Reviews

Review – Transformers – Titans Return – Highbrow

Like most of the original Headmasters, Highbrow hasn’t gotten a proper update in a while. There was a pretty neat Highbrow back in the Hunt for the Decepticons sub-line of Revenge of the Fallen, though his alt mode for that line was a Lockheed P38-Bomber style plane, and he was mostly green instead of his original blue and white. It’s a neat toy mostly for using a cool alt mode, but it’s not very Highbrow and it wasn’t a headmaster.

Like most of Titans Return, Highbrow is a much more faithful remake of his G1 iteration. He has the same colors and turns into a dual prop Cybertronian helicopter. It’s not a toy without some pretty bad flaws though, mostly due to the helicopter blades. This is one of those areas where the lessened budget of newer toys actually become a bit of a hindrance. The helicopter blades don’t have any way to lock into place in robot mode and don’t fold out of the way in any meaningful way. They just sort of flip around, which wouldn’t be a problem except they tend to get locked up in his massive helicopter cockpit backpack.

He also suffers from a severe case of “wobbly head” syndrome, which seems to plague a few of these Titans Returns figures. Part of the problem seems to be that the hook for his head sticks out from his neck a few millimeters. On the plus side, it means he can sort of look up and down a bit, but it doesn’t make things lose and floppy. Something that was most common in the Wave 1 figure Scourge, which brings up another interesting bit…

Back in my review of Chromedome, I made a comment about how Chromedome looks like he is a remold of the Combiner Wars Breakdown mold, but isn’t, he just shares a transformation. Highbrow here has a similar sort of situation going, because technically, Highbrow IS a remold of Titans Return Scourge. That said, they share almost zero actual parts and their transformations are “reversed.” Where Scourge’s front form by joining his legs together, Highbrow forms the rear of the helicopter. The tell tale bit that these are remolds lies in the pull out section on the hips/legs used during transformation. That, and that they are part of the same lines, it’s actually pretty uncommon to have a remold cross over between lines the way Chromedome and Dead End would have done.

The toys are definitely different enough to warrant owning both of them if you are interested in both. The transformation results in a pretty near little helicopter. The cockpit is functional to allow for the Titan Master to fit inside. The two guns can attach to the underside of the wings to give the chopper some artillery, though they attach via the non round pegs, which is slightly against what you commonly see but it allows for the use of the molded landing wheels. There’s a third flip out landing gear that isn’t super obvious on the under side of the cockpit.

The helicopter mode looks good and holds together very solidly. It’s definitely a good addition to the vehicles for Titan Masters. If your interest in this line lies more with the Titan Masters and their vehicles and bases, Highbrow is definitely a good addition, even if his Robot mode is a little clunky.

Review – Transformers – Titans Return – Mindwipe

Jan 26th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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Continuing on with the updated Decepticon Headmasters, today’s review cover’s Titans Return Mindwipe. Wave 1 gave us Skullcruncher, the first beast based headmaster, Wave 2 gives us Mindwipe and Weirdwolf. All of the updated Headmasters figures are very close in design and look to their original G1 counterparts with the exception of Mindwipe. While Mindwipe captures the essence of the Bat to Robot, he has a very different transformation and much more proportioned look overall.

That design change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something that may bother people looking for a really pure “update”. Titans Return Mindwipe is also much closer to the original design than the previous best update from Hunt for the Decepticons. HFTD Mindwipe is a nice figure, but he’s a brownish stealth bomber robot. He’s as close to the original design as HFTD Highbrow was.

Like Skullcruncher, Mindwipe does some really interesting things with his Transformation and design. Fortunately, Mindwipe isn’t nearly as flawed as Skullcruncher is. His shins are a little huge, which hinders his leg articulations a but that’s his only major flaw. I suppose I could also mention that the claw weapon is supposed to peg into the Bat’s but to form a sort of tail but it falls out instantly because the hold is too large as well. It really doesn’t feel like much of a flaw though because frankly, the tail is underwhelming and looks lame anyway. The bat is better off without it attached.

So what actually is interesting? Firstly, his robot has extra vestigial wings, entirely to give him wings in his robot mode. This is because of the way the actual wings transform. They sort of roll up on themselves to form the legs. It’s certainly a different technique for dealing with wings in the Transformers line, and pretty clever to boot.

Also fun is his Titan Master cockpit in bat mode, it’s a coffin shaped door, you know, because coffins and vampires and bats. It’s a neat little touch for what could have just been a simple open and toss him in deal.

The transformation is a bit tricky due to the way the legs/wings work, there are a lot of swivels and joints that have to be turned just right to make everything line up and tab in properly, which could be a little tricky for some. The bat head mouth opens and closes, which is a nice touch as well, but it doesn’t have any way to look “up” for flying poses.

Titan Returns Mindwipe is a pretty fun and neat addition to the line. He’s definitely a step up from Skullcruncher’s floppy mess.

Review – New Super Mario Brothers 2 (3DS)

Jan 24th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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The Good

It’s Mario, it’s pretty good in all the ways Mario is good.
The return of the Raccoon Leaf, generally reminiscent of SMB 3 all around
Build in mechanisms for if things get too tough

The Bad

It’s Mario… It’s not a particularly original Mario either
There are a few tricky points but not much is super difficult, which makes the game go by pretty quick
The Coin Collecting aspect is interesting but serves little purpose

In Depth

If there’s one consistency in Nintendo’s world, it’s Mario. I’m not even going to attempt to figure out just how many Super Mario Brothers titles there have been, let’s keep it at “a lot”. A few years back for the original Nintendo DS, we got the first New Super Mario Brothers, a sort of, return to roots restart of the Super Mario Brothers franchise. There have also been a few New SMB titles on the Wii and WiiU as well. New Super Mario Brothers 2 comes to the Nintendo 3DS.

It’s not a remake of any previous title, despite the name, which can be a bit confusing, given how much Nintendo rereleases it’s old SMB titles. I didn’t expect it to be a remake but they seem to have taken the same idea with the Yoshi’s Story series, there is a New Yoshi’s Story, that apparently isn’t a remake of the original as I had thought it might be. Though not a remake, there isn’t a whole ton here that’s super original. While the more old school Super Mario Brothers titles would get newer graphics and power ups and music, this game looks and feels very much like it’s predecessors, especially New Super Mario Brothers for the DS. There aren’t even really any super original power ups in this title, the primary two being the Fire Flower and the Raccoon Leaf.

I really like the return of the Leaf, SMB 3 is one of my favorite titles in the series. Of all of the ways Mario has been able to fly over the years I always felt like Raccoon Mario was a good balance between functionality and being too over powered like say, the Cape. If you fail a level too many times you will be rewarded with the chance to use a White Raccoon Leaf, which gives you unlimited invincibility as well as (normal) flight power. This isn’t always the best choice though hen trying to collect the Star Coins necessarily though, as some coins require you to perform tricky bounce maneuvers across enemies, with the White Raccoon power, you’ll simply push right through the enemies. Also, while completing the stage with the White Raccoon lets you proceed, the stage will remain red and incomplete for actual completion percentage.

The real addition to the gameplay here is the coin accumulation. In addition to score, you have a counter for how many total coins you have collected throughout the game. The only real change that occurs as you collect coins however is that the pile of coins on the title screen will gradually grow larger. This feature is similar to how Wario Land worked. It might have been a nice twist to the classic formula for Wario or maybe the genie from Wario Land to show up, giving this coin total purpose, but sadly, it’s just the slightly tired 8-9 worlds with Koopa bosses.

Which is another nice nod to Super Mario Brothers 3, and Super Mario World, the return of Reznor and the Koopa Kids. Bowser Junior was the villain of the first New SMB, instead Bowser’s other kids get to take control here, one in each world, just as you’d expect.

If you really like the coin mode there’s also the Coin Rush Mode, where you play 3 randomly selected courses with a very limited time set to see how many coins you can gather. These coin records can be saved and shared via the Street Pass system, to let you try to beat other’s records. It’s an alright additional mode, though nothing special. You can also purchase additional course sets, which I believe is the first time a Mario game has had paid DLC. Honestly, I don’t find the mode fun enough to justify buying more stages for it. I’d rather just buy another title.

The Verdict

What’s the final call here? Well, it’s a decidedly adequate Mario Game. It’s fun, it’s got some good references to older titles here and there, it’s everything you’d expect. It’s also… everything you’d expect, with nothing overly new.

Review – Movie – xXx (2002)

Jan 20th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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Around the same era that Vin Diesel started making his mark as a tough guy Street Racer in The Fast and the Furious, he starred in a similar movie called xXx, or Triple X. It’s similar in that Vin Diesel plays the same sort of underground tough guy bad ass character and both films are sort of designed for the X-treme audience. xXx take this whole concept to the X-treme level though.

Aside from general tone and Vin Diesel’s character, xXx and Fast and the Furious don’t share a whole lot else in common. At it’s core, xXx is essentially a Bond film. In fact there is really very little that would need to be changed, including dialogue, to make this a bond film, aside from swapping Vin Diesel’s Xander Cage for Pierce Brosnan in a suit. I suppose the early 30 minutes or so where Xander Cage gets recruited would need to be reworked a bit, simply because James Bond is already a secret agent, but you get the idea.

The core plot boils down to, the government is too out of touch to infiltrate a terror organization, Anarchy 99, of young Ukrainian punks, so they need to recruit their own younger hip tough guy to go and extract some intel. Of course, this leads to Vin Diesel’s character getting too involved and he ends up saving the day.

This is definitely a film full of some pretty cringy bits, though mostly because it’s very much a film of the early 2000s. Heck, Xander Cage’s nickname is “Triple X”, because of his three strikes criminal record, but also because it looks XTREME. This is all demonstrated early on in the film as Xander steals a sports car and runs it off a bridge while video taping a statement about how the owner, an unpopular politician is a dick. This basic concept seems kind of whatever these days but something to consider, this movie came out 3 years before Youtube was a thing. This is pre internet video activism.

Xander Cage is then recruited by Samuel L. Jackson, as “government handler guy” though not before running him through several tests. There are bits in the Colombia scenes that feel really out of place in the flow, since it’s really obviously just an excuse to throw some stunt bike work in, but otherwise it’s all pretty alright. It seems a little ridiculous that the government would throw some random punks into the middle of a warzone with no training though. Not to mention the incompetence in how the diner was staged.

Xander heads off to his mission, still without any training, though he does get some gadgets from this movie’s Q to help him out in a pinch. One thing I will give this movie props for is that he uses most of the gadgets he is given, and none of them feel ridiculously situational, as seems to happen a lot in James Bond.

Eventually the necessary data is gathered but not before Xander falls for Yelena, the girlfriend of our villain. Where would out X-treme James Bond be without an X-treme Bond Girl after all. This becomes Xander’s driving force for the second half of the film, as the government wants to extract him, but he believe Yelena is good and wants to save her first.

During the extraction attempt we learn of the true plans of Anarchy 99, to launch an unmanned mini sub filled with deadly bio toxin filled missiles. The ideas is to wipe out the world governments and cause Anarchy. It’s once again, very James Bond in nature.

Eventually we learn, to not a lot of surprise, that Yelena is also an undercover agent, and Xander teams up with the Ukraine police to raid the compound of Anarchy 99. Not before we get another really out of place X-treme sports sequence though, as Xander uses his mad Snowboarding skills to cause an avalanche and cut off communications to the compound. It’s kind of funny considering part of the theme of this movie is the whole X-treme sports X-games motif, but anytime that element shows up, it doesn’t fit the movie plot very well and feels tacked on.

During the raid and final sequences, we get some good bits that help sell Xander’s character, which I really enjoyed. He hasn’t had to do a lot of actual spy/soldier work yet, though he kind of boasts about how he’s this great whatever and plays plenty of video games. Yet, he almost gets killed by not knowing how to work his machine gun (saved by Yolena, the real spy), and later only manages to kill Yorgi, the leader of Anarchy 99 when he takes time to actually aim his gun instead of shooting wildly. He also has no idea how to use his recently acquired weaponized super car, though as pointed out in the film, nothing it’s equipped with is actually very useful to their situation.

During the final sequence, Xander and Yelena chase down the submarine in that super car, though Xander still gets to do some clever X-treme sports tricks to finish off the submarine.

Despite the grungy loudness of the film, it flows pretty well and is pretty believable in what it’s attempting to accomplish. The dialogue has some cheesy bits, and everyone’s Russian accents get a little old after a while, but xXx is a decent action flick. If you’re a fan of Brosnan era Bond or The Fast and the Furious, this movie is a decent blend of those concepts that makes it work. It’s not high film, but it’s not god awful schlock either.

Review – Battlefield 1 (PC, PS4, Xbox One)

Jan 17th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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2016 – EA DICE – Single Player/ Online Mutiplayer

The Good

Visuals are top notch and dense
World evolves and changes as the battle continues
Massive miltiplayer battles that really feel like a war.

The Bad

Dense visuals can be extremely confusing most of the time
Leveling process is extremely slow
Price (Game, Micro Transactions, DLC, etc)

Note, I generally try to use my own screen shots but despite my best efforts with several tools, I couldn’t get this game to TAKE screen shots. Chock that into the negatives if you want. These shots are pretty indicative of what things look like, if anything, they are too sparse.

tl;dr Review

This isn’t the first Battlefield Game and it won’t be the last. It is the first one that I’ve personally played however. This sort of title isn’t really my type of game but I’ve found that I ended up enjoying it a lot and really stuck with it despite it’s flaws.

Most of these flaws are in the level progression, which is extremely frustrating and slow on all fronts. Also, being an EA title, it’s kind of ridiculous how expensive this game is in order to get the “complete experience”.

It’s a lot of fun though and definitely a different play experience than the types of FPS games I generally play (think, TF2). It’s much more grounded in a realism aspect, there isn’t any kooky power ups or super abilities, and you die pretty quickly if you get shot. The game is pretty much built around the idea of dying a lot, the opening tutorial style missions says this right off the bat. The line is “You aren’t expected to survive”.

The battles also feel huge, despite the massive open areas of each map. You will almost always be surrounded by fellow soldiers with gunfire and explosions all around. It’s easy to get lost and killed without even seeing the enemy.

It’s not likely a game that will appeal to everyone given it’s frantic nature but it’s a lot of fun to be sure.

In Depth

I want to start off with the problems, which are things that could be patched and fixed but reading around online about the history with other titles from the same folks, it’s not likely to happen.

The biggest annoyance is how slow progression is on all fronts. Your account has an overall level and rank which progresses the quickest, you gain points for how you perform throughout each round. I can tell you from experience that you don’t have to be the best shot and get the most kills to progress this rank. I’m pretty terrible at killing the enemy and often have a Kill/Death ratio in the range of 1/10+. I also still finish in the top ten players on the team often, since points are also earned for how much team work you do. Kill assists, Medic healing, and control point capturing all help push up your score and rank.

As near as I can tell, this rank is mostly just good for earning money to unlock weapons.

There are also 4 classes, Assault, Medic, Support, Scout. Each class has it’s own rank up system. This system feels like it runs extremely slow and has the most impact on gameplay. After fifteen hours of play across all classes, I only managed to level up one class to Rank 1. I believe there is a maximum of Rank 10 on the classes. Ranking classes allows you to unlock (via in game currency) new weapons and equipment to expand how you can play your classes. Based on my experience, the new weapons work much better than the earlier ones. I may or may not be an awful shot, but I find I often will unload 4 shotgun blasts into an enemy without a kill only to get killed in one shot in return.

This actually makes things kind of discouraging for new players getting into the game. Dying is part of the game, but dying constantly despite what seems like a good effort starts to get discouraging. Leveling up classes seems to be done by getting kills and such with the classes, which means it’s slowed even more when you are fighting stronger enemies with weaker weapons.

I don’t expect to be Rank 10 after a week of play, but it would be nice to see SOME progress.

Then there are the medals. It’s not super clear within the game how Medals work and they don’t seem to really affect gameplay other than being a nice fun side mission to work towards. Essentially, they are like achievements, only not (he game has it’s own separate achievements). A different set of 5 medals become available each week. They involve things like “Get 10 kills with the shotgun”. Each medal has 3 stages.

Problem One, you must select which of the 5 medals you want to work towards before a match. If you select an Assault based Medal, you can’t earn the Medic medal just by switching classes, which is pretty lame. The 3 stages also need to be earned in order, which is also lame, since many of the later stages are tricky enough to earn. For example, the above metal will have the stages, “10 kills with shotgun”, “5 headshots with shotgun”, “5 kills in one life”. Killing ten people with headshots in one life with the shotgun, will only earn the first stage.

This is the biggest issue, because it really discourages newer players from getting into the game. It encourages older players to always be more powerful which only results in a constant stream of death which just drives people away.

This isn’t helped with how confusing things can get, especially early on. The maps are huge, there are enemies running everywhere and friendly players running everywhere. There is a constant stream of noise and explosions, and the terrain changes drastically as the battle rolls on. This is really both a plus and a negative actually. It makes the game harder, but it also makes things way more interesting and it’s a nice realism effect. War, especially this kind of on the ground war, is confusing and bloody and overwhelming.

Rolling into the positives, I really do like the crazyness of everything as much as I hate it. Many of the buildings and structure can be damaged, so as more tank fire and canon fire rains down on the maps, the builds fall apart or get destroyed, walls will be missing sections, there will be huge craters to hide inside dotting the landscape. You can take a tank and drive it through a small house and a wall and it will leave a permanent huge hole. You can bombard a building with cannon fire and it will start to collapse revealing the structure and any enemies inside. You can pummel a checkpoint from a one of the giant airships into a flat wasteland removing all cover for anyone trying to capture it.

This all makes the game pretty graphics intensive, though it’s worth mentioning even on under powered hardware it seems to run pretty well. I get a warning that my video card is under the minimum but everything still runs fine and looks great.

The result is the battle feel HUGE. Though admittedly sometimes they are huge. Often there will be 64 players running around on a map making little ad hoc teams to drive tanks or defend or capture control points. Everyone has a place as well and though there are only 4 classes, you can select different sets of equipment for different play styles. For example, you can select trip mines and such as a Scout to try to snag enemies at choke points, or you can use the flare gun to help reveal enemy locations for your team mates. The Assault Class can use different grenades for dealing with troops or heavier artillery to deal with tanks and armored cars.

There are also the limited “other” classes. Such as piloting one of several types of planes across the battlefield, or jumping on a horse and running around shooting and swording people. Occasionally the losing team gets a massive overpowered bonus in the form of a massive battleship, a zeppelin or an armored train, these have gun emplacements which can be used by the players to decimate enemy locations. It adds a lot of variety, though it’s a shame some of it is behind the slow leveling gatekeeping mechanic.

You can also earn unlocks with “Battlepacks” which are your pretty standard fare micro transaction random loot boxes. You can earn them through regular gameplay or by purchasing them in the store. The gate keeping mechanism also kind of discourages low level players from purchasing these packs however. The weapons still have a Class level limitation, so you may find a good weapon drop and still be completely unable to use it. This is kind of a shame since, though it costs money, it would be a good way to help give newer players and edge if they so wanted if the weapons were instantly usable.

This leads into my last point, though it’s more a critique of modern gaming, especially EA. This game is really expensive. The base game is $60, the Deluxe version that contains some weapons and cosmetics is $80 and the Ultimate edition which includes all (eventual) DLC packs is $130. Now, the base game does go on and has been on sale, but that extra $50+ for the DLC isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.