Cloverfield Review (or 'how not to make a monster/horror movie')

Cloverfield is yet another piece of media to fall prey to my arch-nemisis 'hype-fever' and it has hit it hard with a film that held so much promise, a fresh take on film making, a plot with more depth than the standered 'monster has hatred of concrete' plot that holds these things toghether and maybe just maybe a few half way good scares.
what we got was a camrae that goes from one point to anothere faster than a squirell on steriods, a plot that turned out to be no more than a loss bunch of 'in' jokesfor all the online fans that made it suck so very badly and a grand tottal of three moments that where not scary but which manged to carry this film above the general shittyniss it wallows in for most of the time.

so i will cover the main bad points of this film first, and because there are so many poor points i will create a list going from least to most film ruining.

5. the first twenty minutes (or there abouts)
I am not one of these people that thinks all films should be one long gun fight (the green mile is my joint best film ever) and even in a monster movie some time to get to know the people can really help a film along. but when you spend the first twenty minutes of a film getting intresting angles on peoples chins it helps me do two things 1 is to make me feel nothing for all but the camrea man and 2 to make me feel more happy leaving than i was during most of the film. so if that was the aim then mission fucking acomplised.

4. the monster (no spoilers here)
when i think about the great movie monsters i think of the King Kongs the Godzillas and to a lesser extent the Krakens. because of this i had very strong views of what make good movie monsters, so when we finelly get a clear view of it i could not help feeling a littil disappointed in it after all the only thing it really has going for it is the amazing power to shed gaint crabs and not die.

3.the lighting
the light and general tone of this film varys from 'tar black' to 'shit brown' with a liberal splashes of explosion and blood red which just hurts your eyes with the constant to-ing and frowing of the camrea it can get annoying to say the least.
i would like to meet who ever it was that thought that shining blinding light in to the face of the viewer was a good idea, some may argue "it increase emmersion in to the film" and that may be true. but a then on that token a crane can increase some ones emmersion in to a cesspit but does that make it any more fun? In fact i was more aware that i was watching a film at that point than at any other

2. the camrea work (excluding one or two moments)
hear is a littel class thati would have thought all directors and camrea men where tought in film school 'if the audience cant see what is going on because you are moving around to much then there is something wrong' and it seems to be a leasson that J.J.Abrams missed at school because there is about ten seconds total of the camera being still, and this would be including when...*puts hand over mouth*.....never mind lets just say it jerks around lots and you know what that would be okay if there had been a pause for just a few seconds more often or even if they lingered on points of intirest for longer then i wouldnt mind so much. in the film Hud, the one and only charcter that is not a 2d cut out and is also the camrea man says the now well knowen line "yeah so that people will know how this all went down" but i think anyone that did find the fottage would spend so long rubbing there eyes and holding there heads they wouldent beable to get anything out of the film.

1. the main charecters (excluding Hud)
i will keep this one short. all o the people in this film are unintresting, flat and and with so much attesion being brought on the idea of it being a small group of people moving through this attack( it is all that is on the back of the box) makes it all the more disapointing when we find out that they are all you standered "paint by numbers" steriotypes.

so to summerises this film can say only one thing in defence of it and that is that at least it isnt as bad as the Blair Witch Project.

logical paradoxsis(there fucking hard to spell)

some people (normally that prick that you get stuck beside at a party) say that if you say a word enough times it will lose its meaning, well by that logic if you say the meaning of a word enough times it will loses its word, witch is fucking impossible(yeah i am sick of working around swearing,from now on i am going to swear up a FUCKING storm)

chapter's delay

i was hoping to put up the first four chapters of the story that i am writing but my hard drive doesnt seem to like word files(or sound files) so i am now going to have to rewrite the entire bloody lot again.

podcasts definatly NOT on the way

well, the twin temptrests of booze and GTA (goddamn them!) have rendered me completly broke so i can no longer afored to by a mic so it will be some time before i can make it.

so in the mean time i have been working on the script of a machnama that has been getting longer and longer, it will be a joint effort between me and ewan jf (from this blog http://www.thefedorablog.blogspot.com/ ) i hope to have that ready in a couple of weeks (i have exams in about a week so time is not very plentiful) and on top of that i am just finishing of the first full chapter of the perfect nightmare*wipes brow*

well wish me good luck

the perfect nightmare-intro

The walls where slick with the moisture from the overhead condensers, they had been smashed and now sprayed out sporadic mists of coolant. Without turning around he knew that she was behind him, he felt safe with her there but the low growling coming from around the next corner was not so comforting.
“careful Jordan” Alexia whispered, a hint of fear in her tone.
“Matt” corrected Matt then scalded him self for forgetting where he was. The growl had stopped now and he could hear a shuffling sound of claws dragging on wet concrete and then a rush of air, a rush of movement and a blur of fur. He brought his gun up too late the creature leapt on to him and then, after biting through his chest plate and ripping at his guts out like bloody confetti did it move on to Alexia he saw through the hazy darkness of death the monster biting in to her and heard her screams and then,blackness...and then the image of Alexia faded in to view, her features locked in a look of anguish.

Matt hung his head, the game pad fell to the floor and he put his hand up to the screen and lay it against the glass, tears rolled down his cheeks and he managed to choke out a apology.
“I am so sorry” he sobbed as he lovingly stroked the image of Alexia's face twisted in a visage of horror.
“I am so sorry.............”

the perfect nightmare

i have had an idea for a novella for a while and i have decided to act on it, so this is the blurb of it just to give a feel of what is to come.


Matt is a games fanatic, if it is a gaming console then he has one and he loves his computer.
so when the "quarter-life" game is released he is the first to get it and with "quarter-life 2" he found a game charicter better than any other,Alexia, but when he starts to get a littel to intrested in her his like of her quickly goes from affectinate to abseseve.
soon reality starts to blurr and there seems no way out of his perfect nightmare.

podcasts definatly on the way

i am definatly making my first podcast i am just getting all the kit toghether and then every one can listen to my rants about games books films and the world at large

The Orange Box: i will review it....some day *looks off in to the distance*

F**k where are those tissues! *sniff*

i dont mean that in a bad way (i.e sexualy) i mean that i have just fineshed the orange box and i really need to get a tissue *sniff*

i dont want to get in to much detale right now because i am hoping to do it in audio form to save me having to right out a 3000 word article on it.

so i will just close with a littel message for valve. I BETTER SEE EP.3 BY THE END OF THE YEAR OR I WILL......be very sad AND PISSED.

frontlines multiplayer review

ok this is a littel later than i had hoped but i was sick then my power supply broke and that is the way it goes.

so at the end of the single player review i said that the single player was just a trainning ground for the multi player and i can say with all certenty that..... i have no god damn idea!

this game is so unbelivebly hard to get in to online that it made me want to just through the disk on the fire (whitch i could have done because i have a log burning fire LIKE A REAL MAN!)
with a some of the worst map desing ever. oh! so i am supposed to spawn at the back of the map if i want a vehicle? HOW THE FUCK WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT UNLESS I MADE THE FUCKING MAP! *takes a sip of tea* ok i will trie to be calmer from hear on in but it is reall y hard to not just slap on the caps lock and WRITE LIKE THIS FOR THE THE HOLE TIME but i am trying to be a bit better than that so hear we go.

as i said before the map design is truly terrible with the most uneven spread of vehicles i have seen since apartied africa (oooh i went there!) and some really under powered tanks. now this is an issue whitch i left out of my single player review because i felt is was not enough of a problem to warent a look in but now in the multiplayer game it becomes a hugh problem and .that is the complete uslessness of the explosings in the game, in the other FPS whitch is currently rulling xbox live *cough call of duty cough* a grenade or a rocket is really dangeous with people running as fast as they can away from a grenade but hear they might as well have not been put in, they are pointless unless your enemy stands on it after it has bounced around a few times and even then it may not kill him and another problem is that your charicter has all the haste of a snail full of horse tranks. he takes an age to reload and insistes on cocking his gun every time you take it out. i think that if a added all the bullets he must have wasted from cocking his gun for no reason then i would have enough bullets to make my self a suit and cape ( it would be called somthing like murder on the dance floor) and this is really anoying when you have to change weapon sharpish ( whitch you always have to do because you never get a secound to think before an enemy is in your face) and this is only agrevated more by the weapons seliction wheel. who the f**k thought "hay! i know lets make them select there weapons by using a wheel" to whitch the other developers said "that is the best idea ever" and so this horrible thing was born. there isnt even a quick switch button or any thing like that when you want to change weapon you must hold down Y stopping all you where doing (including defending your self from the guy shotting you in the arse) and select your new weapon (dont for get to recock it!) and if you arent dead by then, well you are bloody lucky, as with the wit the weak granades this was not mentioned in the single player review because it was not to big a problem (the A.I is really bad).

this was always going to be compared to COD4 but really they are two diffrent kettles of fish (although how you get any fish in a kettle is somthing i think i am happyer not knowing) for one thing frontlines is for the battlefiels crowed and call of duty is for the *shudder* counter-strike crowd so any compareson of the two is really a bit pointless.
do i think it will take over live? no it just does not have the fan base although there will be a sizible communtiy of really good players (although there all ready are) and it could be fun for a rental unless you really like battlefield and its peers.

on a side note, battlefield:bad company looks like it may be the next big live game

another thought

What would happen if i put milk through a soda stream? would it be fizzy or would it curdle or somthing?

answers on a post card please (or an e-mail)

a thought (whilst i should be doing somthing else)

why is it that cats are all ays looking past you or away from you?
do they think we are NOTHING! us there masters why do they hate us why? why? WHY!? *breaks down in to tears*

just a thought

no gamercard

this more of a plea of help than a explinsion, as you will know i have an xbox live account and you may also know it is possible to display your card on a blog but i have a problem, when i set up my account i mispelled my email so now i cannot chang the email with out setting up anothere account, whitch i am not going to do.

so can any one help i will be forever greatfull.

thanks in advance

frontlines review part 1

this is the first part of my frontlines:fuel of war review where in i shall review the single player.

You may be wondering why i dont just review everything in one, well i have decided that the single and multi player aspects of this game are so diffrent that they warrent there own reviews.
so first a little bit of plot: frontlines is set in the year 2024 in a yet another post-apocaliptic waste land that seem to be the only thing we have to look forward to.
but this one has an intresting twist and that is that it is a really likly timeline, here is a quick run down:

the oil in the middle east starts to run out and that region bassicly goes in to complete civil war(well ok the hole place gets nuked which is what i have been saying we should do all along)
then the developed world starts to feel the strian and pretty soon all hell has broke lose.
Russia and china form the RED STAR alience and start to look for the last oil.

the EU and america form a aliance and take controle of the remaning oil fields.

and all this leads to a very black hawk down esk first level intro and some of the most tear inducing lines since Evil Dead.

on to the gameplay, on the hole this is a very easy to use system of contoles once you figure them out, if you are striaght out of COD4 like me then you will struggle for a while but once you get used to it the controls start to make sense and you will be blasting those naughty ruskys (who are the only people you fight strangle) with ease.

the single player story is very short taking at most five hours on normal although there is added value with all the timed achevments and what not but i can say with a amount of certanty that it will prove to be no more than a training mode for the online witch i will review with in the next two days.

game violence-my two pence

before i say anything let me state one thing. i am all for protecting the minds of chidren and i would never see a problem with a law that stops children playing game that where never meant to be played by them(although lets be honest no normal healthy adult has ever played manhunt for more than a guilty pleasure because that game had some bad controle problems) but when people try to stop the sane majority from having one of the basic human rights (that is to do what ever the hell we want as long as no one gets hurt) then these people can be called with complete convicsion a bunch of narrow minded hipocrits.

Also i would just like to point out that games are NOT REAL! some people really need to get this in to there heads(most of these people being sadly lawyers)

great quote

best quote ever!

Rowan atkinson-"your american!"

american guy-"yes....from america"

podcast on the way. maybe

i may be trying to make a podcast about all sorts of things.

so i will try and get a mic soon

films maybe on the way

i am thinking about making a few live action films but i may or may not.

i stole the idea from my friend ewan from the fedora blog(find it here http://www.thefedorablog.blogspot.com/)

so with any luck there may be some video up here soon

and in the meantime GET TO THE CHOPPA!!!!

BULMERS Cider review

This is for the brits(since as far as i know you cant by BULMERS in america) and i am reviewing this against its non-alcholic counterpart (in this case apple juice) and i will keep it short and sweet since i have already had a few *hic*.

they way i will do this is to take a swig of the cider and then take a swig of the apple juice and compare the taste, non of this "clarity test" crap! i will tell you about what matters, the taste!

so of we go, my first thoughts are that the juice seems to lack the tangy flavour of fresh apples where as the cider has all the tang you could want! Also the cider is very "drinkable" as stupid as that sounds, what i mean is that unlike some other alcholic drinks you dont feel that you have had your fill after one can. Wheather this is a good thing or a bad thing dependes on your political view, also the apple juice doesent really taste of any thing at all but a sort of flat appley flavour like you have just put a apple through a mincer and you then compliment then goo with half a gallon of water.

so i best rap this up, all in all cider will always be my first choice just because i can and if you are under eightteen then drink appletise it is almost as good.

p.s if any one at BULMERS read this you can put "recommended by the binary blog!" on the side of the cans. also never stop putting it in big glass bottels, it makes me feel more classy!

the melancholy death of oyster boy and other stories review

This collection of weird and wonderful stories was written by Tim Burton (apart from the title story) who was the genius behind a nightmare before Christmas (one of the best films I have ever seen) and several other great and not so great films (I’m looking at you corpse bride) and in this book he shows again why all of his films have a breathtakingly dark sense of imagination and humour.
First off I will clear one thing up, I am a Tim Burton fan boy through and through every one of his films I have loved and this book received the same amount of excitement when I spotted it as a American may have when they see a hamburger (also I know that is a stereotype and that there are lots of healthy and sane Americans you just cant see them round the bulk of the obese ones) so that is why for the first paragraph I will rave about the book then I will try to make some bad points.
This book is a collection of short poems about people who are a bit “odd” to put it lightly, I shant ruin any of them but trust me when I say that if you saw one of them in the street you would cross the road (and in the case of the Americans gun them down with a glock in one hand and a milkshake in the other). A great thing about the book is that apart from having poems witch are wickedly dark (and I mean dark) there are also some great pictures to go with them and if you have ever seen a nightmare before Christmas then you will recognise the distinct art work of Tim Burton. The advantage to this is that when you are sitting reading the book people that look over your should (the nosy sods!) will look at the pictures and will say things like “what on earth has that man got on his head!” or “are you right in the head?” instead of things like “ha are you to stupid to read a book with out pictures” etc. in fact when I was sitting in my living room at least two people stopped what they where doing and looked at the book for five minutes and then wondered of in a strange trance (then again I do know some weird people).
Ok now I must name a few bad point (as is said in the reviewers charter just below “thou shalt not take in with the devils of gamespy”) so here we go bad points………hmmm bad points…….this is harder than I thought….here’s one and it is so stupid that the fact I am actually pointing it out proves just how good this is, the book is not child friendly I know that that is a stupid complaint but it is the only one I can think of. Also it is a pretty stupid compliant, after all the title alone should put of all but the most stupid parent and if you are thick enough to by this then chances are your children will probably all be to busy popping out the next generation of inbreed hicks.

99%

tech help

ok the title is a littel inaccurate, what this is actually about is getting the oblvion expansion (for the 360) to run. some people have been having problems with it mostly people that bought the boxed version so here is a littel guide to getting it up and running.

First things first if you have never had your 360 connected to the internet and you have owned it for over a year then the shivering isles just wont run because you need to have the most up to date oblivion patch for the game to run it as part of the main game so there are a few remides for this the first is to take your 360 to a freind or relatives house and using there internet to downlaod the patch(all you need to do is connect it to the internet then play the game and it should ask if you whant to downlaod the patch) also an important note is that your hard drive must be on the xbox YOU own, if you put it on to your friends machine then download it when you get home (thanks to microsoft and there penny pinching ways) the machine will just ignore the patch and continue to not play it.
But if you have no easyly accesed broadband connection then you can phone up microsofts xbox support branch and have them send you the updates on a cd (you can get there number from the xbox website www.xbox.com).

well there you go also another thing about the importants of using your machine to download the patch, i have no idea how you delete a patch after you download it. If any one knows how then feel free to share your knowlege with all of us.

MASS EFFECT Review

MASS EFFECT is a game that has been both blessed and cursed with a littel thing i like to call 'hype fever' symptomes include, gaming magezines publishing 8-page and up spreads on said game and crazy cliams being made in big shouty letters like this "THIS IS THE GAME OF THIS (console)GENERATION!!!" on posters and the like. Recent monthes have seen 'hype fever' reach almost pandemec level with barely a month going by with out some game suffering through it, and when i say suffering i mean it hype is is the most deadly of all the double edged swords, with a positive that is worth its weight in gold(publcity) and a con that could ruin the game (not living up to the hype).

Over last year i saw a few game suffer a serious(if not terminal) blow at the hands of hype fever, the one that jumps to mind is bioshock with so many promises made (and some of the more important ones being kept "great story any one?") but i wont linger on that lets just say that it wasnt all that.

MASS EFFECT is a great game lets make no mistake taken for what it is it is a fun engaging space opera with a likable cast of charters and a accesable combat and leveling up system that makes it easyer for all of the RPG virgens (like me!) to get to gripes with the depth which the game hides beneath its sleek graphics(more on them later) so just bear that in mind as i point out every littel trivial problem because here arent any big ones.

I will start from the beginning of the game, by that i mean i will take you through the charecter building screen and all that jazz. So on my first playthrough i made my own charcter to see how much freedom i had to make an ugly sod and i almost instantly ran in to a problem and that problem was a lack of choice and a interface that was frustrating to use i found my self just calling him titty and staring to play witch is never a good sign in a game like this, but in retrospect i think that those of you familer with that kind of screen (maybe bioware use that setup for all there games this is the only one i have played)then it will not be a problem? and if that is the case then ignore all that stuff about it being hard to use. maybe i am just thick?

So moving on to the main game. as soon as the first video was over you go striaght in to a conversasion with the pilot of your ship(who is voiced by seth green...just so you know!) and you get to see the graphics in action, and the first thing that struck me was "wow all the humans look like play-doug but the aliens look real!" and that was for me a really bad point, if you cant make humans look real then why the hell is it that the aliens look like i could touch them?there are some serious problems with your engine. and that leads on nicly on to my next point, and that is that the engine sometimes lags to fuck! with a gunfight being nothing more that a mess of disjounted frames and sound effects the last bit of the game suffers the most for this since it has some rather spectacular stuff going on in the backround.

On the plus side the leveling-up system is very well used and the enmies dont level-up with you ala Oblivion! so that is a plus and you can use the charcter from your last play through in the next campign witch makes getting some of the achevments easier, but this also has a flaw to it in that you also keep all the swag you had at the end of the last play through witch can be worth a rather insane amount of money giving you a lot of spare cash to by all the best armour and guns.
that final point could be good or bad depending on your view but i think it is a mixed blessing.

So to rap this all up MASS EFFECT is a flawed game but if you can look past the somtimes juddery frame rates and the play-doug humans you will find a deep exciting world to lose your self in for 20 hours, and in the end that is what gaming is all about.

also it has shagging whitch is always welcome!

score 85%