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Dead Movie Franchises Don’t Tell Tales!

When Disney said they were returning to the series’ roots for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, what they really meant is that they were going to forget that On Stranger Tides ever happened (heaven knows we all did) and just copy the highlights of the first films.  Like all poor photocopies of an original, the cracks are showing and it has faded quite a bit.  Dead Men Tell No Tales was a waste of everyone’s time.

You already know what happens in Dead Men Tell No Tales.  Jack will bumble around while crazy set pieces explode and fall apart, all while searching for a magical MacGuffin that will save him from a pirate ship full of undead seamen.  The only change this time around is the kid he has teamed up with is the son of Will Turner.  Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites) is hoping that Poseidon’s Trident can save his father from having to serve for all eternity on the Flying Dutchmen.  As luck would have it a very smart, very pretty girl Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) is also looking for the Trident, so they will all have to reluctantly team up.

Another fun change for Dead Men Tell No Tales is that Jack has almost no agency of his own.  He is not a mastermind playing dumb, he just is dumb.  He is being dragged along by these youths, and is now just a bumbling violent drunken nitwit.  It is like Johnny Depp and Jack Sparrow have completed their merge in to one another.  The thing is, had they written an okay story this all still might have been fine, but that is not the case.  Stuff just happens in this movie, and it is all a big coincidence that all these things all just happen at the same time.  I understand that all adventure films require a little ‘destiny’ to make them work, but this ‘plot’ completely relies on it, without ever even acknowledging it.  All the while stealing things from other movies without even as much as a wink or a nod.  Gee I wonder what Carina will say when someone mentions that ‘no man’ can read the map to the Trident.

You should not waste your time watching this movie like I did.  Yes, I know it is on Netflix now, and you are looking for a movie to watch with your family, but trust me, there are a lot of better things to watch.  It makes me angry that no one even tried to do something fun or original with this film.  It could and should be an exciting franchise, but instead everyone involved is willing to let this franchise slide in to mediocrity while they count their money.  If Dead Men Tell No Tales then everyone who made this movie must be six feet under.

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If Your Game Needs Co-Op To Be Fun, It Is Not That Good Of A Game

I have been playing some Ghost Recon: Wildlands on and off with my friends and family, and it is great fun to play that way, but it is boring to play by myself.  It is the usual Ubisoft sandbox and icon vomit of a game.  It feels completely uninspired, but add in some friends and all of the sudden I am having a good time.  Mostly because my friends are causing all kinds of chaos, interrupting my well thought out plans, or just generally chatting while we play.

Here is the thing though, almost all things are better with your friends.  Coffee shops are okay by yourself, you can read a book or get some work done, but add in a few friends and it is a much more enjoyable experience.  Hanging out and watching Netflix is better with other people, so it should be no surprise that Icon Hunt: The Game is better with someone crashing a helicopter in to an SUV while you are trying to snipe a couple of narcos.

All I am saying is that for a game to be truly good I should want to play it on my own, and I don’t really get that pull from Ghost Recon: Wildlands.  Other games have this problem as well, but you will always see the comment, “It is really good with a couple of friends.”  You would hope so, since friends make everything better.  It was smart of Ubisoft to include the mode to cover over the issues that Wildlands has, and most games should include co-op if they can, but the game should be the selling point, not your friends.

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Jade Empire On The Xbox One Is A Wonderful Way To Revisit A Classic!

When the Original Xbox needed games, specifically RPGs, Microsoft made the savvy decision to have the then independent BioWare create two original games for their systems.  The most famous being Mass Effect, but the first game to come out of this partnership was Jade Empire.  While Jade Empire was well regarded when it was released, it came out only a few months before the Xbox 360, so a lot of people skipped it, and then it was quickly overshadowed by BioWare’s most famous title the aforementioned Mass Effect only two years later.

While it is true 2K released a Special Edition of Jade Empire for PC in 2007, it just didn’t get the marketing hype that it deserved, and since it was published by Microsoft and then 2K, BioWare’s new owners, EA, never seemed to care much about the Chinese Folklore based RPG, which is a shame.  But now if you have an Xbox One, the original has come to backwards compatibility with either a 2x or 4x bump in resolution depending on which Xbox One you play it on, and there are no more frame rate drops.  Something that just wasn’t possible on the Original Xbox, and it never came to the 360’s backwards compatibility program for some reason.  It is amazing how good this game looks with just a simple res increase.

The game isn’t perfect.  It features narrow paths to move between locations and small open areas for fights, so it feels a little restrictive compared to the wide open spaces of modern titles (it makes fellow Xbox title Morrowind feel massive), and the combat is slow until you level up your skills, but the story is fantastic.  Sure there are always clear good and bad options, but the neutral choice is usually equally as effective.  A rare things for RPGs with morality systems.  Not to mention there are so few games that feature Chinese Folklore as their setting, and almost zero of those games are fully featured RPGs.

While I am sure the PC Special Edition of Jade Empire is technically the best version, the original on the Xbox One is a great way to revisit a lost classic, and to make the lust for a sequel that will probably never happen, just that much greater.  I rarely like to replay RPGs, but Jade Empire has roped me in again, and I am enjoying every minute of it.  If you can find a cheap Jade Empire disk around somewhere, throw it in your Xbox One, you will be glad you did.

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There Are No Good Choices In Episode 5 Of Batman: The Enemy Within!

I have been kind of distracted, so it took me a while to finish off Batman: The Enemy Within, but the series really ends well.  All those choices you made finally pay off with a Joker of your making.  He either ends up trying to be a vigilantly or a villain, and you will have to deal with him either way.

Batman and the Joker have always had a very codependent relationship.  Without Batman there would be no Joker, so to see your choices bring a different Joker to life is kind of an amazing experience.  Sadly for Bruce, things still cannot end up the way he wants them.  He has to make a lot of tough choices in this episode, and almost all of them end poorly.  Which is the most Batman thing of all time.

Telltale has hit a bit of a rough patch, so I am not sure about the future of their Batman franchise, but I hope they find a way to keep making this story because it is excellent.  If only the Warner Brothers movie studio had this much writing talent, maybe we would finally get a good new Batman movie.  Regardless, now that the story is complete, there is no reason not to jump in to Telltale’s Batman: The Enemy Within, or go back and start at the beginning with Batman: The Telltales Series.  You will be glad you did.

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Shmee Is Engulfed In The Infinity War!

It has taken ten years to get here, but Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has finally all come together to take on its biggest bad guy yet, Thanos.  The fact they were able to pull something like this off on this kind of scale is incredible, and the fact it still manages to be a fairly focused movie and not some muddled mess is a minor miracle.  Of course you will have to wait for Infinity War 2 (or whatever the title of May 2019’s Avengers movie is going to be) to get the closure you were hoping for.

Avengers: Infinity War is the movie where Thanos actually does something, and he does it quite well.  For the most part I have never enjoyed overpowered comic book villains.  They are generally just massively powerful so that the comic book has a reason to cram in every hero known to man, and honestly Thanos isn’t any different, but Josh Brolin brings him to life perfectly.  He actually has a character of his own, and while his reason for wanting to kill half of all life in the universe, to stave off overpopulation, is iffy, you at least believe he believes it.  Even though if he hired a population expert, they would have pointed out that Earth, for instance, was at half its current population a little less that fifty years ago, meaning if he succeeds in his dark task it doesn’t buy the universe a lot of time.

The biggest problem for Avengers: Infinity War is that it feels a little like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  It has epic battles and cool villains fighting heroes we love, but then it ends before it crosses the finish line, and there are two more Marvel movies we will probably need to watch before we can cross that line a year from now, but if this movie is yet just another setup movie, at least it was a good one.  It shows that Marvel has so far been the only studio capable of doing anything like this, and I am guess next year’s movie is going to be something special.