Voltron: Defender of the Universe

"Activate interlock!  Dynotherms connected!  Megathrusters are go!"

And that's when the awesomeness started.  Seeing Voltron form, with the cheesey technobabble that accompanied it, was probably one of the most awesome sights on TV at the time.

A little trivia - Voltron was originally supposed to be a re-dub of Mirai Robo Daltanious, but when World Events Productions requested the material from Toei Animation, WEP requested "The one with the lions."  Toei sent Beast King GoLion.  WEP was unable to translate them, so they just made up the plots and dubbed their own lines.  And this explains alot...  

Who can forget the dreaded Nipple Monster?

The show starts with Optimus Prime narrating.  OK, not actually Optimus, it's just the voice actor Peter Cullen.  Anyway, so Prime narrates and then the story starts.  Usually with Zarkon deriding the witch Haggar for her most recent failure and the witch proposing a brand new plan.  The brand new plan is usually the same plan that just failed - "make a monster to kill Voltron."  Zarkon likes this plan because he apparently lacks the ability to learn from past failures.  Then the monster gets sent to Planet Arus.  The Voltoron team go out to fight the monster in their lions.  They do not form Voltron yet because they also have issues with learning from past mistakes.  They get their buts kicked, find out what the monster's weakness is and then form Voltron to kick butt.  The bad guy is usually killed by being cut in half vertically.  And like anything from Hollywood, it explodes.  Even if it's not mechanical. 

The formula was apparent even when I was watching this in Elementary school.  It's cliche and predictable, but it worked.  Think about it:  Voltron had to win or the series would be over but if he won too easily then there was no real risk and the series would be boring.  A typical plot twist would be that they could not form Voltron because one team member was injured or one lion was down for repairs.  And again, the team cannot learn from mistakes and never really trains replacement pilots, so if one guy gets sick the whole team is pretty much going to get its ass kicked.

The Voltron team consists of Keith, the commander and pilot of the Black Lion/head.  He's pretty much your stereotypical leader - good looking, calm, and tough.  Then you have Lance.  He's the one who stands up to Keith when necessary and also cracks jokes and playfully teases the other members.  He pilots the Red Lion/right leg.  Pidge small.  I'm not sure ih he's a little kid.  He had a weird, annoying voice and is a little scared.  He also makes friends with the sentient mice of the castle and pilots the Green Lion/left arm.  Hunk is the fat guy.  Like all fat people he is obsessed with food and sleeping.  Yellow Lion/left leg.  Sven has a thick Swedish accent.  He pilots the Blue Lion/right arm.  He is replaced early on by the princess.  Princess Allura is the token female.  She wears pink so much that it may be the only color in her wardrobe.  She is the poorest skilled pilot and is frequently kidnapped.  Zarkon apparently keeps attacking Arus because he wants her to be his slave. 

Hasbro loves me!

Voltron was pretty epic.  But like all good things, it had to end.  Specifically, because WEP ran out of episodes to re-dub.  So they just picked up some other random cartoon, redubbed it, and called it Voltron.  The took Armored Fleet Dairugger XV and called it Voltron.   It was not well liked, but it was Voltron, so we tuned in every day, hoping for the good stuff.  Some days they'd show the lions, some days they'd show the cars.  It took 15 vehicles to form Voltron (all separately, of course).  I don't really remember much from this shows and I haven't been able to find it to watch it, so I'm pretty much sticking to the one that I remember enjoying more - the lion ones. 

You can watch Voltron for free (and legally) on Hulu and a few other sites.  The first few aren't that good, but later in the series it really hits it's stride, mainly as the writers begin to realise where they want to go with it. 

There is a new Voltron out now.  It's good.  It's really good.  I've only seen a few episodes due to time, but I got a kick out of seeing the guys from the old show play a part too.  It's nice that it's not a reboot.  And best of all, it seems to keep the parts that made the old show awesome and added better storytelling, voicework, and animation.  The Nicktoons site has some episodes up (I think).  You can watch them after you've caught up watching Korra.  :-p

Batman: Arkham City

Firstly, this game has a free demo in the Xbox live marketplace, so there's no reason not to try it out before buying.  It lets you play the first 15 minutes of gameplay. 

The plot is pretty simple but still compelling, and let's be honest here, this is Batman- the plot is gravy.  The whole reason that you're playing is because you want to zoom around Gotham and beat up bad guys like the Joker and Penguin.  The plot merely serves as an excuse to drive Batman forward as he pummels his way through oddly dressed henchmen toward the main villain.  And in this case, the plot serves well.  It is simple, yet compelling.  After the Arkham Asylum incident, a whole section of Gotham has been fenced in and made into a giant prison under the control of Hugo Strange.  Hugo knows that Batman is Bruce Wayne and arrests Wayne and tosses him into Arkham City along with anyone who knows the secret of what Strange is up to. 
Batman meets up with many old favorites such as Harley Quinn, Two Face, and Catwoman.  He also pattles lesser know baddies who are sure to please true Batman fans such as The Mad Hatter and Zsasz.



"Jeez. She fell funny."



The setting is big enough to give you the feel of a whole city to play in and there are plenty of side missions to keep you busy and happy while you are making bad guys rethink their career choices.  The level of detail in the city is amazing.  Be sure to visit the alley behind the Monarch Theater for a touching scene.  There are a few other eastereggs there as well.  The Exibits in Penguin's museum are worth checking out.  The devs put a lot of effort into the little details here and it really if worth stopping to just look around this miniature world that they've created.

The fights can be a bit repetitive and most can be won by masshing buttons, especially on easy mode, and the boss fights usually hinge around a gimmick.  In the tradition of Legend of Zelda, the gimmick usually hinges on the most recent addition to your arsenal.  But the vastness of this sandbox more than makes up for it.  As you play on, the baddies get tougher and you will eventually need more strategy to defeat them such as specific combos to defeat certain weapons and specific tactics to take down gunmen.

All in all, I am in love with this game.  there are enough levels of gameplay here to keep anyone interested, a plot worth following, and a wide vast sandbox to play in with lost of places to explore.

Dungeons & Dragons (The Animated Series)

In 1983 Dungeons and Dragons was starting to become popular, or at least widely known outside of the basements of parents with geeky children.  News channels were starting to carry news of kids playing it and Christian groups were accusing it of Satan worship instead of Rock and Roll.  CBS needed something new to add to its Saturday morning lineup and Scrappy Doo was a breakaway character that saved Scooby Doo from cancellation (It wasn't until later that he was blamed for the show jumping the shark).  So CBS, in a rare forward-thinking move for a TV network, combined the IP from TSR and the storytelling skills of Marvel Productions (Spider Man, The Incredible Hulk, Muppet Babies, Transformers: The Movie) into a Saturday morning cartoon that ran from 1983 to 1985 and spanned twenty-seven episodes.  That is pretty short lived for a series, so it wasn't really a huge success.  It also got a lot of criticism for the level of violence, despite the fact that the weapons were rarely used again people or animals (the barbarian would use the club to strik the ground to create an earthquake) and when they were they did not harm the target (the Ranger's arrows ofter turned to rope and bound the target).  Eventually, the low of ratings and high criticism (at one point the National Coalition on Television Violence demanded a disclaim linking it to real life fatalities) made it no longer worthwhile for CBS to keep it on the air.

The characters were pretty boilerplate for the time and it is so stereotypical 1980's cartoon that it is really fun to rewatch, in the same way that you'd go through your old yearbook and laugh at the hairstyles.  There is the tall, handsome, older leader of the group.  He is blond and smart.  There's the thief, a bit shy and a cute female to balance out the leader.  There's the token minority, a black girl (she's 14 and probably a girl to balance out that there is only one other female in the group).  There's the loudmouth coward for comic relief, the nerdy, brainy wizard whose spellcasting is a bit unreliable at best.  You have the little kid cast as the fearless barbarian because...  umm...  because... Scrappy Doo.  And what 80s cartoon would be complete without an adorable little mascot?  In this case, we have Uni the baby Unicorn who adds nothing to the show except cuteness and the occasional comic relief or plot device ("Oh, no!  The monsters took Uni again!  Let's rescue her!") 

Just look at that face.  She was up to no good, I tell you!

The general plot is that a bunch of kids ride a rollercoaster at a fair and get sucked into the "world of Dungeons and Dragons."  Why them and not anyone else is, to my knowledge, never explained.  Personally, I blame Uni.  I never trusted that little bastard.    Where was I?  Oh, yes.  So they're randomly sucked into the nameless world of D&D and met by a short wizard known only as the Dungeon Master and told that to get home they must fight the evil Venger, a winged magical baddie who either has one horn or it too cheap to replace his broken-ass hat.  The DM tossed them a bunch or weapons because what harm could giving a bunch of kids weapon bring and told to go fight evil.  DM appears whenever they need help or advice and gives them riddles before disappearing for the rest of the episode.  Wizards are dicks.  At least when Gandalf pulls that shit he comes back and either saves everybody's ass or has been up to something useful - like chilling out on top of Saruman's tower until an eagle happens to pass by.  But even Gandalf never comes out and says, "dude, this shit's fucking evil and the bad guys are going to come and kick your ass."  He just says, "Hello, you tiny, defenseless hobbit.  Why don't you take this pretty ring and wander around aimlessly for a while.  I'll catch up later."  Yeah.  Wizards are dicks.



You didn't really think Hasbro cared about where or not
you shared with your little sister, did you?



The series, like most cartoons of the time, never really advances the plot.  Each episode has is pretty formulaic and has the kids meeting a random stranger, who may or may not be a henchman of Venger, and cleaning up after the loudmouth's mess.  Uni may or may not be at risk of getting eaten by something.  The kids whip out the magic weapons, kick ass, and then Dungeon Master shows up to fulfill the shows legal requirement of hold an educational value (yes, there was a legal requirement for a show to be educational, that's why so many had PSAs at the end).

In at least one episode, they got to go home for a short time before needing to go back to the D&D world.  Come to think of it, I don't think the cartoon ever named the world.  Sadly, the show was cancelled before they kids ever got home, so they're trapped forever in the fucked up land of D&D. 





Uni, that's the last time we miss the portal
because you were getting eaten by a grue!

The show is pretty bad, but it's a fun kind of bad.  The bad 80s styles and cliches are a bit fun to recognise and point out, the villains are over the top and evil for the sake of being evil.  The kids sometime agonize over moral dilemma that are quite silly, and the requirement to have some kind of redeeming value is shoehorned in so clumsily that I imagine the writers at times just said, "fuck it, let's do a sharing is caring episode and be done with it so I can go get a beer."  DM is completely useless.  In fact, he's exactly like an idiot pretending to be smart - he just blabbers some nonsense and tells you after the fact he knew it all along but that you needed to learn it for yourself.  The barbarian has no pockets whatsoever and yet manages to conceal a massive club. 

Let's face it - It's cheesy and cheese is delicious!

Max Payne: The rise of the cutscene

Rockstar's latest offering is a gritty shooter in a style that reminds me of the old detective film noir style.  The plot is simply captivating and it kept me up way later than I should have just because I wanted to know what happens next.  Unfortunately, the film relies on custscenes and some kind of red and blue blurring effect to distort the cut scenes, which really annoys me.  I have vertigo and those effect are what vertigo feels like.  To be fair, though, they seem to use the effect more when Max is drunk, and it does convey the disorientation of drunkenness quite well.  Also, I'm a big believer the the saying "show, don't tell" and in games that means let the player explore and discover it on their own rather than force the player to stop playing to watch a cutscene.

Now please don't get me wrong, custscenes can be truly epic when done right.  The Wrathgate cinematic in World of Warcraft nearly brought tears to my eyes.  In this case...  Well, I'm on chapter five and I feel like I've spent more time watching cutscenes than actually playing the game.  And every now and then, Rockstar decides to not tell you when a cutscene ends and you were supposed to be playing a gimmicky and timed shooting gallery segment.  I am beginning to wonder whether Rockstar really wanted to make a game or if they really wanted to make a movie but just made it into a game instead.  I love the plot, I'm not a big fan of the way in which Rockstar has chosen to tell this story.  Every time you use a cutscene you are taking the gameplay out of the player's hands and relegating him to the role of a passenger on your ride.  The whole point of a game is that the player is the driver.  The player gets to drive the story forward and unravel the beautiful fabric that you've woven as the plot. 

The gameplay is pretty solid.  It's a standard shooter and the controls are pretty intuitive.  There aren't too many trick shots or special finishers that you can use, but that's fine with me.  The last bad guy in each...  let's call them "encounters", the last bad guy in each encounter is marked by a special slow motion effect and a focus on the bullet and a close up of the kill.  You can pull the rigger to pump a few more shots off in you like, but you're wasting ammo.  The first few times I felt a rush and the thrill of victory at this accomplishment.  After a while it got on my nerves.  Not only does it tell me that all the bad guys are dead rather than let me explore and clear the room, but sometimes the shot just isn't that good or worthy of an epic slo-mo.  A headshot does, a near miss to the left hip really isn't that cool.

In the end, with a same like Max Payne, the style is exactly what I expected, which is good in this case.  The cinematics are increasingly artistic and creative, to the point of trying too hard.  The game play is excellent, but too sparse and too often interrupted.  The "bullet time" effect is is overused or simply not used to good effect. 

On the whole, a good game.  Great gameplay and a story worthy of any Hollywood summer blockbuster.  Personally, if I'd been able to play a free demo I probably would not have bought the game, but now that I've played it, I can't put it down.