Now Playing: Black Crypt (1992)

Black Crypt is the obscure first game by Raven Software, makers of a big pile of amazing classic games like Heretic, Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, X-Men Legends, Singularity, etc, etc, etc. More games than I want to list here. There’s so many that I still haven’t played a few of them, but every one I have has been fun as hell. Hell, these are the guys that even made a fun game based on that pile of shit Wolverine: Origins movie.  Anyway though, back to the point…Black Crypt was a dungeon crawler that only ever came out on Amiga and who the hell even had one of those? I mean I’m not knocking it. If you look into it they seemed to have had a surprisingly good line-up of games and an interesting early-PC-like UI, but never in my life have I met someone that had one. Amiga emulators have proven to be a huge pain in the ass for me in the past too. Luckily there are some wonderful people out there who took it upon themselves to make a bunch of automatic Amiga games contained in single executables with no installation or setup required. (Manual not included though. Get that here.)

Movie Night III: The Revenge

Of Unknown Origin (1983)A lesser known movie from George Cosmatos, the director of Cobra, Rambo 2, Tombstone, and Leviathan, where Peter Weller fights…a rat. Not a supernaturally large or mutated rat. Just…a rat that I guess is an unbelievable overachiever that starts doing increasingly ridiculous things to Peter Weller. First it somehow kills a cat that was brought in to defeat it, then it somehow finds and chews up a check that some exterminators were meant to receive to come deal with it, then it even chews up Peter Weller’s important work presentation out of nothing but spite. It’s not the greatest movie ever. It’s more of a drama/thriller than straight-up horror, really, but it’s still better than the average man vs. evil animal B-movie.

Now Playing: Silent Hill – Book of Memories (2012)

Silent Hill – Book of Memories is one odd game (and yes, I got a Vita, deal with it.). Not odd in an expected Silent Hill sense of “man that was a fucked up story”, but odd in that it’s a weird isometric-viewed survival beat-em-up game with almost no real story behind it.

Pint N’ Play #007

Games played this time:

Alien Syndrome, Strider, Spinal Breakers, Wild Fang, Alien 3: The Gun, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, G.I. Joe

Now Playing: Until Dawn (2015)

Until Dawn is a horror-themed adventure/interactive movie. It has Peter Stomare in it for some reason.

I’m not sure why. He plays a surprisingly minor part and I feel like he should have been involved more somehow because who doesn’t like this guy? Anyway, I had no idea that he was in this, or Brett Dalton (Agent Ward), or other semi-famous people you may or may not recognize from things.

Anyway, this is your seemingly standard story about some dumb kids in a cabin in the woods who get into some trouble with some mysterious sources of evil. There seem to be maniacs, monsters, ghosts and other mysteries all going on at once here and you’ll have to survive long enough to figure out exactly what is really going on.

Now Reading: Fatale

Most conveniently collected in Fatale – Deluxe Edition Volumes 1 and 2

Can’t really go wrong with Ed Brubaker, especially when he’s teamed up with Sean Philips. This one takes a bit of a departure from their usual noir stories. Well, it’s still basically just another noir story, but this time with a Lovecraftian supernatural horror twist on it. Fatale tells the story of Josephine, a mysterious immortal woman with the power to control the minds of men, whether she wants to or not, and many of the unfortunate men she meets in her long life, while on the run from the evil Cthulhu-cult-type guys that keep chasing after her for reasons unknown.

Movie Night II: The Sequel

Circle (2015)

This was surprisingly good. Ironically, it’s reminiscent of Cube. It’s a super low budget sci-fi movie with a mysterious premise that all takes place in one room. A room where 50 people suddenly wake to find themselves held captive, stuck standing in a strange circle, and quickly find that one of them is automatically executed every minute or two. They quickly realize that they have the option of voting for who dies next and that only one of them is going to live through this so the whole movie is basically just a long conversation about who should live and who should die, which sounds boring in theory, but they actually pull it off really well. The acting and the writing kept me interested the whole time. I recommend checking it out.

Beetlejuice

Anyone remember the old Beetlejuice cartoon where Beetlejuice and Lydia were best friends and an almost-couple?

Anyone remember Beetlejuice the movie where Beetlejuice’s relationship with Lydia was that he tried to rape and murder her, maybe not necessarily in that order?

Why did no one ever think that was weird?

Now Playing: Bloodborne (2015)

Welcome to Bloodborne…

…and that’s about as much of a story as you can expect from this game. Not that anyone cares about the story in these games. You play these From Software games for the soul-killing, yet so, so satisfying combat.

Now (No Longer) Playing: Marvel Puzzle Quest

Oh Marvel Puzzle Quest. How much time and money did I sink into you over the last almost two years? How much?!? Too much, that’s how much. I honestly don’t even know how much time I was spending per day on this damn game. An hour? Two? More than I realized, I’m sure, even though I’d cut down from how much I used to play by giving up on the PVE part of the game entirely.

Puzzles.

Right, so…this is a puzzle game obviously. Match the colors, build up energy to use character specific powers and puzzle your opponent to death. This primarily happens in two forms, PVP tournaments and PVE tournaments. Ironically, you aren’t actually playing against real people in the PVP, but AI controlled instances of the teams real people are using, and you aren’t really up against the AI in the PVE, well you are in your battles, but your rank, which determines your reward, is based on how well your score matches up to all the other real players you’re competing against. In other words, you’re constantly fighting uphill against the constantly rising points of other players and/or the attacks of other players whittling away at the points you’ve already made. Unless of course you buy a shield! Shields can be bought with Hero Points, which are exactly what you’re probably already suspecting them to be. It’s a rare in-game currency that you get very little of, but is essential to almost everything in the game.