Review: Seven Psychopaths

Holy fucking shit.

That could be your review right there. Three words, holy fucking shit. Because that’s what I found myself saying throughout most of this movie. But since I don’t want to just crap something out, I’ll elaborate (also, you’ll have to forgive me if I skimp on some of the details – I’m running on about three hours of sleep).

The main focus of Seven Psychopaths is really a writer by the name of Martin Faranan, who is working on a movie appropriately titled Seven Psychopaths. But he doesn’t have to go it alone, being helped by his friends Billy and Hans, who kidnap dogs so they can return them to their owner for a reward. Billy is an out of work actor, and Hans helps with the dogs to get money for his African-American wife who’s in the hospital with cancer. I normally wouldn’t have mentioned that she was African-American, but it comes up more than a few times in the movie.

As Martin is writing his screenplay, Billy has kidnapped the shih-tzu of a mob boss. So most of the movie deals with Martin’s attempts to come up with convincing psychopaths while helping Billy and Hans not get killed by the mafia. Fair warning: Last chance to skip to the last paragraph to bypass the spoilers.

Review: Driv3r (aka Driver 3)

So, Driver 3.

I have no idea whatsoever what happens in this game. It starts out in Istanbul, Turkey with an incredibly confusing firefight involving people we haven’t seen yet because we’ve been playing (or rather, watching a movie) for about thirty seconds. Two people involved end up in the hospital and one of them dies, and I can’t tell what the doctors and nurses are saying because they’re speaking Turkish and there are no subtitles. So, to recap, something happened, I’ll be damned if I know what, and then we jump back to Miami, six months earlier.

And then the game proper starts, with undercover FBI agent Tanner at home being called into the Miami Police Station, presumably to assist with a case. This is as far as I got in the game, which I attribute to the controls being, to borrow a phrase from Ben Croshaw, “pants on head retarded”. Oh, I have a list.

It starts with not being able to change controls in the middle of a game, a mechanic I describe as “Seriously? Oh, fuck this shit.” This naturally means that once you find something stupid in the controls, after staring slack-jawed for a moment or two, you have to exit out of your current game, back to the main menu, go down to settings, get into the controls, change the stupid setting, save the one that makes sense (because if you just hit escape, it reverts to its dumb-as-hell default), back out of the controls, out of the settings, out of options, back to the main menu, start a new game, hit spacebar to jump past the cinematics you’ve seen already, start playing again, run into another idiotic control, and finally quit in a huff.

On to the controls that I found particularly dumb. The least of these is inverted y-axis on the mouse. Some people like it, I just happen to find it annoying. But that’s just a personal issue. The dumbest thing, and the one that made me say “fuck it” after accidentally hitting escape after fixing it, was the vehicle controls. The vehicle controls aren’t WASD. They aren’t the arrow keys. They aren’t even ANY FOUR KEYS IN THAT GENERAL SHAPE. No, they had to spit in the face of the established gaming standards, and go with Z and X for left and right, <.> for gas and </> for brake and reverse. What in the everloving fuck.

But, like an idiot, I just now decided to go back and give it another shot. This time, I actually got to the police station (using standard WASD controls, thank you very much), although when I got there I discovered that firing your gun isn’t mapped to left mouse, LIKE IT IS IN EVERY GAME INVOLVING GUNS SINCE THE LATE NINETIES. Fuck. This. Shit.

The graphics are, frankly, sub-par, and I find it clear that they wanted to show off their sunlight system (which, BTW, doesn’t even work right, painting Tanner in a thin coat of white) that they skimped on models and textures, the animations, while not as bad as Rockstar implied, aren’t exactly anything special, and DEAR GOD THE CONTROLS. If you absolutely have to play Driv3r, do it on a PlayStation 2 where it belongs.

Review: The Austin Powers Trilogy

I could review all three separately, but the hell with it, all in.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

Austin Powers has emerged as the seminal spy movie spoof for the twenty-first century, putting it in company with films like Our Man Flint, the 1967 version of Casino Royale, and sadly, Spy Hard. The movie starts in 1967, where at a party, Austin Powers just misses capturing noted supervillain, Dr. Evil. Evil freezes himself, returning to Earth in 1997, prompting British intelligence to unfreeze Austin, who is then paired up with Vanessa Kensington, the daughter of his 60s partner.

A fair portion of the scenes involving Austin are there to point out that he is, to borrow a term, a fish out of temporal water. And a lot of these are pretty good, like his assumption that the communists won the Cold War, or his putting a CD on a turntable and his reaction to Liberace being gay. Likewise, a lot of the jokes in Dr. Evil’s scenes work really well too, some because they’re straight up parodies of what evil geniuses do in serious movies, and some that take the Family Guy route – doing something mildly funny so long that the joke stops being about what’s going on and starts being about how long it’s been going on.

Burger Boy Hat

See this Pyro’s fine fry cook cap?

 

This little number was crafted from a drawing just yesterday by me, and added to the Steam Workshop. If any of you have Steam accounts, I’d really appreciate you voting on it.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3417

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.