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Xbox One Finally Gets Morrowind!

The Backwards Compatibility program for Xbox One has brought a lot of value to its customers, and the Xbox One is finally getting one of the best original Xbox games ever, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.  Morrowind was the game that sold me on western RPGs on console.  It was the first open world game that really allowed me to do whatever I wanted.  I could be the good guy or the bad guy, there were deep dialog trees for main quests, so I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say.  In other words, it was the first console game where I felt like I was truly role playing.

Even better, on the Xbox One X it is going to run at sixteen times the resolution with sixteen times anisotropic filtering.  Meaning outside some PC mods, this is going to be the best looking version of the game.  To have all three of the modern Elder Scrolls games on one console, in high resolution, is pretty sweet, and honestly, at this point Bethesda should just release Arena and Daggerfall as a classics pack, so that people can see how far the games have come.  They could even throw in Battlespire if they felt like it.

The are very few games left that I want to see come to Xbox Backwards Compatibility, and it is nice to see that Microsoft is protecting my purchases.  I guess they want to make sure I always have an Xbox under my TV, and with the way things are going, there always will be.  While I wait for April 17th to install Morrowind, I may just have to start up Red Dead Redemption now that it runs in near 4K thanks to Microsoft’s technical wizardry.

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Shmee Meets An Atomic Blonde!

On paper Atomic Blonde is perfect: it has the color and flair of the punk 80’s and the action of John Wick.  Plus, it features one of the greatest action stars currently working, Charlize Theron.  Mix in a little cold war era spy intrigue, and things get even better.  You look at everything Atomic Blonde has going for it, and you think it is going to be amazing, but sadly it falls a little flat in places, so it ends up being merely pretty good.  Watching a good movie should never make you feel let down, but when it had so much potential, it is hard not to be disappointed.

The hook for Atomic Blonde is fabulous.  You let Charlize Theron loose in Berlin just as the wall is about to come down, and she has to fight her way through every intelligence agency in town while trying to find some list with a bunch of spies’ names on it.  Can she trust the people she is working with?  Absolutely not, but we know she will claw her way to the top of the spy pile.

I was buzzing when I saw the first trailer for Atomic Blonde, and I was even more excited when I found out it was being directed by one of the guys that brought us John Wick, David Leitch.  Here is the thing, while Leitch did a great job bringing the style and filming the stunts, the spy stuff was all pretty by the numbers.  Sure there are the usual spy twists, but nothing that thrilling.  You just have to wait through it to get to the next fight sequence.

However, the fight sequences and the style do almost make up for the lack of an interesting plot.  I mean Atomic Blonde is so cool to look at, and you can feel every punch that gets thrown and every set of keys that get stuck is some dude’s face.  Theron was meant to be in movies like this.  I want to see her punch and kick everything and everyone.  I would faint if she and Keanu Reeves ended up in a movie together.

So where does this leave us?  With a movie that oozes style (and more than a little blood), and has some wonderful stunt choreography, but with spy-craft that is less than intriguing.  Hey, if you are just going in for the action, you will probably like Atomic Blonde, but if you were expecting a little more because of all the potential, it is hard not to be disappointed, so just temper your expectations, and things will be fine.

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Shmee Visits A Quiet Place!

I am sure when Jim from The Office started shopping around the idea of Signs, but everyone has to be quiet, there were not a lot of takers.  However, after a massive opening weekend Paramount must be glad they took a chance.  While the movie is far from original, though honestly what horror movie is at this point, A Quiet Place makes up for it with its spot on execution and amazing performances.

The quick setup for A Quiet Place is that in the near future the world is overrun by blind monsters with amazing hearing, and they kill anything that they can hear.  A family has learned to survive in this silent world, thanks in part to their hearing impaired daughter, giving them the ability use sign language to communicate.

As I said earlier, we have seen a lot of this before.  Obviously Signs used the hook of a family up against aliens, and just last year Don’t Breathe had everyone trying to stay quiet unless they wanted to get viciously murdered, but John Krasinski keeps everything so tight, tense and focused that the familiarity is not an issue.  Not to mention the family’s struggle to survive is so convincing that you can’t help but get swept away with what is happening on screen.

Obviously Krasinski’s directing wasn’t the only reason this family’s tale was so convincing, the actors get a lot of credit for that too.  A lot of times it is hard for real life couples to portray their real life chemistry on screen, but that did not seem to be an issue for Krasinski and Emily Blunt.  They don’t get all the credit though, their kids, played by Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, also do a fantastic job.  Kids are always great for horror movies because with adults it ticks us off when they do something stupid, but kids, we believe that they will make bad decisions.

As you can tell, I really enjoyed A Quiet Place.  It is refreshing to see horror movies that are made with actual talent, and a will by their creators to make something good.  Instead of the usual dreck that gets made.  Even better, it might be the most family friendly horror movie made in quite some time, so if you have older kids, it is a movie you and the kids can get scared at together.  While not as good as last year’s Get Out, A Quiet Place is a fantastic way to start off the summer movie season.

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I Liked Half Of Pacific Rim: Uprising…

I was blown away by the first Pacific Rim.  It was big and dumb and I couldn’t stop smiling when I watched it.  Pacific Rim: Uprising is also big and dumb, but it misses the heart of the first movie.  Which is a shame, because the movie has a promising start, but then somewhere someone decided that the second half the movie had to be a pointless monster fight, and while Pacific Rim is a movie series about giant robots fighting giant monsters, apparently the writers must have had a contest for the dumbest reason for this fight because it defies all logical explanation.

Pacific Rim 2 takes place ten years after the events of the first movie, and the world has obviously changed.  People are rebuilding after the attacks, and the Jaeger program is struggling to continue to have relevance.  Meanwhile, Jaeger tech is booming on the black market as people try to build their own massive robots.  A post Kaiju world is an interesting one.  Sadly, the movie doesn’t continue to explore this, and instead has a series of increasingly dumb things happen until some robots fight some monsters.

I would have loved Pacific Rim: Uprising if had just extended the first part of the movie to a logical conclusion (or at least a more logical one).  While I may have suggested the writers had some sort of terrible contest to decide the ending, I am guessing there was actually more than a little executive interference that demanded a monster v robot fight like the one we got, and the writers had to figure out how to make it work.  Which is what makes this all so aggravating.  Had the whole thing been bad, I wouldn’t have been as upset, but there were some good ideas here that just got squandered.

I am guessing you can tell that I was disappointed with how Pacific Rim: Uprising turned out, but if you like the first movie, the second one is worth a rental, or if you are MoviePass subscriber like me, there are worse movies.  The robots and the monsters are still cool, even if the reason they are fighting is not.  Let’s hope Pacific Rim 3 learns the right lesson’s from Uprising.

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My Take On All This Far Cry 5 Nonsense!

The game that has been all over the media these days has been Far Cry 5, and it seems that people either think it is the best game in the series, or the worst one.  What seems to be swaying people one way or the other is how they respond to the main story.  The marketing made it seem like it would tackle America’s hot button issues, but the actual game goes out of its way not to say anything about anything, and since this is a Far Cry game, this shouldn’t have surprised anyone.  Top brass isn’t going to take a chance offending anyone’s political or religious beliefs with a game this big.  They need Far Cry 5 to move a lot of copies to keep the company in the black.

However, I do understand that this can be disappointing.  Especially to players from United States.  To use our problems as marketing, and then not say anything about them is a tough pill to swallow.  It would have been nice to have a major game have an actual point of view.  Any point of view.  Even one a lot of people disagree with, but apparently Far Cry 5 goes out its way to not have one.

Does the Seed family’s religious symbology look a lot like that used by white nationalist extremists? Yes, but the Seeds have multiple African Americans in their ranks, so it is just a coincidence the imagery looks similar I guess?  Do they Seeds seem to worship guns? Yep, but they are being taken down by a bunch of gun loving rednecks all around them.  It almost makes people wonder how the Seeds took over in the first place.  Oh, they are drugging people.  Sure, that is fine.  So it is cool if I, as the player, murder a bunch of drugged up people?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯   There doesn’t seem to be an alternative.

Here is the rub.  All Far Cry games are zany and crazy, but this time the craziness has hit our shores, and the story is just an excuse to let loose in Montana with a rocket launcher and a weaponized bear.  If you are okay with that, apparently Far Cry 5 is great.  If the use of current political goings-on for cool posters makes you a little teed off, maybe skip this one, but at least now we know how Bolivia felt when Ghost Recon: Wildlands hypothesized what it would be like if their country was run by a Mexican drug cartel (they threated legal action).