tpmcleod

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - Maniac (2012)

Maniac stars Elijah Wood as Frank, a clearly mentally unstable man with a strange sexual affinity for mannequins. He can't relate to women, so in order to release his sexual frustration he gets involved in “relationships” with his antique mannequins that he restored himself. The only catch is that in order for the mannequins to feel real to Frank, they need to have real hair. In order to get this hair, Frank stalks women at night, killing them, and scalping them for their hair. Eventually, Frank meets a woman named Anna who shares his fascination with mannequins. Frank soon begins to fall in love with Anna, and as the two become closer he struggles to hide his dark secret from her.

The constant first-person perspective created a unique atmosphere to the film. Frank's distorted interpretations of reality were allowed to be visually represented on screen as we literally see what Frank sees. This perspective also changed the dynamic of the “stalking scenes” one might find in a typical slasher in an interesting way. And while being inside Frank's head didn't necessarily make me empathize with his actions, it did allow to me to feel his loneliness and isolation.

I personally enjoyed this film more than I ever expected to, and it definitely falls pretty high up on my list of favorite slashers of all time. 

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - The Innkeepers (2012)

The Innkeepers revolves around Claire and Luke, the remaining two employees for an old historic hotel in its final days of buisness. The Inn's upper floors are stripped bare, and the place is empty, save for a handful of strange guests – including Claire's idol, former actress Lee Rease-Jones. Luke, an amateur paranormal investigator, believes the hotel to be haunted and recruits Claire as his trusty sidekick in an attempt to make contact with the ghost of Madeline O'Malley, a young bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1800s.

Just as with West's previous film, The House of the Devil, the plot in The Innkeepers unfolds at a very slow pace. The first hour of the movie is primarily scenes of the two characters just sitting around and talking about mundane things, with a handful of more-tense-yet-equally-as-slow-paced “investigation” scenes sprinkled throughout. I found this style of horror quite refreshing with House of the Devil, in a genre typically looking for the quickest way to get the audience to yelp in the theater. This “slow-burn” style allows the the characters to become much more realized and developed, making the audience care for them more once the shit begins to hit the fan in the third act. But that's the thing, in these types of slower horror films, things are typically supposed to go nuts in the final act, which doesn't really happen in Innkeepers.Sure, there's a definite spike in urgency, but it's one, not a big spike, and two, almost an artificial urgency due to the fact that the film's antagonists actually haven't been shown to be any real threat at all. I mean, the only harm to ever come to the characters throughout the movie is of their own doing. The Innkeepers is a good example of how to not do slow-burn horror, which is spending an hour slowly building up to a completely underwhelming finale. 

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - Some Guy Who Kills People (2012)

Although the film is billed as a Horror-Comedy, its pretty lacking on the laughs and even moreso on the scares. The movie is just plain depressing, but this is by no means a bad thing. I think if the film had leaned to heavily into either comedy or horror, it would have undermined what the movie is actually about – Protagonist Ken and his inability to connect with the other human beings around him. All of the acting is pretty average all around, although Ariel Gade, playing Ken's daughter Amy, recites her lines surprisingly naturally, considering her young age. Apart from the movie's comparatively original premise, Some Guy Who Kills People ends up being an OK movie with a pretty predictable plot that has few, if any, surprises in store.

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

In Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Heather Langenkamp – star of the first and third Nightmare on Elm Street films – plays herself, after she's mostly moved on from acting. She's settled down to raise a son with her husband, a special effects artist. Throughout the film, Heather is increasingly emotionally distraught due to strange calls and letters she continues to receive from a stalking fan, as well as an unusually high frequency of earthquakes. To top it all off, Freddy Krueger – the iconic villain from the Nightmare films – has somehow found a way to taunt and torment those in the real world, and he has a strange fixation with Heather's son.

As a massive fan of Craven's later self-aware slasher Scream, I thought I'd be in for a similarly clever and fun experience. Boy, was I wrong. Unlike Scream's fast-paced, witty exchanges, New Nightmare is chock full of dialog that's both poorly written as well as awkwardly delivered, especially by Langenkamp herself, who overacts in pretty much all of her scenes. The only truly decent acting done in the film is from Julie the Babysitter, played by Tracy Middendorf. The film also attempts to give Freddy some unnecessarily convoluted reasoning behind his appearance in the real world, that ends up being more confusing than “Freddy just showed up”. The movie's special effects are also pretty terrible, even for the mid-90's, especially during the “freeway scene” and the movie's climax.

New Nightmare is a film that had tons of potential to be great, but ultimately ended up being a poorly written and acted movie devoid of both scares, or any sort of fun. 

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - +1 (2013)

+1 follows David, who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend Jill after she caught him locking lips with another girl. In an attempt to win back his former girlfriend, David follows Jill to a massive party thrown by a mutual acquaintance, with his two best friends Teddy and Allison. Things quickly take a turn for the strange, however, as a strange power outage causes everyone at the party to jump back an hour into the past – creating two versions of everyone at the party. Teddy attempts to stop everyone's dopplegangers from interacting with each other for fear of them killing themselves, while David takes this newfound second chance as an opportunity to right the mistakes he's made.

The plot moves at a brisk pace, constantly switching between the film's four leads, who each take a drastically different approach to dealing with the dopplegangers (and one who is completely unaware of the situation). The biggest complaint I have with the plot is how the Allison character is dealt with. She ends up having a much more complicated and interesting relationship with her doppleganger than that of David or Teddy, but everyone seems to just forget she exists, and the story ostensibly leaves her in the dust halfway through the film, only briefly checking in on her once or twice throughout the remainder of the movie. The film's got a refreshing visual palette for a horror film (although calling this horror might be stretching it just a bit) with bright, colorful neon lights filling much of the movie's backgrounds. I felt satisfied by the film's conclusion, but I also, without spoiling anything, wished the film hadn't wrapped up so cleanly – especially considering how random and haphazard the force creating the dopplegangers was shown to be.

Overall the film really surprised me with how cleanly it executes on a premise that might otherwise easily be subject to plot holes. I just wish the film had given more screen-time to Allison's storyline, which had the potential to be much more interesting than the already intriguing primary story arc. 

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - Grave Encounters (2011)

The film, set in the early 2000's reality television boom, follows Lance Preston and his team of “Paranormal Investigators” as they attempt to shoot an episode of their ghost hunting reality show, Grave Encounters. The team, consisting of Lance, his co-host Sasha, a “psychic medium” (who is actually just a paid actor) and the two cameramen, investigate an abandoned insane asylum that the locals claim is haunted. The team lock themselves inside of the asylum for the night, as per the show's premise, as they explore the halls, searching for any paranormal activity. As one could probably predict, the team suddenly finds themselves being taunted and tormented by real ghosts, who attempt to break the team's sanity.

The cast are all pretty likeable with cameraman “T.C.” stealing every scene he's in, although there isn't much development of their personalities throughout the film. The early scenes at night are all wonderfully creepy, building up huge amounts of tension as the team all separate and investigate different parts of the claustrophobic asylum. But once the movie's first ghost was revealed, I couldn't help myself from chuckling at a how awful the CGI was, which ended up effectively ruining any tension that the film's later scenes might have had. There were also a few potentially interesting ideas that the film presents, and then never really executes on, such as the seemingly shifting walls of the asylum or “ghost detecting pictures” that the audience can see, but the characters can't. The end result of all of this is a film that starts out strong, but peters out in quality well before the third act. 

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror - The Loved Ones (2009)

The Loved Ones revolves around Brent, a young Australian teenager, who is kidnapped and subsequently tortured by one of his classmates named Lola (aka Princess) after he rejected her invitation to the school prom. I went into this movie completely blind, and admittedly probably would not have selected it if I'd known it hailed from the “torture-porn” segment of horror – a sub genre I'm not particularly into. The Loved Ones, however, pleasantly surprised me with it's disturbing characterizations of the film's two villains – Princess and Daddy. The creepy, incestuous undertones the villainous duo share whenever they're on screen together might make you squirm even more than the film's ample amounts of graphic violence. Xavier Samuel even manages to carry the film as it's lead despite the fact that he's effectively mute for most of the film. The plot makes a few nice twists and turns, dipping the tip of it's toes into some weird waters that take the film in directions I never would have expected in a million years from a film like this. The film also features a mostly unnecessary “at the prom” subplot and all of the characters outside of the three leads are utterly useless and uninteresting. And although the movie hardly subverts any of torture porn's common tropes, the novelty of the film's pink and glittery aesthetic, along with the great performances by the three leads should be enough to warrant a watch by anyone bored of the barrage of derivative, soulless torture porn horror.

[tpmcleod]

31 Days of Horror: Film List

If anyone knows me, they'll know that I'm undoubtedly a fanatic for a good horror flick – particularly of the slasher variety. And despite having watched more movies about people getting murdered than any sane person probably should, I'm always on the lookout for good horror films I haven't yet seen. So this October I've decided to undergo the 31 Days of Horror challenge and attempt to watch 31 horror movies throughout the month. The list is primarily comprised of hidden gems of the horror genre as well as classics I've yet to watch – with a handful of essentials and personal favorites that I've already seen sprinkled throughout (marked by an asterisk). As I finish up each film I'll be writing a brief paragraph or two in regards to my initial impressions of the movie.

Below you'll be able to find my list of 31 movies, and once October rolls around its where I'll be posting my impressions.

     Dog Soldiers

Halloween*

The Exorcist

Blair Witch Project*

Friday the 13th Remake

Nightmare on Elm Street*

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

I Spit on Your Grave 

Halloween Part 2

Trick 'r Treat *

The Descent*

Let The Right One In

Hellraiser

Black Christmas 

The Loved Ones

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Hatchet

The Innkeepers

Dream Home

Rosemary's Baby

Prom Night

Maniac

In the Mouth of Madness

Sleepaway Camp

Grave Encounters

Some Guy Who Kills People

The House of the Devil*

Freddy vs. Jason

Dance of the Dead

Severance

   31.  Carrie

[tpmcleod]

Divekick Review

On it's surface Divekick simply looks to be an elaborate, impenetrable “in-joke” designed soley to appeal to the hardcore fighting game community. But if one decides to dig even just a bit deeper, they'll discover that it's actually a fighting game with a surprising amount of depth that distills the genre into it's most basic and exciting form – the mindgame.

In Divekick, gone are the long button combinations and joystick motions of the fighting games that came before – instead these are replaced by two simple input commands: Dive (up into the air) and Kick. The game's two simple inputs are able to be customized by the player and attached to nearly any two buttons on the controller. In addition to the basic Dive and Kick commands, the player can also press both buttons at the same time, be it on the ground or in the air, to execute two different special moves.

Typically, the learning curve of a fighting game tends to be that you sit in training mode for hours on end learning combos to where eventually, being able to correctly input the correct commands for a combo becomes second nature and is no longer a factor in your performance. This allows the game to shift from being about inputting combos correctly into a fast-paced game of chess, where the game then becomes about what combos to use and when. The true genius of Divekick is its complete removal of the first half of the fighting game learning curve, allowing the player to jump immediately into the much more complex, and frankly fun phase of the game.

While local multiplayer is without a doubt the ideal way to play Divekick, the game also includes a Story mode and online play. Story mode has the player choosing a single character to go up against the game's entire roster of Divekickers, with cutscenes unique to the character you chose sprinkled throughout. The story is wacky and nonsensical, as expected, but a lot of the jokes contained references that flew right over my head, or just straight-up fell flat. And although I understand that the story mode was without a doubt the last thing on the developer's mind, I can't help but think that the game squandered a massive amount of potential to create a story mode that elicits more than the occasional chuckle.

Online play is fairly straightforward, you simply queue up and wait to be matched with another player. The game would usually match me up with a player in a minute or two, but on more than one occasion it took a good ten minutes to match me with an opponent. Divekick uses GGPO netcode, the gold-standard for online fighting games, a system that handles the lag between two consoles with a “rollback” system that essentially rewinds the game if a disparity between the two consoles in play are detected. These rollbacks rarely ever happen, but it's often frustrating when they do, as many times they'll completely reverse a victory. The game's online lobby also features a stats page when you match with another player displaying victories, losses as well as your opponent's disconnect rate, which is a nice way to avoid wasting time battling players who just disconnect at the first sign of defeat. There's also a lobby system included in the game, but it only supports a meager two players in a room at a time. I guess if two friends want to continually fight each other online this would be nice, but without the ability to gather up a bunch of players into a single room seems to make the lobby system useless.

Despite the story being chock-full of inside jokes and the graphics looking cheap and haphazardly thrown together, Divekick is still a game with a decent amount of depth that miraculously manages to somehow cut out the less interesting half of the fighting game learning curve, allowing anyone to immediately jump in to the most interesting part of the fighting game genre.

[tpmcleod]

Sony E3 2013 Press Conference Impressions

Pack it up everybody, show's over – Sony may have just very well won E3 2013. Their press conference started out as a bit of a snore-fest, but man if it wasn't completely ON FIRE by the end. The show featured the first unveiling of the Playstation 4's appearance, a solid, varied and lengthy lineup of titles for PS3, 4 and Vita and finally Jack Tretton dropping more than a few bombs that might send Microsoft straight to the grave.

The show started in a similar fashion to Microsoft's conference by discussing the future of the current generation hardware, allowing them to get all of that out of the way in order to show what they had in store for next-gen. With that being said though, the lineup Sony has in the leadup to the Playstation 4 was actually quite impressive. They weirdly showed stuff for The Last of Us, a game coming out this week and my internet sputtered quite a bit during the Puppeteer trailer, so I'm unable to comment on that. However, two titles in particular stood out to me during this short trailer rapid fire. The first was Beyond: Two Souls from Quantic Dream. Although this trailer made me more confused as to what this product actually is, with some sequences shown looking a lot like a shooter, I'm still far more interested in this title that I've been at previous E3's. I'll remain skeptical of Cage's games after being thoroughly disappointed with Heavy Rain, but Beyond looks like it might be a step in the right direction for Quantic Dream. The second PS3 game that interested me was Batman: Arkham Origins, I'd written this game off initially due to the absence of Rocksteady as a developer but upon seeing brief glimpses of some of the gadgets the game has in store, I'll definitely be watching this game more closely. The game's also sporting one of the best Joker designs in recent years.

The show then moved onto undoubtedly the most boring part of the conference: TV and Movies. Here Sony announced a partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, to bring all of Sony's movie and television library to some sort of Netflix-like service. They also mentioned something similar about their music library too, but to be honest, I wasn't exactly paying a whole lot of attention to this part.

Finally after getting an entire half-hour's worth of boring business out of the way, Sony dropped it's first of many bombshells of the night: it unveiled the actual box. Sporting a similar design to the Xbox One, or as someone on my twitter feed called it “Xbox One Italicized”, the box looked incredibly sleek and noticeably smaller than Microsoft's machine. From what I could tell, the box had two USB ports on the front of the console, identical to the PS3. I was unable to see where the slot for the disc to go in was, but I've had more than one person tell me that they think it's a pop-top. But that couldn't be true.....right?

The next section was devoted to the system's launch lineup, sans InFamous, which is coming a bit later. Aside from Driveclub, due to my complete lack of interest in driving games, I thought the other four games showed in this segment looked really solid. The first up to bat was Ready at Dawn's The Order: 1886. What the game's steampunk re-imagining of a Victorian-era London would mean for the gameplay, aside from the cool weapons, wasn't made readily apparent by the trailer. But the cool setting along with Ready at Dawn's previous track record have sustained my interest in this title. Killzone looked good, but it also looked like a AAA shooter launching on a new platform, so there really wasn't much of note with that one. Knack, a title introduced at the Playstation event back in February, headed up by industry veteran Mark Cerny put a big smile on my face the entire time. Outside of Nintendo's franchises, this current generation hasn't seen a whole lot of the cutesy action-adventure platformers that heavily populated previous generations. The biggest surprise for me during this first batch of games however was InFamous: Second Son. I liked the previous three entries in the InFamous series well enough, but my biggest gripe with the franchise has been it's downright abysmal story and characters. But the primarily story focused trailer shown at Sony's Conference looked as if someone directed it specifically at me. The game's new protagonist dressed like he originated from the same circle of douchebag friends as Cole McGrath, but a least his voice actor didn't sound like he was trying to swallow sandpaper every time he opened his mouth. The most interesting element introduced in the trailer was the Protagonist's Brother. I strangely found their short quips and banter a real delight to watch. Despite the “Brothers on opposite sides of the law” trope having been done a million different times in other mediums, I still think Second Son's story will be a fun one to watch unfold.

Next on the agenda for the evening was for Sony to show off their partnerships with independent developers – something they've been heavily promoting over the past few months. They shot off a quick rapid-fire of titles, and there were far too many to list here but I'll talk about a few of the most interesting games showcased. Supergiant's new title Transistor was the highlight of the independent showcase. The game shared a similar isometric perspective to that of Bastion, the studio's previous game but the game seems to be set in a futuristic cyberpunk setting as opposed to the, stylized fantasy world of Bastion. Despite Transistor's similarities to Bastion it looks like a solid game and I'm sure once more info's released about the game, it'll come into its own identity. I seriously doubt that Supergiant would simply slap a new skin on Bastion and attempt to pass it off as a new game. Mercernary Kings, the next game from the studio that made Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, looks to this time be a giant homage to Metal Slug, as opposed to Scott Pilgrim's clear references to River City Ransom and the Beat 'em Up genre as a whole. There were also a bunch of hilariously offbeat titles featured in the indie showcase, like Octodad: Dadliest Catch.

After a brief announcement regarding Diablo 3's port over to the Playstation 4, Square Enix put Tetsuya Nomura up on the screen to showcase Square's Japanese lineup for 2014. It was at this moment where the conference's hype train started to pick up a bunch of speed, with very little throughout the remainder of the conference slowing it down. Nomura opened his segment of the Conference addressing the fact that Final Fantasy versusXIII still did in fact exist. He then played a trailer for the game. I thought the game looked fun, but it sure didn't look like a Final Fantasy game. The trailer featured the protagonist engaging in Uncharted-like climbing and traversal sequences, along with massive cinematic events occurring throughout the level a la God of War. An even bigger surprise than the game still existing came at the end of the trailer when the Versus logo erased, and was promptly replaced with a Final Fantasy XV logo. I'd had a sneaking suspicion that if Versus did indeed still exist that it would end up getting rebranded, but it was still surprising to see actually happen. Nomura then played a reveal trailer for a game I never thought would ever actually exist: Kingdom Hearts 3. The graphics shown in the trailer looked really slick and despite the lack of gameplay, I think the game will turn out just fine. The PS2 games were great and as far as I've been able to tell from reviews and word of mouth, all of the most recent Kingdom Hearts stuff on PSP and 3DS has been really solid, and I've got enough faith in Square that they'll make a good game out of this.

In the following minutes of the show, Ubisoft showed off Assasin's Creed 4 and Watch Dogs, neither of which I particularly found interesting, although the crowd along with the internet, seemed to enjoy these two a great deal. I did feel bad for the dude playing the Assassin's Creed demo though, who had the game crash on him halfway through. NBA 2K14 was shown next along with a nightmarish version of Lebron James who looked like he could swallow an entire person's head whole. Bethesda then announced that their upcoming MMO, Elder Scrolls Online was coming to the Playstation 4. They showed off some first-person gameplay, a staple of the series that had up until now apparently been removed from this entry. Despite this new addition however, I still found myself uninterested in the game as a whole.

As the Press Conference neared it's final quarter of scheduled time, Jack Tretton once again stepped out to address the crowd. He began with a lot of PR speak about how many games are being developed for Playstation, and the number of exclusives are currently in development. But the words that came out of Tretton's mouth next were the first right hook in a 1-2-Punch that very well may have singlehandedly TKO'd Microsoft for this hardware generation, or at the very least this launch season. “The PS4 won't impose any new restrictions on the use of pre-owned games” was the sentence that caused the crowd to erupt in hollering and applause. As he laid out the details of what this meant (effectively saying “Things are staying the way they are on current-gen systems”) The crowd burst into another fit of applause and whistling, this time chanting “Sony! Sony! Sony!” causing Jack Tretton to let out an audible chuckle. The second blow to Microsoft came in the form of Tretton's announcement that disc-based games do not need to be connected to the internet to play, causing applause before Jack could even finish his sentence. Once the crowd died down he then finished his statement, adding that no online authentication of any kind would be present on the Playstation 4. Even adding, in a direct reference to Microsoft that it “won't stop working if you haven't authenticated in over 24 hours”. Tretton then reiterated some of the new features coming to Playstation Network that had been previously announced in February, such as cross-game voice chat and the ability to play games as they download. He also detailed the features of Playstation Plus, quietly slipping the fact that online multiplayer will now be hidden behind a pay wall.

Tretton then introduced the final game to be shown at the conference, Bungie and Activision's the Massivley Multiplayer Shooter: Destiny. The demo showed two players walking into a large walled compound. The demo was filled with the cheesy “I am now using this feature! Hostiles spotted!” dialog between the human players participating in the demo, but nonetheless the footage showed off some of the cool features of the game, such as one guy using a small drone as a mobile light source. After defeating the first of two bosses they showed off the game's loot system and talent trees, which got me excited. The game gave off a real Borderlands vibe, which became even more apparent when they reached the second boss, and they met up with another group of players just as a “Public Event” started. It's unknown if these events would be scripted or at least semi-random, but nonetheless they were large scale and looked like a lot of fun. Overall I really enjoyed the Destiny demo and I'm excited to hear more about how large that game's multiplayer can actually get.

As the Destiny demo closed, Andrew House stepped out one final time to close out the conference with some discussion around GaiKai, and the service's potential for backwards compatibility along with the night's final “megaton” announcement. House announced that the Playstation 4 would launch at $399, an entire $100 cheaper than Microsoft's Xbox One. The crowd, clearly surprised, erupted into loud cheers and chanting once more closing out one of the most bizzare and surreal press conferences I've ever seen in my 10 years following the games industry.

This might be a bit hyperbolic and due to the heat of the moment, but I think that when we look back at this E3 and specifically this conference in years to come it'll be remembered as one of the more intriguing E3s of all time. Ever since February there's been a massive amount of anxiety and uncertainty as to the potentially dark future of this industry. No one was certain that Sony would actually follow through on their speculated support of consumer rights. Seeing them go in for the kill as Microsoft exposed their weaknesses was an incredibly exciting process to watch unfold as a gamer and when Sony finally dropped the bomb that they were keeping their support for used games, I was so surprised, I wasn't sure how to react. Then to top it all off, coming in at a whopping $100 cheaper than Microsoft's system made that conference all the more surreal and insane. This conference injected some much needed life into this increasingly stale games industry, and as an observer, seeing how Microsoft is going to react and attempt to win back their audience is going to be massively interesting and exciting to watch unfold.  

[tpmcleod]

Microsoft E3 2013 Press Conference Impressions

As the lights dimmed on the show floor and the first trailer for Microsoft's E3 Press Conference faded onto the screen, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. In the previous month or so leading up to today, there's been a lot of discussion regarding Microsoft's new console and the potentially anti-consumer policies it might impose upon its users. Leading up to this event, Microsoft's social stock with gamers was at a historic low, and the company would have to pull something truly incredible out of their hat in order to win back their audience's faith. And while the 2013 Conference didn't quite live up to that goal, some potentially great pieces of software were shown (as well as some not so great) that indicate that the future of the games industry will, at the very least, be interesting to watch unfold.

The show opened with a trailer for Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain that looked as if I had edited it back in middle school and then haphazardly slapped it up on YouTube. The trailer showed Punished Snake pulling off a bunch of stealthy maneuvers in the game's newly announced open world setting, ranging from hanging off the side of a horse, to hanging out in the back of a truck. It also introduced a few of the game's major characters, none of whom looked all too interesting. Finally the trailer closed with a small snippet of dialog from Jack Bau- I mean, Kiefer Sutherland as the voice of Punished Snake.

As the lights came up and Don Mattrick shooed Metal Gear auteur Hideo Kojima off of the stage just as quickly as he had introduced him, I felt unconvinced by Microsoft's first impression. But after quickly getting through a few announcements regarding the Xbox 360, such as Microsoft's attempt to mimic the success of Sony's Playstation Plus program, the conference started to slowly but surely turn around in quality. The next game shown was Crytek's Ryse: Son of Rome, a game that looked like it had taken the Allied Soldiers and M1 Garrands of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and replaced them with Roman Warriors and Shortswords. As far as I could tell the game's goal was to blend the melee combat of an action game with, for lack of a better phrase, the “cinematic linearity” of games like Gears of War and Call of Duty. The end result was a veritable snooze-fest of boring combos and quick-time events.

The next few minutes were a rapid-fire of trailers for various games. The biggest highlight of this section was the brief trailer for Rare's Killer Instinct reboot. Despite having no relationship with previous entries in the Killer Instinct series, I thought the gameplay shown during the presentation of Xbox One's streaming features looked like that of a solid fighting game, and I'm hoping that the tournament scene embraces this game, as it would be a nice change of pace from the overload of Capcom fighters. The next trailer I took a real liking to was Insomniac's (of Ratchet and Clank fame) new game Sunset Overdrive. Although it was just a CG trailer, from what I gathered the game looked to me almost like a cooperative, hyper-stylized mix of Mirror's Edge and Dead Rising 2. Assuming Insomniac doesn't do what they did with FUSE and strip the game of all of its personality upon release, Sunset Overdrive looks like it could be a really fun and unique experience. The game's also got one of the better titles I've heard in a while.

Next up was the demo for Forza Motorsport 5. Not much of the demonstration did anything for me due to my lack of interest in racing games and cars in general, although the Turn 10 representative's overly passionate, pseudo-inspirational speech set to hilariously “epic” music made me chuckle for a bit. One thing that did catch my eye though, not so much for its usage in Forza, but for its potential implementation in other games, was the stupidly-named “Drivitar” system. It's ostensibly the next evolution of the “ghost racer” feature commonly found in other racing games. Instead of recording the player's exact path along the track however, Turn 10 told us that the game records the player's playstyle and driving habits. This data is constantly being fed into the player's “Drivitar” after each race, allowing the player to have an AI racer based on their own playstyle. Where this becomes interesting is that when the player is not playing the game, that “Drivitar” makes it's way into other player's games, replacing what would normally be an AI driver. I was impressed by Turn 10 implementing an almost “Dark Soulsian” system of asynchronous multi-player into a driving game of all places. The potential for a system like this to be implemented in something like a fighting game, or a shooter could finally be the way to merge the disconnect between a game's single player experience not preparing the player for online.

One of the bigger disappointments of the presentation was the reveal of Dead Rising 3. Despite the game's graphics being a marked improvement over it's predecessors, and the gameplay mechanics remaining solid – including a welcome streamlining of DR2's crafting system- I can't help but be disinterested in this game. Maybe it was just this way due to its presence on live TV, but the game seems to have lost all of the weird, wacky, Japanese charm that the made previous entries in the series so exciting. The game's goofy style even survived in Dead Rising 2, despite shifting the series to a Western developer, so I'm a bit baffled as to why the series has decided to suddenly take itself so seriously.

The show continued on with a few more trailers and demos, none of which were too noteworthy in one way or another. These included bigger games like the Witcher 3, which in a similar fashion to Metal Gear is making its first foray into the open-world genre. More footage was also shown of Remedy's Quantum Break. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this game, mostly because I'm not exactly sure what it is. Sam Lake specifically called what he showed at the press conference today “gameplay” and yet all I saw was what looked like a cutscene. Perhaps this means Lake is taking up after David Cage and making Quantum Break in a style similar to Heavy Rain. The game is also supposed to somehow tie in with a television show, too? At this point Quantum Break is a giant question mark to me. Similarly to Quantum Break, What Lies Below, was a new roguelike announced from the creators of the adventure game “Sword and Sorcery EP”. I felt the trailer didn't particularly convey what the game was really meant to be, but I'm all for more roguelikes.

Finally the show closed out with something that was obviously set up to be a surprise, were it not for the Game Informer cover story of the game leaking early. The game is of course, Titanfall, from Vince Zampella and Respawn Entertainment, a company formed by former employees of Infinity Ward, creators of the massively successful Call of Duty franchise. The game's goal seems to be merging the blockbuster spectacle and scale of a single-player Call of Duty campaign, with that of it's multiplayer mode. I've found a fairly apt description of this game to be “Call of Duty 2142”, which isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Even just by looking at the game, it's Call of Duty lineage is readily apparent, with 60 frames per second, similar animations and the same experience numbers flashing on screen every time a kill is scored. But the future setting provides an opportunity to expand on the tired Call of Duty formula in ways that might make games of this type novel again. The increased mobility provided to players with actions like wallrunning and jetpacks are a welcome addition, that I could easily see changing up some of the basics of how a normal CoD-like shooter is played. The biggest asset that the futuristic setting has been able to provide the game is the Titans – incredibly agile mechs that the player is able to pilot in battle. It's apparent that Respawn has taken some cues from the indie mech shooter Hawken, and are of the mind that fast mechs are cool. I happen to share their viewpoint – what's the point of being allowed to pilot this powerful, destructive robot, if its not even fun to do? But anyways, Titanfall looks like it has the potential to be a really great title, and I can't wait to hear more about that game in the future.

Looking back on the conference as a whole I'd say I was simply “whelmed”. While I thought there were a handful of really cool looking and interesting games, there wasn't really anything that made me go “I HAVE to have an Xbox ONE”. There were also a bunch of titles that looked outright bad, especially on the frontend of the presentation, leaving a sour taste in my mouth throughout the show. And as I stated earlier, what was shown wasn't enough to make me overlook all of the bullshit surrounding the system's hardware and policies. Microsoft had a decent showing, but the company still has a ways to go in regards to damage control.