Injustice: Gods Among Us – Ultimate Edition (2013)

It’s Not What I’m Doing … It’s What I’ve Done.

You could say that my sister has a bad habit of picking the worst game from my Christmas list to get me as a present.  I prefer to think that she has a gift for it, and that the bad habit is my naiveté for assuming I’ll like so many games.  If you’re up to date with my reviews, you’ll know that two years in a row my sister has given me a game that made it into my worst games of the year.  Last year was Twisted Metal, but this year she got me Injustice: Gods Among Us – Ultimate Edition, developed by NetherRealm Studios, published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and starring the voices of George Newbern, Kevin Conroy, Adam Baldwin, Susan Eisenberg, Richard Epcar, Phil LaMarr, Neal McDonough, Joey Naber, Khary Payton, Mark Rolston, Tara Strong, Alan Tudyk, Stephen Amell, Troy Baker, Grey DeLisle, Jennifer Hale, J.G. Hertzler, Nolan North, and Fred Tatasciore.

In an alternate reality, the Joker (Richard Epcar) tricks Superman (George Newbern) into killing Lois Lane and destroying Metropolis, sending Superman off the handle to the point where he kills the Joker and establishes a new world order as the High Councilor.  In our reality, the Joker’s plan did not succeed, but did send the heroes from our world over to the other one, where they must join Batman’s (Kevin Conroy) insurgency and try to take down Superman’s regime.

There must be some sort of mistake.  I seem to not have taken any notes on the story of this game.  Of a fighting game!  They’re always so story-driven!  This game didn’t have a bad story (especially when you compare it to other fighting games), but it was fairly forgettable.  I guess I didn’t take any notes about it because it didn’t really make any impact on me one way or another.  It didn’t impress me as being particularly well-written, and I didn’t think of jokes to tear its shittiness apart.  It was roughly as good as any of those straight to DVD DC or Marvel movies.  Take that for what it is.

The thing that really makes or breaks a fighting game is the gameplay.  The problem with that when it comes to me reviewing them is I don’t really like fighting games.  I was interested enough to complete the story and beat the game with a couple of the individual characters to see their specific endings, but as with all other fighting games, once I hit that wall of boredom I hit it hard.  When I reach boredom with a fighting game, there’s no taking a break and coming back to it; I’m out.  Returning to the game is extremely painful at that point.  This game controls like most of the newer Mortal Kombat games.  There’re some punches and some kicks, a few special movies, and a super move for each character.  Nothing revolutionary.  I do like the fighting games that allow you to transition between different sections of the same level by knocking your opponent off of an edge, and this game does that as well.  Of course, once you’ve seen it once you can pretty much put a check mark behind that ‘cause it’s just going to be the same thing over and over.  There were a couple of notable changes to the fighting game mechanics that I noticed.  The first was the health bar system.  Unlike most fighting games that give each character a full health bar for each round, you’re given two from the beginning but do not get full health when you knock out one of the enemies’ health bars.  I actually liked this because it inspires you to do good all the way through as opposed to getting a fresh start because you just got KO’ed.  The other thing I noticed was the Wager system, which I hated.  It basically just gives the opponent the chance to prolong the battle by sacrificing their super bar.  They’re about to die, so they’re not going to need it, but you may have if you were trying to finish the game spectacularly with a super move.  Instead, they wager their entire super bar every time and you have the choice to either sacrifice your ability to do your super move or let them win, damaging you or healing them.  It just seemed like an unnecessary annoyance.

The characters were pretty good in the game.  It’s basically every notable character from DC comics, at least as far as I know.  I’ve never been that big of a fan of DC, but I certainly couldn’t think of anyone else from that universe that I would care to see in the game.  That basically means that Batman is in the game.  But I also resented Batman because they changed his default costume and made it look lame.  Thankfully, that could be repaired with alternate costumes, but you couldn’t fix how lame his super move was.  He basically just jumps up into the air and hits the opponent with the batmobile.  This is Batman we’re talking about!  Stupid ass Aquaman stabs the guy with a trident, hits them with a giant wave, and gets them eaten by a giant shark!  Wonder Woman’s super also sucks because it makes her seem like she needs help because she basically gets her Amazons to come in and beat your opponents ass.  It would’ve been less lame to involve that stupid invisible airplane she used to have.  But there were lots of characters to choose from, and even more because I got the Ultimate Edition.  That means I had even more characters to not care about.  Like Zatanna.  …Yay…

Injustice: Gods Among Us was a decent enough game for those who like fighting games, especially the Mortal Kombat games.  Unfortunately for it, this review was written by me.  I’m not that big of a fan of DC and I’m not that big of a fan of fighting games.  Kind of makes you wonder why I asked for this game in the first place, doesn’t it?  Well I am a complicated individual, but I will not complicate my review any more than I need to.  If you like DC and fighting games, buy it.  Otherwise, skip it.  Injustice Gods Among Us – Ultimate Edition gets “There is no justice!” out of “You could feel the love, right?”

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Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

I Punched Out Adolf Hitler 200 Times.

I just watched a trailer that made me really excited for May of next year. So excited that I decided I should try to do one movie a month that will set us up for that movie. The movie I’m excited about is the Avengers, and today’s movie is the most recent Avenger movie about the oldest Avenger, Captain America. I’ve already knocked out Thor, so I have two Iron Man movies and two Hulk movies left. So, again, the one I’m knocking out for this month is Captain America: The First Avenger, directed by Joe Johnston and starring Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell, Stanley Tucci, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, Dominic Cooper, Neal McDonough, Derek Luke, Kenneth Choi, J.J. Feild, Bruno Ricci, and a brief appearance – as in most Avenger movies – Samuel L. Jackson.

A bunch of scientists are messing around in the Arctic when they find something in the snow. It’s a giant spacecraft looking thing. Inside, they find a circular object with red, white, and blue on it. We then dive into the backstory of that circular object. Back in 1942, a Nazi scientist named Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) busts into a church looking for a shiny, blue cube with untold powers. In the US, a scrawny kid by the name of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) keeps getting rejected from the army because of his health and wussiness. But the kid’s got moxie! A scientist named Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) recognizes Steve’s moxie and allows him to join the army to see if he’s got what it takes to be the guinea pig of Erskine’s super-soldier program. At first, his commanding officers, Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and British agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), don’t have a lot of confidence in him. But, after being the only soldier to jump on top of a dummy grenade that was thrown as a test, they agree to allow him into the program. Moxie! A couple injections and some vita-rays later, Steve Rogers turns from a scrawny fuck into a big hunk of man meat. At first, Steve is made to go around on propaganda tours to raise money for the war, but when he tries that mess for the troops, they mock him for being lame. He finds out that his old friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and a number of other troops were taken prisoner so Steve Rogers resolves to rescue them. He successfully rescues them and meets Schmidt, who then takes off his Agent Smith mask and reveals that he’s the Red Skull – failed first experiment of the super-soldier program – and that he’s got a plan to basically destroy the world. Steve Rogers, with the help of Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), gets a snazzy new outfit, a sweet, very familar, Vibranium shield, and starts ass whooping some Nazi’s under the name Captain America, even though he’s only First Sergeant America.

It always warms my heart when Marvel makes a good movie out of one of their franchises. As with most comic book companies that have taken their characters to the big screen, Marvel has had a spotty history, but they were able to pull off Captain America very well. And thank Odin for that too, because Captain America is not only one of the biggest names in comic books, but he’s also kind of an American icon. The story of this movie could probably not help but be good. Just put the Captain America origin story up on the big screen. That can’t be that hard. That origin story was good when it started, and it has been refined over the years in different incarnations of the Captain that I can’t imagine much difficulty for the writers here. At first, I was thinking that the message of the movie about a scrawny kid becoming a hero was a good message, then I got to thinking that this message is lost because of the fact that he was only able to become a hero by getting changed completely by a serum that real scrawny people won’t have access to. But who cares, the movie is good times. I also like the whole part about Captain America disappearing in martyrdom, then being found in present day and recruited for the Avengers, but that was a fairly small part in the movie that just bookended the rest of the movie. It was also pretty cool that Cap starts off using a gun but quickly learns that he can whoop ass with just his shield and stopped using guns. A couple of story things that caught me was that, at one point, a spy from Hydra tries to sabotage and steal the super-soldier program and he sets off a cigarette case explosion with a button in a lighter. The thing I thought was weird was that this same lighter made a car explode and made his submarine come up. That is a versatile lighter button! Also, Captain America gets onto Red Skull’s big ass plane by the landing gear which made me think: shouldn’t someone do something about landing gear? How many times have you seen someone sneak their way onto a plane through the landing gear, either in movies or video games? Heck, I just did it in Uncharted 3 a couple days ago. Someone should figure that out.

I really like the visual style of the movie too. It’s definitely a period piece, taking place in the 1940’s and all, but it’s also got a little futuristic part to it because of all the cool technology that Stark and Schmidt had invented. The contrast really worked for the movie. The effect of shrinking down beefcake Chris Evans into a scrawny kid actually worked better than I expected. I half expected it to be an awful, young Jeff Bridges from Tron thing, but they did it much better. There were times when the face didn’t fit that well, but for the most part it looked good. I also watched the special features and found out that sometimes it was just Chris Evans in the scene and they shrunk him digitally and sometimes they plastered his face onto a scrawny dude’s body. They also changed Cap’s outfit a bit, as they tend to do in movies, but it still had the classic look to it. It wasn’t nearly as drastic as the changes in the X-Men movies, where each of their distinctive outfits became black leather gear. In this movie, Cap’s normally weird outfit of a blue scaly top, red pirate boots, and wings on his helmet became something more practical with the same color schemes. And they threw in the old outfit as his propaganda costume just to show people how gay it would look.

I came to a realization in watching this movie. I really want to hate Chris Evans because he’s all in shape and handsome and whatnot, but I can’t. He’s an entertaining guy to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do an emotionally charged performance before, but I thought he was cool in Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Scott Pilgrim. He’s like Brad Pitt, but not as great an actor. I really want to hate them both, but I like their movies so I can’t. Hugo Weaving is also a badass. I had just been thinking the other day about people that have played so many awesome characters in movies and my best example was Hugo Weaving. He has Red Skull, Elrond in Lord of the Rings, V from V for Vendetta, Agent Smith in the Matrix, and he’s the voice of Megatron in Transformers. Tommy Lee Jones is also awesome in this movie. He doesn’t play it like the classic army guy that R. Lee Ermey made a staple. What he does do is play a pretty serious role that is always making snarky comments. My favorite was when Hayley Atwell kissed Chris Evans goodbye before he got on Red Skull’s plane and then he looked at Tommy Lee Jones and TLJ said “I’m not kissin’ you”. Good times. Hayley Atwell herself did a fine job but she was mainly there to have a love interest for Cap. I liked Sebastian Stan as Bucky, Stanley Tucci as the doctor, and Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, but I don’t really have anything much to say about them.

Captain America is not a movie that will bring out tons of emotions in it’s audience, and I’m not sure they’re really going for that. What they seemed to want to make is a good times movie, and they did. The look was fantastic, the story was from the comics and was always great, but translated well, and the performances were all great too. I bought this movie on BluRay the day it was released and I believe this is a good enough movie to join any respectable movie collection, but in the very least, you should rent it. I’ll give this movie “I think it works” out of “I’m a captain!”

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