PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (2012)

Sony’s Super Smash Brawl All-Stars Royale with Cheese.

When I learned of the existence of today’s game, I scoffed.  I had no interest in playing this game.  Well, that’s not necessarily true.  I actually have had interest in playing this game many times before, and I’ve enjoyed playing.  Problematically, I enjoyed playing these games when they were called Super Smash Brothers.  But this time PlayStation was doing it.  I still only decided to play this game because I have a somewhat underused Vita and my roommate gave me a code that would get me this game for free.  Consider yourself endorsed, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, developed by SuperBot Entertainment and SCE Santa Monica Studio, published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and including the voices of Eric Ladin, Sean Pertwee, Tim Phillipps, Khary Payton, Tara Strong, Unshô Ishizuka, Josh Keaton, Max Casella, Sanae Kobayashi, Terrence ‘T.C.’ Carson, Jennifer Hale, Nolan North, Dred Foxx, Quinton Flynn, James Arnold Taylor, David Kaye, Stephen Fry, Stephane Cornicard, Kevin Miller, Marc Silk, J.S. Gilbert, and, of course, Mario.  No one is going to read through all those names to see that one joke.

…story…Hmmm…  Well, a while ago, a company made a game called Super Smash Brothers because they had been around long enough and had enough iconic, exclusive characters that a game could justify it.  Years later, another accomplished company took their few iconic exclusives, added some exclusives no one gives a shit about, and acted like another character or two were exclusive, and pretty much jacked Smash Brothers blatantly.  And you use those characters to reach the end and beat a disembodied head to make your character glow blue in his epilogue.

You will find that the biggest problem I had with this game is that it is Smash Brothers.  It is so blatantly and unforgivingly Smash Brothers.  I feel like I will use the word Nintendo in this review more than I will the word Sony.  I felt like the credit sequence was so painfully long because they also had to thank everyone involved in Super Smash Brothers.  It lasts like a half hour!  I could bust through the story in less time than I could the credits.  And to refer to what it had as a “story” is true exaggeration.  Every character, no matter how different, hears that something is happening where characters from different worlds are collecting.  They go, they fight, they have a brief, one-stage-long rivalry with a character, and then they fight a disembodied head.  Winning gives them some sort of power that makes them glow blue, in the still-frame ending movie, and then a half hour of credits.  And the final boss was so disappointing to me.  The disembodied head has nothing to do with any Sony product I’ve ever experienced.  It DOES have something in common with a certain Nintendo product that ends with a pair of disembodied hands and polygonal, colorless versions of the other characters in the game.  I will eventually remember the name of that game.  But I believe Sony missed a huge opportunity to make the final boss Kevin Butler.  That would have been fucking perfect!  …SMASH BROTHERS!  That was it.

I was vaguely surprised to see that Sony had actually pulled off a fairly strong set of characters for their Smash Brothers rip off, but they cannot justify it nearly as well as Nintendo could.  Kratos, Nathan Drake, Cole MacGrath, Sweet Tooth, someone from Killzone, Big Daddy and Dante (neither of which are Sony exclusive, by the way.  And didn’t Bioshock originally come out as an Xbox exclusive?), Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, PaRappa and Nariko (why does anyone remember these two?), Raiden (the least favorite of all Metal Gear characters, since Nintendo already had the most popular), Sackboy, Sly Cooper, Sir Daniel Whogivesafuck and Toro Whatthehell from Huh? for Red October.  I lost focus near the end.  I started wondering if Xbox could pull this off.  My research pulled up Marcus Fenix, Master Chief, Blinx, Alan Wake, Joanna Dark, the Viva Piñata characters, the dude from Condemned (which admittedly might be a little dark for a Smash Brothers rip off), and no, they can’t pull off this kind of game.  Of course, they might be able to pull it off if they add in characters that are not exclusive to Sony (such as Big Daddy and Dante) or if they actually had the audacity to make Cole into 2 different characters, justified by being a good and an evil version of the same character.  Hell, I guess Microsoft could pull of this kind of game.  There are like 10 different Carmines in Gears of War, and they could always have Master Chief and crestfallen Master Chief.  And, strangely, the characters I enjoyed playing as most were the ones I didn’t know or didn’t give a shit about.  I liked Sir Daniel from the game I can’t even name because I gave all of my shits away to the orphans in Africa.  I liked the strange cat thing, Toro, from whatever the fuck crazy Japanese thing it spilled out of, partially because he felt like this game’s version of Kirby.  I even liked playing as Nariko.  Certainly more than I liked playing as her in the game she came from.  I kind of defaulted to Kratos most times, because I wanted a character that played well that wouldn’t embarrass me.  I liked the Big Daddy too, but watching a Big Daddy get suplexed by Sackboy is not something I endorse.    I do endorse beating the crap out of PaRappa, especially when he keeps shouting about how you’ve gotta believe.  Believe this, PaRappa: I hate you.

The gameplay in this game was as good as it was a few years back on the Nintendo, but they again failed to live up to Smash Brothers.  The biggest problem was that beating up enemies served no good purpose.  In Smash Brothers, you beat people up because weakening them makes them easier to knock out of the level.  There is no ring out in PSASBR.  In other fighting games, you beat up your enemies to take their life bar down to zero.  There are no live bars in this game.  You beat people up to build up super moves, and super moves are pretty much instant kills.  So, basically, your ability to win is only as good as your character’s super move.  Kind of takes a little bit of the fun and strategy out of it.  There were other issues, like how annoying it was to double tap on the screen to pick up an item instead of just pressing a button to do it, but I think I hate most games that force touch screen use on you.  The big problem I thought of in regards to playing this game is I don’t see any reason to do it.  With Smash Brothers, you did it on the big screen on a console that could support four players simultaneously.  On my Vita, I play alone unless I want to go online (which I never really do).  Of course, this game is also available for the PS3, so I might have liked it more that way.

Graphically this game was fantastic.  Sony will always have that over Nintendo because the decision makers in Nintendo really have gamers figured out.  But this graphical improvement comes at a cost.  The load times between levels are awful, and really take you out of the pacing of the game.  You play a level, taking three minutes tops to beat it, and then you can put the Vita down and go get a sandwich waiting for the next match to start.  The levels are also nicely designed.  They start off as one person’s level and, over time, get invaded by a character from another game.  Like playing in Ratchet and Clank’s Metropolis and having the Hydra from God of War pop out of the ground, or having a Metal Gear slice its way into the Patapon level.  The game was musically delightful, but there was a problem with my game and the sound at first, but I don’t really fault the game for it because it was patched while I was still playing it.  And after that, I got to listen to the music from Uncharted from time to time, and I am always ready for that.

Of all the categories that this game comes second to Nintendo in, there is one category that Nintendo could never touch Sony in: trophies.  Sure, one could argue that Nintendo did not do a Trophy or Achievement system, but that feels irrelevant.  The trophies in this game were super easy, and not even very time consuming.  It’s not much more complicated than beating the game with all the characters and using their Level 3 Super Move in their own level.  Then just grab Toro, go online, and get an easy triple and double kill with his Level 3 move that seems to kill everyone on screen no matter what.  Easy Platinum.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a decent enough game that was ripped off wholesale from Nintendo’s Super Smash Brothers, and without very much by way of improvement.  Their characters aren’t nearly as iconic and the gameplay feels pointless and unsatisfying in comparison.  But, this game is not without its charms.  If you don’t own a Nintendo system, if you’re looking for an easy Platinum trophy, or if graphics are more important than gameplay, I could see there being reasons to play this.  Ultimately, I wouldn’t have paid money for this thing, and I wouldn’t be able to recommend it to you.  PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale gets “Super Brawl Brothers” out of “Melee.”

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Equilibrium (2002)

If I Was Gonna Shoot You, I’d Shoot You in the Face

Nothing really inspired me to watch today’s movie. I decided it was based mainly on the fact that I need to do something to prep myself for the release of Dark Knight Rises. Since there are only two Batman movies with Christian Bale, I decided I could fill the time in between with other Christian Bale movies. But that’s a flimsy premise, as I decided it after I started watching this. In truth, I just wanted to watch it. I have no idea how I originally came to see this movie, but once I had, I liked it enough to get it on DVD. Since then, I have decided at random to watch it probably a dozen times. That may spoil my review of the film, but I don’t care. This movie is Equilibrium, written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, and stars Christian Bale, Sean Pertwee, Angus Macfadyen, William Fichtner, Taye Diggs, Emily Watson, Sean Bean, Matthew Harbour, and Emily Siewert.

We’re in the future and, as we have seen many times in the past, we did not age as a fine wine. Shit went bad. There was a WW3 and, instead of leading to a bunch of really good movies and really good video games as it’s predecessor did, it lead to people deciding we needed to kill emotions so people wouldn’t get in fights and kill folks. That also isn’t going well, but people seem to like it or, more likely, feel nothing about it. They’re all on a drug that stops everyone from feeling, but there are people that decide to go off their meds and start feeling up the joint. That’s where the Tetragrammaton comes in, acting under the rule of the “Father” (Sean Pertwee). They go in, do a lot of fancy shooting, and burn the artwork and stuff that they’ve collected so that no one will be inspired to feel. This is where we join in. We follow a high ranking Grammaton Cleric named John Preston (Christian Bale). After a raid, he finds out his partner, Errol Partridge (Sean Bean), is off his meds and feeling. He finds him reading poems by Yeats and shoots him in the face. Shortly after, he accidentally knocks over his dose of Prozium and decides to not take it anymore, causing him to start feeling. He and his new partner, Brandt (Taye Diggs), raid the house of Mary O’Brien (Emily Watson), and Preston starts feeling for her. Trouble begins to amp up for Preston as his feelings start getting in the way of his job and he has to make some decisions that may change society as a whole.

I really like this movie, though it is somewhat less awesome with as many times as I’ve seen the movie. The story is interesting, but we’ve seen versions of it before. It’s a pretty regulation dystopian future/government control story, similar to Aeon Flux. The whole lack of emotions thing raised some interesting questions for me, and probably most people. Would it be better to have no emotions, but also no negative emotions and all the things that go along with that (wars, murders, etc.)? The movie didn’t make sense in that the people that were saying how emotion stopped people from killing each other would go out and kill people that were feeling, but if there weren’t the killings it would probably be a pretty boring movie. If they just said “We’ll stay here, you go feel out there somewhere and we can just ignore each other”, then what would we be watching? The real reason to see this movie is the fighting. This movie is probably one of the most innovative uses of guns I’ve seen since the Matrix movies. They were the ones that brought slo-mo to the mainstream, but this one brings in something I called “Gun Fu”, but they called “Gun Kata”, but we’ll stick with Gun Fu because puns are more funs. The whole Gun Fu thing in the movie was supposedly based on the strategic directions you could shoot in to maximize kills and minimize the amount of time you put yourself in the typical crossfire trajectory. It ends up looking like a Kung Fu fight with guns, thus the name I gave it. The use of guns in this movie is worth the watch alone. They also have some hand to hand combat (or, since it is using the butt of the gun, gun to face combat). These parts didn’t work as well and looked more like Christian Bale flailing his guns at surrounding attackers like a couple of drunk girls fighting in a club, when he was CLEARLY my man from the start, Shaniqua! Hold my earrings, gurl! … Sorry. But Shaniqua is a bitch, am I right? They also throw in some sword combat near the end, and it’s pretty good. It made me wonder how they were able to choreograph stuff that was brand new like the Gun Fu fighting, but not that interested in the tried and true types of combat.

It’s hard to judge the performances in this movie. The movie called for the greater majority of the cast to perform in almost robotic, emotionless ways, which would normally be a really poor job in the acting department. It works fairly well here, though. Christian Bale does a good job, starting off really cold and emotionless, but slowly getting those emotions in there, and having to try to hide them as well. It did strike me as weird that Bale was supposed to be the top Cleric, but he lived with three people (his wife and two kids) who were feeling the whole time, but he never had any idea. That makes him a pretty shitty Cleric. Taye Diggs’ performance kind of bothered me because he’s all career-minded and wants to overtake Bale by any means, but seemed like he might have been feeling the entire time. He may have just been a douche bag, so I don’t know if that counted as an emotion. I thought Sean Bean’s performance was really good as well, though he wasn’t in it very long. Angus Macfadyen makes a pretty good bad guy as well. Everyone else was kind of nondescript as the movie called for that. There was this dog in the movie that gave a great performance as a super cute dog. It was like it really WAS a super cute dog! But it also got like 10 people killed by barking from Christian Bale’s trunk. But I forgive you because you’re adorable. Also, there was this group of Resistance fighters that got on my nerves. Christian Bale tried to tell them to escape when the Tetragrammaton was invading their hideout, but they wouldn’t run like he was telling them to because he would shoot them in the back. It got on my nerves (for reasons that Bale even said in the movie) because he could just as easily shoot them all in the face, were he so inclined. They got killed, and they deserved it for being dumbasses.

I really like this movie, but it gets a little stale on the 10th viewing. The story is stuff that we’ve seen before, but still pretty interesting. The real reason to watch this movie is the awesome fight scenes, mainly the Gun Fu, but also some decent sword fighting. The performances are a little robotic, but that’s what the movie calls for so it’s okay. Bale still puts on a really good performance. And he’s Batman, so respect! I bought this movie on DVD, and I recommend you guys at least rent it and give it a watch, especially if you like guns and action. If you liked the Matrix, this is pretty similar to that, but great in it’s own way. Equilibrium gets “I pay it gladly” out of “You’re treading on my dreams.”

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