Category Archives: PlayStation

Games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

Live From E3

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Maybe that title’s a bit misleading because I’m not actually at the event on which I’m writing as I was last time I used that syntax, but this time it’s a far more clever Xbox Live pun.

The Internet has made E3 much more of a public event than it used to be when we had to rely on magazine coverage the next month which made audacious (though ineffectual in the following example) stunts like the Saturn launch possible, but from what I’ve seen so far Microsoft should be commended for opening it up more than I’ve seen before. We’ve always relied on third-parties for coverage but this is the first time that I can remember a console manufacturer providing fast access to new show content themselves. Certainly the first time it’s come direct to the console.

Microsoft’s conference isn’t until tomorrow but already Live subscribers (most of them, if my friends list is any indication) have a dozen or so HD trailers to download and a demo of Test Drive Unlimited. The demo is nothing special and Sonic The Hedgehog is the only trailer which struck me immediately, but with any luck we’ll be able to download trailers for the likes of Halo 3 and Gears of War tomorrow, and we already know that we’re getting demos of Lost Planet and Moto GP 06 over the next couple of days. Not to mention that Live Gold is free for the duration of the show and that some of the trailers aren’t even on IGN or GameSpot.

Admittedly some of the stuff is eliciting disinterested reactions, but being able to watch this stuff in HD with 5.1 sound on your own TV instead of a Quicktime window is a nice boon. How much it’s going to do depends a lot on what Sony shows in a bit under three hours, but I hope for Sony’s sake that it looks better than this.

DVD & Blu-ray, Games, Impressions, Movies & TV, PlayStation

Advent Children

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It took its sweet time, but Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – the CGI film arm of the new Final Fantasy VII triptych – is finally out (legally) in the West. I last saw it when I was in Japan seven months ago and can’t imagine why an English dub would take that long to record, but at least it’s here and I don’t have to rely on a typo-ridden fansub to understand most of it.

Advent Children

My impressions of the movie itself haven’t changed, even with the slightly better translation. I enjoyed it but it remains quite esoteric, assuming prior knowledge of the games by, for example, not even naming most of the original protagonists. The DVD addresses this slightly with the 25-minute ‘Reminiscence of Final Fantasy VII’ feature which gives an abridged history, but even that is hard to follow and more useful for those like me who played a lot of the game but never finished it. Obviously it contains major spoilers for those who plan to finish it and somehow don’t know how it ends.

What will draw many people to this is the spectacular CGI. While characters fall short of looking completely lifelike as they did in the previous Final Fantasy movie, The Spirits Within, for my money they’re the best “realistic” CG humans on film so far, and since the whole thing is styled like an anime (no real hair can be that spiky) the occasional flaky animation doesn’t tend to detract. How does a person look when they’re backflipping off a skyscraper, anyway?

Either way, Advent Children remains an action-packed movie with some of the best high-flying combat scenes since The Matrix. It’s enjoyable as a purely visceral experience, which is probably why most exposition scenes are brushed aside in a few minutes to make room for another motorcycle chase. Not exactly deep, obviously, but good fun. Fanboy pornography, basically, and entertaining despite its vapid nature.

Games, Impressions, Movies & TV, PlayStation

Silent Hill Movie

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Silent Hill's Pyramid Head

I’ve been excited about Silent Hill’s film adaptation for a while now since the early material seemed to be not-completely-rubbish and it has a decent pedigree, but when I agreed to see it earlier in the week the scariest thing about it was the complete lack of reviews. The first one didn’t even appear until Thursday and that’s generally a bad sign (as with games), but when that turned out to be positive I felt a bit more optimistic.

Still, I feel a kind of obligation to see game-based films so off I went earlier tonight, coupled with the lowest possible expectations. They generally serve me well with anything that I think might disappoint. Except that rubbish new Star Wars, of course.

Resident Evil and Silent Hill are oft-compared and the difference ultimately boils down to that RE is about jump scares and action while SH is psychological horror, and the same can be said of the movies. Resident Evil was adapted into an action movie whereas Silent Hill is a trippy and macabre film, aiming to constantly unsettle. Certain elements are borrowed from classic horror (to mention the one I’m thinking of would probably spoil things) but above anything else the style is taken from the games. This looks like the games and looks fantastic doing it, mainly because it’s frankly too dark to show the seams in the CG transitions between plain old creepy Silent Hill and its hellacious counterpart.

Those who aren’t familiar with the games may find it slightly cryptic until a sudden torrent of exposition towards the end (even storytelling methods are borrowed from games, apparently), and even then the end can leave you hanging. It’s fans who will get the most from it since, as I said, it looks like one of the games and squeals of delight are likely when old favourites like the Pyramid Head show up. There isn’t a lot of the red stuff until the end, but when it shows up it doesn’t do anything by half, with the triangled terror himself providing the gory standout.

My main criticism is the script and acting, as at the beginning in particular it’s fairly bad and Sean Bean puts on a really poor accent throughout. This aside though, it’s definitely the best game-to-movie that I’ve seen thanks to adherence to the source material and a respectful translation all around. Whether or not you like it depends a lot of whether seeing Silent Hill in film form is appealing, but as long as that’s what you expect you should have a good time.

Games, General, PlayStation, Xbox

Quote of the Day

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Ladies and gentlemen, the first shot of the console war has been fired:

“We didn’t want to go out to E3 and show a bunch of rendered videos that wouldn’t necessarily reflect reality. Sony has created that expectation and we’ll have to see if they can deliver on it. We’ll have real content at E3, real games that people can go out and get their hands on.”

Oooh, burn. This is going to get fun.

Games, General, PlayStation

PS3 Worldwide Launch

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Now it looks like things are going to get interesting. A year after Microsoft’s worldwide launch was filed under the “could have gone better” category, Sony are going to attempt the same thing. Credit to them for not shitting on the European audience like they can so often be accused of doing, at least.

My name is still down for one and it remains to be seen how we’ll they’ll be able to deliver since demand is likely to be astronomical (depending on what price they announce, of course) and one can assume that first generation bespoke hardware would have even more manufacturing problems than the more proven stuff that Microsoft launched with, but they’ve thankfully given themselves more time to get the manufacturing done.

One thing we can be assured of is that the gloves are really going to be off at E3 now, with Microsoft showing off some second-gen stuff (Halo 3, please), Sony letting us know the exact launch details for the PS3, and Nintendo coming in with their dark horse in the form of the Revolution. I have a feeling that people aren’t giving Nintendo all the credit they deserve at the moment and they’re being very hush-hush about something, so I’ll be watching them closely come May.

Time to start saving those pennies again because this year is going to get expensive…