Mongo Nation

Hopefully, more like the first of many

By Jeremy Azevedo

There really isn’t any shortage of RPGs to choose from this season, with new titles flooding the 360, Wii, DS and the PS3. But if you can only make room for one more after Fallout 3 and Fable 2, The Last Remnant should be the one.

The Last Remnant is just about the best-looking RPG I have ever played. Square-Enix employed the Unreal Engine 3 to construct visuals on par with the best that the 360 has to offer. This comes at a cost, when the machine struggles to keep up the frame rate or takes a full minute to load the next area anytime you go anywhere, but it’s a minor hindrance, really. The characters look great, whole armies are present at any given time, and the controls work perfectly.

The Last Remnant cans the usual “plucky, orphaned teen hero experiencing an existential crises” bullshit and instead focuses on a wider reaching plot centered on ancient and unknowable technology, politics, cold war and military operations. There are no labored love interests or children, and though your main character is a teenager technically, he is also quite different than what you would expect, as he is a total dick.

Throughout much of the games opening, you fight alongside Marquis David Nassau (whom your character refers to as “Dave”, enraging the members of his cabinet) and the four generals of Athlum. The four generals, who are representatives of the four prevailing races (giant fish-men, four armed cat people, Yoda-like frog dudes and humans), are all great characters that you will enjoy fighting alongside. Even better, you don’t even have to micromanage all their stats and equipment. Since they come and o so frequently, Square-Enix wisely decided to have them take care of themselves, merely requesting items from defeated enemies from time to time which they then use to upgrade their equipment. Awesome.
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An attempt to innovate by doing what everyone else is doing

By Steven Busch

I have never been much of a Kanye West fan. I have been a mild fan of some of his hit songs, but for the most part, he is obnoxious, and cocky, to a point where he is an annoying asshole.

With that being said, I still approached “808s And Heartbreak” with a clean slate, after all, this is not a typical Kanye West album. “808s” is Kanye’s attempt at singing. The only problem is, Kanye can’t sing. Kanye knows Kanye can’t sing… so what does Kanye do? He does what all rappers who wish they were singers do, they use Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune is a fantastic effect that is used to correct the pitch of a singer’s vocals. If you are flat, sharp, or just plain miss a note, Auto-Tune will come in and correct it for ya.

Kanye’s unjustifiably immense ego is made of cocaine and neon.

When you hear that (now generic) robotic sound on a rapper’s vocals, it’s the result of turning Auto-Tune up to full power, which has an electronic result. This has become rather popular in urban music lately. It’s ok every now and then, perhaps on a hook or as a double on some secondary song, but Kayne uses this effect on every song on the album, because he cannot sing, and it provides the illusion of a decent singing voice.

Kayne, I want to slam dunk a basketball, but you don’t see me trying out for the Lakers, showing up with a trampoline so I can jump high enough.

“Love Lockdown” has a good hook, where the Auto-Tune is a nice addition… though it is, of course, overpowered by the fact that the rest of the song uses the same effect. But on “Love Lockdown”, Kanye shows a prime example of what the effect is for: A big soaring hook, where his voice cant quite reach the note he is going after, so Auto-Tune gives him the boost.

Kanye performing with the Auto-Tune Orchestra.

“Paranoid” is total crap. The beat sounds like Kanye was on the shitter, and had a lightbulb over his head, and by the time he got to the studio, it has been reduced to a glowstick. The entire song is generic, and sounds like the drivel that a 14-year old kid churns out as his “first beat”, not what you’d expect from a dude who began his career as a producer for Roc-A-Fella. Don’t forget that Kayne is supposed to be a producer. He is supposed to hear crap, and turn around and say, “this is crap”. You can do better.

Well, who is telling Kanye he can do better? Kanye sure isn’t telling Kanye that. Hell, Kanye would probably definitely be a backstage groupie for Kanye if Kanye could.

Like I said, some of the songs are decent, if you listen to them separately. But you certainly cannot listen to the entire album in one sitting, unless you have a meager ear for music, and can listen to something just because the radio tells you that you are supposed to. If that is the case, Nickelback has a new album coming soon. I am sure you will enjoy that as well. It probably has overproduced vocals too.

Enjoy. Asshole.

Movies that continue to spawn sequels that no one sees

By Jeremy Azevedo

You know how every couple of months, you see an ad in the paper (or anywhere else that’s cheap to advertise) for a new National Lampoon movie? And you think to yourself: “Who watches these?”

Not even the horniest of frat bros would waste ninety minutes of their time watching “Bag Boy” just to hear the same dick and fart jokes they’ve heard 1000 times that day already and maybe see some nobody’s boobs once or twice. (That’s what the internet is for, amirite?)

A parade of crap. Starring Bon Jovi and Paris Hilton. (Sigh…)

And yet, National Lampoon continues to make more and more shitty movies, slipping into near Troma-like depths of cheap cash-ins and half-baked plots. In case you need reminding, this is a company that at one time produced bonafide classics like “Animal House” and “Vacation”! But as painful as it is to see a franchise killed, buried, dug up, raped, reburied and pissed on like this, National Lampoon is not the only victim of Dead Horse Kickings Disease (DHKD) out there. Many once popular films have birthed series that continue farting into the wind to this very day, sometimes unbeknownst to anyone!

Let’s review:

Underworld

Vampires with guns. Okay, sure, why not?

Vampires in skin-tight Lycra body suits pretend to karate-fight CGI werewolves in slow motion. Do we really need three movies to convey this? Someone seems to thinks so… The third film in the series, “Rise of the Lycans” comes out next year. Just in time for you to apathetically get it confused with Blade 4, which you will also not go see in 2009!

Cruel Intentions

CI2: It may not have a coherent plot, but it does have sorta fugly naked twins!

The first Cruel Intentions, while based on a popular 18h century French play, was a banal sex movie without any actual sex in it. However, a cast that included Reese Witherspoon, Sarah Michelle Geller and Ryan Phillippe insured that it would be a hit. What most people don’t know about Cruel Intentions, however, is that it actually has two sequels! The first sequel was actually the pilot for a planned TV series, written and directed by the same guy as the first film, which was subsequently dropped from the Fox programming schedule and re-purposed as a movie. A third movie soon followed for absolutely no discernable reason, and of course no one saw it. Read the rest of this entry →

I just thwarted the resurrection of Dracula, and boy is my arm tired

By Jeremy Belmont

Earlier this year at the E3, I spoke briefly with Castlevania series creator Koji Igarashi about Castlevania Judgment. He explained that it was his goal to create a 3D Castlevania game for the Wii in which you could swing the wiimote like a whip, becoming more fully immersed in the series’ trademark vampire slaying.

The problem with this play mechanic, he said, was that your arm would get tired after a short amount of time, preventing you from playing as long as you would like. He then decided to make the game more like a fighting game, which would provide the same kind of action element, but with frequent pauses in-between rounds in which to rest your whip-swinging arm.

Knowing this, it was easy to enjoy Castlevania: Judgment when it finally arrived this week. A longtime fan of the flagship Konami series, it was great to be able to play as characters from all previous games, including pretty much the entire cast of “Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse”, Shanoa from this year’s “Order of Ecclesia” and even Cornell, from the shitty N64 “Legacy of Darkness”. I approached the game not as a contender to Soulcalibur, but as a fun action game with unique and easy controls. Really, Castlevania: Judgment really plays more like Devil May Cry then it does the traditional fighter. You can still string together some pretty sizeable combos, but it doesn’t require you to memorize hundreds of different button combinations to do so.

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New pics and info about the upcoming downloadable content!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Rockstar recently announced the release date and details of their upcoming downloadable content for GTAIV, “Lost and Damned”, available February 17th on Xbox Live.

This DLC will be the first of two planned episodes, starring an all-new protagonist and taking place in Liberty City, dovetailing around the events of the main storyline. Lost and Damned will be as full-featured as supplemental content comes, including new missions, multiplayer modes, weapons, vehicles and even its own soundtrack. I’ve never been a huge fan of motorcycles in GTA myself, due to the potentially fatal crashes that seem to happen to me anytime I drive over 30 mph, but I must admit the pics look cool:

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