Beautiful Katamari

A good long while ago I reviewed We Love Katamari on the Playstation 2. You might remember it. You might remember me liking the game. You might also remember that post being a bit shit. I am aware as much as any of you that sometimes my posts are a little bit on the dull side, especially when it comes to things I actually like. Beautiful Katamari (one of the games in the Katamari series don'tcha know?) gave me the opportunity to re-examine the Katamari formula, only this time much better. So let's get into the review shall we? Royal Rainbow!

The story begins with The King of the Cosmos on holiday with his family. Because the King of the Cosmos is both extremely powerful and extremely careless he manages to destroy the universe in a game of tennis. Game, set and match universe. So the King does what any all powerful universal collosus would do and gets his puny son to roll shit up into balls so he can hurl them into orbit and declare all extraterrestrial bodies replaced. You might think this sounds lazy of him but oh no, the King keeps hard at work harshly critiquing your efforts and punishing you when you fail to roll quick enough. But in all honesty the King of the Cosmos is a lovable character. Sure, he's out of touch, mentally inbalanced and destructively irresponsible. But you'll love him anyway.

Gameplay wise Beautiful Katamari is basically the same as any Katamari game. You roll shit into a ball. The ball gets bigger. Bigger balls roll bigger shit. The King belittles your efforts. Repeat. But this formula, although simple, manages to stay very refreshing and addictive with the use of clever level design and some interesting rules. There's one level where you have to quickly roll up a Katamari that is 10 000 degrees celcius by rolling hot things and avoiding cold things. Of course, Katamari logic dictates that hot and cold things are often abstract and confusing. For example a penguin counts as a cold thing and chili sauce counts as a hot thing. I'm pretty sure a penguine would burn better than a glass jar, but who am I to argue? Katamari logic can take a bit of getting used to, especially when you're trying to decide whether you are yet big enough to roll something up. There have been times where I was marching proudly along, rolling up all the puny objects in my way only to have some piddley little knick knack push me away like a repulsed blind date as you lean in for a goodnight kiss. Apparently size matters with katamari's too, but at least katamari's can grow without surgery.

Although the design sounds simple it always manages to stay fresh and fun. The mere act of rolling up something new is rewarding in itself, in a sort of Pokemon, gotta roll 'em all, kind of way. The game keeps track of your collection of crap, filing it away neatly and giving you an idea of how much of the world has been left unabused by your presence. The way a Katamari handles also feels right. You can start off a level speedily rolling up thumbtacks and gum saving up for being able to roll up that dogshit that's been giving you trouble and end up later on in the level slowly ploughing through cars, people and even buildings in the same slow, lumbering, unstoppable manner of Godzilla. People even panic and attempt to flee from your path. There's something very primally thrilling about seeing some jerk kicking and screaming as they are rolled around into other people. The levels are relatively short, usually clocking up about 6 mins. But you will find yourself replaying them over and over trying desperately to earn yourself a perfect score from the King. After doing so you unlock Eternal Mode for that level, allowing you to roll freely around it without a time limit. There's something extremely cathartic about toiling for hours for the perfect score and then going back to the level in Eternal Mode to reduce the level to an empty room or a flat area where a great city once stood.

The game still has it's flaws of course. Aside from the aforementioned Katamari logic to get your head around there's the camera. There are many occassions where I have done something I regretted because I couldn't actually see where I was going or even where my katamari was. Sometimes when your Katamari is big it obscures your vision and you find yourself crashing into unseen, mystery objects. As well as that I have found myself getting unfairly stuck because my katamari is just big enough to get wedged into some tight nook that is time consuming and damaging to get out of. Although these few flaws can be frustrating they certainly aren't dealbreakers. Katamari is as fun as it ever was.

I've heard some people complain that the Katamari games haven't changed at all. Whilst this is most certainly true I don't really care for a number of reasons. First of all, these games are so unique and fun that having more of them is definately good. Secondly, almost every katamari iteration appears on a different console, allowing more players to enjoy the game. Now that Katamari is on the Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PSP and iPhone I don't see any reason why you, the reader, can excuse yourself from trying a Katamari game out. It may not sound like much and may look outlandishly camp and Japanese but just trust me, it's fantastic. The only reason I'm not playing it right now instead of blabbing on and on about it is because my fucking poorly designed Xbox 360 Pro has fucked up and is yet to be replaced by a new Xbox 360 Slim. But I've already ranted about how the Xbox 360 is shit. I bet if you opened one up it's probably being run on one of those potato batteries kids make in school. Yeah, that's it. Microsoft enslaves children to build Xbox 360's out of vegetables and chicken wire. Sigh...I miss Katamari.

Christmas Songs Rant

Remember when I actually used to post pictures with my blog? Well I've decided to stop being a lazy cunt and start up that tradition once again. So here's something vagueley relevant, enjoy!

You'd have to be majorly out of the loop to not be aware that Christmas is basically a month away. It's that time of the year when fairy lights begin to pop up in windows and front yards and mall Santa's start making their appearances. It's also time for fucking Christmas compilations to be played in every place with a sound system in the western world.

So let me open with this. Christmas songs are the shittest. The. Absolute. Worst. Music. I'm always surprised to see which saps actually get roped into making Christmas albums. Nat King Cole, Mariah Carey, The Simpsons; there's even a fucking Pokemon Christmas album. And they're all shit. Even the ironic, comdey ones are shit. In fact I'd go so far as to say that anything with the words "Christmas" in the title, be it movie, album or book, is shit with the possible exception of Christmas Lemmings.

So seeing as how I work in a shopping centre I have recently become plagued by stupid Christmas songs playing over the store radio. after a few hours of suffering a fellow employee said " fuck I hate Christmas songs" to which I agreed, but in my mind I sort of said to myself "well duh! Who the fuck doesn't?" Then I reached this realisation in my mind, I didn't know a single human being on the face of the Earth who didn't dread setting foot in stores this time of year for fear of being driven to auditory suicide by "Jingle Bells Rock". This presented me with many questions. Did there exist such a mythical beast that actually liked this garbage? If so, were their numbers significant? Assuming not, why are we exposed to these songs? Do the corporate big wigs in marketing like this music? Do they think it helps move units this time of year? There were so many questions that popped into my head and the weird thing was I couldn't shake the feeling that these songs would be, for the most part, a negative presence in shops.

After several hours of working for the man all troubling thoughts had left the forfront of my brain, but the music kept on playing. Eventually, as the evening wrapped up, I noticed something else disturbing about these songs. Many of these so-called "Christmas Songs" are sexual in nature. Whilst for the most part they seemed mostly harmless, mentioning topics no more frisky than stealing a quick kiss underneath a sprig of mistletoe, there were a few that got into the eggnog and decided to get slutty. There was this one song in particular being seductively and slowly wrung out of the speakers that actually featured lyrics that went, and I kid you not, something almost exactly like "I want you to crawl down my chimney, I want you to fill my stocking up" which doesn't bring to mind Christmas as much as it invokes images of a sexual deviant with Santa rape fantasies. My advice would be to avoid that track at any office christmas parties you might be planning, otherwise you might find the photocopier unusable and office relations becoming awkward.

But really I don't know what I hope to achieve here. I have no power at the best of times but even if you had the charisma and fanbase to bring down Microsoft I don't see how you could possibly prevent the overuse of Christmas songs in the lead up to Christmas. Me trying to stop these songs with the awesome power of my blog would be like trying to stop the tide coming in with the awesome power of parking tickets. I'm not sure why it's so hard though, because I'm pretty sure they are almost universally loathed. But somehow, despite this, the Christmas soundtracks have become an undefeatable force in the shopping world. I don't think I'll ever understand society.

Kite

Any regular reader of Infinite Possiblogities that has two brain cells they can rub together has probably been able to deduce that I have a certain appreciation for Japanese culture. Ok so I don't walk barefoot across my matted floor or spend ours on end preparing tea but what I am into is anime and gaming; both of which have some heavy Japanese connections. In the past I have tended to review good anime because I spend a certain amount of time researching to see what anime series are worth watching. But for reasons I won't delve into I sometimes come across anime that is shit. I guess it can't be helped, but every cloud has a silver lining. The polish of this particular turd comes in the form of this blog post. Whenever I find myself experiencing some disfigured abomination of mankinds creation I can always take solace in the fact that I can run home to my blog to vent my frustrations and take the piss. So with expectations set low enough to scratch a hampsters ballsack I present the review of Kite.

So what the fuck is Kite about? That's really a very good question. Only running at about 50 mins the story of Kite is something of a vague, half-baked affair. So it starts off in an elevator where a hitgirl kills some famous jerk. She flees the scene of the crime in an action sequence that feels like it was ripped right out of Ghost in the Shell before the Crime Scene Investigators turn up. After a bit of stickybeaking the scene changes to the hitgirl and the head crime scene guy talking in some dingy appartment. It's all blah de blah de blah then BAM! Hardcore sex scene. Wow ok so there's a hentai bent to this anime. Didn't expect that one. So anyway the story kinda starts to get retarded at this point. Basically the plot is about the different characters and their twisted relationships with each other. The hitgirl has some sick father/foster parent/boss/kinky sexual relationship with the CSI dude, which is made a little more disturbing by the fact that he basically has this same relationship with all his other female hired killers who all seem to be of school age. Creepy relationships aside for the moment, hitgirl has agreed to fuck and kill in exchange for the identities of her parents killers. So then there's this young boy who's also a killer but is trying to get out but apparently the seedy corrupt CSI dude doesn't like this, or indeed the boy, very much. Probably because the boy doesn't put out. Anyway the boy and girl are friendly There's obvious chemistry...kind of. There's a few more arbitrary hit jobs and then the boy drops the totally unsurprising bombshell that Mr. CSI killed hitgirls parents to which hitgirl replies "yeah I've known that a while now", just in case their relationship didn't already totally creep you out. Anyway, the boy is forced to watch CSI fuck the hitgirl at gunpoint before being walked away to be killed. CSI and the girl had apparently planned this to trap him and make him miserable. The boy escapes, killing the ugly sidekick. The girl betrays CSI, shooting him in his disproportionate hentai dick before killing him. Then there's this totally ambiguos and disatisfying ending where the boy is implied to have been shot by some little girl for some reason and that's it.

So that was fucking confusing right? Basically the story can be summed up as this. Creepy, powerplay sex. This is the most confusing 50 mins you will ever experience. The whole plot is arbitrary and raises a multitude of unanswered and fructrating questions. Why did the girl repeatedly have sex with her parents murderer? Why didn't the boy or the girl kill these creeps a long time ago? Why was the boy feeding cats? Is the boy dead? Why did a girl less than 10 years old try to kill him? Why? Why? WHY!?!

Some people might argue that this movie is just hentai and as such the story is just an excuse to explore strange sex situations but I'm not sure I completely buy that. Although the sex is extremely explicit and obviously hentai-esque there isn't really enough of it to go to all the trouble of making a story for it. To cut a long review short, Kite is sexually explicit retardedness. Even if hentai was your cup of tea I'm not really sure that the story is well enough contructed with well developed characters for anyone to ever consider it good or even ok. What it is is a series of twisted sexual relationships and character motivations that make little to no sense. I don't really know what else to say about it; that's Kite. It's stupid but it has big dicks and tits in it.

(Appologies for my delayed posts, I've had exams and shit. I should be able to make at least one post a week from now on so stay tuned.)

The L Word (Season One)

FACT: Guys like girls. FACT: Television networks like money. FACT: The person who first put two and two together to make a softcore sexual, lesbian based television drama must now have enough money to pay God to do his gardning and housework. So it's no surprise that after much controversy, media attention and general outcry from conservative, white housewives who go into automatic outraged-mode when their neighbours hairdresser tells them about a nipple they heard was visible through the top of an actresses blouse in a photoshoot; that The L Word managed to become a success. But wait, I hear you cry out from deep down in your caves of cultural ignorance, what is The L Word? Well it's time to get comfy knuckleheads as I move on the paragraph two and make some sense of my introduction.

So The L Word is set in L.A. and follows the lives and dramas of a handful of young women, most of whom are lesbian, as they eat at trendy cafes and engage in sexual acts that are filmed with gratuitous detail and scored with popular music and panting. The variety amoungst the main characters is there to ensure every single gay achetype is present like some sort of lesbian (and by that I mean, of course, MORE lesbian) Spice Girls. There's sporty lez, boy lez, bisexual lez, pretentious accent lez, husband and wife lez and, everybodies least favourite, might-be-lez-might-not-be-lez. All we need are wheelchair lez and asian lez to complete the rainbow but then this is only the first season, there are 5 more and no doubt some new ones will wriggle in.

At this point you probably think I'm being pretty cynical and in a way I suppose I am. The L Word can be overtly pretentious and trendy like a hipster reading Jaymes Joice beside a Japanese koi pond and the way the show was launched off the raunchiness of the concept was also shamless and predictable but underneath the thin shell of apparent shittiness is a show that's actually pretty decent and engaging. In my younger years I found myself occassionally dipping my feet in the shallow waters of The L Word as a masturbatory aid but actually found that the show was actually deep enough to swim and dive in. After the first few episodes the characters actually become more than just archetypes with names and start developing and becoming, dare I say it? Endearing. Of course the variety and wide focus in the cast means that everyone will pick out their favourite lesbian and have one that irks them horribly and not wanting to get too presumptious, I think most of you will hate Jenny. But I guess that's what The L Word is all about. It's supposed to give us a varied cast with challenging plots. I particularly like some of the later episodes in season one when one of the main cast is personally attacked for being partly responsible for the organisation of a controversial art exhibition. I actually felt quite angered by the fictional protests of these conservative, Christian bastards and not because the show lacked quality; not because I have my own personal gripes with conservatives, but because the show had managed to engage me.

So in conclusion I have to say that after one season I think The L Word is pretty good. It's got drama and complex issues woven amoungst a tapestry of mostly likeable characters if you're willing to take the plung. Plus it's got tits and girl-on-girl panting if you're just looking for something to do with your dick.

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII is the latest installment in the increasingly inaccurately titled Final Fantasy series and chronicals the adventures of annoying and boring characters down a linear corridor who stop and pause every now and then to motivate each other. If you think this sounds dull and would like a bit more story the game thoughtfully provides you with a small encyclopedias worth of text to bring you up to speed on the backstory, the current story, the best local cafes, whether or not the characters are into BDSM, etc. So in other words the story is untidy and disjointed. It would be a little like if you were watching a soccer game and every 5-10 mins having the game interrupted by an elderly man reading a few pages of a novel. Except imagine that the soccer game is about 50 hours long.

But maybe your playing the game for the mechanics? Makes sense really seeing as video games are an interactive medium. But then again the fans of the series have always praised the games for their rich storytelling, so maybe that's wishful thinking. But funnily enough the combat is actually good...really good...kind of. My problem is that although the combat system and character developement system is great it takes way, WAY too long to reach it's full potential. In fact you don't have full access to the characters best moves until after you've finished the fucking game, which is stupid design if ever I've seen it. Surely the point of a game is to have all the exciting bits fairly early on or to build it up gradually before reaching a cresendo of orgasmic delight. But in FFXIII the fun is kept to a minimum for most of the storyline. In fact I only really started having proper fun in the post game stuff when the world became vaste and open and my developement tree was completely unlocked.

Many people have asked me in the past how they can make so many Final Fantasy games not realising that for the most part they have nothing in common. The story, characters and settings are almost always completely different. The only things that seem to tie the games together are a few recurring enemies and weapons. So what exactly makes a Final Fantasy game? I have no idea but as I play more of them I've started to think that maybe the only thing that makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game is Square-Enix's desire to make money out of it.

So that's Final Fantasy XIII for you. Not too much to say really except that if you DO in fact buy it make sure you have a trained monkey or a passive, friendless nerd to play through the story for you so you can skip straight to the good bits.

A Post Apocalypse Double: The Road and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

You know I'm actually starting to get pretty sick of the apocalypse. I mean after all the movies, books, tv series, video games and nerds huffing and weezing about it it's going to be so fucking hyped up that whatever actually causes the apocalypse in the end is probably going to feel rather embarrased about it. "Sorry guys, but this is it...hope you enjoy it" is something like what I imagine this entity saying. I mean I get that people like to use the post apocalyptic setting to explore things like hope, the darker side of mankind and the perseverence of humanity but it's gotten too far out of hand people. I mean honestly, exactly what do some of these film directors think makes their take on a grubby guy who's family perished long ago any different to the last one? "Oh my gosh! He's having a flashback to a happier pre apocalypse time!" "Oh wow! I loved their completely different take on how fucked we are!" So anyway, sarcasm aside, today I actually managed to watch 2 completely different post apocalyptic films. One was a beatifully directed masterpiece that told story about the destructive powers of war and disharmony with nature. The other was about a grizzled survivalist and his son going to the beach for some reason.

The Road is a pretty typical post apocalypse movie. It's shot on a camera that manages to capture the world in crisp, clear, HD quality black and white and hopes that it can get the edge on the multitute of other movies doing exactly the same thing by being even grittier than the last one. You can sum up almost the whole movie by describing this one scene at the start in which the father is showing is son how to commit suicide with a handgun. Yeah that's right, says the movie, I'm fucking edgy. There are two types of people who inhabit this world. The hectic, pack-hunting rapists/canibals who somehow ended up with all the guns, trucks, houses and whatever else you'd care to name. Everyone else is a starving, dirty hobo pushing their trolly of supplies about the landscape robbing each other and wishing they were dead. I did have to hand it to this movie, it had me on edge the whole way through as I wondered just what would happen to this grubby father and son combo. But on the other hand the way it achieved most of this was pretty cheap. A good apocalypse movie could be set on a pornographic theme park made out of candy and rainbows and still have me on the edge of my seat and The Road could not have done this. It relies too much on gloomy settings and discomforting gore to get the job done. But there was one very crucial factor that made me realise that this movie wasn't good. I thought I was near the end of it, it felt like it had been running for ages and had made all it's social and psychological points and then it turned out it had only been going for 30 minutes. There was still over an hour to go. Upon this discovery I felt unhappy at the thought of sitting through the rest. So there you have it, if a movie feels way longer than it is and you become depressed at the thought of sitting through another extremely slow hour then chances are this movie is not good. Oh yeah, one more thing. If you don't like the idea of slogging it through 100 mins with a character who keeps saying "papa" in an increasingly whiney and blubbering tone then I suggest staying well away from this one.

Contrast what you read above with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, which manages to convey hoplessness and desolation despite being animated and colourful. The thing about this movie is that I was so engrossed in the world and the characters that I failed to realise that it was a post apocalyptic movie. I suppose this movie is almost 30 years old now and pre dates the whole apocalypse fad we're currently going through and as a result manages to sidestep pretty much all of the stereotypes. NotVotW is also beautifully paced and thoughtful with it's story telling. It slowly presents the harshness of the world piece by piece. The funny thing is that this movie is actually longer than The Road but because it is so cleverly executed it feels considerably shorter. NotVotW also seems to have a much clearer idea about what it's trying to say and how best to say it. People are better of living in harmony with nature and each other. Killing each other isn't good. This may not sound like much but if you think really hard about it that's basically what all post apocalypse films are trying to say, the only reason you might not have noticed is that they don't do a very good job at it. They spend so much time making everything as grim and fucked up as possible that they forget about the point they're trying to make and that's ultimately the biggest flaw in most modern apocalypse films. NotVotW may not have been as bleak and depressing, but it was certainly more engaging, emotionally involved and moving. I realise I haven't actually revealed anywhere near as much about NotVotW as The Road but that should be taken as a good thing. A truely excellent movie hardly needs any explaining or critiqueing, it should just be recommended and held up as a shining example of cinematic brilliance It's like marking an essay at school. There's no need to go on and on about how good the A+ essay was because it's already achieved great marks. But the slow kid who handed in the C- essay needs a lot of feedback so that they can hopefully understand where they went wrong and do better next time. Or at the very least they can see which kid they should try and copy for their next class quiz.

The Spider Man Movie Trilogy

Woah! Over a month since my last post, gosh I need to shape up. Anyway, first up I'd just like to point out that I was never that big on Spider Man. I never read a comic, I very rarely watched any of the multiple animated series and to be quite honest I never gave a shit. I don't really see the appeal to be honest. The only good thing about Spider Man is the occassionally decent game in which you can swing around the city, getting as high up as you can before flinging yourself towards to ground in an exhillerating, I-have-a-sinking-feeling-in-my-stomach act of catharsis. So now that you know roughly how I stand on the whole Spider Man franchise it's time for me to give you my highly opinionated rundown on the Spider Man Trilogy and how it sunk from mediocrity into a cloying casm of darkness and shit.

Spider Man
The movie that started it all. I was in my early to mid teens when this movie first hit the big screen and I think I recall actually liking it a fair bit at the time. Granted, this was before I had any taste or clear understanding of what makes a movie good in any way, so I think it's a fairly safe bet I liked it because it looked good and the story had internal consistency. Looking back the movie was really just above average and did nothing new and exciting with the Spider Man formula. You know the drill, Peter Parker is a weedy little nerd with glasses whose parents, now deceased, apparently didn't have a lot of money for vowels and consonants to give him a cool person name. The movie sets Peter up as the loser for a while, he has a hopeless crush on a girl out of his league, he is forever running alongside his school bus and the jocks shove him about. I guess it's pretty important that all the Spider Man fans can inject themselves into this universe. Anyway, to cut a long and often painfully scripted story short this movie is about how Spider Man came to be, what motivates him and why.

Spider Man 2
The second movie is a very similar formula to the first one. I can really only fault it in one new way over the original and that's this. They fucking explore the same shit. There is no character developement, which isn't normally a problem because Spider Man has already been developed as a character. But instead of exploring other characters they just retread the "what motivates Spider Man" ground. Oh and Spider Man's love interest is a mopey, unlikable moody bitch who I have no interest in seeing Spider Man get involved with unless it involves consuming her in web, feeding on her and laying eggs in her. However it is this movie in which my favourite Spider Man character ever is introduced. No, not Dr. Octopus you nerdy fuck. The character I'm refering to is the semi-attractive, plain Jane character who is the daughter of Peter Parkers landlord. I like her because she is the only character in the movie who feels real and genuine; as well as that she happily makes Peter a cake to cheer him up, juxtaposing her nicely against that other hormonal tramp. In fact what has always pissed me off about that movie is that Peter Parker should have clearly ended up with the cake lady. She was lovely, she was a dear, she would've had a cake ready for Spidey at the end of a long day of fighting freaks. But despite this I can't really say that this movie was any worse than the first, not in any significant way. But then along came...

Spider Man 3
What a ballsack of a movie. Once again they decide to explore the personal life of Spider Man only this time Peter Parker lets the fame get to his head and he turns into a douchebag. I don't know why this pisses his girlfriend off so much, seeing as how she's a complete bitch too, seems like they're made for each other. Also I'm not exactly sure why the years of being famous have only just now gotten to Peter's head as opposed to say TWO FREAKIN' MOVIES AGO! But I digress. Also the bad guys have the shitest motivations yet. Sandman's excuse for shooting an old man unnescessarily after stealing his car was simply "my daughter is sick." The other guy wants to kill Peter as revenge for revealing that his photo's he was selling to the paper were photoshopped and stealing his girlfriend. He actually goes into a church and preys for Peter's death. Oh yeah, did I mention that of all these unsubtle movies this one is about as subtle as having your scrotum pulled back through your legs and stapled over your sphincter. The fact is that the story is just a clumsier version of the older stories with characters who are all unlikable with the exception of cake girl, who Peter Parker is a complete jerk to. The really stupid part is that half the movie is actually not about superheroes or supervillians, it's just about people you don't like ruining relationships you don't care about. I remember when this came out the Angry Video Game Nerd did a review defending this movie against the swarms of disgust it stirred in people and actually claimed it was the best of the trilogy and wrapped everything up nicely. To that I say, are you fucking kidding me? That movie was pointless, did nothing for the franchise and will forever be known as "The Shit Spider Man Movie." What isn't completely awful is utterly bland.

To conclude I'd just like to say that Spider Man is actually pretty shit. He's a lame super hero with uninteresting motivations and all his supervillain counterparts are stupid. In fact,I can't think of a single decent Marvel Comic franchise. They're all shit. Spider Man is probably the best one. I mean DC has Batman and The Watchmen, which are simply a lot better in terms of quality.So there you have it, I have scientifically proven that DC is superior to Marvel. Fuck you nerds!