slicedbread Reviews

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII (2006 Video Game)

Fun, but not without problems

[8/10 · 20 June 2007]

The best way to explain this game is with a simple list of pros and cons.

Pros- Very fun, the battles are enjoyable and destroying enemy planes is a great source of instant gratification.

Stunning visuals, all of the levels are truly beautiful.

Large levels, unlike some of the last generation's fighter games, I truly feel like I'm in a free-roaming map. Although on occasion I find myself being forced back into the area of play.

Unlimited ammunition, this is both a pro and a con. It takes away from the realism, but at the same time increases the fun. This is really subjective as to what you're looking for in your game.

Diversity, unlike most WWII games that make me focus on one theatre of war, this one has levels in both Europe and the Pacific.

Grandeur, some of the levels feel distinctively like being part of a truly large scale war. This was one of the great things about Call of Duty 2, and I'm happy to see that it can still be done in new games.

Cons- Time consuming tedious activities. Shooting down enemy planes is easy, the hard part is getting the reticle on them. I don't know if it's just that I have yet to master this skill, but it seems like I spend most of my time in the game hopelessly unable to target the enemy.

Poorly animated humans, this was largely not a problem for most of the game. In most levels the humans you can see on the ground are quite far away. However in the Pearl Harbour level you begin with many American soldiers running in front of your plane. They are dismally poorly animated, to the point where they seemed like something out of a PS2 game. I was very disappointed in this. It seemed very unprofessional.

REPETITIVE DIALOGUE! This was by far the worst part of the game, and largely the most unprofessional showing. Both the Japanese and German enemies repeatedly utter such phrases as "You shoot worse than you fly!", "My mechanic flies better than you!", "Shot! By an American!", "That ought to feed the sharks!", "Man overboard, ha ha ha!" "The fuhrer will be displeased!", "You have no honour", "For the Emporer!", and my favourite, "Rising Sun! Falling Plane!". (The last few, obviously, are country specific.) Nothing is particularly wrong with these phrases. It's merely the mind-numbing repetition of them that annoys me so.

Racism, this game is horribly racist. Japanese pilots are depicted as ruthless and cruel. Case in point withe the quotes "Man overboard, ha ha ha!" and "That ought to feed the sharks!". They target civilians during the Pearl Harbour level. I was very disappointed in this. They also have very stereotypical and unfunny accents.

Dead Silence (2007)

Entertaining for all the wrong reasons

[5/10 · 17 March 2007]

I have come to expect one thing from horror movies; stupid characters. It's sort of a compromise. I suspend disbelief that anyone would really be as stupid as people in horror movies because if the people in horror movies where smart, there wouldn't be nearly enough horror.

This movie, however, starred a PAINFULLY stupid protagonist. It will seriously blow you away. You've most likely heard the proverbial "Don't go in there!" in a movie theater during a horror film. This movie was more like "Don't go into the creepy haunted mansion while making sure that you don't have any weapons and no one knows where you are".

I'll give you a few examples (in case you couldn't figure it out SPOILERS COME HERE). At one point in the movie, Henry (a mortician who encountered the evil scary ventriloquist lady during his childhood) finds his mentally disturbed wife trying to talk to the creepy ventriloquist lady's doll (which, he finds entirely reasonable to keep inside his house). He puts the doll "back where it belongs" and then continues to go about his business. He then hears what he thinks is his wife crying in a crawl space (for lack of a better term) that she likes to hang out in. He goes in to apologize, and unsurprisingly the door shuts behind him. Also unsurprisingly, this dude doesn't make it to the end of the movie. This scene had me screaming "BUT HE KNEW SHE WAS BAD!" Okay, in words his actions sound a bit more reasonable, but wait, there's more.

The movie begins with our hero and his new wife receiving a mysterious package that is merely dropped on their doorstep. They open it, creepy doll. Our hero walks out to get takeout. Of course it wouldn't be a good idea to talk to the police now that someone is leaving random dolls on his doorstep, oh yea, did I mention the package had no stamps or addresses on it? Couldn't be that maybe whoever left this random package here might come back, right? Our hero gets home to find a bunch of blood on the floor. His wife's voice beckons him into their room, where he finds her dead. The cops (actually cop) clearly think that our hero is the killer. The next day our hero returns to the house to pick up the creepy doll. After all, it's not like he could tell something creepy was going on by virtue of the fact that he heard his DEAD wife talking to him.

Let's keep going. At one point our hero is trudging his way through the creepy theater (more about the theater in the last paragraph). They both know something is going on, they have both realized (at least I hope they have) that the creepy ventriloquist lady intends to kill them. While investigating a scary noise, our hero hands his lantern to the cop, who has a shotgun. Now, this action was already dumb enough, the cop needs two hands to use the shotgun effectively. But the cop is even dumb enough to take the lamp with his right hand! So if they should suddenly get attacked they wouldn't have a prayer of getting a shot off.

All of this, however, is NOTHING compared to the horrendous stupidity that occurs near the end of the film. The cop shows up to arrest our hero, announcing that all the dolls have been dug up (by the way, creepy ventriloquist lady had 101 dolls, sounds like a Disney movie!) and accuses our hero of being responsible. Unsuccessfully he tries to arrest our hero, but then his stepmother walks in with a telephone, announcing he has a phone call.

Okay, prepare for this.

The caller is Henry (the mortician), who has a terrible connection, Henry announces that he has a way to prove our hero is innocent of the murder of his wife. Henry asks our hero to meet him at the abandoned theater that the creepy ventriloquist lady once performed in, immediately, at night. Apparently our hero concludes that this miracle evidence the mortician found to clear our hero's name can't be revealed to him in broad daylight at, I don't know, maybe Henry's FLIPPIN' HOUSE?!?!?! Seriously, what is this guy thinking? If the evidence is SO urgent that, for some reason, he has to be told about it TONIGHT, then how does he ever expect to keep it until HIS TRIAL? Remember, our hero should have learned early on that the creepy ventriloquist lady can mimic voices, she mimicked his wife's voice when he found her dead body.

Not only this, the theater sits at the opposite side of a creek from the rest of town. There was once a bridge, now one must take a boat (for some reason some person sees fit to leave a perfectly good boat for the mere purpose of crossing from one side of a creek to another. And the two boats that sit there, seemingly not tied to anything, never seem to drift away). Our hero is so dumb he doesn't figure out that Henry requires a boat to get to the theater too, and there are only two boats, both of which are on the opposite side of the creek from the theater.

The problem with the whole last 20 minutes of this movie is that it seems as though our hero wants to get killed. In fact the movie in general made me appreciate the intelligence of all the other horror movie characters I've ever seen.

That being said, this movie actually was entertaining. The scares were solid (mostly), and the stupidity of the characters actually added to the entertainment value. I don't know if I can say I got my money's worth, so I suggest you wait for the rental, but I would at least say it is worth watching.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004 Video Game)

Okay, not great

[25 December 2004]

Just picking up San Andreas you can see that it's a lot of quantity. There's a high quantity of land, and the quality of what you can do on it is pretty good. However it's excessive, in theory they probably could've made every city 1/8th it's size and had the same effect, as when you drive around both the countryside and the cities you get a feeling of nothing significant, as if every block is almost exactly the same. You never got this in Vice City.

Speaking of quantity, there's a high quantity of curse words, I don't mind curse words, violence, and all that. But the curse words in this game overshadow ALL of the humor. Everyone speaks in ebonics, making me think this game was built to court the lowest common denominator of intelligence in young wannabe gangsters of suburbia.

Also, the weird red and yellow tints that everything gets when the sun is at twilight are weird. The concept of using bicycles is just stupid, there is no other way to describe it.

On the upside, there's plenty of fun vehicles to try out (with cheat codes), and it is kind of fun (for a while) to drive around the country and the city. Some of the radio banter is funny, not much.

The roleplaying aspects just take away from the fun, I play the Sims, I don't need Grand Theft Auto to be the Sims. I know it's a cool concept to have a life simulator, but that is The Sims, you don't need GTA to do it too. Eating, sleeping, building muscle, not in my Grand Theft Auto game okay? The graphics are mediocre, this is nothing new as we saw with Spider-Man 2, more gameplay space = less room on the disk for graphical info. How "good" the storyline is of no consequence to me, I play Grand Theft Auto because it gives me a chance to live without playing the linear story. And I know a lot of people really do play through the missions, at least people I know, but most of them don't pay attention to the story anyway. So if they really did write a good story, they wasted their time.

Graphics - 3/10 Gameplay - 7/10 Concept - 4/10 Dialoge - 1/10 Overall - 6.5/10