Hey gang, long time since I did one of these, heh?!
I originally planned on posting this yesterday, but stuff like work and life got in the way :P
This time, let's talk movies, TV and fighting games! (again!)
So this past week was the season finale of Fringe.
God, I love that show!
The last bunch of episodes were all pretty intriguing, the on-going plot crazier each time.
I just love the way it totally embraces its scifi roots. I mean, Fringe's basically an odd to science fiction, with big budget. You find the usual tropes, themes and clichés (time travel, mutants, mad scientists, alternate world, future distopia, science gone wrong, etc.), only with a "Bad Robot" touch, great acting and seriousness.
The epic climatic finale left me wanting for some more, though most major arcs seem to be closed for now...
Fox decided the next 5th and finale season will be shortened to a mere ~13 episodes (screw Fox network!!)
I also watched back Total Recall this weekend.
It had been quite some time since I last saw that one.
I love Scharzie!
Back then they knew how to make a good action blockbuster movie, no cheap CGi everywhere and lame lackluster storylines.
And, hey, it was a less racist time in a way, having big "foreign" guys at the head of all these big budget action flicks, Schwarzennegger, Van Damme, Stallone.. just look at the way people spend their time mocking those guys nowadays, their acting, their accents.. -sigh-
Anyways, enough sidetracking, I loved that movie!
Being a Paul Verhoeven movie, it was also pretty big in interpretation, more than I remembered it being.
What really happened in this movie?
Either you accept it was simply this story of this guy named Quaid who suffered from nightmares involving Mars and some brunette. He got a "Recall" which was fake implanted memories of vacations on Mars often... which awakened some actual memories of Mars that were erased from his mind. He goes to Mars for real, spends the whole movie fighting against bad guys *SPOILER alert on a decade old movie* only to discover he really was this Hauser guy. It was a plan with the main baddie to infiltrate the Martian resistance. In the end Quaid doesn't embrace his old Hauser persona and save Mars.
OR
It was all part of the Recall-implanted memories. Lots of things support this interpretation. He did get "the whole package" as he chose at Recall. He contributed in a Martian revolution, there were blue skies in the end as chosen in the simulation. Heck, he even chose that exact same brunette. Is the whole thing only a dream? (from the moment he was trying to escape from Recall?) The movie does end on a fade to white, which usually means a state of dream or someone dying on films. But you can go further than that, perhaps we, as the audience, were experiencing the whole Recall-memories, from start to beginning. Nothing was real, thus explaining things going further and further into over-the-top action. Deviating.
And even having this big muscled Schwarzy in the main role plays into the audience expectations. We have a certain level of expectations regarding the movie. Perhaps, if we'd were to choose "Martian memories" in the persona of a spy, Schwarzy would be our avatar.
God, I love Verhoeven!
Been playing a lot of fighting games too.
Some Blazblue on my sparetime. A game, I honestly am not a fan of...for a lack of trying.
I mean, since I got the original, I played so very little of the game.
But I wanted to like it!
I liked GuiltyGear, but I just never got around playing BB...
(unlike my 50+ hours into the usual Namco, SNK and Capcom fighters...)
Speaking of which, finally got a copy of Street Fighter X Tekken for super cheap, in second hand, on ebay. That way I won't geel cheated by Capcom whenever I'll buy those additional characters as DLC...
And by the by, when are they gonna release them? October?!!
I already fhought against Pacman, on the online mode, ON MY FRIGGIN' XBOX!!
And finally, Soulcalibur V!!
I wanted to dislike the game, I kept dissing it every new News blog I posted here... And even so... I just love the game!
It simply is a well rounded, well timed, well executed new entry in the long running series. I was afraid the lack of familiar faces, the exponentially over-epic theme, plus the bad after-taste SC IV left in my mouth would ruin it... So I even stared only playing with Ezio at first...
But... like, woah!!
The game is pretty fun! I love the SC-y music, the narrator, the gameplay.. Heck, even the awful *get broke by a combo/super attack and lose clothes* isn't as silly as it was in the previous entry. (though I kinda wish they'd just get rid of it...)
The characters are either new "old ones" in everything but name, children and successors who look pretty much the same, or old returning and older classic SC characters. I'm okay with it. Namco mostly cleaned up the lineup, not everyone was that essential anyway. I still have Maxi around. Mitsurugi. Even *SPOILERs-again* Kilik.
I miss Taki, but there's still a new badass ninja around, Natsu. I miss Xianghua but there's Leixia now. Even Raphael finally looks fun and playable now!
Spent lots of hours on it already, either *local* against my bro, or on Arcade, Quest and Legendary modes. Barely touched the online, but I'm an "old school" gamer, so I doubt I play a lot of it anyway.
~
And that is all I had to say~
