Dark Souls

In my honest opinion I don't care much for the Call of Duties and other average (yes I said average) shooters. I realize that this may have caused many readers to become ex-readers, but those are the risks one must take when speaking the pure biased truth.

Dark Souls offers something very unique to their players. FRUSTRATION. The casual gamers of this time period do not understand what a hard game is. They may play on the highest difficulty setting yet they still play the game the same way as when they played it on easy mode. Games are meant to be plowed through and at times yes it is fun to be dominating a game with nothing slowing you down. Dark Souls makes you learn from trial and error sometimes. You walk down a new hallway only to find out that a boulder smashes into you killing you without giving you time to react at all. Great, now that you know that spend 20 minutes getting to that part again and now you can try to avoid the boulder. Often times to find out that past that obstacle is another one ready to kill and infuriate you.

Look at games like the Grand Theft Autos and the Call of Duties. They have a single way to advance, by you going Rambo and single-handily wiping out a bunch of soldiers with RPGs. Then you slap your friend a big high-five and say "dude we are so great at this game". NO!!! You're not great at Saints Row, the game is just supposed to be mindless shooting with little to no actual threat. You never have to think, because knowing how to shoot is all that is needed.

Dark Souls doesn't baby you, it almost wants you to lose. Most importantly thought is required when playing, and often times there is little room for making mistakes. You can't just run through Dark Souls, the environment of the game forces you to slow down and take your time if you want to progress. There are cliffs, narrow pathways, invisible floors, traps, and more. You will have to learn from your mistakes and it will be frustrating at times, but it makes every little advancement in the game feel so much better. Every little thing feels that much more rewarding.

The feel of the game is always important, and Dark Souls feels pretty nice most of the time. Every swing of a sword, every clang of an enemy's weapon against your shield feels satisfying. When a giant monster is barreling toward you and you're still drinking a health potion and can't defend yourself you actually feel afraid or at least very anxious.

As with all things Dark Souls is absolutely not perfect. There are a moments in the game in which you die in the stupidest ways because you are getting reckless and frustrated. That is when you are best advised to walk away from the game and come back when you calm down. So its not a game you can play non stop, breaks may be required.
Certain classes my be slightly better than others, however no class (even the Deprived class) is unusable. There is a lack of online play to it, online play isn't much more than a PvP fest, so to be honest if you love online play Dark Souls is most likely not for you. So get back to your Gears of War.

Overall, Dark Souls is a challenging, strategic, and an incredible sequel to Demon Souls on the PS3. Play it, and for more than an hour or two. You will begin to appreciate that the game treats you like an adult, and doesn't hold your hand the whole time.

I DECREE THAT DARK SOULS GETS AN 8

Hugo (2011)

Martin Scorsseseseese's latest film, Hugo, is a beautifully produced movie that was a joy to watch, and not think about. When thinking about the movie became a factor, its rating began to plummet. Let's break it down a bit.

THE GOOD.

This movie is beautiful, just a joy to watch. It’s the kind of movie that makes your eyes grow 3 times in size and start twinkling like two big… twinkly round things. I was forced into watching the 3D version, and as upset as I was for paying an extra $5 for another crappy pair of 3d glasses that I still have in my car from the last 3d movie I saw, it was actually great. Instead of being used as a gimmick, it really helped draw focus to and from certain areas of the screen. It made you feel immersed in the set without giving you that cheesy, "whoa, it's heading right for us!" 3d movie feel. Also, the setting is in France, the 1930’s, and clock stuff is EVERYWHERE. Anybody who knows everything about everything knows that this is about as good as Country-Year-Object combinations get, so tip of the hat to Mr. Scorsmeiser for figuring that out.

THE BAD

              Hugo is basically two movies that were Frankensteined together. The first half is a movie about a boy whose parents somewhat recently died and is now trying to avoid the orphanage by living in the walls of a train terminal while attempting to fix the last remnant of his father’s existence. The second half is a movie about an old man who used to be a great filmmaker, but his dreams were crushed by the changing times causing people to lose interest in his work. Both of these halves on their own seem like interesting stories but, as everyone who has ever tried eating pickles and ice cream know, when you mush two good things together, it doesn't always become one great thing.

          The two plots just didn’t connect. The first half of the movie put a ton of focus on the automaton being a link to his father, leading you to believe that once he fixed it there would be more father-related plot. Once he fixes the robut, all fatherly plot is replaced with Papa Giorgio plot. It can be argued that the automaton was seguing from old father to new father, but that doesn’t excuse the horrible transition. It’s like a switch was flipped and the original father never existed. Dead dad? What dead dad? Never heard of him. I think your confusing this with some other movie. This movie doesn't involve dead dads. Let’s be perfectly honest, by the end of the movie you had completely forgotten the automaton had anything to do with Hugo’s dad.

       The automaton wasn’t really important at all. It was just a tool used to forward the plot with no real significance. If it was instead an old pen cap that Papa Giorgio used to chew on while he worked, that was later found by Hugo’s dad, then given to Hugo, and then spotted by Papa Giorgio when he made Hugo empty his pockets; the movie would be the same.

Characters are portrayed in ways that make you feel like you should care deeply about them, but for some reason you just don’t. Instead you feel a strange emptiness. The reason you don't care is because this movie relies solely on empathy for your attachment to the characters. This creates a very quick but short lasting bond. When you see Hugo crying, you feel bad for him because, c’mon, he’s an adorable lonely crying orphan. How could you not? The problem with empathy is that it’s temporary. When Hugo stops crying, so does your attachment to him. To make you really care, they need to make the characters seems like they're your friends, like you've known them all your life, but this takes time and good writing (Think about the beginning of UP).

Without any real attachment to the characters, the only thing keeping you watching is the mystery of, "What is Papa Giorgio's connection to the automaton?", and this is how you find out...

Hugo - "Papa Giorgio, what is your secret?"

Papa Giorgio - "I won't tell you"

---repeat until the end of the movie ---

Papa Giorgio - "Fine, I'll tell you my secret", blah blah blah movies blah blah dreams shattered blah blah, "All of my mental scars have just now been magically healed by the magical automaton, lets live happily ever after now" THE END

        I hope at this point you're yelling at your computer screen. Something along the lines of, "You ignored SOOO many important things! What about the police guy? And all the train station peoples? And the library guy? And the girl?" I didn't bring up these topics because i was trying to be nice, but since you asked for it... all of these characters are irrelevant to the movie (if they were all completely removed, the movie would be essentially the same), and to make things worse, if used correctly they could have made this movie great.

         Lets start with the girl. She also had her parents die or something. This was mentioned and used ONCE as a "Look, Hugo and the girl have an excuse to be drawn to each other" and never spoken of again. Everything she does are things that Hugo could have done himself. It creates the illusion that she's an important character, when shes actually just a useless side-kick.

          The library guy. What's that Mr. Scorsfarb? You say your not sure how Hugo should find out that the old man used to make movies? I know how, just throw in another random useless character and have that character tell Hugo that the old man used to make movies, DONE.

        All the train station peoples. Imagine that all of those peoples didn't exist, like you just kept coincidentally going to the bathroom when they were on screen and the coming back just as they left. Did this affect the story at all for you? No, but you did miss an irrelevant side story that I just now titled, "Fun times with quirky people from the train station."

         Lastly, the policeman. This may be the saddest of all of the underused characters in the entire movie. He has a messed up leg with a metal brace. You of course think, cool Hugo knows clockwork, he'll prolly bargain with him by fixing up his leg and then they'll bond over it, WRONG. It is not touched upon until the literal last 5 minutes of the movie where they do the whole "lets see how things changed after our adventure" and he now has a spiffy new clockwork leg for no reason. They bring up the fact that he too was an orphan AND when he finally catches Hugo, Hugo cries out something like "Pity me and let me go because we are both orphans!! Here is your chance to be a relevant character!!" NOPE the old man comes in to save the day, claiming that Hugo is his son, ending any possibilities of the policeman's character being meaningful to the story.

All in all, I give Hugo a 6. I know i bashed on it pretty heavily, but it is a REALLY well produced movie that's still enjoyable to watch, despite the train wreck of a story line.




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GRADING SYSTEM!!!!!!!

So, i was about halfway through my review of Martin Scorscescsececs's new movie, Hugo, when i realized that i should give you people who read this an explanation of our grading system here at Biased Reviews. Ratings are on the scale of 1-10.

Lets get something straight right here and now... scoring a 5 is NOT BAD. I don't know why people always consider anything less than a 7 to be bad, but it drives me crazy. 5 is in the middle of the scale, meaning its neutral, not good, not bad, just neutral.

With that out of the way, here's the scale...

3 - Just flat out bad

4 - Disliked, but not terrible

5 - Meh

6 - Just ok. Basically a Meh that was somewhat enjoyable.

7 - Good, but I don't love it enough to give it anything higher than a 7/ Bad, but I love it too much to give it anything less than a 7

8 - Great, but for whatever reasons it didn't deserve to be a 9

9 - More great than an 8. This is basically perfect. It's as high as you can go without some kind of irrational love for it.

You may have noticed that 1, 2 and 10 are not on the scale. This is because I will never rate anything as 1, 2 or 10 so it's pretty much on a scale of 3-9. Anything that deserves a score below a 3 or above a 9 will get special treatment...

Anything that is so bad that it scores below a three is not worthy of being rated. I'll just say it's bad, you'll get the picture.

10's are impossible. A 10 means that it's perfect, and nothing is actually perfect... BUT... some things can be irrationally loved far past the point that numbers can describe. In this situation, the score of the reviewed item will be replaced by something random that portrays my love for the thing being reviewed.

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to Biased Reviews, a wonderful place where all of your wildest dreams will be picked apart and scrutinized. I will then make harsh and often irrational judgments that will be HEAVILY influenced by any personal bias I may have towards it.