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Shmee Ponders Getting An Upgrade!

Thanks to John Wick the old school late 80’s early 90’s action revenge genre is making a comeback, though it is getting a few tweaks along the way.  Upgrade stays truer to the formula than John Wick does, but it mixes in a cyberpunk setting and some horror elements for flavor.  While its story will not blow you away, its great fight choreography and gruesome practical effects might.

Upgrade’s plot is basic: happy man and wife get attacked, wife gets murdered, and then man goes out and takes his revenge.  The difference in Upgrade is that the man, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green), becomes a quadriplegic, so he undergoes an experimental surgery that implants a cybernetic computer, STEM (voice by  Simon Maiden), on to his spine to move his limbs for him.  Then when he allows STEM to have complete control over his body he turns in to a cyborg killing machine.

What is great about this movie is that it understands what the audience is in the theater for: cool fights, and they are a ton of fun.  Watching Grey watch what his body is doing without his control with a combined look of horror and amazement on face is quite funny, and Marshall-Green’s ability to make his movements look unhuman while making those facial emotes is uncanny.  Then because Upgrade is billed as a horror movie, the ending to those fights are shocking.  With really well done practical effects to sell what you are seeing on screen.

While no one is going to win any acting awards for this film, like I said before Marshall-Green really grounds this movie.  His ability to make not quite robotic movements and still give his character some emotional depth is worth recognition, and Upgrade needs that good central character because there is almost no other character of note in this movie.  Except for maybe STEM.  Everyone else is just a roadblock to justice.  Roadblocks that do some great stunt work.

Upgrade is barely over an hour and a half long including its ending credits, so it doesn’t outlast its welcome, and sophomore director Leigh Whannell does a fabulous job keeping it running at a fast clip.  You can tell he reveled in bringing his horror background to the action genre, he wrote and co-created the Saw and Insidious franchises.  While it won’t win any new fans to the action revenge genre, existing ones should find plenty to like in Upgrade.  It is quite literally a bloody good time.

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Steam Tears Down The Wall And Replaces It With A Papier-Mâché Fence!

Valve for years has pushed back on content that it deemed too offensive for its digital storefront Steam.  However, as time has passed the line for what gets let in and what gets banned has turned in to more of a sine curve that developers have had to try and calculate in order to sell their wares on gaming’s biggest digital store.  Then after doing all that “math” some developers got notices that their games were going to be dropped from the store anyway.  Which is a problem if Steam accounts for 80% of your sales.  After a few weeks of silence Valve brushed it all off as a misunderstanding.  The devs, as you can imagine, were not pleased, so to make everyone “happy” Steam’s forthcoming policy is that everything is permitted, and it is up to the users to build their own walls for what they see with tools that are forthcoming.

Here is the thing, those tools have got to be really effective and easy to use otherwise people are going to start seeing a lot of crap they don’t want to.  It is like going to a video store in the 90’s and just pretending there was nothing behind the beaded curtain.  Of course in that case at least the store put the curtain up.  It wasn’t up to the perspective renters to hang the rod and decide the bead density.  Valve should have just said they were creating an “opt-in” policy, and then let people check the boxes for what they want to see.  That way everything stays beyond the wall until you say to open the gates.  If someone searches for something beyond that wall, it could let them know that it exists, but that they would need to update their settings.  Now however, it is going to be a free-for-all until you get your barrier setup correctly.

Then on top of that Steam has the audacity to say that even though they are letting every kind of game in that doesn’t mean they agree with the game in question’s content.  Oh, well I am glad you don’t agree with what you are going to try and make a bundle of money off of.  It is a like a nun working the front desk at a brothel, “It is a sin to step inside my child, but I will need $50 up front to enter the bar.”  What?!  Even more insane is that Valve will still ban games that are illegal and that are “outright trolling”.  Illegal I get, but trolling?  According to who?  Why get rid of an arbitrary line to just add a worse arbitrary line?

I am glad that developers will now be able to make the kinds of games they want to make and host them on Steam, but Valve should still have a major hand in trying protect its users from the terrible stuff those devs are going to make.  The wall should still exist, just make a gate and post some guards warning of what lies beyond, “There be adult content, gruesome violence and nudity past this point fair traveler!”  Let it be a user decision, not a platform decision, and “trolling”?  That should be more detailed, like no games replicating racist acts or school shootings, you know, an actual policy.  Steam will soon be the Wild West, and I am not sure its users will apricate the change.

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We Finally Get Look At The LEGO Movie 2!

This is a pretty long trailer for a movie that isn’t coming out until February, but I am excited!  It is a pretty epic looking apocalypse, and I am on board!  Not to mention there is a pretty great Guardians of the Galaxy joke in there, so at least we know the tone of the movie is on point.

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Microsoft Just Bought GitHub For Some Reason…

It must be nice having tons of money to throw around.  Microsoft just made its first major purchase of Satya Nadella era, GitHub.  You know, that site where all the open-source nerds host all their projects.  For free.  Well it turns out that Microsoft is hosting a bunch of their stuff there too since they closed down CodePlex in 2017.  I mean sure, it is a cool site, so I can kind of see the appeal, but they bought it for $7.5 Billion!  That is like buying a nice little bungalow by the beach for a couple of tons of gold bullion.  A slight overspend there.

Here is the thing, while there is a massive amount of data on GitHub, Git is an open-source version control system, and there is nothing, I mean nothing stopping people from making a new GitHub-esque site somewhere else.  Not to mention GitHub was only bringing in about $140 Million a year in revenue, so it will add next to nothing to Microsoft’s already massive bottom line.  This is nothing more than a vanity purchase.  Microsoft wanted to prove that they are down with open-source, so they bought where it is all stored (for the time being).

I just don’t understand it.  Hosting a bunch of projects on GitHub already sent the message Microsoft was trying to make, and if it is a code ownership thing, Microsoft could have made their own Git site in the blink of an eye, but so can all those aforementioned open-source nerds, so now it is just a count down until GitHub becomes an empty wasteland as the multitude of anti-Microsoft code jockeys leave to self made geekier pastures.

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Why PUBG, Why?

Yesterday PUBG Corp did something very dumb, they sued Epic Games for copyright infringement.  While I get why they are angry, PUBG pays Epic to license their engine, and then Epic turns around uses that money to create a Battle Royal variant for their game Fortnite.  Which at first played very similar to PUBG.  It must be hard watching a bunch of players leave to a similar game made by the people you pay to help you with your game, but this is just a bad look.

PUBG should have responded to Fortnite: Battle Royal by doubling down on making their game better.  To be fair it has gotten better on both Xbox and PC, but it is still poorly optimized, and it doesn’t have the best aesthetic.  Not to mention its loot system is pretty lame.  Though despite all that I like PUBG more.  The moment to moment tension in PUBG is better than the arcade-y thrill of Fortnite.

Which is another problem for PUBG’s lawsuit, while Fortnite started out very similar to PUBG, they are vastly different games now.  I am not sure how copyright works in Korea, but they would have a hard time making people think they are the same game here in the states.  Especially since the game industry is full of clones of one another, and a lot of them are far more egregious than Fortnite.

Look, it was bad form for Epic to literally say, “we like PUBG so much we are going to make our own Battle Royal game”, but suing people for bad form is not good business practice, and it makes all the gamers out there dislike PUBG for its epic case of sour grapes.  If PUBG wants to get its gamers back it needs to buckle down and make its game better, not sue Epic for bogus copyright infringement.  That will do the opposite.