Saw: The Video Game has been out for a couple of weeks now… But we figured that you’ve probably seen “Saw VI” or at least considered seeing it by now. Or maybe you told someone a longwinded boring story about why you’re not going to see it?
Either way, the fact remains that you’ve probably at least thought about it in some capacity. So perhaps you’ve also thought about playing the new Saw video game as well. And you’re probably also wondering if it’s any good or not. Well, we’ve played it, so hopefully our experience can help you make an informed decision. I promise it won’t be like that one time when we told you wouldn’t get sick from drinking your own pee. We just wanted to see if you would do it. But it won’t happen again. Real talk.
Sucks to be you.
So yeah, Saw: The Video Game. It’s about 100 times better than most movie spin-offs I’ve played, not that this is saying much. Movie spin-off games are notoriously bad. But the dudes that make the movies made a smart decision by contracting Konami to do the game, thanks to their experience with the Silent Hill series. Saw looks and plays a lot like those Silent Hill titles, which is both good and bad. Everything is pretty dark, but you always have a light source to see your way around. The controls are a little tankish, like old-school Resident Evil and the combat is a little stiff. But if you’ve played survival horror games that came prior to Resident Evil 4, it’ll all seem pretty familiar.
The darkness in Saw actually creates a lot of tension. Playing the game at night is a likely to cause you to experience a bit of anxiety. And if that doesn’t do it, the combat will. See, Jigsaw sewed a key into your body and told everyone else in the joint that they have to tear it out of you in order to escape. So you’ve got that going for you. The combat takes very specific timing, but is actually pretty fun once you get it down. Especially when you start using traps! But it’s kind of f**ked when you walk into someone else’s trap like an idiot, and getting your head liquefied in the process. The save points are sort of far apart at times, and there were a couple of instances in which I had to repeat puzzles or encounters unnecessarily because I wasn’t walking around looking at my feet.
Aw hell naw!
Speaking of feet! Your character isn’t wearing shoes throughout the game, which sucks because there’s broken glass all over the goddamn place. You’d think that maybe there would be a “put on some shoes so you can stop walking around on hypodermic needles and various other crap like a f**king idiot” power-up, but sadly, this is not the case. There’s lots of stuff to clobber people with though, from baseball bats and lampshades to table legs and mannequin arms. So you’ve got that going for you at least. Read the rest of this entry →
Exclusive interview with James Wan and Peter Cornwell!
Most horror fans know that it takes a real sense of humor to make movies about people being tortured, dismembered and killed all day. Now, famous horror directors like James Wan (Saw) and Peter Cornwell (The Haunting in Connecticut) are taking it upon themselves to prove this fact by stepping out of their comfort zone and producing short comedy films exclusively for Xbox Live.
Ryan Rotten from Shock Till You Drop came with us to interview the two about their own short films, “Doggie Heaven” and “Post Apocalyptic Pizza”.
Check back next week for part two, when we interview James Gunn (Slither) and Andrew Douglas (The Amityville Horror)!
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 →
