I don't know how this is classified as Supernatural Literature. Well I do, but I disagree.
I sure hope this blog doesn't make comparisons with The Incredible Hulk
The Curious Case of Dr Jekyll and Benjamin Button is a crime drama written by M Night Shyamalan. It would have been interesting if the twist hadn't already been ruined the day I was born. The twist is that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same person. Props to doing it before Fight Club, but still, I don't care.
The 'supernatural' element is the shocking transformation that happens when Dr Jekyll drinks a concoction. So the 'supernatural' element is alcoholism. The concoction makes Dr Jekyll a cool guy that sometimes kills people. Again, drawing parallels to alcoholism.
Dr Jekyll is a lame version of Bruce Banner. He may have some friends and the know-how to alter his appearance with drugs but Bruce Banner is a beast when it comes to science. Bruce Banner is heaps smarter and has a stronger moral code.
Mr Hyde is a lame version of The Incredible Hulk. The Hulk can fight toe-to-toe with demigods and survive Nuclear Bombs. I would pit Mr Hyde's strength levels around that of a gorilla. All it would take to take down Mr Hyde is gorilla tranqs. I take back what I said earlier, Mr Hyde is a lame version of Bruce Banner as well.
There are tons of videos on YouTube with the same shitty song and same shitty footage.
The protagonist of the novel is a lawyer named Phoenix Wright (citation needed) he tasks himself with figuring out who this Mr Hyde guy is. The most noteworthy thing Phoenix Wright does is say "If he calls himself Mr Hyde then I shall be Mr Seek". This piece of dialogue is noteworthy because the name Mr Hyde was always a setup for that terrible line. I love how it demeans the whole book.
Mr Hyde's plan is to kill Dr Jekyll so that Mr Hyde can inherit Dr Jekyll's fortune. If there is one thing I've learned from comicbooks is that there is no Hyde without Jekyll. The two share the same body. How is this guy even serious? The two share a symbiotic relationship. Imagine Spider-Man killing Peter Parker. You are both the same person, also Spider-Man doesn't kill.
In this blog I have made the book seem silly and made it appear that I didn't like it. That's because the book was silly and I didn't like it. It isn't supernatural, I suppose it is literature because of all the deviations that come from it. It isn't good. It's a crime drama with the ending ruined.
Let me know in the comments if you disagree. Your opinion is of value.
---
I have a Twitter, so follow me or else : @KrisCreedYo
I just read Frankenstein, the old book written by Mary Shelley. The edition where the doctor marries his cousin because they are European. I was surprised in how different the monster was in the source material than every other interpretation. He was yellow, didn't have bolts in his neck and didn't die in a fire in a windmill. There are a few points that I would like to discuss about the novel that might fix a few misconceptions.
He looks like this, except without a mangina.
The Monster's Name
You alway hear it. Frankenstein is the name of the doctor that created the monster, not the monster himself. What is the monster's name then? In the book he makes connections between himself and the son of God, Adam. If I compare myself to Clark Kent that doesn't make me Superman. So his name isn't Adam but I can see where the creators of I, Frankenstein were coming from. Throughout the novel the monster laments that he was never given a name, yet he knows who his creator is. I like to think that he inherits his name from his father, like Victor did from his father. The monster does not have a first name, but his last name, through inheritance from his father, would be Frankenstein. A lot of people have a problem with this, even people who have read the book, but screw it. Frankenstein is as good a name for a monster as any.
Who Actually is the Monster?
The monster is. Victor Frankenstein creates the monster in body, but does not create the monster in mind. The monster is shown as kind in it's origin but then goes around killing people. Victor Frankenstein, at most, comes to the role as a neglectful father, not a monster. Having a neglectful father does not justify going on a killing spree. The monster threatens his creator to create a mate for him so that he isn't lonely. Victor says he will but chooses not to when he realises he could be potentially be creating another monster to go around killing more people.
Some may argue Alice Cooper is the real monster.
Frankenstein is deluded with Grandiose Ambitions
Victor believes that he, and he alone can overcome the barriers between life and death. That may seem delusional, but it was a goal for Victor. And he achieved it. The advances in medicine and technology could revolutionise how humans live. He very well may have had the best of intentions but was overcome with grief and fear. If he was truly selfish in his motives he still could have made millions of gold bricks (the currency of the 1800's if I understand correctly) off of his findings. Instead he realised he didn't want to create monsters. Victor Frankenstein is selfish, and a coward, and an idiot. If he were deluded with Grandiose Ambitions, it would probably help him out in the long run. He could afford his own security, he could buy a crossbow and shoot his monster in the head, he could treat his family to their own castles and he would benefit science for the entire race.
---
Disagree? Good, let me know why in the comments. Or follow me on Twitter
Every country has its horror stories. Spain has been conquered so many times no one could tell you what a true Spaniard is (citation needed). Now imagine you are at war. Everyone you love is gone. Your values no longer hold any meaning. You can't win, the enemy is too strong, they grossly outnumber you. But you are given an out. If you can't beat 'em, you can join 'em. If you are on the losing side and given a choice between death and joining the enemy you might as well be alive and on the winning side.
Hopefully you can already see where this is going. If the entire planet is overrun by the undead and you have managed to make it that far, good on you. Kill thousands of zombies every day, live in isolation and fear. But me? See you later loser, I'm joining the winning team. As a human you have to worry about gathering food, every day, or you will starve, and die. To get food you have to outsmart legions of the undead. As a zombie, you don't have to eat. You may eat a human every now and then, or try and spread your disease, but if you don't eat literally nothing bad will happen. Zombies also don't sleep, and they don't feel fear. You could go from being a lightbulb technician to being a super-soldier that humans have only hoped for.
You would basically be Captain America
Humans are weak and prone to dying, but Zombies are immortal. They aren't you say? They can still get shot in the head and decapitated? Sure they can, but that is only because most join the ranks of undead with small aspirations. I have only given out the information to survive a zombie apocalypse. What I am offering now is the knowledge of how to thrive in a zombie apocalypse.
Top Tips to Survive as a Zombie
1. First thing is first. You want to cover your weaknesses, and zombies do have them. The first thing to do after getting bitten by a zombie is to wear a helmet. A big, strong, durable football one, preferably with a part that protects your face. This will protect from blunt attacks from baseball bats and golf-clubs.
2. You want to protect your neck. If you don't have chain mail armour then I suggest you get a bunch of normal chain links and wrap them around your neck. This will prevent decapitation in most situation.
3. Get as many sharp objects as you can and shove them through your body. I would recommend swords facing outwards diagonally through your forearms. Repeatedly shove sharp weapons through your arm until you resemble Wolverine or something more frightening. By having sharp, slashy weapons protruding from your body you give yourself more weapons. And frankly zombies need more weapons, all they really have are their mouths, and we covered that in step one. By the time you become a zombie humans would be pretty deadly against stock-standard zombies. By using the element of surprise you can bolster the ranks of your undead team.
4. Make some noise. By completing the last 3 steps you have become an Alpha-level Zombie. But you aren't a rookie, oh no. You are a strong, independent woman. You want to be the Zombie King. That's fine, that's why you're reading this. My personal favourite for making noise is wearing squeaky shoes. If you don't have squeaky shoes then tie dog toys to the bottom of your feet. This will make beta zombies follow you around, giving you much better attack and defense against groups of humans. If you are somewhat of an engineer you may be able to rig together an alarm that sets off if your back falls against the floor, giving you a mighty army to defend your zombie self.
Hopefully these tips makes you feel safer about the impending zombie apocalypse and I hope you try and employ these tactics to get the most out of everyone else's misery.
---
Don't think my amazing tips will help you? Let me know in the comments and I will help you out with your problems. Also I have a Twitter, so follow me or else : @KrisCreedYo
South Park the Stick of Truth is an amazing South Park game and a decent RPG.
I've been a fan of South Park since the first season aired in Australia and I have seen every episode of it. I love it, the jokes are smart, the characters change over time, and the world continually gets bigger. The RPG format matches South Park and it is a wonder the game was not made earlier.
The game starts with the mute protagonist being ordered to leave the house and make friends in his new home town of South Park. Immediately you make friends with the local boy, Butters, and he gets you into the Human clan of a Dungeon & Dragons-esque group ruled by the Grand Wizard Cartman. For the first part of the game you spend your time recruiting factions and battling elves to reclaim the stick. In true South Park fashion the story escalates out of control leading to being abducted by aliens, shrank by underpants gnomes and travelling to 8-bit Canada to translate abortion documents written in French. The story makes sense in the context of South Park and it was genuinely a lot of fun to play through.
The aesthetic customisation you can make to your character is really deep. It would be unlikely that you could not make an avatar that does not represent you. You can choose from 4 classes; Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Jew. Each class has it's own special abilities but they all have the same stats and access to equipment. The perks barely have any influence over the game and I feel like I could have played the game to the same effect without them. There are no customisation options for your party members, they level up aside you and get access to new abilities at certain levels but you cannot change their weapons or equipment.
Aside from the 10+ hours of main story there are a load of side missions to complete as well. The quests can vary from finding collectibles to climbing The Tower of Peace and killing all the Mongorians along the way. The rewards for completing the side-quests are usually special equipment or a special summon that you can use once per day to kill all the enemies in a battle, but not bosses, they are too tough.
In the beginning you can only walk around South Park but through the course of the game you gain access to new abilities to access new areas. The battles are turn-based like Final Fantasy or Pokemon but requires some decent timing and button presses to execute attacks, abilities and defending, so the combat closely resembles the Mario & Luigi RPGs battles or even closer to the Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood also made by Obsidian. If you have the bard in your party one of his songs takes you into a Guitar Hero/DDR rhythm style minigame, for other attacks you might have to mash certain buttons. I like the battle style because you can't just mash A and still win. You need to combine tactics with precision to come out on top. That said, the battles are not too hard. If you have the right equipment and right abilities anything less than a boss will die easily enough.
The game looks exactly like the show. I don't know what else you could want from an adaptation from screen to game. The graphics in this game are timeless. Once upon a time Final Fantasy VII looked like an amazing game, it had the best graphics you could ask for at the time, if you played it today without mods it feels really dated. In contrast, Final Fantasy VI (or III) used Sprites, and although it doesn't look photorealistic, the style makes it so that you could still play the game today and it would still feel new. South Park the Stick of Truth is 2D and it would never look real, but it is stylish and will stand the test of time.
Though there were issues for me with the sound it was mostly good. You had epic middle-earthern music playing in the town, songs from the television show played in stores, the televisions sounded like they do in the show, with Terrance and Philip playing and Cooking shows. The voice acting was top-notch, and it needed to be. If it was anything less than stellar I believe the style of the game would have been diminished. The major issue I had with the sound was during battle, your partner in battle would hassle you to hurry up. Mate, it has been 4 seconds and I am trying to find a Speed potion, leave me alone. Seriously you would get pestered to hurry up after one second. If no commands were being inputted I would understand, but if you are scrolling through menus you are going to need more than one second.
A major thing that bugged me in this game was the use of censorship. I don't point my blame at Obsidian or Matt Stone and Trey Parker but at the Australian Classifications board. The game is rated R18+, I'm 22 or something, if I want to give Randy Marsh an anal probe I should be allowed to. If I want to perform an abortion, I should be allowed to. Now I'm not saying I want to do those things, but you know, all my friends overseas are doing it and it sounds like it might be good for a laugh. Man, we got images of a crying Koala telling us what we were missing out on. I do appreciate that the game is telling me it is censored, I appreciate that it is telling other people about it being censored, people who would not have given a second thought if there were just blurs or blacked out parts of the game. It gets the message out there, but I do feel like I missed out.
Between collecting everything, completing all the side quests and levelling up this game will take up close to 20 hours to complete. After completion you can start again and play as a different class and on a higher difficulty. I played as a Warrior and at the half-way point I had already decided that I would play through the game as a different class and make different decisions, though I'm not sure how the different decisions affect the rest of the game.
The game is great. It holds up as a good RPG, but more importantly it transported me to a world that I am all too familiar with. I got to spend a couple of days in South Park. The game was hilarious, funnier than Portal 2. The game oozed charm. It did have it's faults but they are mostly forgiveable. This is definitely my favourite licensed game, even moreso than Spider-man 2, maybe. This is definitely my second favourite licensed game. Well this game is definitely in my top 10 licensed games. I would highly recommend it to anyone who loves the show and would regularly recommend it to anyone who loves RPGs. Also I wouldn't recommend it to anyone under 15, the game goes further with crudeness than any episode does.
All in all I would rate this game an 8 and a half out of 10. It would have got a 9 if not for the censorship.
---
If you liked this review and would like to see more then follow me on Twitter to receive up to the minute updates.
Remember the last time you saw a Godzilla movie? Three months ago when they played it on Channel 7. It was a decent movie. KFC ran a decent promotion on it, even though the toys weren't even Godzillas from the movie. What I am trying to say is, the movie was popular, it still sort of is. Matthew Broderick is a cool guy and he tried to fight a Godzilla, a cool monster.
Now I don't know much about Godzilla outside of the Matthew Broderick version but I know he is worshipped by lizards, or zillas. He was also huge in Japan and he fought other monsters, sometimes they were mechanical. I think he might have even fought King Kong at one stage, but as I said, my knowledge on Godzilla is limited.
This might have happened, also does Godzilla have a mouth laser?
I've seen Pacific Rim, I've touched on the convergence of cultures in cinema before so I'm pretty much an expert on everything ever. What Hollywood is trying to do is to create Hollywood budget movies that appeal to people that aren't necessarily Americans. Pacific Rim was more successful in the East than the West, that's fine. Hollywood is expanding it's audience, and that means people will be seeing some big-budget movies that break the mould. One of the gripes I had with Matthew Brozilla was that it was people mainly dealing with a natural disaster. Godzilla could have been subbed in for a Volcano or a Tsunami or an Earthquake. With Hollywood focusing some of its efforts towards the East maybe Western audiences will be exposed to something different in cinema. One of my hopes is that a samurai tries to fight Godzilla with a sword and manages to deflect Godzilla's punches and runs vertically up Godzilla's body and cuts him in the eye, only for Godzilla to be mostly unphased like when Superman gets shot in the eye in Superman Returns.
See that image? It's big, I made it so people could read it. Godzilla is bigger than he has ever been before. Or she, seeing as she gave birth in Brozilla. How is anyone going to fight that? Sure I'd use diplomacy to get him to be my best friend, but I'm not in the movie, except as an extra that dies in the first half an hour. But seriously, a punch can't hurt Godzilla, an army can't beat Godzilla. The only things I can think of that can beat Godzilla are Superheroes, bigger monsters and science. Which leads me to my next point.
Bryan Cranston is playing the scientist guy. As you may already know Bryan Cranston has incredible range from father with troubles to father with troubles that cooks good meth. Well he at least has the range to deal with troubles (Godzilla) and cook meth (Science stuff, Godzilla's weakness).
This movie will be amazing. It is going to iron out the flaws in the first movie and keep it closer to it's source material. It has to, surely Hollywood won't disappoint. Also for continuity I'll throw in the trailer so you can be even more excited for this movie.
---
If you enjoyed this at all and have made it this far add me on Twitter @KrisCreedYo, sometimes I do more than self promote.
I know, I know. 2 of the last 2 movies I have been excited for are Marvel movies. But give me some credit, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 look exciting. And what is more exciting than people with ultra powers beating on other people with ultra powers? Monsters and robots fighting each other, but it was rhetoric anyway.
Now I'm a comics guy. I love Spider-Man, X-Men and Daredevil. I know the difference between an Infinite Crisis and an Infinity Gauntlet, but in all honesty, I would not have known what a Guardian of a Galaxy was if it wasn't going to be a movie. Sure I played as Rocket Raccoon in Marvel VS Capcom 3 but I didn't know where he fit into anything. That said, when they announced GotG however long ago I did some research, and this is the movie you want. To watch. At the cinemas. Dish out and buy some expensive popcorn and a peppermint choc top.
Does anyone remember that DC movie that wasn't Superman or Batman? The one with the guy with the ring? I was excited (not too excited) to see it because I thought it would build this universe in space like Trek Wars Episode 1 Wrath of Khan. But it didn't, space was empty, the only powers in the universe were Green Courage and Fear Yellow. Ryan Reynold's character had no flaws, he had a hidden one which was fear but that was actually a strength because if you fear something you can overcome it. Cop-out. There were no mentions of Krypton (unless there was), no other powers that weren't colours and no other heroes. Superman just writing a feature article while a yellow monster thing tries to eat the planet.
In contrast you have the Guardians of the Galaxy. The five lead characters are all different. You have Chris Pratt from Parks and Recreation playing Starlord and he is right at home, none of that fish out of water cliche that every other human has in space. You have Drax the Destroyer played by Batista, and he doesn't need a power ring to go on a rampage. You have Rocket Raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, where the hell did a raccoon come from? There must be a raccoon planet, easy, I don't need my hand being held. Vin Diesel plays a tree, the role was made for him, perfect casting. Then you have that hot green chick that is topless in the trailer. Progress! Every character is a character, no one feels tacked on. Even John C. Reilly as a prison guy adds a lot to the movie already in my opinion.
Through end-credit scenes this movie has already been linked to Thor and The Avengers. We already know a lot about the universe, the foundations have been laid. You have Thanos running around with Chitauri somewhere. You have Asgard being ran somewhere else as well as all the realms shown in the Thor movies. There is a planet with heroes running around having adventures all the time. From the trailer we can see there is a prison for space criminals. There is heaps of room to expand, and with the Disney acquisition of Star Wars there could even be links to Star Wars.
This movie has an all-star cast of reliable actors, it shows promise for an expanded universe and it has a Blue Suede song in the trailer. How can anyone not be too excited for this movie?
---
You can follow me on Twitter and I will probably follow you back.
