At least that's my opinion after just getting back from a sneak preview of the only movie anyone cares about opening this weekend: 28 Weeks Later, the highly anticipated sequel to 28 Days Later. I really enjoyed the first one as a good, original horror film that treated an viral outbreak fairly realistically and had some good adrenaline-charged moments. While there have been some decent dumb-fun type horror films since then, there hasn't been a good serious horror film, and though you'd expect something better if they were going to bother to do a sequel, "Weeks" suffers from the same bad cliches and the same stupid types of characters you've seen in every awful horror film over the last 20 years or so. I've theorized that since horror movies never seem to scare me that I'm just not the kind of person who can enjoy a serious one, so take this review with that in mind, but I sure as hell won't be showing up for what seems to be yet another inevitable sequel judging by the ending.
The long-awaited Spring Update has happened for the 360, and my reaction is a huge "meh". It's kind of nice to be able to set my console to shut down automatically after a download is finished, but everything else seems incredibly unnecessary, especially the much touted ability to IM across services that were previously not available on live. Of course, we can already trade messages back and forth and talk to to other players through our headsets. If I wanted to talk to someone on AIM, I'D USE MY COMPUTER. This seems like one of many desperate moves to try and capture a more casual market that has mostly eluded Microsoft. But the casual non-gamer won't buy a 360. The controller is intimidating, the price is kind of steep. And why would they buy a console to play these casual games they can get for free on a PC they already own? I realize both MS & Sony are trying to establish themselves as some sort of centric entertainment box that covers all your needs, but the consumers don't want that much convergence, and they are proving it with their wallets by buying the simple and easy Nintendo offerings in droves.
And as a final note for today, I'd like to thank MS (or whomever is responsible) for butchering yet another classic. Double Dragon was released, and while it shares some of the same problems as TMNT like cheap difficulty, it brings a whole new one that completely ruins the experience-massive slowdown in co-op. You're telling me that you couldn't get a 20 year old game to run smoothly on your oh so powerful system? As long as fuck-ups like this keep happening, Live is always going to seem like a system filled with potential it never fully realizes, and somebody (possibly Sony with their Home service) will swoop in and take the jaded gamers.
FREE GAME OF THE WEEK: Tam Tower Challenge
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment