The Eagle (2011)

The Eagle: A Channing Tatum Joint is a stressful movie.  With so much moral ambiguity it's hard to know who to root for...the oppressive Romans who seek to rule all of the British Isles, or the native Britons who dress up like lunatics and murder for fun?  Never mind that the movie just assumes you'd be on the side of the Romans, because the filmmakers are too stupid to realize that their main character isn't even slightly sympathetic.

Deliverance Banjo Kid all grown up on 'roids Channing Tatum is all the star power The Eagle has to offer, which should give you an indication of the movie's quality.  From Fighting to GI Joe Rise of Cobra to Dear John, Channing has been trying as hard as he can to be the Steven Seagal of the 21st century.  The squinting, the mumbling, the cavalcade of instantly-forgettable performances...it's all there.  He just needs to get old, join up with some obscure Asian religion and become a truly overweight shitbag cop and the cycle is complete. 

Oh yeah, the plot.  So apparently in Roman times they made these giant golden eagles that vanguard forces of the army would take into newly-conquered lands.  Channing's dad was a super cool Roman general guy who decided to take one of these eagles into enemy territory and was promptly torn apart by the super-evil Briton savages who selfishly didn't want to be enslaved.  The Romans build Hadrian's wall to keep the filthy paleskins at bay, forming what you might call a Green Zone that's a safe refuge for the civilized soldiers in the midst of a war-torn land.  The jarhead (or brush-head) Roman soldiers find themselves led by the son of the failure who lost the Eagle.  Lucky for them, Channing has super-human hearing due to the fact that he has severely reduced vision from all that squinting and wakes them all up in the middle of the night to fend off a surprise Briton ambush.

The director must have realized at this point that no one in the audience gives a fuck so he has the Briton leader, a babbling Druid, take some Roman soldiers hostage.  They drag one up to Hadrian's wall and behead him.  Pretty gruesome, eh?  Not really, since The Eagle is PG-13 so retarded teenagers could potentially pay money for a ticket.  Any time in the movie that someone is about to get beheaded, eviscerated or otherwise brutally murdered the camera turns away. 

So this turns out to be a ruse, and Channing's phalanx of wannabe Spartan warriors who went out to save the other survivors gets set upon by war chariots.  After a magic spear throw that kills the Druid leader Channing gets hit by a 2-ton out-of-control chariot that knocks him out and cuts his leg a little.

He goes back to the Green Zone and gets some stone-age surgery which turns him into a cripple.  While rehabbing his leg he visits the local bread and circus deathmatch where the daily matchup is the two-face helmeted gladiator guy from Gladiator versus a shrimpy 98-pound Briton slave who refuses to fight.  As the Gladiator is about to strike the killing blow the audience screams "Death!  DEATH!!" with their thumbs down.  Channing has an epiphany and throws his thumb up, yelling "No!  Life!  LIFE, GUYS!"  which totally turns the mood of the crowd around.  The Briton whose life he saved becomes his slave, swearing to be loyal to him forever.

Channing decides to go on an epic quest to find the eagle his father lost while being devoured by cannibal Scots.  He takes his Briton slave up past Hadrian's wall into the wilderness.  At every opportunity Channing treats his slave buddy like shit.  He orders him around, tells him about how his people need to be crushed by the Empire and squints at him accusingly.  Channing doesn't even speak the local language and if anyone figured out he was a Roman soldier his innards would be used for haggis and blood pudding.  The slave is his only hope for survival, but he's still an elitist dick to him.  You would think that as soon as Channing closes his eyes to rest the slave would cut his throat and head home.  Maybe it was really hard for the slave to tell if Channing was asleep or not, which is understanding.

Channing finds some old Roman soldiers who escaped the massacre back in his father's time.  They have all gone native and no one knows where the eagle is.  The only thing that points Channing in the right direction is praying to Zeus, wherafter he hears an eagle cry and follows it to the North.  I didn't even make that part up.

Channing and the slave come across the Seal People, an ultra-savage group of Britons who wear grey bodypaint and bone armor 24/7.  Channing's slave tricks them into believing that Channing is actually HIS Roman slave.  Channing is unable to deduce this ruse and instead becomes enraged and calls the Briton a traitor, attempting to kill him with his bare hands.  The Seal People then proceed to beat his ass, repeatedly.  "We'll help you keep your slave in line" they helpfully offer.

After being humiliated for a while at the hospitality of the Seal People, Channing becomes witness to one of their heathen Druid rituals.  They all get drunk on goat piss and hallucinate while their deer-antlered shaman dances around in front of him.  And what does the shaman have as his magic staff, but the golden eagle.  As soon as he sees the eagle Channing tries to assault the shaman and promptly gets his ass beat again by the Seal People.

Channing's Briton slave then reveals that he was faking the whole time and he's still indentured for life to his Roman master.  They grab the eagle and take off on horseback.  The only one left in the village who's not stoned off his ass from last night's ritual is a little kid who is sorry to see the two leave.  The slave gives the kid a little wooden fish to remember them by and to not wake anyone up.


After their horses' legs break in the peat moss of the Scottish Highlands, it's a foot race against the Seal People.  Everyone back in ancient times had the ability to run for days on end.  It was a survival tactic that allowed them to hunt wooly mammoths, one which disappeared with the invention of polyunsaturated fats.  Channing's wound starts to give him trouble and he goes into septic shock.  His slave runs off back to Hadrian's wall in a stupid attempt to get reinforcements from the Romans.  In case you were wondering, Channing still treats him like a dick.  He very begrudgingly gives the slave his freedom in order for him to leave his side to go find help.


So the Seal People who have been running for a week finally catch up with Channing, who takes time off from puking his guts out to somehow be in fighting shape again.  Magically, his former slave comes back with all the disgraced old Roman warriors who had lost the eagle to begin with, their armor and weapons still intact.  "Defend the Eagle!"  Channing commands.


But the Seal People have one last surprise.  The director must have remembered that at this point absolutely no one would be sympathetic to Channing and are most likely actively rooting for the Seal People to kill him, so he tries to demonize the savage Britons one last time.  The Seal People have brought that little kid from the village, the one who got the wooden fish from Channing's slave.  They then slit his throat (off-camera) to show just how hardcore they are.  It's cool that these guys sprinted for a hundred miles with a little kid in tow just to make a point (and wipe out one of their small village's only male heirs), but whatever.  A slow-mo 300 Spartans fight ensues where all the Seal People and old Romans die and Channing is branded Best Roman Ever.  Hooray!

Moral of the Story:  Pray to Zeus, and you'll get shit done.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) - Breaking and Entering Evolved

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the original Deus Ex somehow keeps finding its way onto Top 10 Games of All Time lists (If not the #1 Game of All Time), it was still a game plagued with issues.  These issues have become popular to ignore by gaming journalists, who have been seeking for years to turn the "Best Game Ever" debate into something more complex than just "It was Half-Life.  Alternatively?  Half-Life 2."

Playing the original Deus Ex would lead one to notice some glaring problems.  Namely, horrendous voice acting, casual if unintended racism, retarded sound effects, abominable AI and convoluted plotline.

Now, this is a '90's action game so I'm going to let all those problems slide.  I'm going to do this namely because Deus Ex was the most hilarious game I've ever played.  A game that took itself so seriously and attempted to bring up so much deep commentary on government, religion, power and the future of humanity, one that allowed you never before seen freedom to complete missions in any way you wanted...none of that mattered when you were tasing the homeless in the streets, gathering up as many '40's of malt liquor as possible and downing them at once, breaking into someone's apartment and stealing their couch, beaning cops in the head with basketballs, and generally being a cyborg criminal nuisance.

My experience with Deus Ex can be summed up into my first impression gathered during the game's training mission.  As JC Denton you're set through a variety of simple trials to get you used to the controls, augmentations and inventory screens.  At the very end of the training mission, however, you encounter a GIANT ROBOT FIRING LIVE AMMO.  Evidently UNATCO is pretty serious about putting you through the ropes before sending you into the world.  In trying to escape this mechanical monstrosity I was introduced to the damage system that was able to calculate injuries down to individual limbs, even going so far as to immobilize them until you've received adequate medical attention.  I got my legs shot off and had to crawl across the finish line.


I continued to scrape along in agony as my superior congratulated me over the radio on my achievement and subsequently expounded at GREAT length on the happenings of the world, UNATCO, terrorism, the "gray death, etc. etc."  All the while I'm crying with laughter, screaming at my monitor for a medic and oh god why is no one helping me.

I'm happy to announce that, while the outright silliness of the things you could do in the game world have been toned down a bit in Human Revolution, most of what gave Deus Ex its flavor have returned.  Homeless people lie in the streets waiting to be shot with taser guns and brutalized with your augmented steel fists.  Apartments with easily-hackable door locks range far and wide.  The AI is still laughably bad, voice acting ranges from decent to horrendous (Eidos has a very specific stereotype in their minds on how blacks and Chinese people talk and act.)  You get to go to China for no real reason and check out people living in pods.  Poverty is everywhere, people whine constantly about the nature of humanity and augmentation and governments.

While there's no GEP gun to be found, the main difference in augmentations in this round is that they are all useful and pretty cool to boot.  They are also extremely expensive, so you really have to take some time to choose what to upgrade.  Do you up your hacking skills to be better at breaking and entering, or do you boost your battery system so you can punch more whores in the face before having to find a Cliff bar?

Sadly, alcohol is not nearly as prevalent in Human Revolution as it was in Deus Ex, leading to far fewer instances of wanton drunkenness on the job.  This is due to the fact that liquor gives a legitimate boost to your stats, temporarily pushing your health up past 100% like you were Bender or something.  The only way to replenish your battery power (after performing multiple lethal takedowns on Chinese civilians) is to eat powerbars, supposedly to "replenish nutrients."  So you can run out of powerbars pretty easily and be wandering through a Shanghai market where street cooks are frying up meat in woks left and right and there's shops full of snacks everywhere you look, but you go hungry because all Adam Jensen eats is a specific brand of candy.

I am about halfway through the game and enjoying breaking as many laws as humanly possible, surpassing what he term "humanly possible" even means as I see through walls, jump from 5-story buildings and land without a scratch, punch through walls and immobilize transients with a sonic cannon.

Final Verdict:  I never asked for this.

Dwarf Fortress: Tales of Promise and Failure

Dwarf Fortress (Or:  Armok, God of Blood volume II, Dwarf Fortress) is a game that appeals to me much in the way Nethack appeals to both me and to people with sick senses of humor like me (but who, unlike me, are obsessive and Autistic.)

Namely, it's a game about losing.  Losing in surprising and horrifying ways.  Ways that are also funny.

The Aspergers-afflicted shut-ins who play this game refer to this aspect of the game as "Fun."  "Fun" being a sarcastic way to describe grim failure.  Most of the work the creators of this game have done in creating Dwarf Fortress is to create ever more varied ways for you to lose.

This game has levels of complexity that dwarf (fuck you) supposedly complex games like Civilization and Master of Orion.  It revels in demonstrating to you how intricately it can create an entire planet of dwarves, elves, goblins and humans.  In a matter of minutes it will randomly generate hundreds of different biospheres that rate landscapes based on terrain, local wildlife, vegetation, geology (including dozens of types of rocks, minerals and ores that make up the dozens of subterranean levels), danger level, local civilizations and, of course, how blatantly evil the surroundings are.  Whereas in Civ your biggest concern is which river you plop your first city next to, in Dwarf Fortress you have to worry about whether your first Dwarf settlers will be instantly surrounded and devoured by hell rats.

And, even better, the biggest Autistic masochists can play the game with its original graphic options.  Meaning, there are no graphics.  Everything is in fucking ASCII format, so a dwarf is represented by a different-colored happy face, an arrow is a <, a dog is a d, a monkey is an m, an elephant is an E, and a horrendous hell-beast is a D.  If you care about your sanity at all, you can download a tileset that somewhat attempts to represent the world in a more convincing way than a lazy bunch of letters and punctuation marks.  You'll also turn the default music off IMMEDIATELY and play some internet radio instead (I recommend either classical music, or dubstep.)

After a random world is generated, the game will then spend about 10 minutes generating an entire HISTORY of that world, including notable historical figures, events, heroes, cities, tomes and legends.  It's sort of retarded and pointless, but the game likes to flaunt this aspect of itself.

You start Oregon Trail-style with about 8 dwarves showing up in your chosen area.  The lives of these brave few midgets now rest in your incapable human hands.  As in Nethack, there are shortcut key-presses to remember, menus to delve through, jobs to assign, food supplies to manage, rock to dig through, labors to assign and train, structures to build, caverns to carve, smooth and decorate, and lots and lots of time to waste.

Over time more dwarves will stupidly join your doomed civilization (And don't kid yourself, it's doomed.)  Your society will swell through accumulation of useless, stupid Dwarves with titles like "Cheesemaker" and "Miller" who steadfastly refuse to make cheese and mill, instead choosing to drink dwarf beer and fuck and make useless baby dwarves who instantly become targets for goblin pedophiles.

I don't want to list every way in which your Dwarves can be brutally maimed over the course of their adventures, but here are a few of my favorites that I've either encountered directly or read about from Autistic people posting online.

-A Goblin kidnapper appears in your fortress, luring you into sending all of your poorly-trained militia after him.  Soon after they leave the safety of the fortress they are set upon by well-armed Goblin raiders who kill or cripple your soldiers, leaving the rest of your Dwarves to be murdered in their bedrooms.

-Human traders enter your area, bringing with them valuable items for trade as well as some Yaks.  One of the Yaks goes insane immediately after appearing in your territory.  The Yak tramples the humans and goes on a months-long rampage through your fields and into your fortress itself, killing about 4/5ths of your Dwarves.

-Your Dwarves dig too greedily and too deep, attracting Cave Trolls, Albino Alligators, Imps, Tentacle Demons and Forgotten Winged Poisoned Elder Snails.

-Your Dwarves go insane through lack of clean water and turn on each other.  Lack of laws and prisons mean that murderers go unpunished, and bad feelings send your society into a spiral of revenge killings.

-Herds upon herds of elephants roam through your lands, stomping your Dwarves into paste and camping the bodies of the dead.  They feast on any other dwarves who idiotically try to loot the items left behind, or even those who attempt to bury their fallen comrades.

-You choose the least evil (and therefore happiest and most magical) area to place your fortress...and your settlers are murdered by Unicorns.


More stories await those brave enough to read through more text than the game itself in my future updates.