America ***IN REVIEW***

The following is a review of a road trip I took in September of 2017. I think I wrote it in September of 2017. It is not to be taken at all seriously.

we drove through 13 states and visited 10 cities (and 4 sec schools)

virginia
just drove through
roads: B, good shape, most southern drivers know how to use a two-lane highway
food: n/a
sights: D, rural highways
people: C, chatty but genuine

tennessee
we visited knoxville and vanderbilt then stayed two nights in nashville
roads: B, see above
food: A, brisket at sweet ps, biscuits & gravy at biscuit love, smoked meatloaf at pucketts, hot chicken & pecan divinities, all fuckin great
sights: B, broadway is a lot of fun with great music but wasn't sure what else to do other than eat. saw some confederate monuments possibly for the last time ever!
people: B, really nice and fun to talk to

alabama
stopped to eat in birmingham and visited university of alabama
roads: D, get some fukin asphalt idiots
food: B, smoked turkey w/ white bbq at saw's
sights: F+, birmingham is genuinely depressing, 90% burnt down buildings and derelicts, but uoa was real nice
people: n/a, didn't really talk to anyone

mississippi
visited msu but mostly drove through
roads: A, great for driving 120mph
food: n/a
sights: E, slightly more interesting scenery than trees, i was asleep for the msu drive-through
people: n/a

louisiana
stayed 2 nights in new orleans. the hurricane hit the day before we arrived so there was a bit of flooding out in the country, but nbd.
roads: C, the fuckin bugs that smash on your windshield in the bayou are such a pain to get off
food: A+, best meal of the trip was jambalaya/red beans/shrimp creole at gumbo shop. also beignets.
sights: A, french quarter is just weird as hell, like time travel. great music & chicks on frenchmen street. only disappointment was missed an airboat tour bc winds were 30mph.
people: A+, locals go out of their way to help you out and are hilarious

texas
stayed 3 nights in austin. austin was unaffected by harvey. i got bronchitis at this point in the trip.
roads: D, insane amount of trucks and ppl not observing fast lane rules (maybe this was bc hurricane? idk)
food: C+, kind of a mix with texmex at chuy's, pizza at home slice, voodoo doughnuts (not local), nothing really outstanding. whataburger best fast food of the trip.
sights: A, apparently there's a great local punk/metal scene so that gave me plenty to do. ghost wolves rule and caught a surprise gbh show.
people: B, polite, tbh didn't interact with people a ton bc i was hoarse from coughing all night

colorado
we actually flew from austin to denver and then did a day there before driving the rockies overnight
roads: B, some winding roads in the rockies but no traffic since it was overnight
food: B+, awesome apps and pizza at bar dough
sights: B, went to a barcade with great selection (1up) and obviously the rockies are massive and impressive
people: B, lots of chicks at the arcade

utah/arizona/nevada
this was one long 14-hour day drive
roads: A, desert driving so you just blast it
food: B, tasty hole-in-the-wall hawaiian bbq in nv, carl's jr. also good
sights: A+, gorgeous scenery and it's constantly changing, so many photo ops. we drove through vegas but didn't have time to stop.
people: n/a

socal/yosemite
spent a night in fresno as a staging area for yosemite where we did a day driving/hiking
roads: D, concrete like alabama and fucking awful drivers, then winding as all hell in yosemite
food: C, got good jew york bagels but that was it
sights: A, i mean, yosemite is incredible, don't need to say that, but too bad about all the smoke in the air
people: E, what am i in fucking mexico?

northern california
stayed two nights in san fran & visited with friends, then drove the pch and wine country
roads: E, highways still a mess, driving in sfc is a joke, and the scenic routes take forever to drive
food: B, sushi way better than east coast, chinese food exactly the same as everywhere else, and this sour beer that i can't remember the name of but was great. in n out is the most overrated burger in america.
sights: C, kinda disappointing tbh. 49-mile drive was cool and there are some beautiful parks, but the beaches may as well be jersey shore and there apparently isn't a nightlife? sadly we got a foggy day for route 1.
people: D, the number of homeless in sfc is absurd and a major turnoff

oregon
stayed a day/night in portland then flew out in the morning
roads: B, fine, only time we got pulled over the whole trip was doing 80 in a 65 here, but nice cop / no ticket
food: B, solid cheap prime rib @ clydes, coco's donuts not as good as voodoo
sights: A, very nice and attractive city, stayed in a house from 1880, botanical gardens, lots of live music and punk scene
people: A, friendly and all white/asian, proof you can interact with people without politics mattering

trip overall
A, honestly it's hard to say i'd change anything within the two-week limit. after a couple 10-hour drives you get used to it, and so much scenery out west can only be seen by car, so i'm glad we drove. probably would fly from nashville to nola to save some time, that drive through the south was pretty boring and a waste of a day (except alabama bbq). new orleans was the highlight of the trip in most ways, but portland/denver seem like the places i'd want to live. san francisco wasn't great and in retrospect i'd have rather spent a day at sequoia or grand canyon, but there was no way to know that going in.

A brief consideration of tells in shoot-em-ups

I was considering the application of "show &" tells to shoot-em-ups the past few days while playing Raiden IV, Mushi-F, and Lightening* Force; the idea that enemies should visually indicate when an attack is about to happen (e.g. Bowser sucking in air before breathing fire). It should be taken into consideration that I have not cleared any of the three games I'm about to discuss, although I'm on the final stages of Raiden IV and Mushi-F. Lightening Force I've played for like 3 hours so take that with a grain of salt.

As I said before, Raiden is so positionally-oriented that precise shot timing doesn't really matter. If there's a group of enemies above me that I know fire single tracking bullets, I also know that I will be safe sweeping left until I clear the bullets. I can start the sweep any time before the first bullet reaches me and end it any time after the last one fires. If there's also an enemy left of me, then I should probably sweep up-right to get away or down-left to get under it and fire. These scenarios are pretty static across runs. Timing doesn't really matter that much - what matters is doing these movements in such a way as to sync up with targets while also setting up the next dodge. Which is quite enough to make it more complicated than "sweep left". I did think it would be helpful on a few enemies who shoot starburst or static patterns - and I also noticed these enemies do have animated tells (e.g. a mine blinking faster before it explodes).

Mushihimesama Futari yeah nah. It's all sight-dodging. I'm looking at the bullets for paths through them, or for enemies under them to shoot and consume them. Also, everything pretty much shoots immediately as it comes on screen and doesn't stop til it's destroyed. Herding is a pretty big deal in situations where aggression fails - essentially, you can treat enemies as though they are firing at all times and this would not significantly change the strategy.

Lightening Force I can definitely see the applicability. Not for bullets so much, but the game is plagued with enemies that blast on screen and smash into you so fast there's barely a second to react. Some of them do have foreshadowing, swooping across the background or burrowing through the desert sand, but not nearly enough. Blazing Star solves this in the simplest way possible, with "incoming" arrows where enemies are about to emerge. Crude, but effective. The bosses desperately need tells for everything they do, because they move around jerkily without pattern and again fire extremely fast bullets without warning. Maybe need is too strong - they'd be altered, for sure. As is, playing it safe and staying completely out of their targeting zone is pretty much the only road to success. The anxious fidgeting makes sure that even that isn't particularly easy.

So yeah, I'm inclined to think something is wrong with Gradius if it would really benefit from visual tells, and I'm starting to question if it actually would. The most troubling factors seem to be malingering enemies like the footbots who hang around for 10 or 20 seconds and can mostly be ignored except for those three random times they shoot, and the crowded spacing that means sustained motions like I described re:Raiden lead to constant collisions (I've said in the past I don't care for walls in shmups). It's like the series carves out a weird space between Thunderforce, where you always have to play it safe, and Mushihimesama, where you always have to wait and see, but without having the elegant level design of Raiden IV which realizes that it's in that space.

*light·en·ing

/ˈlītniNG/

noun

noun: lightening; plural noun: lightenings

1. a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.

2018: The worst year yet? in video games?

I started 41 new games this year and finished 43. As the uneven numbers suggest, among the 43 completed were quite a few being cleaned up from previous years, and among the 41 started, many remain in progress. The ratio remains on track from the past couple years*, demonstrating that I'm doing a good job keeping to my one-in/one-out rule. Given that the list is expanding more slowly now, I was hoping to finish at a higher advantage, but a couple factors kept the completion total in check.

First is that I binged on a lot of Switch arcade games. I'm guessing I bought nearly 20 NeoGeo / Arcade Archives titles over the spring and summer and finished nearly none of them. Arcade games are arcade games - good for repeated 10-20 minute bursts, but unlike platformers, you can't count on the brute force Arino-clear.

Speaking of sidescrolling platformers, I barely touched the staple genre this year, less because of disinterest than because the well is drying up. Sonic Mania led to a cleanup on aisle Chaos Emerald, and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze was fantastic, but I really didn't have much else to pick from. A dozen years and dozens of games later, I've whittled Wii's Virtual Console down to scraps, with remaining options the caliber of New Adventure Island and Kirby's Dream Land 3. And Rayman, over on PS3. Unless the contemporary trend of adventure-platformers abates or I find new patience with PC emulators, this looks to be the start of a long winter. A real shame - for many years there's been no safer bet than grabbing a random 16-bit sidescroller on a Saturday night and playing til the credits roll or the sun rises.

Run-and-guns at least seem to have retained some popular support beyond the plague of 'roguelite' and 'metroidvania', and the aforementioned arcade libraries are only helping. Beyond the many hours of Super C loops, Alien Soldier, Bleed, and (the final release version of) 20XX were among those I finished, with a few more newly underway. Mega Man X7 and X8 were more... rewarding... than expected, enough so that I intend to revisit both on the re-anniversary collection. 3D platformers provided plenty of substance too, with Rayman Revolution being the highlight, Rayman 3 being the lowlight, Jak & Spyro as pleasant surprises and Jak II an ill-forgotten curse. Sonic and the Black Knight happened too, and like X7, doesn't really deserve its awful reputation.

But the main story of the year is of course the shift in taste that has left me spending the majority of my time with racing games and shmups. I've always enjoyed both on a seasonal basis, but 2018 was an endless chain of both genres in parallel (though Raiden V did aggravate me off of shmups for a couple months). Nine 1CCs nearly doubled my lifetime total, and I'm still hoping to make Raiden IV the tenth before the new year. Deathsmiles was a clear favorite, though Axelay is close behind and only Forgotten Worlds caused any pain (well - any bad pain. All shmupping is pain). This was the other big detractor from the ratio - the length of shmups is hard to predict, and for each of the nine I beat, I started another, nearly none of which got finished (goddamn Ikaruga). Put a lot of hours into Mushi-F without much to show, but Akai Katana won't last much longer.

Fuel may be the best driving game and the best open-world game I've ever played, combining a huge world of Skyrim-like terrain with simulation-nuanced physics and as wide a range of vehicles as can be fitted with tires. The races are fucking hard and the landscape is complex, complicated further by the free-range navigation imported from the continuous overworld. It's hard to express how many light-years more interesting this is than something as precious and decompressed as GTAV, but it's buggy, doesn't have side-quests, and the netcode was weak (forget the hundred hours of single-player gameplay), so it tanked in ratings and sales. Burnout 3, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, and ExciteTruck provided some arcade counterpoints, though Burnout got hairy at points with insane AI and arbitrary traffic creating challenges too reflex-dependent to be especially satisfying - still, it's close enough to working that three times out of five you can see the great game underneath. It'll be interesting to check out Paradise. Crazy Taxi snuck in there too, but I wasn't feeling the alien technical maneuvers that seem fundamentally cabinet-bound. Ultimately I've wrapped back around to Codemasters with GRID 2, strapping the mechanical range and dynamism of Fuel to more traditional level design. So far that's a go.

A few action-adventures and RPGS filled the adrenaline troughs, but not many made the clear list. It did feel good to finally retire Darksiders II after many years of prolongation, and my feet are starting to sink into the mud and muck of Ys VIII. Yakuza 3 is a really neat River City Ransom sequel which, unexpectedly for a beat-em-up, would probably win story-of-the-year if I'd finished it (actually, no, Wolf Among Us). 60 hours into Final Fantasy VII I am STILL on disc 1. OCD and materia are a dangerous mix.

That's about it for the year. Greg and I partner-played six games, all distinctly unnotable: Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 6, Munch's Oddysee, Rayman 3, Pikmin 2, and Metal Gear 2. The dual themes of the series were A.) solid foundations spoiled by overfocusing on one stupid element (dungeons in Pikmin, combat in Rayman, etc.) and B.) going on for way longer than necessary. I pretty much disliked all of them, though RE2 is more boring than bad, Munch is a promising alpha, and RE6 was shallow incredibly trashy eye-rolling fun. I mean RE6 was definitely the best one. That's how good a collection of games we're talking about.

* 2015: 74/54, +20
* 2016: 55/55, +0 (I may have tracked 'started' differently for 2016)
* 2017: 60/59, +1

2018: The worst year yet?

I think we all know and remember by now what a terrible year 2017 was. It is scarred onto our brains like those ubiquitous marks on pears that make you never want to buy them at the grocery store, as each and every one of us struggles through treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder which doctor's are campaigning to have renamed as "2017 disorder". Carrie Fisher died. A show I liked on TV got canceled. Netflix. And probably the worst thing about it is that it came directly after 2016, which was far and away the worst year of all time, for reasons that I cannot recount without being immediately hospitalized into a psychiatric health facility.

The question we've come together today to answer, as we count down the final years of 2018 (which interestingly enough is only the 2017th year since there wasn't a year zero or August for a while) is whether things have gotten any better. Let's a take a look back at the ten biggest events that afflicted us all this year and consider how things stack up.

1. Kavanaugh got supreme court
2. The rape crisis
3. The opioids
4. (*U.S. ONLY*) Democrats won Congress but Republicans won the other half (end *U.S. ONLY*)
5. The heat doesn't work in my new apartment
6. At Super Bowl they didn't kneel for the flag
7. Trump took a picture shaking hands with a fascist tyrant who murdered more people
1. (Trump tweets) (not a separate event)
8. Slatestar doesn't support marijuana anymore
9. Lives lost that the world probably cannot cope without:
1. Stan Lee
2. Charlie Krauthammer
3. John McCain
4. John Carpenter
5. Lyric McHenry McHenry, who appeared on EJ Johnson’s Rich Kids of Beverly Hills spinoff EJNYC, was found dead in the sidewalk in New York City on August 14. She was 26 years old. 
6. Simon Kerr
7. Joe Jackson
8. Aretha Franklin
9. Everyone in Marvel when Thanos snapped (spoiler)
10. Suicides
1. Anthony Bourdain
2. Avinci
1. Possibly not a suicide
11. Margot Kidder, Superman's Wife
12. David Spade
13. What the hell Mark E. Smith died and no one told me about this? That's what I get for not checking Prindlebook anymore
10. Bill Cosby was in the news again

The evidence is definitely in and we can safely declare that 2018 is definitely the worst year ever, and that's with a month and a half left for things to get worse. Post in the comments how your life changed because of some of these events.

Baby clears: Prehistoric Isle 2

Well that didn't take long. Still, it's nice to get a quick clear here and there, especially after weeks toiling away on arduously boring Raiden V or vengefully punishing Psikyo "games". Nicer still to land at #4 on the Switch leaderboards, though that's a meager accomplishment if ever there was one (only about 15 players appear to have hit the 1CC so far. Judging from their score, the 100th ranked player hasn't even cleared Stage 2!). Prehistoric Isle 2 was never going to amount to much anyway, being a plainly stripped down, late-period aesthetic showcase. The reward on offer is clear: fluidly animated prerendered prehistoric creatures inhabiting dreamy ruins, jungles, and volcanoes. After struggling under the bitter tyranny of hellrank stoking the fires of Strikers 1945, the opportunity to memorize a couple patterns, learn a handful of scoring techniques, take a couple risks and finish the ride is just nice, like a blowjob for fifty bucks. Notes:

• I've said it a thousand times before, I'll say it a thousand more times before I die, I don't like rank (PI2 has none). If I want to increase the difficulty of the game, I'll go into the settings and increase the difficulty. I did exactly that with Preshistoric Isle 2 after my first attempt was a startling 3CC, then realized that I'd rather play at the default difficulty and strive to increase score, interacting with more of the game's systems without having to worry about an ever-fluctuating survival threat. Build dynamism into your design (chains, score items, whatever) and you can allow the player interesting choices, rather than railroading them onto the hardest path.
• The difficulty curve is just right - Stage 1 is pretty easy, leaving most of the challenge first to learning mechanics and later to maximizing score; Stage 2 gets the enemies more active, making sure there are always bullets onscreen; Stage 3 is almost like a bonus level, a really simple straight shot that also has the prettiest backdrop - the calm before the storm; Stage 4 is where the difficulty peaks, introducing lots of new enemies and constant pressure; Stage 5 is the gauntlet, revisiting all the previous challenges and providing very few opportunities for recovery; and Stage 6 is the denouement, a protracted boss battle of the R-Type battleship form.
• The Japanese version has a 5-HP health bar versus Worldwide's 3-life stock; this doesn't change the effect of getting hit (main weapon and subweapon single-level power-down, one rescue lost), but it does change the appearance of restoratives. In the Japanese version, delivering a certain number of rescues (more than three?) to a pre-boss evac chopper generates a +1HP item. At the beginning of Stage 4, defending a certain number of evacuees (all 30?) grants another. (That's at least +5HP total over the course of the game, and I may have missed some). There is a 1UP that appears somewhere in Worldwide, but I haven't been able to find it. This was a clear of the Japanese version, which is obviously somewhat easier, although I also chose that route because....
• The health bar makes the game more interesting. Delivering rescues to the evacuation chopper can be used to get back health, but it means sacrificing the pretty hefty stage-end bonus you get for carrying them through the boss fight (500k per rescue + another 500k for all five). This is a neat twist on the traditional score-extend - you have to pull off the rescue to get either benefit, but at stage-end you get to decide whether it'll be a score bonus or recovery - and whether you want to risk losing the bonus entirely if you make a mistake on the boss. The North American version of the game trades this for... nothing. Delivering rescues still grants some power-ups, but that isn't nearly as meaningful as health/1UPs. The game is simply boringer without that element of risk/reward.
• The design of bosses is a clear highlight. They last for minutes, moving around the screen, attacking from different directions, almost never repeating attack patterns. Having a fully powered up weapon or using bombs to shave off a few seconds can make a huge difference if it means skipping the last phase or two. Particularly vicious is the Hornetpede who snakes unpredictably across the screen while firing two-phase bullets.
• The bomb doesn't seem to offer any invulnerability, or if it does, it's so short as not to matter. No panic-bombing. This is a pretty fair trade-off in a game that offers at least one health restorative per stage. 
• I played with the green chopper (spread shot) using the red (chain gun) weapon. Subweapons I swapped a lot, it's hard to hang onto them for long, but super missile seemed to be the best. Napalm was invaluable in the final boss confrontation. 

Anyway, that's a solid recommend for $8. Now I guess it's Blazing Star, unless I want to scream some more at Strikers.

Don't buy the Crash N-Sane Trilogy you stupid mothers of fuck

God why do they even make games that are this broken? And why do game reviewers feel like it's okay to equivocate to a middling score of 7 or 8 in the face of such fundamental flaws?

To get straight to the point, Crash N-Sano is a shot-for-shot remake of the original three Crash Bandicoot games for Playstation. It is a graphical update that preserves the exact level layouts of the original recreated in a new engine capable of rendering 1080p 30fps motion-blur visuals with gruesome lighting effects. Despite making no modifications to the level layouts, the developers have changed the height of Crash's jump* (accidentally or intentionally, who's to say). Crash, perhaps tired from years of overwork, simply can't hit the heights he once did, and now jumps a few pixels shorter than in the equivalent PlayStation titles. To retiterate, this is without any modifications to the level layouts to accommodate.

Now, if you're not recoiling in abject horror that a developer could modify a platforming character's jump height without expecting any repercussions on the experience, Crash Bandicoot may not be the series for you. See, the entire pleasure of the Crash games, very much like the Donkey Kong Country titles that clearly inspired them, is the rhythm and flow of platforming. It's the gradual accumulation of that melody for each stage, the building of muscle memory such that however hard each stage, it will feel perfectly natural by the time the player has mastered every jump. There are no stutters, no shimmies, no need for visual alignment or minor tweaks - it's all timing and technicality, hitting the right inputs without needing to think. This isn't every platformer, mind, just this specific subgroup that more or less boils down to Bit.Trip Runner. So when you change the properties of a particular move, it's like altering the time signature of a composition. The whole fucking thing changes. Though this doesn't necessarily ruin the song, if every note and break has been perfectly configured to sound right at its original time signature, you can't simply expect equivalent results after altering that. And, more importantly, you shouldn't tell someone they're getting the original when you've made that swap.

What bugs me nearly as much as the audacity of the developers and publishers in letting this slip through is the cavalcade of reviews that note that Crash's controls or mechanics 'feel off', but can't be bothered to investigate further than that. Many of them note that this may be because of the mapping from digital D-pad Playstation controls to an analog stick on Switch/PS4, and others observe oddities with hitboxes. Yet no one (that I saw published on Metacritic - surely some dude on Youtube has made this his life's purpose) sat down with a PS1 copy of Crash 2 and a handheld Switch and did a side-by-side comparison to root out the specific issue, something that took me far less time than it did to compose this screed.

*alternately, Crash's entire hitbox may have been shrunken, such that his head doesn't reach as high at the peak of a jump and his feet don't reach as far at the length. The effect is the same: overhead boxes that could previously be bonked with a normal jump are now out of reach, and ordinary gaps that could previously be spanned with a normal holding-forward jump now require a slide jump.

People hate Raiden V, right?

Picked up Raiden V: DX for a pretty good sale price at $13, gave it a spin just to see how it would run on my new PC. Lightning fast, you might say, although I've never played nor imagined a game so dedicated to the furiously denounced flaws of the widely derided Sine Mora. Can you say BLOOM LIGHTING EFFECTS? And while Sine Mora was able to light the shmup world on fire with just optional screen shake and two bullet colors (orange and blue), Sine Mora 2: Raiden V has individual enemy volleys that can mix as many as five colors (red, blue, green, yellow, pink!), not to mention any other enemies on screen and the player's two hues of their own (blue and your choice of red, blue, or purple). It even has a camera that will zoom in and out mid-combat! Boy there's nothing I love more than watching the playing area shrink to half scale (and double size) while an approaching bullet pattern become so small and orange that it's completely obscured by the sun glare blooming off the orange buildings in the orange desert and the whole game becomes a gleaming white blob.

Seriously it's a nightmare. It's also baffling that anyone called this game "burdensomely latched to hoary conventions of shmups yore", when it's in fact so modern that it barely feels like a Raiden game at all (unless this is what the Fighters subseries is like). It has a long-form story mode with incessant voiceover during gameplay (you may say - hey, isn't that a Star Fox thing? but only Sine Mora and Raiden V are smart enough to pair it with subtitles covering part of the gameplay area), save points, branching paths, three ships with different stats and fully customizable weapons loadouts (three choices each for red, blue, and purple, for a total of 81 different profiles!), achievements, and a goofy-ass networked parallel-play power-up system. Like, Raiden III and IV are 90% the same game, IV is a loose remake of II, and the original Raiden has like eight variations and ports. This is a series about on par with Mega Man for variation, so continuing from IV to V feels like going from Mega Man 4 straight to ZX Advent without the 15 years of connective tissue explaining how you got there.

Did I mention the lifebar!!!

Okay I just hit up YT and WP and yeah looks like most of the new weapons and the branching paths are just carryover from Fighters. Why not now, nearly 20 years after the final entry?

A review of Ponyo in the format of Jeopardy

Boy, that screenplay left me with more questions than ANNIHILATION. Although, one lingering issue there - why does Lena Kane refer to her husband only as Kane, even in private? Seems very strange. Which leads me to my first question on PONYO...

Why does Sosuke call his parents by their first names? Was this supposed to be a trick, or tell us something about their relationship? They seem kinda childish in their own right, and there's the seeds of an interesting conflict in Lisa's tantrum over her absent husband, but it never goes anywhere.

Why does Fujimoto want to destroy humans, and is he still planning that? He doesn't need a backstory, but he doesn't even learn to like humans in the end. He's just suddenly nice. And we're not going to address that Ponyo's mother abandoned her to be imprisoned, yet they're all fine in the end? Are they going to go through this crisis 175 more times as all her sisters grow up? Why is Ponyo's real name Brunhilde, and never brought up again? Her father should be calling her that the whole movie! Just a throwaway opera reference?

What's with the ship graveyard? It's a cool visual, but did Sosuke's father just turn around and head the other way? Because they said they were lost. Why bother setting up Koichi at sea if the tsunami was harmless and he just sails safely home? Shouldn't Ponyo or Fujimoto have had to use their magic to help Sosuke rescue him, after the "trial of love"? The engine magically going out and being restored in a single scene doesn't really count. And why is Ponyo falling asleep? Is that a ticking clock a la Cinderella or did Fujimoto put a spell on her (a la Sleeping Beauty)? He has a line of dialogue that kind of hints the latter, but why is it so ambiguous? I don't know how to respond emotionally when I'm this confused.

Why is the moon falling?

And how flat is that climax? "Do you love her as a fish"? They fell in love and loudly proclaimed their love at the very beginning, when she was a fish! There's no development there at all. There's not even a conflict by that point - every single character wants Ponyo and Sosuke to reach the senior center and be in love. The scene where Mad Granny catches the kids as they run from Fujimoto makes no sense, it is a moment of completely forged emotion. She was wrong - the other old ladies weren't being tricked. (also, TWILIGHT ZONE reference).

All of these reek of the same core problem, that the movie sets up conflicts and simply erases them at the end, like it would have been too mean to let anything come to a head. It's a bit ironic - Miyazaki movies are known as incredibly forgiving, yet Ponyo skips right to the forgetting, leaving an almost sinister aftertaste. Did they live happily ever after, or did Koichi die at sea, Lisa become an angry shrew who envies Ponyo's beauty and beats her at night, and the kids fall out of love by middle school, ultimately to be drowned out of existence when Fujimoto collected another few gallons of Ooze? This goes hand in hand with the overabundance of cutesy crap. It's a kids' movie, I can't criticize that too much, but I was cringing pretty hard through some of the ogling preciousness, like either of the scenes with soup. The characters are perfectly lovable without that stuff - the moment they bonk heads waking up is the perfect medium.

All that said, I did like the movie, and it was certainly never boring. The character designs are great (I loved everything with Fujimoto riding his sub), the sea adventure through the Devonian era is exciting for all 10 minutes that it lasts, the action is inventive, and the soft colored pencil backgrounds are sleepily comforting. And I'll take a story that makes no sense via omission over one that makes no sense via overcrowding, as is the case with HOWL'S MC.

Weak franchises

I was thinking that the movie franchise equivalent to Mega Man vs. Mega Man X (in terms of quality, disregarding that the two series are related) is probably Friday the 13th vs. Hellraiser. With Friday the 13th, you know exactly what you're going to get - it's never going to be particularly great or special, but it's never going to go off the rails either (except the one time it did, catastrophically, with Mega Man 8 GOES TO HELL). Hellraiser starts off genuinely great and hits one solid riff on that, takes a wrong turn but is still kind of tolerable for a few more entries*, completely jumps off a direct-to-video cliff by the fifth, and hangs around for four more things and a reboot that no one was asking for.

*I hated HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE ("in space") until I saw its pathetic shadow EVENT HORIZON.

Revisiting Jurassics Park

I guess I'm joining into the chorus of not really loving JURASSIC PARK? That's surprising. I'm a '90s kid I guess (born '88), and I remember it being a huge deal, but thinking (at that age) that the idea of a dinosaur theme park was really lame, and why not just make a real movie about dinosaurs, like LAND BEFORE TIME? As an adult I understand that the concept exists to be a lead-handed metaphor, although I can't say that adds to the appeal. On the other other hand, perhaps dinosaurs in the present day are a scarier concept that a fantasy about dinosaur world - horror being best defined as the invasion of the uncanny into normalcy.

Overall though the movie feels too much like Spielberg by numbers, and watching it fresh just a couple months ago, I was surprised how much of it I know by heart, because I went in thinking "surely there's more to this movie than I remember, because otherwise why would it be considered such a masterpiece?" The characters but for Hammond are paper-thin, and the hammed-up performances are enjoyable but don't exactly alleviate the superficiality. Then there's the fact that our protagonists are deliriously insane, declaring from the moment they hear the concept that Jurassic Park will lead to the apocalypse, unquestionably, and I think at one point I saw Michael Crichton lean into frame and wave. This will affect the sequels in both good and bad ways.

For all the quality execution, too much action is wasted on things that aren't dinosaurs (the car in the tree kinda galls me - it's an immaculately directed and edited sequence, heart-in-throat thrilling, but why are you wasting a set piece in your dinosaur movie on something that doesn't involve dinosaurs!), and even the dinosaur sequences feel incredibly limited - in a way that makes them memorable and scary, yes, but not in a way that takes advantage of the concept and makes for an exciting adventure. A T-rex attacks a car, a brachiosaurus sneezes on a little girl, velociraptors in the kitchen, T-rex smashes T-rex fossil, roll credits. Spielberg is too locked into his idea of a motion picture as a roller coaster for my taste - it works sometimes, and Jurassic Park is still good, but this formula worked a lot better with just a shark.

LOST WORLD I've only seen one-and-a-half times, because the second time I was so disinterested by the midpoint that I turned it off. All I can say is that the idea of centering the story on Doctor Ian Malcolm, a character whose prior existence was solely as a font of pop-science drivel, is a poor one that never stops feeling forced.

Which leaves JP3, the great unsung hero to come save the day and give us a fully satisfying experience. Yes it's dumb, yes it's far removed from the glamourous sheen of the first two, but it's competently and even breezily made, taking no time at all to declare what it's going to be doing with the next 90 minutes of your time. It's just actually unpredictable and fun in a way Spielberg never could be, because his entire career is staked on being The Sure Thing. Yet I can't but be amused as hell at the weird variety of second-tier dinos and the hilarious boldness of the raptor-talking-machine and the Tarzan-of-the-dinosaurs boy. Yup, the ending is dogshit, the cast is fine but forgettable, and some people will not like jokes about a kid jerking off a dinosaur (or something??). But it also has one inarguably great point, which is Sam Neill's better performance as Grant with a much better arc to permit it. Him screwing everything up and becoming a real downer is a great starting point, and we do something more interesting than reiterating the same "learns to love kids, barf" lesson. We see him correct the attitude and mistakes of the first movie and finally realize how wrong they all were at that first awkward dinner party.

(this comment prompted by the weekly podcast chat at the always great Alternate Ending)

Mega Man X7: The Final Trilogy

For hopefully the last time I ever publicly discuss Mega Man X7, let's talk about Mavericks. In the spirit of wonderfully creative portmanteau names, why not offer some alternates in the form of anagrams?

FLAME HYENARD
Okay, he's definitely a hyena, but what ends in "rd" or "ard" that would describe a mentally deranged dog-man who runs in circles and screams the word "burn" so frequently that he often can't make it through the first syllable without interrupting himself? Best anagram: Handle my fear!

VANISHING GUNGAROO
Pretty easy one here - it's a kangaroo who rides around in the front pouch of a giant mech (actually a clever way of integrating X's animal and ride-mech themes). The mech carries the Maverick like an Indian water-bearer carries his burden, thence Gunga Din + kangaroo = Gungaroo. Best anagram: Ongoing vagina rush.

SPLASH WARFLY
I was tempted to believe war fly could be an actual species, maybe one that was particularly recognized for hanging around the carnage of battlefields. I may have been thinking of the Black Fly. Why when you look up pictures of flies are they always perched on human skin? It's like we've encoded into the entire phylum this notion of personal intrusion. Someone oughta get these guys a microaggressions lawyer. A micro-lawyer? Best anagram: Wasps shall fry!

RIDE BOARSKI
Take away this motorcycle man's wheels and you bet you'll find him chasing his speed fix out on the slopes, skiing down the double black diamonds in record time. We've got all the bases covered and filled in quite a bit of backstory too. Best anagram: I broker AIDS. Hey, someone's gotta do it.

SNIPE ANTEATOR
The wise, veteran member of Red Alert's ensemble, nimbly picking apart his opponents' psychology with years of battle experience to draw upon. Thus the name must refer to Shakespeare's most famous poem, "To be, or not to be" - a question all foes looking to defeat Anteator will soon have to answer. Best anagram: Psion Anteater.

TORNADO TONION
Now presumably this is a contraction of a name that once had an apostrophe, like Darby from D'Arby, and historically our Tornado would hail from the T'Onion clan. I find myself picturing an African kingdom, where the T'Onions coexist alongside T'Carrots and T'Artagnans and T'Challas. Not particularly great anagram: Onto triad noon.

SOLDIER STONEKONG
I mean, I think we all know exactly what a Stonekong is. You've seen CONGO, I've seen CONGO; killer volcano apes are not something to be messed with. These guys would rip Donkey Kong's head off and serve it on a silver platter (which is just something they do with any dismembered body parts they have available). Best anagram: Gooks' tenderloins. I apologize for the slur, but you'll have to blame this one on Capcom.

WIND CROWRANG
For one thing, didn't we just have a wind-themed boss in this game? Secondably, isn't Tornado Tonion meant as a clever satire of the dozens of wind/bird Mavericks throughout the series? This seems to undercut that otherwise effective parody. Not to mention this is the hackiest portmanteau of the bunch. Seriously, fuck Wind Crowrang! No anagram!

Revisiting Mega Man X7

Finished the game this week, clocked in around 6 hours at a solid D hunter ranking (I did get a single C on Ride Boarski!). Luckily the game treats all time equally, whether or not it's paused, so if you take a mid-stage break, enjoy your automatic D. I guess it's true an elite Maverick Hunter wouldn't stop for a piss or a yogurt. Presumably what I saw was the "bad" ending, but it's just X saying to Axl "you're not ready to become a MavHunter" (presumably only veteran Hunters are allowed to get D rankings and stay on - a sort of grandfather clause). Not really on the same level of consequence as X5, in which I believe the entire Earth blows up if too much time expires. And what's with Sigma's master plan? He comes back from the dead, takes over a vigilante gang, gets them all killed, and then says "X and Zero will be mine!". You could call it a revenge plot, but it comes across as romance.

In terms of series ranking X7 probably belongs around the middle, between X3 and X5 (as if it needs to be said, the full ordering is X > X2 >>> X4 > X3 > X7 >>> X5 > X6, and I've yet to play X8). And I probably feel better about it than X3, which only barely coasts by on the strength of things done better in X and X2. X7 at least feels fresh and has some new ideas that genuinely work, namely the 3D stages and the weapon and character swapping. The story - while really terrible - is at least perfectly comprehensible, a big step up from the latter two PlayStation games. I even like the pre-fight dialogue with bosses - never hurts to give them some personality, and it's pretty cool that each player character gets unique exchanges. As for the legacy stuff: the 2D levels range from fan-made level editor junk (Soldier Stonekong) to tedious redundant slogs (Tornado Tonion); the Maverick designs are insanely terrible (did you read the names I just quoted?); hostage reploid permadeath is goddamn obnoxious; and copy abilities have never felt more superfluous. In the category of new-but-bad are the frankly humiliating graphics, absolutely pathetic for a 2003 PS2 game from a major studio competing against the likes of Jak II and Going Commando (it doesn't even look to be from the same hardware generation as Capcom's own Devils May Cry or Maximos). Yet more embarrassing is the frequent slowdown, an unheard-of problem on the PlayStation 2 even for games with acceptable sixth-gen polygon counts.

There's a New Game+, which would allow fully powering up all three characters (there are only enough chips in a single playthrough for 16 upgrades; each character has 12 slots). I wonder if that has any reward. I got enough out of the experience that I'd like to get to know it better, although I may wait a month for the Switch Mega Man X Legacy Collection Collection, which collects Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 and Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2. The weapon and character selection add textbook replayability, about half of the bosses seem decent (Snipe Anteator eventually did get some competition for worst), and 3D action-platformers are just a rare thing. I mean, I'm the guy who likes Shinobi '02. On my most recent go-round with Ratchet & Clank Future... Dudes of Destruction? (sounds too cool, must be something stupider), I realized the series thinks it's 3D Mega Man, and started to process it in those terms. So Mega Man X7 is a great point of comparison, as it completely butchers all the presentation and accessibility stuff that makes R&C so palatable, yet maintains the legacy of Mega Man enemy and stage design.

Then I wrote a blog post about the motorcycle stage in Mega Man X7

Yeah but you know what does have great hover bikes? Mega Man X7. It doesn't, but I'm glad to see they at least tried for a 3D version of the then-established variety stage. And the fact that the bike accelerates rather than blandly auto-scrolling almost inherently makes it the best iteration of the always weak gimmick. Unfortunately, there's something terribly wrong with the steering mechanics that I can't quite put my finger on - it might actually be what's been described to me re:Outrun, that X-velocity and Z-velocity are totally independent, combined with a 3D Sonic camera that doesn't stay behind the vehicle (e.g. a left turn will have the camera placed so the road snakes from the right edge of the screen to the left).

Whether or not the controls are something I could get used to, the design of the stage is especially trashy, just a narrow corridor littered with boxes, hostages, and the now-iconic Runnerbombs. (It's pretty amazing that "Runnerbomb" isn't a name that I made up, although maybe not as amazing as the fact that a Runnerbomb's modus operandi is to stand in place and throw bombs). Each of the obstacles/enemies spawns on-screen with a bright teleporting-in effect that saves the game from needing a draw distance - it's good for drawing attention visually and shows that the developers at least understood that you can't just have enemy pop-in (I really am describing an Outrun remake, huh?). The downside is that Runnerbombs, which need to be avoided, and hostage reploids, which need to be collected, have near identical silhouettes that make every decision whether to dodge or collide a last-second one. That gives the already cluttered layout an extremely haphazard mouthfeel, and, since this is X7, the heroes have enough reserve HP to just plow through everything. Which is important, because all of this is operating on a time limit.

Yup, continuing on from the brilliant structural mix-up of the intro level's cyclops-walker arena-showdown, the bike stage deviates from standard traversal/survival gameplay towards an actual racing format. Not entirely racing, thankfully, but the objective is to grab (all) 20 time-bombs planted across the course loop before the countdown timer reaches Zero. The player can drive as fast or slow as they want, but can't turn around, so missing a bomb means needing to speed through another lap to come back to it. The mission ends instantly as soon as the 20th bomb is collected. Given this collection objective structure, you might call this the long lost final level of Sonic R.

Indeed, I should probably mention that the Maverick ruling over this high-speed terroristic attack is branded Ride Boarski. I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize the name is a reference to Polish sausage, you fill in the details.

Ultimately the whole experience is like the opposite of the PSX/Battletoads-era cycle rides where any minor deviation from the exactly plotted course is instant death. Since the layout requires constant last-minute course correction, the slippery mechanics make that especially difficult, and there's plenty of time for multiple laps, the most productive strategy seems to be starting off barreling forward as fast as possible, grabbing all the low-hanging fruit, then on later laps slamming on the brakes whenever a bomb is known to be coming up. Like other points of comparison with X5 and X6, X7 isn't really better, but it's at least more interesting.

Sonic Mania oughta take some lessons from Ed Wood (a review of ED WOOD with a clickbait title)

ED WOOD is the greatest kind of emotional storytelling: it is a film that finds joy in despair, creativity in loss, roaring success in crushing failure. It takes the depressing and pathetic life of a perennial loser and transforms it into something to admire, to be proud of, and it doesn't do it by lying, or reforming, or quibbling about facts. It is a much bolder story, one that asserts not that Ed Wood was a great artist or genius despite his achievements, but by way of his spirit and vision; if the product doesn't fit with our expectation of great art, that's only because we've defined it wrong. It dives so deep into the ocean of subjectivity as to forget the surface, yet uses this to expand the mind rather than to deceive it.

Take for instance Bela Lugosi's final filmed appearance in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. On paper, this is a rather dark, disheartening history, surrounded by the stench of exploitation. Lugosi's film career had completely disintegrated by the time he met Wood; he lived in poverty, alone and crippled by drug addiction. Wood 'revived' his legacy for a few years by throwing him in embarrassing roles in Z-grade bombs, most famously using some extremely random footage and a lookalike within PLAN 9, as Lugosi passed away during filming. ED WOOD retells this tale in all its detail, but with the focus placed entirely on the loving friendship between the two men. Bela is confused by Ed's films and doesn't see half of them, but is so charmed by the man and happy to be acting again that he doesn't care. As he points out when swarmed by reporters in a rehab center, he doesn't care if he's being exploited. He's an old man - he just wants to stop and smell the roses one last time. Of course, this is literally the scene he directs for himself as his final performance, the one that would land in PLAN 9: a quiet moment with just Ed and the camera, as the director struggles to find any excuse to give his friend something to do. Nor to Ed is it exploitation - PLAN 9 is advertised as "Bela Lugosi's final film" not because it'll sell more tickets that way, but because it is fucking BELA LUGOSI's final film, and how awesome and important is that? Ed cares for the man so dearly that to him it would be the greater atrocity NOT to let Bela have a final starring role, and he's willing to get all his friends baptized if that's what it takes to get it made.

Likewise the PLAN 9 premiere, we don't see the crowd's reaction, only their applause at the names Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi, and the hushed silence at Bela's scene. Did they hate the film? Did they love it? By now it's clear that doesn't matter to Ed ("[the worst movie you ever saw?] Well, my next one'll be better!"), it doesn't matter to Bela, so it doesn't matter to the movie. We simply rush out from the theater, Ed on the high of his life, as he proposes to his girlfriend and drives off into the pouring rain and thunder, no sunset in sight. Cue the ending titles, with a card next to Ed's glowing expression reading that he would never go on to make a successful picture, dying at age 54 after a 20-year descent into alcoholism and nudie flicks; that two years after his death he was voted "Worst Director of All Time", bringing him a new level of worldwide renown. And this plays as an extremely happy and uplifting moment! That's how much work ED WOOD has done to reverse our idea of meaningful accomplishment.

Throughout the film are peppered matter-of-fact bystanders to remind us that this isn't all a fantasy, that no delusion is taking place. This sets up a beautiful irony where someone tries to correct Ed with a genuinely helpful suggestion, he is perplexed and frustrated, yet so determined to succeed that we side with him, because if you're going to be a moron, it's better not to compromise about it. (Aside: how many of Burton's films could accurately be described as "the unwitting adventures of complete morons"? PEE-WEE, that other EDWARD picture, even Jack Skellington mostly fits). The most amusing and transparent of these reality checks are the conservative Christian producers clomping around the PLAN 9 set; the stereotypical micromanaging money-men who just don't get art slowly choking the delicate genius. The fact that they're evangelicals just gives them that extra Hollywood-ignorant edge. Yet everything they point out is perfectly rational and probably would've made a "better" movie - isn't grave-robbing kinda sordid for a kids flick? shouldn't the exposition be given to someone who speaks intelligible English? don't you want to film a take where the actor doesn't kick over that gravestone prop? Of course, the secondary joke going on here is one for PLAN 9 cultists, as these are presumably all the elements that make that film so amusing (I'm actually grateful I haven't seen it - I think this stuff could've annoyed me as pandering if I had).

So the post title (I don't know if it counts as clickbait when your blog isn't advertised and has no visitors). This all goes back to a comment I made in my review of Sonic Mania, in particular comparing it to Sonic Generations, that Mania was boxed into a boring, conservative narrative that everyone already accepts, that the Genesis Sonic games are classics, and that therefore Mania would have no legacy, because it is entirely subservient to previous successes. I pointed out that Generations overcomes this obstacle by treating the trash material (Sonic '06, Heroes, etc.) with the same amount of care and affection as everything else. And that's exactly what ED WOOD is doing, creating something new by celebrating something that hasn't been celebrated, finding a fresh set of eyes (or glasses) for viewing the past, creating history where history got it wrong. Maybe a different way of putting it is that any adaptation has a choice between recreating the execution / the product / the fact, or re-implementing the concept / the inspiration / the soul. You can guess which work falls into which category.

New 1-credit clears! Axelay, M.U.S.H.A., Cho Aniki, and Other Nonsense Words

Spring is such a wonderful season for shoot-em-ups. God knows you can't play them all year round, but in the spring, you can. I'm a terrible player, but I've finally developed the method and Schedule I prescriptions necessary to clear extremely easy shooters in roughly five years apiece. Mostly that means sticking to old 16-bit stuff on Wii VC; I'm fonder of later arcade and XBLA games like Strania or Under Defeat, but I haven't improved to the point that I can clear them. Plus, fuck rank.

This week I finished a somewhat controversial 1CC of Axelay, one probably not destined for the record books at Win Galaxies. So whenever I pick up the game I play out the remaining credits of my last suspend state for practice; I was busy all weekend, but when I picked up last week's suspend I ended up clearing the game. Some key notes:

• The game lets you map Shot and Missile to different buttons or to the same (like later Gradii). Naturally, most people will put them on the same button - but they'll be displeased when they reach the final boss's mirror phase, where he fires shots when the player does and missiles when the player does. And if the player fires shots and missiles at the same time, so will he, and that'll create an undodgeable attack pattern. So ten hours in I had to relearn to play the game with two buttons (harder than it sounds, because there's a lot of trigger fluttering).
• I like the weapon select, but it's oddly balanced. Once you get a new weapon in each category, you'll never use the previous ones - they're not objectively worse, but they don't complement each other correctly. And one weapon, Spinneroo, I couldn't comprehend in the slightest.
• The rotating vulcan weapon that starts firing backward and angles forward as you hold the button is enough to base a game around. It puts timers and technique into an independent aiming mechanism, like a cross between dual stick (because it's independent of ship movement) and reverse options (because it has its own traversal time).
• The vert stages would be better if they weren't multiple screens wide. The breadth is meant to offer different paths through the stages, but it ends up being like Life Force's split routes, where you just choose one early on and always take it. Ultimately it just adds confusion and ambiguity to an already difficult-to-read style of presentation. 

Overall I liked it a lot. Naturally it's reminiscent of Gradius and Life Force, but the weapon-swapping and management (where getting hit costs the currently equipped weapon, like M.U.S.H.A.) also adds an element of Contra III. I definitely prefer a shooter without any powering up or recovery phases; saves all the frustration and jerky pacing without dismembering the difficulty. The rules are simple, the design is lean (not a hint of popcorn), the weapons are self-consciously weird, the visuals are terrific (the artwork, not the Mode 7), and the difficulty lives in that perfect spot where screwing up hurts but doesn't undercut the momentum.

Cho Annunaki is interesting to look at too, with an aesthetic somewhere in the neighborhood of 15th century European painting crashing a train into 20th century manga. Even the buff dudes at this point feel more Classical Antiquity than Homoerotic Gaydiquity. Notes:

• It's tempting to call the game pure popcorn, with enemies and even bosses rarely hanging onto life for more than a few seconds, giving it a really soft, smooth flow. 
• Each stage has a unique enemy set that tends to conform to the same balanced triumvirate: one enemy creates barriers (the lenses in Stage 2, the alarms in Stage 3, the nautiluses in Stage 4, the helms in Stage 5), one pumps bullets onto the screen (the chess knights in Stage 2, the jerkoffers in Stage 3, etc.), and one that dive-bombs toward the player (the birds, the bees, the planes). It's a conservative style, but it does highlight the subtleties in each incarnation, like the way the lenses can be pushed back and the nautiluses fire when passed.
• This is the most tautly suspended power-up system I've ever seen. Basically the player has ten power-up levels to scale and five for each of two options, only each level takes more and more pick-ups to achieve (1 for the first, 3 for the second, 7 for the third, 17 for the fourth, 28 for the fifth, so on - the game doesn't display any of this, and only the first, third, and ninth (I think?) level-ups even result in a visual distinction). On a good run, I reach full power by the final boss of stage four (of five), and any single death shaves a good chunk off that (maybe half?). So if I've died twice, no way I have full power on the final boss. And since it takes so long to power up, I ended up essentially competing with my options, as splitting things three ways drastically slows down the leveling up, and isn't worth it in distributed firepower. 
• No extends! No hidden 1UPs either. This is true of all Masaya games I know (Gley Lancer, Cybernator, Gynoug). Extends shouldn't be underrated as a mechanism to draw the player into the scoring system and reward them for perfecting early parts of the game.
• Was there a lot of subtly sexual language in what I just wrote?

Then we've got M.U.S.H.A., my first victory over Compile (unless - is Recca considered crypto-Compile? It at least came from the same Carnival that generated Spriggan). Anyway:

• On the subject of extends, I didn't really notice them here, but the option supply is kinda accomplishing the same thing. It's really quite odd that the player can build up a huge stock of options to deploy later, never affected unless they use a continue, and it can definitely be put to use. Personally I stuck with 3-Way, Back, or Reverse for the early levels, then once I had 30+ in stock and things got bitchy, I switched to Lock. These little fellas eat bullets, too, and they're graciously fixed in place for reliable dead zones.
• Splitting the weapon power level such that picking up a secondary weapon provides an extra hit point (and getting hit costs the secondary weapon) alleviates recovery as I discussed favorably wrt Axelay, but M.U.S.H.A. goes a bit too far and strays into easy mode. With a pretty sizable invincibility frame and frequent weapon drops, the max challenge is really just to go ten or fifteen seconds at a time without getting hit. Of course, if the main power drops enough and your option supply runs out, you're pretty much fucked. So it's a very low difficulty hurdle with a steep dropoff. 
• Black hole bomb* is a crazy and awesome weapon concept (pulling enemies! in a shmup!), but it generates so much chaos on screen I ended up not using it much. At the same time, white-green laser loved covering up bullets approaching from the front, so it needed to be paired with Reverse option to last. 
• The graphics are too big.

So yeah. All three decent, fun games that I'd recommend, but I liked them in the order listed here. 

* The idea that angular momentum and energy may be transferred from a rotating black hole to a particle being scattered by it was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. The first discussion of a runaway effect, the black hole bomb, was explored by W. H. Press and S. A. Teukolsky in 1972. If such an effect were to spontaneously occur, it may point to new physics beyond the Standard Model, and showing that black holes have "hair", as pointed out by a paper from 2017, by William E. East and Frans Pretorius.

Blogging like it's 1997

I like how Dunkey's new Rockstar video, another step on the path to being W.O.K.E., starts with "the second time I played Red Dead, GTA, etc, I noticed how 90% of the game is time wasting. You don't really pick up on this the first time...". Yeah, you don't pick up on it the first time if you're not paying any attention to the game you're playing, and are therefore forming superficial and useless opinions.

It's funny, years ago he pointed out something I hadn't noticed in Arkham Asylum, that it takes Batman like an 8-second cutscene to open vents, an action you do about 150 times over the course of the game. He called it something like "artificial game lengtheners". Now, in that particular case, I think it's a hidden load buffer, like the "buggy" doors in Metroid Prime, but there were other examples that couldn't be, and I've noticed it as a thing ever since. For instance, in God of War 1-3, you have to hold R2 for like 5 seconds to open a chest. I think on paper the reason it's there is to make it feel more tactile, like you're 'doing' the animation of Kratos ripping open a chest. But when there are three next to each other, it's suddenly the dumbest thing ever, and again, it probably adds something like 20 minutes to the total playtime, plus all the other kinds of non-combat QTEs adding 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there.

Man, I haven't played Metroid Prime 3 in a million years. I should really find time for that.

Deathsmiles part 2: The tweaks and twixes of Mega Black Label

K got the slightly-non-scrub clear of Deathsmiles (all stages Rank 2+, beat the penultimate boss for real and beat more of the final boss than I expected (only used 3 bombs I think)). Ultimately it's definitely not a game I'd call bullet hell (**danmakuu** \'>_<'/ kawaii densetsu gaiden, senpai!! *\^o^/*) - the multiple aiming directions and handful of bullet-clearing techniques make it much more about planning how to keep bullets from piling up than about herding or tap dodging or reading geometry. In fact, sans the final two bosses, if there are ever enough bullets on screen that I'd have to go into weave mode, I just bomb. That's how rarely it happens (if you're playing decent at least). Nearly all of my character movement is with the goal of orienting my option or lining up a shot - in the final playthrough I made good use of Sakura with her reverse option, alternating locking it into place as Double or Tail. This time I was playing Mega Black Label, a mode that tweaks the scoring and adds some content but not much else (I'll be referring to the base game as "vanilla").

Before we start discussing the updates, you might want to check out my full run-down of Deathsmiles' score items and Power-Up mode. There's one detail of the base game that I left out, which is that the Overall Counter maxes out at a value of 10,000, after which all item drops will be crowns (which can still break apart into tiaras and skulls when hitting the ground). I've seen this state called "Frenzy mode", but nothing in the game or manual uses that terminology. I didn't mention that because I forgot to, but it also has no bearing on gameplay incentives - Power-Up scoring is two orders of magnitude greater than Normal even without it, and raising the Overall Counter as quickly as possible is inherently beneficial.

Mega Black Label's two biggest changes are meant to send scores into the tropoplosphere: first, Power-Up can be deployed at any Item Counter value above 500, and second, the Overall Counter is never reset. The scoring is so inflated that the second extend now sits at 300 million, far above my top All-Clear score for vanilla. Better still, the Overall Counter is now displayed directly below the Item Counter (just like I suggested in my previous post!). There's also a new playable character, a new optional Chapter 4 stage, and Rank 999, a fourth selectable difficulty alternative for each stage.  I'm not going to go into the new content, but I ought to note that playing stages on the highest available rank is necessary to maximize score, because higher rank means more enemies, and more enemies means more items. Since I'm interested only in scoring within the confines of a 1CC, I pick stage rank based on what I think I can (learn to) survive, and work on score only after.

Into the weeds on the first point first: the lower threshold for Power-Up. Transparently, this opens up a lot more flexibility in planning where to deploy the transformation, and it likewise makes doing so less costly. It's quicker to charge and it's quicker to recharge. This has obvious survival utility (Power-Up still boosts attack and clears bullets when transitioning), but also allows burning off some Item Counter value before a big item flow is known to be coming up to provide a refill (for instance, I know the ogres in Chapter 5 are going to spill gallons of items, so I make sure I'm always coming up to them on empty). At the same time, there are new costs to consider. Fever mode, which you'll recall lasts as long as the Item Counter is kept at 1000, remains unchanged - from Item Counter values of 500 to 999, the player character remains in Normal mode, despite Power-Up now being available. And if the transformation is triggered in this range, the Item Counter will immediately drop to 500 and count down from there, meaning any progress toward Fever is lost and the transformation duration is artificially shortened. Because of that counterbalance, it's still worthwhile to think ahead to get the most out of the Item Counter.

This wouldn't be as meaningful if the Overall Counter was resetting to 0 at each of these refills, as it was previously established that OC is the driver of exponential scoring. A shortened Power-Up would mean lesser Overall Counter values and probably wouldn't be very consequential. Likely with that in mind, Mega Black Label drops the Overall Counter reset (that in vanilla Deathsmiles occurs at the end of Power-Up) and also drops the cap value of 10,000. Now the Overall Counter is free to grow and grow throughout the entire run of a game, ramping up the suspension of a scoring run while also sacrificing most of its atomic nature. Although it's value is preserved throughout, it's still only active (i.e. applied to item pick-ups and able to grow) during Fever or Power-Up modes. If the player loses a life, the Overall Counter takes a big hit (maybe 30%? hard to track precisely during gameplay). More significantly, for the entire duration of boss battles the value quickly drains. Bosses need to be killed as quickly as possible or milked for items (which is only possible in Power-Up) to keep the counter up. This also seems to discourage the all-Fever style of play I briefly mentioned in the previous write-up.

These changes are interesting, but as my descriptions probably convey, I haven't fully wrapped my head around the best ways to use them. More flexible planning is ultimately more complex planning, and the full playthrough suspension of the Overall Counter throws massive flux into potential scores. I remarked about the vanilla game that you can completely blow a stage and still get consistent results in the next - that's no longer the case in Mega Black Label. There's more happening in parallel, more choices available at every point and more potential for tradeoffs, all making it harder to identify where one strategy is outperforming another. At some level of play I could see myself enjoying this granularity, but at the moment I find it more satisfying experimenting with routes and timing my Power-Ups in vanilla, getting that more straightforward feedback.

Average franchise running times

This is from an old email, but I wouldn't want to lose it. Given that Superman movies always have to be so fucking long, I was curious which of the all-time great franchises (and Batman) are most distended.

Friday the 13th: 92 minutes over 12 films
Rambo: 97 minutes over 4 films (the "epic" Rambo III clocks in at 101 minutes)
PotApes: 108 minutes over 8 films (97 for the original run, 127 for the reboot trilogy)
Star Trek: 116 minutes over 13 films
Die Hard: 121 minutes over 5 films (you'd figure these were shorter, but 3 is brokenly long and 4 & 5 are modern movies)
Alien: 125 minutes over 6 films (118 if you count the AVPs)
Star Wars: 134 minutes over 8 films (surprisingly - the prequels feel so insubstantial for their >140-minute run times)
Batman: 135 minutes over 9 films (142 if you exclude the 76-minute Mask of the Phantasm)

and the winner is, naturally...
Superman: at 137 minutes over 7 films. Although it was quite a tight contest for a moment there.

A review of Deathsmiles' scoring

This isn't a guide to scoring in Deathsmiles, nor is it a review of Deathsmiles. It's just an attempt to reconstruct the scoring system as a big picture that is neither as cryptic as the manual nor as prescriptive as a guide.

When it comes to score in modern arcade shooters, the classic question is always "does it really need that many zeroes?". When I started playing Deathsmiles, I was reaching the final boss with scores around 3 million, wondering why the extends were sitting up at 20 and 45 million. After taking a few minutes to read the manual, I was instantly able to adjust my play such that I was grabbing both extends and reaching that same finale with scores over 50 million. What's odd about this is that it didn't at all involve dying less or killing more enemies, and barely even affected my routes on screen - the initial change was completely orthogonal to the core survival challenge of the game.

Scoring in Deathsmiles is driven entirely by the collection of point items dropped by enemies; drastic variability in scoring derives from the player's ability to determine how many points each item is worth. This stems from a transformation dynamic; in Normal state, the player will be collecting items worth hundreds of points, and thus only total a six- or seven-digit score (hundreds of thousands or millions). In the transformed state, aka Power-Up Mode, the same items are worth thousands and tens of thousands, and will thus accumulate to eight- or nine-digits (tens or hundreds of millions). Therefore, scoring in a Normal state will be completely drowned out by Power-Up scoring and ultimately does not matter. A single 30-second burst of Power-Up at the beginning of stage 2C (the volcano) can score twenty times as much as an entire single-credit playthrough without it, and serves as a good illustration of how useful this technique can be (incidentally, the manual points out this location explicitly).

Anyway, the way it works is that you have an Item Counter, 0-1000. Picking up point items dropped by killing enemies increases the counter; when it reaches 1000*, press B to go into Power-Up Mode. While powered up, the counter gradually decreases, and at 0 the player returns to Normal. There is no way to prematurely exit the state, but it (and the counter value) do carry over between levels (i.e., if the player kills a boss in Power-Up with their counter at 350, they will start the next stage in Power-Up with their counter decreasing from 350). The Power-Up state lasts about 30 seconds, during which: 1.) player shot coverage and damage is substantially increased 2.) collecting items will not increase the Item Counter, and 3.) the score value of items is compounded with an additive modifier (Overall Counter) which continues to increase as more items are collected, thus creating an exponential effect (each item increases the score AND increases the value of the next item). The modifier, Overall Counter, doesn't exist outside Power-Up and is reset to 0 each time Power-Up ends*; it's therefrom implied that this modifier, and thus the quantity of items collected during Power-Up, is the key to scoring.

As long as the Item Counter sits at full (waiting to be deployed for Power-Up), the player character will be in Fever Mode. In this state, all enemies drop crowns (the most valuable point item). The Overall Counter also becomes active, but builds very slowly. Fever Mode does not affect any gameplay aspect outside of score, and will continue indefinitely as long as the player doesn't Power-Up or take damage. It mostly acts as a way to prime the Overall Counter while waiting for a planned transformation opportunity; there isn't any strong incentive to stay in Fever (it scores worse and leaves the character weaker than Power-Up), and the incentive to reach it is redundant with the incentive to reach Power-Up*. That said, supposedly the proest of the pros play the entire game in Fever and never use Power-Up, benefiting off the long-term Overall Counter growth.

The type and number of point items dropped by an enemy is determined by the enemy type and which weapon it's killed with - rapid, focus, or lock-on shot. Each enemy has a defined 'weakness' that has to be discovered via experimentation; that is, a specific shot type that generates extra items (rather than doing extra damage). You'll usually see dozens of instances of each enemy in its given habitat, so deducing weaknesses isn't too hard until things get frantic at the end (actually remembering them can be a bit tougher - and I would swear a few enemies have different drops for different player characters). Of course, there are also practical/survival incentives for using different shot types, so this sets up a balancing act for the player. (Mushihimesama Futari has a similar, simpler system: when the item counter is Blue, use focus fire to get the most items, when it's Green, use rapid fire; the color alternates at fixed counter values).

There are three types of point items of increasing value: skulls, tiaras, and crowns, the last of which only appear in Fever or Power-Up modes. Items fall to the ground from the point where they're spawned; upon landing, the larger items break into a multitude of skulls. Each item collected adds to two independent sums simultaneously: the player's score and the Item Counter (in Normal state) or the Overall Counter (in Fever or Power-Up)*. Probably the most confusing aspect of the game is that a collected item adds a different value to each of the aforementioned sums, e.g. a skull adds (+1) to the Item Counter, (+100+OverallCounter) to score, and something like (+log(OverallCounter)) to the Overall Counter, while a tiara adds (+5) to the Item Counter, (+800+OverallCounter) to score, and the same (+log(OverallCounter)) to the Overall Counter. So at an Overall Counter value of 250, three skulls = 3*(100+250) = 1050 are worth the same amount of points as a single tiara = 1*(800+250) = 1050, and are worth three times (3*(log(250) compared to 1*(log(250))as much to the Counter itself, which will increase the value of the next pickup. Since a tiara breaks into three skulls upon hitting the ground, this means that in Fever or Power-Up, it's better to let it break apart before collection - i.e., the highest quantity of items drives the highest score.

It's definitely complicated, but it's not AS complicated as it at first seems, due to the confusing presentation. The Item Counter should just be a super meter, because presenting a number so prominently suggests that the numerical value matters, which it does not (all the player needs to know is whether it's full and how soon it will be); the Overall Counter should be named something like Item Bonus, because it does not count anything "overall", in fact doesn't really count (the rate at which it increases is exponential), and sounds too much like Item Counter; the Overall Counter should be displayed where the Item Counter* is such that the player can actually read it (presently it's displayed as a +XXXX next to the item acquired, meaning it's in the middle of the gameplay area and somewhat hard to track), and enemies should somehow indicate that you killed them with the correct weapon (e.g. in MushiF, using the right weapon generates large gems and the wrong one small gems. In Deathsmiles it's more like the weakness gives you 3 crowns and 2 skulls, and the wrongness gives you 5 tiaras, so you need to mentally track your expected reward while determining weapon choice).

Overall it's well done, if maybe a little too meta-level for my tastes. It all comes down to deploying Power-Up at the right time, something that carries over between levels and therefore creates suspension (especially with a level select in play), yet also is self-contained enough that the barrier for entry to experimentation is low (you can totally butcher or totally ace the early stages and still get consistent results later). Contrary to my first impression, the counters do tie survival strategies to scoring, both because they can be exchanged for weapon power and because the type-weakness aspect of enemies is a counterpoint to which weapon might seem practically useful. The stage design is a bit monotonous and the bosses are too easy until they're too hard, but turning up the rank helps a little. Still, it's the abstract systems that drive a game like this, not the design.

*See MBL

MYASS in the meantime: 2017

GALAXY QUEST (1999)
Dean Parisot / Robert Gordon, David Howard
"If not the best Star Trek film, certainly the most adoring of the fans and characters"

ALIEN (1979)
Ridley Scott / Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
"The detached menace of the first half roughly adjoins with the pedestrian slashing of the second, although I fear my overexposure to the franchise diminishes the impact of what on paper should be a lot more thrilling"

SATURN 3 (1980)
Stanley Donen / Martin Amis
"PFOG (pretty fucking objectionable garbage), although some of the man vs. machine chess bits are kind of hilarious, as is the ominous presence of my one true nemesis, Brainbot"

PROMETHEUS (2012)
Ridley Scott / Damon Lindelof
"If this is intended as a white-hot dump on the face of everyone ever to adore a creation that owes more to Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, and H.R. Giger than it does to Shitly Scott, it supremely achieves that goal. If it is intended as a white-hot dump on the face of everyone ever to adore intellectual science fiction brazenly pillaged to found the career of Shitly Scott, it supremely achieves that goal. If it is intended as a white-hot dump on the face of everyone ever to adore summer blockbusters, monster movies, and pulp sci-fi, it supremely achieves that goal. I will be shocked if I see a movie in 2017 that despises its audience and begs to be despised as openly as this*."

*See Star Wars: The Last Jedi

JOHN WICK CHAPTER 2 (2017)
Chad Stahelski / Derek Kolstad
"Pencil etc."

DRAGONSLAYER (1981)
Matthew Robbins / Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins
"Solid adventure that spends just enough time milking the Star Wars model before swinging into a daikaiju eiga with unique air-to-ground magic monster battles"

LOGAN (2017)
James Mangold / Scott Frank, Michael Green, James Mangold
"A reflection on Shane no more fantastic in its superhuman trappings than the fairy tale manifestation of gunslingers in the old West; successfully tragic rather than simply grim"

SCANNERS (1981)
David Cronenberg / David Cronenberg
"More fantasy than science fiction, too concerned with its concept and plot for its failure to ground them in characters, themes, or visuals worth caring about"

CLASS OF 1984 (1982)
Mark Lester / Tom Holland, Mark Lester, John Saxton
"DEATH WISH in a high school with the nastier morality that implies, effective enough as a downward spiral arc to back up the novelty of the setting"

KING KONG (1933)
Merian Cooper, Ernest Shoedsack / James Creelman, Ruth Rose
"More violent and action-packed than you'd imagine, more forebodingly atmospheric than you'd imagine, more movie in 100 minutes than you could possibly imagine"

KONG: SKULL ISLAND (2017)
Jordan Vogt-Roberts / Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly, Dan Gilroy
"Competent but impersonal and overstuffed with bland characters, reliant on far too many cliches from the wrong genre to ever pull through as the monster movie triumph glimpsed in the action sequences"

I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE (2017)
Macon Blair / Macon Blair
"A combination of indie character study and exploitation thrills that someone else reminds me is basically the idea of early Coen Brothers, still human enough to feel fun in its quiet moments and brutal in its violence"

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 (2017)
James Gunn / James Gunn
"Visually, a perfect impression of space adventuring in a Kirby world"

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)
Alfred Hitchcock / Ernest Lehman
"Status = earned. Brilliantly aggressive and precarious set pieces thrust you right in the characters' shoes"

THE HITCHER (1986)
Robert Harmon / Eric Red
"Gutting, menacing, choking, strangling"

ALIEN: COVENANT (2017)
Ridley Scott / Michael Green, Dante Harper, John Logan, Jack Paglen
"Hey look I was wrong, I saw another movie that hates its audience as much as PROMETHEUS, shockingly aping that dumpster fire in every last detail while pathetically insisting how much better we must certainly like it (but xenomorph! but riploff! but fuck you ridders)"

ALIEN 3 [assembly cut] (1992)
David Fincher / Larry Ferguson, David Giler, Walter Hill, Vincent Ward
"Bombastic performances and overbearing setting on par with previous entries, it's actually pretty excellent if you can forgive the boring iteration of the monster and a wonky second act structure"

AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson, Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
"Playful in just the right way, never taking itself seriously while still bursting with excitement at its own existence, it's only too bad they skimped on the gore fundamental to both franchises"

ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet / Joss Whedon
"Why do people hate this movie? It's funny, creepy, and innovative, building on the alien in huge ways while laughing at how far it's come"

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017)
Matt Reeves / Mark Bomback, Matt Reeves
"Re-centering the apes is much appreciated, and the movie works as an action thriller, but it's criminal (both as a finale and as a film with that title, and that trailer, and that poster) that it fails to deliver any kind of war between men and apes"

The following 11 movies were watched as part of the popular social media dare, "Summer with the Seventies Auteur Challenge".

SORCERER (1977)
William Friedkin / Walon Green
"Possibly a new top 10 movie: fresh and impressive concept, grim as hell but able to establish enough character investment that you can't avert your eyes"

TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1972)
Amando de Ossorio / Amando de Ossorio
"Distinguishing imagery and concept with the skeleton vampire zombies and all, but kinda a boring movie overall, much too Mediterranean B for my taste (lesbos and all)"

ERASERHEAD (1977)
David Lynch / David Lynch
"Appreciably weird and claustrophobic for the first third, but pretty straightforward too, like a nightmare expressionist fairytale. Gets really boring once it locks itself in its room"

LANCELOT DU LAC (1974)
Robert Bresson / Robert Bresson
"More a series of Baroque paintings than a motion picture, an invitation to detail, speculation, and reflection that probably only gives as much as you're willing to put into it. But damn, for me that was a lot"

A NEW LEAF (1971)
Elaine May / Elaine May
"Pretty funny as these things go, solid premise, May herself is sorta like a Woody Allen character but adorable where he'd be pathetic. The whole thing feels a little 'off', like the timing isn't quite right or something (and Mathau in particular feels like an alien badly programming a robot as a human impression), but occasionally that pays into the dryness of the humor"

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975)
Sydney Pollack / David Rayfiel, Lorenzo Semple Jr.
"Hard to beat as a spy thriller, with just the right blend of stomach-churning disorientation and methodical intrigue, and some killer performances to seal the deal"

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"I have a hard time articulating how I feel about this movie - Herzog is, as ever, operating at a guttural level, below words; striking before thoughts can form into sentences"

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)
Robert Altman / Leigh Brackett
"For all the thrilling strangeness of this summer, this might be the finest movie, just an old-fashioned detective in over his head, conniving and broken humans everywhere he turns. The epitome of what Hollywood does right. Also, Arnold in a speedo - with a mustache"

EL TOPO (1970)
Alejandro Jodorowsky / Alejandro Jodorowsky
"Yeah I mean it's weird and all but what's the point? Of the many gruelingly nihilistic movies of Summer 70s, El Topo stood out in its unflinching desire to fuck itself up at regular intervals, interrupt any possible thematic threads or arc by supplanting the contents. It seems to really badly want me to question my reality or some shit and it's just annoying New Age junk. Too idiosyncratic to be a bad movie - just a really tiresome and unpleasant one"

ZARDOZ (1974)
John Boorman / John Boorman
"THIS is weirdness that works. It has fun with itself, it challenges the viewer by bringing them to new places rather than blowing things up. The visuals are gimmicky at times but originally surreal (shit like a guy who is old on his left half and young on his right is great); the inspiration lies far from Bresson but it's up to the same tricks, using images rather than words to convey story"

LET IT BE (1970)
Michael Lindsay-Hogg / (documentary)
"This is what it is and staunchly refuses to be anything more, a glance at the songwriting and recording process of the Beatles carefully denuded of drama or conflict, yet not manufactured or revisionist. It suggests a band past its breaking point, into the region where no one cares enough to pretend anymore, yet still honors the suicide pact and makes great - inwardly-directed - music along the way"

KWAIDAN (1964)
Masaki Kobayashi / Yoko Mizuki
"Kobayashi's penchant for bleak commentary pairs excellently with ghost story amorality, the missing lessons hanging as caustic indictments as well as playful shocks. The imagery moves from nightmarishly anti-linear in the first story to classically precise in the third, grounded in fantasy equal with history and never quite like anything else"

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1985)
Jon Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, George Miller / a bunch, look it up
"Never gels at all as an anthology (the polar opposite of Kwaidan), and Spielberg churns out some real tripe that evidences not only is he unable to get out of his own ass for long enough to grasp a concept as simple as The Twilight Zone, but that he's also willing to take a huge shit in front of people who can. Landis' segment is fine, toothless thanks to behind-the-scenes events but not a great concept to start. Dante's is bonkers, an amazing short film with a cartoon fascination unmistakable for anyone else (and some wonderfully weird performances to match). Miller's is great too, not especially close to his other work but on the Beyond Thunderdome side thanks to a Spielbudget, wringing horror and hilarity from John Lithgow's sweat and actually managing to make the gremlin scary"

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)
Tommy Lee Wallace / Tommy Lee Wallace
"Fantastic material for bad movie night, bad in so many orthogonal ways and supremely weird and pointless - Stonehenge robots use Halloween masks to kill America? Because The True Spirit of Halloween???"

VERSUS (2000)
Ryuhei Kitamura / Ryuhei Kitamura, Yudai Yamaguchi
"A pretty whimsical diversion with some great Three Stooges slapstick that builds into something way more serious and tedious than it should've been; doesn't help that it looks like the high school adaptation of Moby Dick I shot in the woods down the street from my parents' house"

THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1921)
Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton / Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
"It's Keaton - watching him monkey climb over a banister and slide down magic stairs is all the reward you could ask for, plus 10 manic minutes of every fake haunting gag ever done"

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)
Tobe Hooper / Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
"Still rules"

THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)
Nathan H. Juran / Kenneth Kolb
"One can never get enough Harryhausen, here all over the map for inspiration (a standard Greek cyclops, a Vishnu-snake, a two-headed vulture (Roc), a wingless dragon (?), and, of course, a skeleton), but tied to a story with just enough momentum that it never really matters"

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017)
David Villaneuve / Hampton Fancher, Michael Green
"Thankfully not at all concerned with being a thematic repeat of Blade Runner, this is genuinely heady scifi, thoroughly attached to the investigation of what identity means in a post-birth world. Indulgent but never remotely boring, and always gorgeous"

THE RAID 2 (2014)
Gareth Evans / Gareth Evans
"A lot bloodier than the first one (crushed heads, gouged eyes, ripped throats), and quite a bit more operatic too (son betrays father because he was tricked by the artist formerly known as Prince!), but also laying heavier into the exploitation (ninja baseball batman). The first one wasn't really fun, but this is pretty seriously not-fun, banking more on the awe and shock created by violence of such scale. Obviously it's Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais and it works fucking great"

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE (2016)
Taika Waititi / Taika Waititi
"Waititi has a lean way with jokes such that even when they're not hysterical, they're always doing something, developing characters or advancing the plot or carefully setting the pace - and more often than not they're hysterical. So he can actually tell a story in a comedy without diverting from the humor. It's like traveling back to the first 60 years of Hollywood cinema when this tactic was common knowledge"

CASABLANCA (1942)
Michael Curtiz / Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
"If you think about it, this is really just a run of the mill romcom. But in the tradition of the best '40s films, it projects an individual headspace into a world, an internal conflict reflected in every detail of character and mise en scene. And the dialogue is just, Christ. I don't get why we can't have dialogue like this anymore. Why do everyone have to talk like a retard now?"

MAN OF STEEL (2013)
Zack Snyder / David S. Goyer
"Kinda incomprehensible at times and so breathless none of the story gets air, but worth it for the uniquely raw, violent take on Superman, more akin to Invincible than Action Comics"

SUPERMAN III (1983)
Richard Lester / David Newman & Leslie Newman
"Not as awful as it is painfully misconceived as a comic misadventure only coincidentally involving Superman (and reality); moreover, not funny"

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
Sidney J. Furie / Lawrence Conner & Mark Rosenthal
"Ball-clutchingly terrible in spectacularly visible ways, from the horrifying wires attached to Superman's costume to Nuclear Man's silver-painted nails to Lenny Luthor's shrieking antics; an effective palette cleanser to the frustratingly wrong but competent III and a delightfully campy franchise development on the order of Hellraiser 3 or Nelm Street 2"

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)
Nicolas Roeg / Paul Mayersberg, based on the novel by Walter Tevis
"Pathologically elliptical in performance as much as plot, captivatingly mysterious if a bit overlong, with Bowie as an ineffably alien centerpiece and Rip Torn lurking around the fringes, never asking as many questions as we want"

STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)
George Lucas / Georgie Boy Lucas
"Somehow I forgot how deleterious Jar Jar is to the first half of the film, in which his antics punctuate every last line of dialogue - then again, forgotten moments work surprisingly well, like the quiet dinner before the pod race. Shame the home video edit fluffs up the pod race with boring shit that destroys the pace."

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016) 
Zack Snyder / David S. Goyer, Chris Terrio, etc.
"Real good, even Luthor"

DAY OF THE DEAD (1985)
George A. Romero / George A. Romero
"A step forward conceptually, stepping past survival to the fight to reverse the zombie plague, though too shrill to be fully entertaining and too one-sided to work as satire. Claustrophobic underground setting is a great addition."

STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)
George Lucas / George Lucas, Jonathan Hales
"Not quite as awful as I remember, with a solitary great action scene and a great sense of color and costume"

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (2017)
Rian Johnson / Rian Johnson
"The most boring, unoriginal, contemptuous, and out of place addition to the franchise. Occasional great bits, and more tedious than awful, but a seriously trying attitude and sense of importance and rage (rather than fun) that makes the prospect of revisitation incredibly unappealing."

SUPERGIRL (1984)
Jeannot Szwarc / David Odell
"Too incomprehensible to be as good-bad as IV and a terrible slog at two hours, easily the low point of the franchise"

STATISTICS
Total -51
"Auteur" movies - 17
Most frequent director - Ridley Scott
Most frequent writer - Michael Green
Most frequent franchise - Alien (watched 6, all but Aliens and AVP2)
2017: 9
2010s: 13
2000s: 3
1990s: 3
1980s: 11
1970s: 14
1960s: 1
1950s: 2
1940s: 1
1930s: 1
1920s: 1

TOP FIVE:
The Long Goodbye
Kwaidan
Lancelot du Lac
Sorcerer
King Kong
Casablanca
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Narrowing it down any further than that would be completely arbitrary.

BOTTOM FIVE:
Alien: Covenant
Prometheus
Saturn 3
"Kick the Can", Steven Spielberg's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie
Star Wars: The Last Jedi