Scream 3 review

     I was a huge fan of the original Scream and Scream 2 movies. Wes Craven and I don't always share the same taste but I loved the idea of a horror movie where the characters had actually seen a horror movie themselves. This, of course, lead to my fandom of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer but also to an unfortunate trend in horror movies where they felt being self-referential made them better.

    It doesn't.

    The trick to Scream 1 and 2's success was that the people involved had an extra layer of reality to them. Part of the recurring problem in zombie movies is that you always have to explain the rules of George Romero's movies to people who, in the real world, would have seen a zombie film. In Scream 3, the characters are aware the killings have become a lurid media phenomenon which superficially resembles a horror movie. So when they discuss the tropes of horror movies, there's some relevance to the so-called real lives of the characters.

Parker Posey and Courtney Cox have excellent chemistry together.

     The people in Scream 3 are attempting to act intelligently, not specifically like they're in a horror movie. If they attempted to act like they were they'd just be insane and this is a trap other franchises have fallen into. I'll address the other elements which make the other two films work in my upcoming reviews but I think Scream 3 comes close to replicating their success.

    Unfortunately, it drops the ball in the third act.

    Scream 3 has a lot going for it with memorable characters, a semi-interesting motivation, and some good laugh out-loud moments. Unfortunately, it lists the qualities of a trilogy and fails to mention one of the worst: excess. A trilogy frequently attempts to imitate what was successful about the first one with half of the passion. I could list some of the examples of this but I'd fall into the same trap as the movie.

    The short version of my feelings are there's too many bodies, too many contrived coincidences, and too much spectacle for a series which relied on dialing it down to greater affect. The first movie accomplished more with its initial victim's death than a half-dozen nameless extras. When people died in Scream 1 and 2 it meant something. Here, the finale of the final act reaches grand guignol proportions of bloodshed. It left me feeling "get it over already" as opposed to tight and tense.

    Part of the problem is, unfortunately, Neve Campbell. Neve's roll is purely perfunctory in the story and could have very easily been deleted without much effect. Which is surprising given the killer's motivation centers around her and she does her best with the material she's given.

Adorable but unnecessary.

      Bluntly, the actual stars of the movie are David Arquette and Courtney Cox. With some tweaking, the movie could have forgone Neve's presence and been the stronger for it. Which is terrible because I love Sidney Prescott and Neve Campbell both. A good part of the movie's plot also depends on a silly plot device I felt annoyed the movie had to resort to.

    There's some genuinely good moments in this movie: Parker Posey is tremendously entertaining, Carrie Fisher makes a splendid cameo, and the death scenes are spectacular. There's a particularly effective moment where Lance Henriksen's character talks about how young women were lured to the casting couch during the height of his career only to have it sometimes go "too far." Courtney Cox and Parker Posey manage to convey a lot with only a disgusted look.

    I could go on but, ultimately, I think the movie is worth watching but could have been much better. It's particularly frustrating because it comes within spitting distance of being a really-really good movie. Like a fumbled touchdown, it's more frustrating than a movie which never really approaches greatness.

7/10

Tucker and Dale versus Evil review

    "Oh hidy ho officer, we've had a doozy of a day. There we were minding our own business, just doing chores around the house, when kids started killing themselves all over my property."

    Special thanks to Michael Grimm for recommending this movie to me.

    Tucker and Dale versus Evil is a delightful subversion of a very tired and overused premise in slasher fiction. Basically, a pair of hillbillies are menaced by college students in the middle of the woods. It's not quite a straight reversal, which might have been just as good but a send-up of the entire genre. Our heroes are menaced by the college students precisely because the later have seen a ridiculous number of hillbilly horror movies. It's a movie about cultural differences and tolerance.

    Eh, who am I kidding. It's a movie about the outlandish humor to be had in two well-meaning fellas accidentally passing themselves off as the kind of psychotic killers usually found themselves in these movies. The college students aren't actually psychopaths, well maybe one is, but an increasingly unlikely set of circumstances leaves an ever-increasing set of bodies around our heroes.

    While not actually filmed in the wilds of Appalachia, where I live, the replication of the mountain worldview is almost perfect. Poor Tucker and Dale come off very much like many of the people I've grown up around: well-meaning, outdoorsy, limited education but lots of practical skills and real-world experience.

    Appalachians (or "Mountain folk"), which is the correct term for the people who live in the area around the Appalachian mountains, are frequently the subject of a lot of causal prejudice. We live in an area which has been amongst the poorest and most underdeveloped of the United States since, well, forever. So it's nice to see something from a differing perspective than Mountain Folk are deranged inbred psycho-killer cannibals. We're like two out of those four, at most.

    Horror fans will get an especial kick out of this movie as there are a ridiculous number of homages spread throughout the story. I counted at least eight to the Friday the Thirteenth franchise alone. There's also ones to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and probably others I don't recognize. There's also a virtually unrecognizable Alan Tudyk as Tucker.

     The comedy is silly, not much more intelligent than your typical television fair, but is helped by the freshness of the material. The deaths are played for slapstick as opposed to horror and are frequently hilarious. I also came to enjoy the romance between Dale and Allison. They're sweet and equally dumb in their own ways.

    In conclusion, I highly recommend Tucker And Dale Versus Evil. It is a silly-silly movie and exactly the sort of cure for the evening blahs we should all have. My wife, who is pathologically afraid of all horror films, loved it. That, alone, should tell you it's good.

8/10

The Cabin in the Woods review

    I liked this film, but I think the heart of the film is an argument which was made about a decade earlier.

    The first ten minutes of The Cabin in the Woods inform us that a government conspiracy of some kind is leading a bunch of college students to their doom. Throughout the story, we'll cut to the government conspiracy as we watch them dealing with the events of a typical horror movie in a bored disinterested manner.

    The movie isn't a comedy but it has a lot of moments of black humor which bear a resemblance to the best of Joss Whedon's work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Longtime fans of Buffy will remember he envisioned it as, essentially, a subversive horror movie and that is in full effect here.

The Scooby Gang. Shaggy is at the end.

    The movie is a deconstructionalist take on the horror film genre; asking the audience why it feels the way it does about certain characters and what they really want from the films. Is it to see people horrifically murdered by cool monsters? We get that. Is is to see likable protagonists struggling to survive? We get that too. Is it to simply see the same old crap re-shot and retreaded over and over again? Sadly, we get bits of that too.

    Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's script is built around the premise we don't value our protagonists more than the monsters. It's an accurate statement that some horror fans just go to the movie to see people viscerally killed. This leaves plenty of characters undeveloped because they're literally only serving the role as meat for the grinder.

    The thing is, Wes Craven beat them to the punch. Three years prior to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he made Scream. Hell, before that his A Nightmare On Elm Street movies emphasized character over massacre. Much like people forget Rambo only killed one person in the first movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street is about Nancy Thompson not Freddy. It was the other ones which turned him into a wise-cracking cartoon out to murder cardboard cutouts.

This board gets a bunch of well-deserved freeze-frame bonus laughs.

    Still, I'm not going to be the one to point out that some anvils need to be dropped since I wrote an essay about the subject literally not two hours ago. The protagonists are people with feelings, hopes, dreams, and goals who we should empathize with. If we want to see them horribly killed just because, there's something wrong with us rather than the movie. I'm not sure I wholeheartedly embrace this since, at the end of the day, everyone involved is fictional but I understand the sentiment.

    Beyond the satire at the heart of the movie is an homage to virtually every horror movie made in the past thirty years. There's homages to Hellraiser, Jason, Freddy, The Shining, and probably two hundred or more others I'd have to spend all day dissecting. Even the central premise is the protagonists of the story are undergoing the most stereotypical horror movie plot imaginable: a bunch of college students are going out to a cabin in the woods.

The woman in peril trope is subverted all to hell here. Which is a plus in my book.

    The movie does an excellent job of establishing the characters at the start of the film. In about ten minutes, they do more to make me care about them than many two hour dramas have done let alone horror films. When they start to die, I found myself genuinely distressed. I would have been fully satisfied to have all of them live and that's an accomplishment for a horror movie.

    I was especially fond of Jules as played by Anna Hutchinson, not just because she's absolutely beautiful but because her character has a lot of range. Ironically, the only character I hated was Marty the resident comic relief stoner. Usually, I love these sorts of characters but Marty's character annoyed the hell out of me every scene he was in.

     Even worse, I swear, his actor goes out of his way to be Shaggy from Scooby Doo. I don't know if this was a creative decision or just coincidence (no, actually, it has to be deliberate) but the fact Fran Kanz has the audacity to imitate Shaggy's voice became extremely distracting. They even have roughly the same personality--replacing food for conspiracy theorizing.

    Overall, I really liked this movie but it wasn't nearly as fresh or original as many people think it was. I also found the ending to be distracting as well due to its troubling implications. I recommend people see it but I wasn't blown away.

8/10

Slasher horror vs. Survival Horror

    Yesterday, I had a lengthy conversation with one of my oldest friends about the difference between Slasher horror and survival horror. Basically, we were both discussing the fact we weren't terribly fond of the classic horror franchises A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteenth.

    Both of us agreed that the two franchises have intriguing premises with their Dream Demon and Unstoppable Juggernaut stars. However, neither of us particularly cared for the way the stories particularly progressed. Likewise, we were both fans of the original Halloween and Scream.

    It occurred to me this wasn't just a matter of taste, though it mostly was. I'm not going to tell you there's anything wrong with the FT13 or NOES franchises other than the occasional bit of bad storytelling. That's your business and tastes may vary. I will say, though, that the two of agreed the primary problem boiled down to a difference of audience expectations.

The Slasher's natural hunting ground.

    The primary appeal of these two horror franchises is watching Freddy and Jason massacre their victims in increasingly outlandish ways. Freddy killed a young Johnny Depp a spectacularly surreal method which has to be seen to be believed. Likewise, there's something gut-bustingly hilarious about watching Jason beat someone to death by swinging their sleeping bag against a tree repeatedly.

    However, I can't say that particularly appeals to me. Furthermore, my favorite of the two franchises revolve less around Freddy and Jason than Kristen Parker, Laurie Holden, Tommy Jarvis, and Tina Shepard. If you go "who?" you probably aren't alone but they're the protagonists of the franchise who put up the best fight against our unpleasant gatekeepers to the world of slasherdom. The fates of at least two of these individuals turned me off these franchises even though I had been forewarned they are not the stars.

    I'll spare you a discussion of the other side of the coin with Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott who are every bit as much the stars of their movies as their antagonists. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course, was built on the mold of the Final Girl without the disposability factor which some of the aforementioned characters above. [Digression: Seriously, I know it's wrong to be pissed off about 30 year old movies but some of the sequels treatment of them still bother me.]

    Which brings me to my point there is a difference between survival horror and slasher horror. Survival horror is exemplified by the typical zombie movie, where a group of people are slowly widdled down to a much smaller number by the relentless horde of monsters, but the audience's sympathy is with the survivors. We want at least one or more of them to survive as the story is about them and their struggles.

There's no e in Myers.

    Slasher movies move the emphasis of the storytelling from the heroes to the monster. They're not alone in this respects, look at Phantasm for example, but the general emphasis is on the audience witnessing the bad guys slaughter versus the heroes' triumph. The nadir of this particular philosophy is the torture-porn ideal where we actively desire the destruction of our leads in the most perverse manner possible.

    The Cabin in the Woods made this point significantly earlier than I did. Basically, that we lose something essential in horror if we de-emphasize the protagonists to the point their survival no longer matters. I won't spoil the movie for you but the basic gist of it is that making people into interchangeable archetypes so they can serve as meat for the grinder is about the lowest form of entertainment possible.

    Yet, I actually think there is merit to the Slasher movie approach as well. People want their villains to be spectacular and the individualization of evil in them results in a more personable menace than a generic zombie apocalypse. You don't need the entire world to be overrun with the hungry dead if you're faced with a figure like Jason Voorhees. The first A Nightmare on Elm Street is staggeringly effective because there's nothing more personal than your dreams and that's where Freddy lives.

    Back during my tabletop RPG days, I actually ran a couple of adventures which incorporated both monsters. The difference in our game, of course, was the PCs weren't running from either but attempting to stop their massacres. The stories were significantly lower key but worked well because both monsters were individually well-realized. In short, Slashers tend to produce very good villains because you don't diminish the threat of your opponent.

     The trick is balancing the two and developing a kind of symbiosis between victim and villain. Psycho, which predates all slasher movies, manages to throw the audience for a loop by fully developing its victim before disposing of her.  Likewise, Norman Bates is equally realized, becoming the heart of all future guys wielding a knife. You don't need a dozen people who exist to die when Janet Leigh's character is capable of handling it all by herself. Hard to believe as it is now, her death was genuinely shocking at the time and changed the nature of horror for decades to come.

Let's face it. We don't care who this guy is.

    My definition of a Slasher movie also applies to something you normally wouldn't think of as one in Jaws. The star of Jaws is undoubtedly the shark and the entirety of the story builds up to our heroes putting it down. Nevertheless, it's looming presence is the heart of the film. We don't even need its victims tremendously developed because the little time we spend with them shows it could be someone just like us. It's one of the reasons I loathe the, "Bad Girls Get Punished" meme that Scream discredited. The villains aren't morally justified in what they do to people, that's why they're villains.

    I think my ideal horror movie is a Survival Horror movie with Slasher elements or a Slasher film with a stronger emphasis on Survival Horror. No one is going to complain is you are upset at losing your spectacular kills but the heart should be all of the potential victims are people you'd like to survive. It should be a tragedy and a surprise when each of them dies as only rarely do movies have the nerve to do so. Likewise, the villains should be fully realized when they're not a natural disaster like zombies or demon hordes or whatever.

    My .02.   

I'm going to be published by Chaosium

Good news folks,

A short story I did was accepted by Chaosium and is going to be published in one of their anthologies.

http://onceuponanapocalypse.com/category/uncategorized/

It's a very auspicious day for me.

I hope everyone will pick up a copy.

Where my life gets a little Lovecraftian

    "And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats—the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion—the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village homes and brought curses and horrors in its train."
     -H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Wall."

    Yes, my readers, I have rats.

    Filthy stinking evil rats.

    The problem began when I noticed a hole in our backyard I, mistakenly, assumed to be a snake hole. No, unfortunately, it was a borough of those foul and disgusting creatures who I have only loved in The Secret of NIMH.

    The borrow would be a problem by itself give our dogs make extensive use of the backyard but, unfortunately, the damned things got into our house. I thought they'd been taken care of but they managed to survive and now infest both the garage and the basement. It's going to be smelly but we're poisoning the creatures and have gotten the exterminators to come to the house.

    Ugh.

    I hate rats.

Skyrim: Hearthfire DLC review

    Hearthfire is the second DLC for Skyrim, though not a full-fledged expansion like Dawnguard. It's a delightful bit of fluff I haven't time to check out until now but am extremely glad I did. Basically, it allows a bit more customization of your particular version of Skyrim and the option of building a location to display all your various trophies from your adventures. There's also the option to adopt some of the many orphaned children spread throughout Skyrim. These children will thank you for your generosity, ask you for presents, and sometimes give them.

    And that's it, really.

Casa de Dragonborn.

    Really, Hearthfire is an opportunity to build yourself a massive storage space for all your goods and decorate it with the various hundreds of unique weapons you've probably amassed over the years. If you've sold them all off, well, then Hearthfire isn't probably going to be quite as fun for you as it was for me.

    One thing I really enjoyed about Hearthfire is that it allows you to reunite your favorite Companions with your spouse and children. For the longest time, Lydia and Ysolda lived together in my house in Breezeholme only for me to feel bad when I had to leave Lydia behind to go live in our new mansion. Now, it's possible to appoint Lydia (or virtually any other major companion) to be your Steward while you move in your new family.

    Still, actually, I'm going to say that the developers went above and beyond what they could have with Hearthfire. There's a bunch of new orphans introduced in most of the major cities and all of them have stories. The "fetch quest" nature of the crafting means that if you want your Shrine of Talos, you're going to finally have a use for all of those amulets you've found of his but will also need dragon bone!

The first daughter I adopted. She's ADORABLE!

    It's a really distracting past-time to try and get your house just perfect. Really, by the time my mansion in Falkreath was done, it looked less like a place to live and my personal Dragonborn museum. This was actually a flaw since I had a bit of difficulty believing my newly adopted children and wife would want to live in a building which consisted of wall-to-wall weapons racks and display cases displaying my awesome.

    I will say, for those who aren't into in-game crafting or role-playing, Hearthfire isn't really going to add much to the experience. There are already plenty of treasure chests in the existing houses you can buy across Skyrim and the mansions you build are limited to the lesser holds which didn't come with them in the first place. There's no new quests, monsters, or weapons to be had in this add-on.

    Do I recommend it? It's cheap, fun, and gave me hours of entertainment. Of course, I do. Sometimes immersion is the thing you need most in order to be able to experience a game world fully.

9/10

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross review

    I really hated this book.

    This is the case of fandom getting in the way of a good story because I loved The Atrocity Archives  and I love Weird Espionage. In this case, the book is one long satire of James Bond and you'd think I'd love that, except for the small problem that the book is about mocking James Bond while I'm a huge James Bond fan.

    I laughed precisely twice during the entirety of the book. The first time was a joke about having a James Bond-esque souped up...Smart Car. That, my friends, is funny. It's not funny when the main villain wears a neru jacket and has a cat for reasons that are explained but don't really mean anything other than, "it's like Bond, ha-ha, isn't that silly!"

Much like Harry Dresden's Beetle, this is an inherently funny vehicle.

    Except, we're supposed to take the plot of a Lovecraftian monster buried in the middle of the ocean seriously. I find it difficult to go with the idea H.P. Lovecraft is "serious business" while James Bond is worthy of derision. H.P. Lovecraft was a guy scared of seafood and man's pointlessness in the universe. I love the guy's writing but it's Pulpish and fun. So is Bond. It's not a mental leap I'm willing to make to say one is good and the other is bad which, unfortunately, is the heart of the book. Stross isn't even making good-natured goofy parody of Bond like Austin Powers, he's beating the readers over the head with how stupid he thinks Bond is.

At least, that's the way it comes off to me.

    The Jennifer Morgue's premise is the aforementioned Lovecraftian monster has been found by the U.S. Navy who can't get to it because the Deep Ones don't want them to. Our hero, Bob Howard, is sent to deal with a person who may be involved in an attempt to recover them. Assisting him is Ramona Random, a sexy skilled American agent who is everything Bob is not. This should be a winning formula but it...isn't.

    I confess a large part of my distaste for this book may well be the the fact I'm fond of Ian Fleming's ideas (racism and misogyny aside) and every time Bob highlights how unlike Bond he is, it slows the pacing down to a crawl. It was implicit in the first book he was a different sort of secret agent from James Bond but this book needs to spell it out repeatedly.

     I've heard mixed reviews about this book but, basically, either you'll find the tone of the book humorous and light in the first ten pages or you won't. If you don't, the entire book will become one long boring exercise in tedium.

    I will say, however, I may be shooting myself in the foot because I actually found the exact same joke I made in one of my book manuscripts in this volume. I won't say which joke it is, but it's very embarrassing, especially as I'm going to give the book an extremely low score. I still laughed but this just made me more annoyed with the work as a whole.

    I'm searching for something to recommend the book but, frankly, I am not fond of the way the plot developed. As a fan of H.P Lovecraft, spies, and off-beat humor I should love this but nothing is worse than a fan who feels slighted. I grew up with the James Bond series and, yes, they're ridiculous but no more than Fish-People trying to take over the world.

    Charles Stross can write really well, it's just this time it felt like he was phoning it in and the subject matter was one that was way too close to home for me to enjoy. I can't imagine I'm going to be particularly pleased with The Fuller Memorandum since it tackles religion and I'm a devout Christian while Charles Stross is a militant atheist. So, well, I'll give this book series one more try before I drop it.

    Maybe it was just an off-volume.

1/10

Buy at Amazon.com

Just Cause 2 review

    Why do the Panau hate our freedom?

    Gold?

    Lust for power?

    Maybe they simply were born with a heart full of Panuanity.

    Just Cause 2 is the game of absolute gonzo game-play with a surprisingly clever social satire to boot, which I appreciate. The premise of the game is Rico Rodriguez is an agent of the CIA (except it's never referred to it as that for reasons that will become obvious) who is sent to a small South Pacific island nation to overthrow the newly installed dictator.

     It seems said dictator isn't returning the United States' calls and Uncle Sam doesn't like that. It helps that said dictator, Baby Panay, is a combination of Jean-Claude Duvalier and Kim Jong Il so you shouldn't feel too bad about overthrowing him. Of course, the means of overthrowing him are built around allying with three utterly scummy criminal revolution groups and destroying the various state-owned industries. Said industries include rocket launchers, gas stations (!), military outposts, water supplies (!!), and power plants.

It's doubtful you're thinking of geo-politics when you're blowing up the Panua military.

      A game of moral uprightness this is not. The thing is that the Grand Theft Auto series initially included a great deal of social satire before it decided to play itself straight. The only way they thought plays could justify being an unrepentant criminal was if they were in a world composed of equally unpleasant people. Just Cause 2 takes that premise and applies it to politics. No one actually cares about Marxism, capitalism, ethnic tribal identity, or any of the other ideologies they espouse in this game.

     Virtually everyone in Panua is after personal wealth, power, and fame with the island's "secret resource" attracting the attention of the world's various powers. What secret resource is it? Actually, I'm not sure it was supposed to be a secret. The CIA doesn't know Panua has it but the island littered with fuel depots, pipelines, and refineries where this secret resource is turned into gasoline.

    Hmm, I wonder if it could be.

    The satire in Just Cause 2 is pretty obvious. It's downright brilliant in places. This is the only game in the history of the world where you have CIA-backed communist rebels, ninjas, the Russian mob, and Japanese Imperialists all in one game. The only thing missing is Nazis and I'm not sure they would be redundant given the way the Panua military handles things.

    Basically, it takes offensive realpolitik and sets it all to the awesomeness of a 80s action movie including insane stunts and endless piles of corpses. The game would be horrible if it was played remotely seriously but it's not and, as a result, is delightful.

    The game's play-style is somewhat similar to Saint's Row, except it includes a number of extra features that make things more ridiculous. The first is the addition of a grapple hook and an infinite number of parachutes. The grapple hook can be fired like Batman's and is one of the fastest means of traveling around Panau. You can also use them to hijack cars and helicopters.

Hijacking helicopters with grappling hooks!

    The game includes many scaling adventures with the option of parachuting off skyscrapers and out of planes on a regular basis. The game's relationship to physics is such you can actually use the grapple to go to the ground faster after jumping out of a plane and not take any damage. The cars handle horribly but I'm pretty sure they're supposed to crash routinely.

     The game world, itself, is absolutely gorgeous as well as huge. There's over four hundred square miles of territory. I've seen snowy mountains, jungles, isolated villages, deserts, and towering skyscrapers. I would have liked to have gone into several of the buildings but the terrain is just about note perfect.

     If there's any flaws, it is that it is difficult to travel around the territory and some of the missions are repetitive but this is a small complaint about an otherwise flawless game.

     This is a fun, action-packed, explosive game with plenty of opportunity to annihilate large portions of Panuan real-estate. I'm only a third through the game and I've already slain 800 enemy soldiers and single-handedly destroyed eight military bases.

     In conclusion, I give this game a hearty 10/10.

The Saboteur review

 
    I want to get X-Com: Enemy Unknown but right now it's a little too expensive. I had the option of trading my copy of Assassins Creed 3 in for half off of it but Christmas is coming up so I purchased, instead, two DS games for my niece and nephew. I want to get Far Cry 3 before I get X-Com, anyway, since it looks more like my sort of game. Still, there's a few days before that happens and I can wait a little until the price goes down. Instead, I decided to head over to the bargain bin and pick myself up a copy of The Saboteur.

    The premise of The Saboteur is a kind of offbeat one. Basically, it's an attempt to tell the story of the French Resistance in the same manner as Frank Miller's hyper-stylized Sin City movie. The majority of the game takes place in a black and white world where only a few things are colorized like Nazi armbands, streetlights, and French Resistance blue ascots.

    The similarity to Frank Miller's work goes beyond the mere artistic style with the world of The Saboteur being seamy, sexual, gritty, and brutal in equal parts. While Frank Miller has gone insane in recent years, this is a tribute to his best work and manages to remain edgy without being offensive.

     Well, unless you count the DLC, which adds nudity to the game. I don't because it was obviously intended to be part of the main game before it was taken out. I don't mind tasteful nudity, like in the Witcher 2, so long as it's part of the story. The burlesque house of The Saboteur remains classier than 90% of other games mostly clothed females. Here, when nudity shows up, it adds to the decadent atmosphere and contrasts sharply against the violence committed against/by the Nazis.

    The premise of The Saboteur is Sean Devlin is an expatriate Irish race car driver living in Nazi-occupied Paris. Sean, like most people in Paris at this time, has a grudge against the Nazis (no points for guessing it's for murdering his friend in the black and white picture he carries around). Sean is recruited into the French resistance within minutes of the game's opening and encouraged to use his skill at explosives to start bombing Nazi equipment around Paris.

I haven't had a chance to blow up Nazis on the Eiffel Tower yet but I'm hoping there's an opportunity.

    The game is, essentially a Grand Theft Auto clone with the addition of Assassin Creed's climbing system and Red Faction's exploding scenery. The story-mode consists of you doing missions for the French Resistance, attempting to drive the Nazis back while getting torn between two alluring women, while free-play mode consists of blowing up literally hundreds of hard targets.

     Seriously, I've blown up dozens of Nazi sniper nests, radar emplacements, AA guns, and fuel depots only to have inflicted 5% of the damage possible on the German war machine. If you're a completion-ist, this is definitely an enjoyable way to spend forty or more hours. It's fun, though I break up my terrorism spree with story missions because the Nazis are rather lazy in this game. Sean kills a Nazi General, steals his car, drives away from the scene and the SS gives up relatively early in pursuit.

    Seriously guys, show some initiative!

    One cool feature of the game is that as you liberate areas from Nazi control, the dark washed-out colors of Sin City is replaced with bright lively colors. I think this might actually be a mistake because the black and white parts are incredibly atmospheric. I think the colored parts should have been restricted to the Pre-War period as well as safe-houses. I can't imagine the people of Paris are particularly happy with even a reduced Nazi presence as long as they're still a few blocks over.

Ah, beautiful liberated North Paris. Sure, there's still Nazis but that's South Paris' problem!

    The Saboteur makes no attempt to be historically accurate, more or less ignoring the existence of Vichy France for example, but this is to the game's credit. No one wants to know about the sort of reprisals the Nazis did when they can, instead, single-handedly win the war against Hitler. I also appreciated the treatment of the Free French as the badasses they were versus the singularly disgusting "Surrender Monkey" stereotype they have in some parts of America.

    Of course, this begs the question why the developers felt the need to use an Irish hero in the first place. It's not like Sean Devlin has a particularly deep character arc or needs to be educated on peculiarities of French culture. About the only thing he learns about the French is they have incredibly nice strip clubs and really hate the Nazis, things I suspect most of us could have guessed. I think it was a missed opportunity not to have a French lead, though the NPCs more than make up for it in likability.

    In conclusion, I heartily recommend picking up The Saboteur. If you're an adult, enjoy moody atmospheric entertainment, and haven't yet had your fill of killing Nazis thanks to Wolfenstein then this is the game for you. It's not perfect, the combat system is sometimes awkward and the difficulty on Causal is RIDICULOUSLY Causal but, overall, I really enjoyed it. I congratulate the development team for their work.

9/10

The Prisoner review

    I believe anyone who wants to write spy fiction should watch three things: the first is a Bond film to show how the profession is glamorized, the second is The Sandbaggers to show how the profession really is, and the third is The Prisoner to drive you insane. The Prisoner isn't a mind-numbingly cracked series, at least until the final couple of episodes, but it is a profoundly strange one. It's an adult Alice in Wonderland where British government (and government-in-general) is satirized along with society.

    Yet, it's not the funny kind of satire. It's the kind of satire where everything has the perverse quality of a nightmare while remaining sickeningly bright and colorful. Imagine waking up one day in a world where everything existed at the whim of another person and your entire existence depended on whether or not you chose to obey said person's commands. Arguably, that's society already but we have the comfortable illusion that the laws and rules of civilization protect us.

The Prisoner discovers you can't win in a democracy controlled by madmen. I've felt that way myself.

    For the Prisoner, I refuse to call him No. 6#, he doesn't have that luxury. He lives in a world where everyone desperately wants to make him conform to the rules of an utterly insane community. He defies them at every turn but his resistance is an empty display as long as he remains their captive. The only people he can punish are the Number 2#s, who go through a succession of persona, all having their job dependent on breaking the Prisoner. It is thus a struggle of wills. The Prisoner can't attack his captors but he can frustrate the aims of his warden, ironically just by existing.

    The premise of The Prisoner is a decidedly high concept one: a secret agent resigns from his job at the British government and is gassed at his apartment. He wakes up in a garish penal colony run by a man called Number Two (who charges actors once, sometimes twice an episode).

     It is a prison with no bars, since it's on an island, and everything the inmates could want is provided for. Number Six is told he can leave if he provides his captors with information, why he resigned, but it's incredibly unlikely this is true. Ironically, the truth wouldn't help him since they already know what he told his superiors at his resignation (it was a matter of conscience).

    They just didn't believe him.

    I'd love to say every episode of The Prisoner is as awesome as its wonderful premise deserves but, unfortunately, this is not the case. The original number of episodes was supposed to be less than the actual run and it shows. For example, there's an episode which is a spy parody and another that's 90% a generic Western. These were obviously crafted as fill-in episodes and the difference in quality from the other episodes is tremendous.

    I recommend everyone take the time to either buy these episodes on DVD or otherwise watch them. I saw the series first at my local library on VHS and eventually purchased them for my very own. There's a reason this series is remembered as one of the great works of television and if you haven't heard of it, you have now.

10/10