. Beating an enemy droid makes them drop one of two things. The first is Elixir Skin. This is used to increase your health, defence, and so on. The other thing they may drop is their equipment. Every enemy in the game, with the exception of the bosses, is made of several random pieces of equipment, and you can take and equip all of it. Not all at the same time, obviously, and the item they drop, if they even drop one, is chosen at random, but its possible to assemble a pretty formidable arsenal fairly swiftly.

Weapons can be equipped on the arms, head, torso or legs. Some weapons have restrictions on their placement - heavy weapons are often restricted to the torso, shields can only be placed on the arms, and legs are restricted mainly to defensive equipment such as speed and evasion boosters - but aside from such restrictions, there's nothing from stopping you assembling the deathbot of your dreams. Head-mounted revolver, a chainsaw on each arm and a Gatling gun sticking out your chest? You can do it. Dual-vibroblades twinned with a railgun and flamethrower? Works remarkably well. There's 300 different weapons, broken down into about 40 different types, with about four or five different levels of power for each class. The more powerful the weapon, the more likely it has additional effects: extra attacks, stun damage, knock down, launching the enemy for air combos, all are things to take into consideration when outfitting your robot.

As if that wasn't enough, weapons can also be powered up further through repeated use. Weapons have limited ammo/usage before being rendered unusable. Attacking with them repeatedly can increase their ammo count, raise the number of times special features are triggered, and lower the heat generated by their use. Y'see, every weapon raises the temperature of the body part its equipped to. If the temperature gets too high, it's rendered unusable until it cools down. Certain weapons, such as napalm grenades and heat swords, can further raise your temperature as well if successfully attacked by them. Of course, this works both ways, so there's nothing to stop you busting out a relatively weak flamethrower and leaving your foes unable to shoot, strike or even dodge properly.

To further sweeten an already impressive deal, the presentation is superb. While the first game featured such stunning locales as 'warehouse with dirt floor', 'slightly different warehouse with dirt floor' and 'shiny warehouse with shiny dirt floor', the programmers wisely decided a little more variation was in order. So while the game starts off in a shiny (though more graphically interesting) warehouse, it's not long before you're thrown into blast furnaces, industrial forest-like areas, cyber-gothic castles and an idyllic domed garden, filled with ponds and waterfalls in stark contrast to the havoc you've wrought over the last few stages, the whole thing feeling like the videogame adaptation of BLAME! we've always wanted, but never gotten. The weapon designs are similarly outstanding, just the right side of wrong, organic in ways that chainsaws and shotguns really shouldn't be. You wouldn't think they could successfully implement the body horror aesthetic in a game featuring virtually no humans whatsoever, but somehow, they found a way. The designs are reminiscent of the Guyver in many ways, and it's easy to cobble together the biomechanical monstrosity you've always wanted, and it helps that many of the weapons are already insectile to begin with. The fact that you can change your character's colour on the fly is a nice touch, the end result being that, before the end of the first stage, I'd accidentally put together a teal droid with swords for arms, an oddly familiar-looking chestplate and legs, and a wicked blade sprouting out of the top of my head. As I said, completely unintentional, but the moment of realisation was so worth it.

And finally, we have the music. As mentioned, its all fierce electronic beats, the perfect accompaniment to the tale of a droid trapped in an endlessly repeating hell. The second stage music is worthy of note, a dark piece that I can't get enough of, as is the challenge room music, a theme oddly reminiscent of Breed by Nirvana. Crowning moment has to be the final boss battle theme, a driving remix of the opening title theme. It's a damn shame that the OST seems unavailable anywhere online, as it's easily one of the best I've heard in a while.

Upon it's release, Rengoku II pretty much tanked. Perhaps the first game was still fresh in the memories of those that reviewed it, but somehow, the game managed to slip under the radars of virtually everyone out there. It's sad, because this is truely a game worthy of greater acclaim. It's Armoured Core-levels of customization, as reimagined by Tsutomu Nihei, with a soundtrack by Alec Empire, back off his meds, but more than that, it's the single biggest improvement to a series I've ever seen in my life.

There's a third game, End of the Century, supposedly on the way for the PS3. Hopefully, with this one, the series will finally receive the respect and admiration it deserved in this instalment.

Give it it's due, Fangirl Fanservice: Crisis Core is a pretty good game (though I think I preferred it more when it was called Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories). I'd just like it more if it didn't feel like a big ol' fanfic given a budget.

Come on, the game even has an Original Character Do Not Steal in the form of Genesis, who's consistantly shown to be stronger and better than God of the Fanboys, Sephiroth Himself! And if the bonus video in Dirge of Cerberus is anything to go bythey're making a big push for him to be a major threat the future.

Still can't take the idea of Shinra being a glorified electricity company seriously though. I mean, a mega-corporation with its own private army? Anyone who's ever read any cyberpunk (or is familiar with Shadowrun) can understand that in a heartbeat. But the idea of Scottish Gas experimenting on soldiers in its private army, a group that happens to be better funded and equipped than anything the government can muster? Yeah, unless this is Tank Girl (well, the movie version at least), I'm not buying it, sorry.

Modded PSP gets!

Yes, thanks to the technical awesome that is Sean, my PSP is now fully cracked and ready for action. It's that familiar rush of excitment when you get a new console and a load of games and you realise you can play anything, but you're so overwhelmed by the choices, so you end up playing one thing for a few minutes, then another for a few more and so on just because you can! Already got a few PS1 games on - I've had a strange craving for playing the original Parasite Eve of late, so that was one of the first things on there - and I've tried a few other random games so far. First impressions:

Final Fantasy: Crisis Core isn't as bad as I thought it would be. The remixes of the familiar themes from FFVII feel like they've taken a few pages from the books of the fan remixes, with heavy crunching guitars everywhere, but that's okay, because the fan arrangements have been pretty good so far. It's still hideously fancervicey, and the slot machine mechanic seems to have no real purpose, other than to throw you a bone every now and then and be loud and flashy, but I'm only really past the prologue, so we shall see.

Ultimate Ghosts and Goblins is a nice attempt at updating the classic franchise, but it doesn't quite feel right. Can't put my finger on what it is, but it may have something to do with the fact that, even on the easiest setting, there's too many enemies on screen at once. The original was about precision timing, aiming, jumping, not flooding the screen with enemies like the bastard offspring of Contra and a Touhou game.

Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero is nice, but lacking. The hip drop, a key mechanic in getting items, is difficult to aim, and the sucky PSP pad really ain't helping much. It's also weird playing a Disgaea game and not racking up experience points by the dozens thousands millions. I'll give it another shot, but so far, oddly disappointed.