Fable: The Journey

The thought of this game coming out actually saddens me. It actually makes me feel upset.

Since the Fable series began, I have bought and loved every single game. I have purchased every tiny bit of downloadable content, including Pub Games and now Fable Heroes. I have had no complaints for any of them. I’ve played all of them many, many times through.

And now?

Now Lionhead has decided to make a Kinect only game. Fable: The Journey requires it to play at all. I do not have a Kinect. I likely won’t ever have a Kinect. I hate it. I hate that it’s such a piece of shit and yet Xbox refuses to improve it or throw it away. They just leave it as it is, and keep trying to push it on us.

Because of this, I will not be buying Fable: The Journey.

For the first time in the long run of the Fable franchise, I have absolutely no desire to own one of their products. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself, here. I want Lionhead to continue to make Fable games, but not if this is what they’re going to do. It’s a big risk making it Kinect required. I know a good deal of people who feel the way I do about the device. I know others who are curious about it but can’t afford it, and likely won’t be able to for a long time. So what’s this going to do for Lionhead? What purpose?

I’m okay with titles having Kinect whatnot built into them, it means I can still play with a regular controller. I’m okay with arcade games being Kinect only. It kind of sucks that I won’t get to play something like Gunstringer, cause it looks cute, but it’s not a game from a company that I have invested a lot of time and love into.

But this?

Two Worlds – Request

Fuck you.

No. Seriously. Fuck you.

I played this game long before I ever started writing this here compendium of geekery. I will not play it again just because somebody out there has some sick sense of humor, or even if they’re genuinely curious about what’s going on.

Never before in my life have I so completely, categorically, loathed a game. Never before had I ever known that anything could make me hate everything so entirely. This game made me want to break innocent objects that were only guilty of being within arm’s reach.

I went into it thinking that I would like it, too. There’s a lot of things this game has going for it that I’m a fan of. But the end result of it all is that I would like to find ever copy of this game that’s floating around and set them all on fire. I know it would create a giant, pulsing hole in the earth’s atmosphere, and I can’t really bring myself to give a fuck. I would do permanent damage to the polar ice caps to gleefully enact my revenge upon this game.

It really blew me away when I realized that this game had a “special edition” for which people would actually pay significantly more money. Really? And who thought that was a good plan? Who bought it should really be the question here.

And how many motherfuckers actually bought and kept this travesty, thus encouraging them to make a Two Worlds II??? Hm? I would like to know. I saw that laying upon the shelf at my local game-centric store and it was a lucky thing that I didn’t have a firearm, because I would have shot myself in the face due to the resulting plummet of my faith in the general populace. Seriously. Things like this should not be encouraged. They should be shunned. Why was there no shunning? Why was a second one made? These are questions important to the survival of the planet.

You, who requested I write about this game, all this ire is your fault. You are to blame for unleashing my thus far pent up rage about this particular subject matter. You? You should feel ashamed for dredging up the pain.

Gnomeo And Juliet

I am crazy in love with Romeo and Juliet. The first time I read it, I was in fourth grade, and it started me on a path to Shakespeare and I never looked back. Okay, I’ve looked back a few times, if you mean it in the sense that I’ve reread everything he’s written about a half a million times.

The idea of making a version of the story for kids, involving garden gnomes, seemed pretty fun to me. I thought it was a cute idea, and that I would really enjoy watching.

Now that I’ve seen it? I don’t think there should be a children’s version of Romeo and Juliet. I also don’t think it should be done with garden gnomes. And I’m pretty fucking pissed off that Mercutio was completely missing from the entire thing. How do you fucking leave out Mercutio? He’s such a pivotal character to the entire story that dropping him hurts everything. Everything.

I’m not happy with the way Tybalt was portrayed, either. I know, I know. For kids. Garden gnomes. I get it. But he comes off as a brute and a bully, with none of the slyness or wit or intelligence that he actually has. Tybalt and Mercutio are two of my very favorite characters in this piece, and I am very irritated at the absence of one and abuse of the other.

Really, so many characters (and important scenes) were missing from this movie that I almost couldn’t sit through it. Luckily for this movie, I was feeling monumentally lazy and couldn’t force myself to move the tiny little bit it would have taken to just shut it off.

I believe that if one is going to make a movie out of a great piece of literature and try to structure it for a younger crowd, one should not completely butcher said work and destroy all the meaning behind it. I would like to point out that I did manage to read this in the fourth grade and grasp everything that was going on pretty goddamned well. I think that treating children like they’re idiots is just breeding a generation of the borderline retarded. What happened to challenging young minds? Building them? Making them grow? What happened to giving kids something to read and then helping them to understand it instead of dumbing everything down so that we don’t have to explain it? This really pisses me off. I’m sure you couldn’t tell (sarcasm, it’s fun).

I hated this movie. HATED IT. There is a burning loathing happening in my heart right now, and all of it is radiating outward in the direction of the writer of this movie. I’m a little disappointed in James McAvoy, too, for willingly going along for the ride. I think I’d rather just imagine that somebody was holding a loaded .45 to his head the entire time, or keeping his cat hostage until he completed recording.

This movie offends me right down to the depths of my soul.

S, Darko

This movie is just as bad as I thought it was going to be when I first found out about it.

At least I got to watch Ed Westwick prance around dressed as a greaser. Sadly, this is the only redeeming part.

To clear up misunderstandings I had previously: Frank is not the same Frank. Yet for some reason, the image of Donnie’s Frank in his Halloween costume, the freaky rabbit, is Sam’s “Dream face”. This brings me right back to the idea that Frank was Donnie’s catalyst and shouldn’t make an appearance in this film at all. I still stand by that.

The guy actually named Frank in this movie is a mechanic and has nothing to do with anything.

Not that any part of this movie made any actual sense. It sort of felt like the writer and/or director of S. Darko didn’t actually understand Donnie Darko, and just took imagery that seemed cool and shoved it into this movie. The entire concept is off.

I hated it. I hated it the whole time. Don’t watch this movie. Run from it. Run screaming. If somebody says you should watch it, punch them in the face and then run. Or set their copy on fire. Either one is fine with me.

Cell – King (and kind of Lisey’s Story)

I just don’t know what to say. I don’t. I’m not quite as angry about this book as I was when I read Lisey’s Story. But I’m still pissed off. This was… it was so bad. It was like King just wanted to, or had to, write something to put out and didn’t have any real solid ideas.

I mean, granted, this book has a lot more going for it than Lisey’s Story did, but really that’s not saying much. Since that book was a COMPLETE WASTE OF MY TIME.

I really enjoyed the characters in this book. I won’t lie. I did like them. I did like the general idea of the book, as well. The end of the world brought about by cell phones. It’s a pretty solid idea. The problem is, the idea behind the idea wasn’t fleshed out. At all. It almost seemed as if King was avoiding anything to do with the background because he didn’t know himself what was going on. There was so much missing. And so much other stuff thrown in randomly that wasn’t followed up on.

But again, Lisey’s Story was lacking even that much. Lisey’s Story is apparently what happens when King has to take a giant shit and uses a notebook to do it on. It’s not the first book I’ve ever been angry at, but it was the first of his, and I had hoped it would be the last. It wasn’t.

Though, maybe I can use the fact that Cell and Lisey’s Story were written back to back as some sort of an excuse for King. Because I really dislike hating anything he’s written, especially now when I’ve made my way through so many other books and I adore them. It’s not easy to hate something a writer you love has written. It’s quite difficult, actually. You want to love everything. You want everything to be good. It’s just heartbreaking when everything’s not good and you end up loathing a piece. Or two, in my case.

Despite loving the characters in Cell, the main character, Clay, leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. The things he does at the very end don’t fit his personality at all. They don’t fit what he’s evolved into during the course of the book. He just goes off on this wild tangent. Several things are wrong with the ending, several, but mostly it’s what Clay does and what he doesn’t do. And who he decides to leave behind. I’m sorry, but Clay is not that big of a fucking idiot, and I don’t honestly believe in my heart that he would have done what he did. I don’t give a shit if it’s written that way, it’s not him.

The book is pretty bad from the get go, however. Which is something I noticed because despite how hard I tried to keep myself involved, parts of the book itself were pushing me back into reality. Not in any thoughtful way, either. In a very abrupt and unfriendly way. It was really hard to keep reading this book, but I have to always finish. I’ve never started a book that I didn’t finish. I just can’t do it. I have to know the end, even if I hate the rest of what’s gone on, the characters, the story – whatever.

Which is PRECISELY why I sat through reading all of goddamned Lisey’s Story when I hated her, and her stupid thought process and her stupid weak and pathetic unwillingness to live her motherfucking life. Despite the fact that I detested where the story went and how long it took to get there, I read the whole thing. Even though I felt that it was some of the worst writing I’d encountered from such a lauded author, I finished the stupid book.

After I was done reading it, I sold Lisey’s Story to a used book store for significantly under a quarter. I believe that Cell will follow the same path. I, the queen of keeping books for future re-reading, want this book the hell out of my house. I never want to see it’s idiot cover again.