State of the NBA

As Carmelo Anthony finally moved to New York near the last minute we now have a large number of "Super Teams" in the league. The Big Threes of Boston and Miami in the east are now joined by Carmelo/Amare and the MVP driven Bulls. Bringing up the rear of the good teams is Orlando, who made a ridiculous trade earlier this season though I suspect they'll still be quite good in the playoffs solely due to Dwight Howard. Of course, once you go beyond those 5 teams the entire Eastern Conference is garbage, but that doesn't seem to bother true NBA fans. I don't consider myself a "fan" of the NBA, I understand a good deal about how the game works and have a mild interest in the strategery of the game but in general it's not as fun for me to watch as Baseball or Football. The playoffs are somewhat different but since the vast majority of those games will be on TNT I might not get to see them (though they do have a buggy online function).

Despite that I don't really see the great benefit of having several super teams instead of a more balanced league, I can understand that the league is probably too large at the moment and several teams have no chance year in and year out but when half the East is under .500 and the 8th seed is poised to be 6 games below (giving the Pistons a shot at the playoffs!) it seems pretty problematic. A few dominant teams to go with several good teams and a competitive race to reach the playoffs is what makes an interesting league, to me, but in this league it's just the hope that any of the super teams go to a 7 game series and have a super dramatic Willis Reed moment somewhere along the line.

The West is slightly better than the East overall, though they have less super teams. The Lakers are the only giant team though the Spurs are doing much better this year it remains to be seen how well they will do in the playoffs. The Mavericks and Thunder seem to both be quite competent and could probably outdo Orlando in the East, but once again the entire rest of the league is subpar (though their records aren't quite as retarded as the East's). New Orleans is a pretty good team, unfortunately they're under the NBA's control until they're able to sell the team and Chris Paul is fairly hampered by injuries, The Nuggets just traded away their best player, and Portland and Memphis might be fairly competent teams in the East but stand little or no chance of overcoming the monster teams at the top in either conference.

While the NFL's parity is overblown at least the teams in the playoffs all have a shot to win the Superbowl (this year's game was almost a 6 seed vs. another 6 seed), obviously the MLB's parity is unmatched despite not having a salary cap, but the NBA has 8 or 9 teams in the entire league that have a shot at a title and the rest have no chance whatsoever. 20 teams to perish in the darkness. No hope for the Cavs, Pistons, Bucks, or any other beloved team you might have.

All of that said I'm still quite interested who's going to win the title and I'm pretty likely to watch the NBA finals provided it isn't Boston/Los Angeles again, while the rest of the the regular season seems a foregone conclusion (though yesterday's game where the Knicks beat the Heat was interesting enough) the playoffs will be quite interesting. Unfortunately they're still a few months out but Baseball is soon to start and all of my troubles will then be solved.

Final Fantasy IV

Pros:
+++ Zeromus is the hardest last boss in the entire series
++ First notable RPG with an actual storyline
++ Moderately Difficult
++ Still fun to replay after several times
++ Pretty sweet soundtrack
+ First game to offer a "Battle Speed" option which is essentially a difficulty adjustment meter
+ Kain is a supreme badass
+ Varied environments
Cons:
- Most characters have fixed levels when they join or rejoin the party, sometimes forcing you to re-level them
- Pioneered the ever so useless last minute villain switch
- Takes forever to get your final party
- Edward sucks

Final Fantasy IV is the first great JRPG ever made, with very few flaws to speak of. In being one of the earliest RPGs with a storyline (distinguishable protagonist/antagonist, more than a few characters) it is the proverbial dartboard which was randomly thrown at and a lot of the ideas really work quite well. There's Ninjas, Karate dudes, Dwarves, the underground, a tower that reaches into the heavens, the last part of the game takes place on the moon, the summoning realm, a village of mystics, and everything else you can imagine.

The vast majority of these now somewhat commonplace ideas are quite functional in the scope of the game and pretty good for JRPGs in general, though the one major complaint I have is that the awesome Golbez is randomly discarded as the primary villain in the last few hours for no apparent reason. Instead the face of all evil Zeromus appears and while he is a great final boss the cliche that spawned has destroyed the plot of many a game. Consistency in villains is quite important to create a sense of dread as well as a sense that you're working toward some final goal at the end of the game.

This game is also one of the most difficult Final Fantasy games around (provided you play it at the fastest battle speed) and forces you to make quick decisions to kill particular bosses and occasionally experiment with elemental weaknesses. By the end the best strategy is pretty standard, load up on your strongest attacks and precast powerful heals to defeat most bosses, but it is fairly difficult to actually execute all of those attacks prior to dying in some cases. The Plague, a boss in the final area of the game, casts "Doom" (death after 10 seconds) on your whole party and that time will tick down extremely rapidly on the fastest speed, so you unload the requisite 20,000 damage in time to kill him. I succeeded at this the first time but I found the result to be pretty awesome:

That is simply how tightly tuned some of the bosses are at the fastest speed, while you can slow the battles way down and make it more or less trivial that greatly reduces the tension while fighting the Plague or Odin (similar gimmick) or Zeromus. Several of the other bosses are relatively difficult though a number of them can be trivialized by using the correct elemental spells, but those 3 major bosses are quite a bit of fun. I played the game with a ZSNES emulator and rather liberally used the fast forward function to speed up random battles, my ingame playtime was around 35 hours but actually I only played about 10. There are a few annoying parts right near the beginning where you have to grind or solo everything with Cecil and this made that part substantially less tedious.

By the time I got to Zeromus I was about level 58 (no grinding for Adamant armors or any such silliness), which is right about where you're supposed to be. Big Z's main attack Big Bang does 1800-2200 damage, sometimes enough to 1 shot Rydia and always enough to kill my team in 2 hits, and this fight is extraordinarily difficult without one of the optional summons (though apart from the Sylph cave there's no reason not to do the optional areas in the game and they don't leave you too overpowered by the end). Rosa's Cure 4 does around 1500 healing to all and Zeromus has about 4 times as much HP as any other enemy in the game so he will get off ~15 Big Bangs before he croaks unless you're ludicrously overleveled, so you have to use Rydia's Asura summon and hope that it keeps casting healing spells (random choice between Cure3/4 and Life), naturally the first few attempts went something like this:

I was hoping Zeromus would die after a bunch of Cecil hits but alas, 'twas not to be. On my third attempt I was victorious through being relatively conservative and just spamming Asura (with mildly good luck to go with it). I've beaten this game at least 5 times (though this is the first time I fast forwarded the boring sections) so for the last boss to still kill me 3 times is quite impressive and makes me that much more joyous. Bart 2 in FFXIII is still harder if fought at the proper time, but Zeromus will always have a special place in my mildly masochistic heart.

There's not a whole lot else to say about this game, it's quite straightforward with a minimal (but still quite fun) amount of sidequests and it doesn't have some legion of followers talking about how amazing it is that a clown blew up the world because he was fucking crazy and how awesome that is. The plot isn't great but it's not terrible either and the gameplay remains entertaining to this day, albeit the first 20 hours prior to getting your main party can get to be tiresome without the magic of fast forward.

Final Score: 9/10

Now I want you to remember

No Bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He did it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. ~ George Smith Patton

Good ol' Patton, solid American hero representing the ideals and the silliness of American culture. While Patton was not, shall we say, a great general by any other standard but those of the beleaguered Americans, he was certainly an entertaining fellow with plenty of good quotes and information. Apart from that George C. Scott played him brilliantly in the movie which I am not going to review, at least not this week, though there will be a few discussions of war ahead.

Sunday ~ Final Fantasy IV

Final Fantasy IV, or II in the United States, was up until recently the most difficult of the Final Fantasy's and also one of the better ones. Not particularly overrated like VI and yet still captivating and certainly when using an emulator with fast forward superior to recent editions.

Monday ~ NBA Discussion
The NBA is finally getting into an interesting part of the season and this year's playoffs look to be the most interesting in recent memory. I don't think much of the Lakers Celtics rivalry but having 5 title contending teams in the East and 3 in the west makes me very interested to see what occurs. I suppose I'll root for the Heat since I think Lebron is a decent enough guy, if followed around by numerous morons, and Wade is certainly an officer and a gentleman, but the Knicks acquiring Carmelo Anthony makes the last 30 games of the season quite interesting, though not if they lose to the Cavs repeatedly.

Tuesday ~ The Big Red One
This is another one of those films I've had in my possession for a while but have yet to actually watch. I've heard that Mark Hamill is actually quite good in it and apart from his Joker voice this might be his finest performance. Luke goes off to war with Lee Marvin and we hope that his Jedi powers can lead the First Division to victory.

Wednesday ~ Samurai Warriors/XL
This game is the finest of DW's breed (and all closely related games as well) and for a number of reasons. Electronic Arts actually hopped in for publishing as this came out shortly after Dynasty Warriors 4 (which sold well here as well as in Japan) and the production values for this game are absurdly high compared to the rest of either series. What's more the XL disc actually adds quite a bit to the game and makes it thoroughly enjoyable for endless hours.

Thursday ~ AL East
In this post I'll discuss the current status of the AL east, including a brief discussion of the Red Sox and Yankees and the declining but still possibly excellent Rays and surging Blue Jays. Additionally I might discuss the relative quality of the AL/NL and use interleague records as evidence.

Friday ~ Fist of Fury
Bruce returns to the screen for more amazing shirtless antics and demolishes all in his path once more. I haven't seen this film either though I might be able to hazard a guess to what happens in it. "The Big Boss" was actually also titled Fist of Fury in some locales but this is an entirely different yet entirely the same film starring the man himself.

Notes
The month ahead will include a variety of Tactical RPGs, namely Front Mission 3 (Dual reviews for both scenarios in the game), Front Mission 4, Final Fantasy Tactics, another game (I have quite a few so who knows what that will be), and one of the best games I own to end this particular sequence, this might be the best set of games I review since some genres do tend to be rather poor by comparison, despite every game having nearly the same gameplay. 

I will also review Final Fantasy XII though the chance of me actually playing through it is quite small, I will most likely continue from a save where I was about to get the Zodiac spear extremely early in the game and mess around for a while. As previously mentioned Dynasty 7 and Warriors: Legends of Troy will be released in a few weeks though I doubt I'll buy either before they fall in price. Battle: LA is soon to come out for more silly entertainment but I'm not particularly optimistic about it, Unknown is probably going to be the best film until May so I reiterate: Go watch it.

Random Favorite Song: War

Random Favorite Game Music: Jidoor

The Big Boss

Bruce Lee is the most legendary of the martial arts invincible fighters of the 20th century and with good reason. He is incredibly impressive visually and quite charismatic and most importantly he died at the peak of his powers. That's not to say he couldn't kick any of Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and Jackie Chan's asses (probably all 3 at once to boot) but dying pretty much solidifies his legend permanently. Regardless of how powerful Bruce was with his one inch punches and lowest body fat ratio ever recorded the "Legend of Bruce" will always be much more dangerous. While I've heard dozens of different stories about how he died and all sorts of random stuff about how he could punch through a concrete wall or a 20 ft thick steel safe and how he killed Superman with his bare hands its pretty hard to say just how apocryphal those tales are.

This is the key thing that goes along with dying early, JFK died before he really did anything in office apart from fuck over the Bay of Pigs and then fix it a little during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but since he died and appeared to be charismatic that's enough for him to be one of the best presidents in history by default. A 10 year forecast of landing on the moon which turned out to be a success simply solidified Kennedy's legendary status (despite it being a shot in the dark), he might have banged Marilyn Monroe and been a ridiculous adulterer but that doesn't matter because he died too soon to ever say anything contemptuous about him.

Okay enough about legends and how silly they become, on to the movie! Bruce movies all follow a pretty typical story arc; Bruce refuses to fight for the first half of the movie for whatever arbitrary reason (and of course if he did everyone knows he'd kick everyone's asses in 5 seconds and make the movie about 5 minutes long), people die and/or there's a damsel in distress and he gets pissed off enough to save them whilst looking mighty impressive doing so, random nudity for no apparent reason except to ensure the film gets an R rating, Bruce takes his shirt off for serious business and shows off all those muscles you never knew humans had, Bruce wins! Naturally this isn't an amazing set of plot elements but credit to Bruce: he did it first and I still tend to like these films much better than Chuck's or Jackie's or Seagal's (well especially Seagal since he can't act worth shit).

This film is Bruce Lee's first role as the primary protagonist. However it has a really stupid plot even for a Martial Arts flick. Bruce winds up in some random location with some cousins and friends working in a factory, he has been told by his dear old ma that he should stop fighting and has a necklace keepsake to remind him so, fortunately one of his cousins is Robin and beats down a bunch of random people, needless to say Bruce feels secure in his pacifism. But then some of his cousins discover drugs at the factory and the foreman kills them to keep them quiet! O NOES! Robin and random guy are off to the rescue but die horribly after a glorious last stand. This first part is pretty standard, but after that it gets absurd. Bruce defends the workers after they threaten to strike to get the workers back (they think they're missing or something) and gets promoted to foreman, he then gets wasted for no particular reason at a whorehouse and random naked model cameo happens, but then, 10 minutes before the end of the movie, he finally realizes he should investigate the factory and discovers the dead bodies of his buds. Bruce is shocked! He goes home and finds the rest of his buds including some random kid are also dead, but there's one last chick left to save and vengeance! And then he kicks some old dude's ass, the end.

Okay, so the plot really sucks but the fighting scenes are pretty sweet (especially the ones involving Batman instead of Robin) and Bruce is as charismatic and silly as ever. He fights off about 10 guys at once three times in the film and brutalizes about half of them, unlike the Way of the Dragon this movie would probably be R regardless due to random blood fountains. The music is kind of goofy in an old 70s movie sort of way but I liked it. I listened to the voice overs for about 5 minutes before turning on Cantonese and subtitles and afterward that part was much more bearable. I have a basic understanding of Mandarin but simply listening to Bruce speak rather than random guy X makes the film work much better even if you can't understand it (standard for these kinds of movies). I enjoyed the movie both for comedic value and glorious Bruce jump kicking people in the face.

Final Score: 6.5/10

Sportscasters

Sportscasters are sort of an easy group to make fun of, though there's a variety of reasons why. Some of them are legitimately insightful and these get labeled "good" like Costas and Collinsworth, one in particular is ridiculously excited when things happen in a game, Gus Johnson of Stokeley fame. But the vast majority of sportscasters are masters of stating the obvious in slow and straightforward ways.

As designated by Seinfeld many years ago George would be unable to become a sportscaster because he's not a former ballplayer nor "in broadcasting," even though he would be an insightful color guy. The Play by Play announcers tend to just have decent voices without commenting on the actual process of the game, though some of them who are particularly good like Al Michaels do (and Hawk Harrelson pretty much takes over both roles singlehandedly, he's such a homer most people don't like him, he's my hero though). That leaves us with just the color guys.

Firejoemorgan was inspired by horrible color guys and mocked them for several years in posts which are still humorous to read today. Joe Morgan was recently released by ESPN along with Jon Miller, I liked Jon Miller a lot but Joe sort of went off in weird directions every time he spoke. There is an inner cult of stupidity within every sport and no matter how intelligent a player is while actually playing the game the vast majority of the ones that become color guys are colossal morons. Morgan decided moneyball was the devil and Billy Beane the source of all evil (despite Michael Lewis writing the book), McCarver is keen on mispronouncing as many names as possible even while trying to be whimsical, while generally stating nothing except the obvious.

I think ultimately the average sports fan (who is probably an idiot) likes to be told obvious and safe things when watching a game, with no desire for further insight nor complicated dialogue, the very best sportscasters are able to please and satisfy those fans but still state interesting things in relatively straightforward manners, but those are few and far between. The reason sportscasting is so terrible of late is because of the network's desire to please the average fan over the intelligent one and of course some insightful people have annoying voices or are incapable of getting a point across by speaking rather than writing.

For this reason there is little or no hope of sportscasting improving in the future and we continue to hope that the ridiculous overanalysis of sports that goes on today will gradually produce more competent members of the sports media rather than a bunch of idiots, but such hope seems futile. I still have a soft spot for John Madden even though he'd mostly just repeat himself 10 times in the same sentence. Despite being one of the greatest coaches of all time he really wasn't all that great of a sportscaster, but simply existing in my childhood and having that jovial fat guy distinctive voice makes him all that much more endearing.

Dynasty Warriors 5/DW 5 XL/DW5 Empires

Pros:
+++ Unique, vaguely historical (!) storyline for each character
++ Guan Yu's Escape, Fan Castle, Xia Pi, Bai Di Castle, and He Fei Castle are all great stages
++ Moderately Difficult
+ Slight improvement to weapon system
+ Decent New characters
+ Chaos mode is in DW5 by default
Cons:
-- Same old gameplay
-- Vast majority of the characters remain unchanged
- Base system, though a good idea, is poorly implemented and makes many of the stages feel too similar
- "Heavy" weapons are completely useless (and some unique weapons are heavy)

There's not a ton to say about Dynasty Warriors 5 except to say its the first DW I owned personally and may be the last depending on whether DW8 is improved or not. I once made a vow to buy every third Koei game per series (except Kessen which is quite varied between games) but I'm unsure if I'll be able to keep it, though I have actually bought a Koei game for the PS3 already. I've played about 150 hours or so combined between the three DW games and I've "completed" (Acquired ultimate weapon) 30-35 characters, maxing out about 20 of those.

Unlike the previous 3 games this one gives each character a fairly unique storyline, so while many of the other games always start with the Yellow Turban Rebellion before moving on to Hu Lao Gate and the rest of the story many of the characters follow completely different paths which follow their actual paths in RoTK. This makes playing through numerous characters a bit more entertaining than it would be otherwise, though ultimately the game is still a bit dull regardless.

Chaos mode is present in the main game and is next to impossible (at least the later stages) without Lu Bu or some item to acquire meat buns every 50 kills or what have you, as absolutely nothing drops healing items in Chaos. It is an interesting enough challenge but having no real way to defeat it makes it questionable at best (I suppose you could just bumrush the commander and hope you don't die horribly along the way). I believe DW4 had easily accessible mid-level saves as well but the amount of saves you get is reduced according to the difficulty.

Overall this is just the same old game with some minor differences and a particularly fun grinding map, Guan Yu's Escape, which feels completely different from the rest of the game. Some of the completely new maps such as Fan Castle fit the new "Base" system quite well and make the game more entertaining, but you're still ultimately powering through tedious/trivial levels to get to those few interesting ones toward the end of whichever campaign you're following.

Final Score: 7/10

Dynasty Warriors 5 Xtreme Legends

Pros:
++ New Destiny mode could possibly be fun with enough time devoted to it
+ Xtreme mode is slightly improved
+ Scroll system helps to improve non 4th weapons
Cons:
-- Nowhere near as many Legend scenarios to play
-- Still just a cheap corporate gimmick
- Only thing this adds to the main game is "Novice" mode which makes everything trivial no matter what

This game is almost exactly the same as DW4: XL, so apologies if I'm exceptionally brief in describing it. Novice mode is pointless, Xtreme and Legend modes are bearable for a few hours but ultimately still boring without adding much to the actual game. Destiny mode puts you as a nameless grunt and you gradually get to unlock your 3rd and 4th attacks and gradually become the officer you're serving under whom you could already play as if you really wanted to in the first place thus defeating the purpose of the entire experience. It's an interesting setup and might have worked if the whole game was based around it and designed better (like say SW's design for creating a new officer), but it's not and it kind of sucks.

Final Score: 4.5/10

Dynasty Warriors 5: Empires

Pros:
++ Theoretically infinite replay value
++ Moderately difficult
Cons:
-- Has no storyline to speak of
-- Kind of a huge pain in the ass on anything but easy or novice difficulties
- Takes forever to unlock later scenarios
- Voice acting is less impressive than the initial DW5 voices

This game has the dubious status of being the last PS2 game I ever bought at Gamestop. At some point I realized that Gamestop was a douchetastic  enterprise and didn't deserve to ever be purchased from and stopped shopping there and instead buy most everything online. However, that was a long time ago and we are recalling games from the somewhat distant past. This game is basically an extremely oversimplified version of RoTK placed in a DW world and it possesses all the stuff that DW5 does such as bases and the various characters. If I had bought this as a standalone without every touching DW5 I may have enjoyed it (and it was after all only 30 bucks) but I did not and I believe I got Final Fantasy XII and Valkyrie Profile 2 around the same time which were two of my best purchases ever for the PS2 so this game fell into relative disrepair.

In order to prepare for these reviews I played empires for a while and quickly discovered how annoying the novelty of playing as any random officer as opposed to an actual character is on anything but easy difficulty, though I later realized I did have an old save on one of my old memory cards but had little or no motivation to mess around with it. This game does let you customize your own scenario with your own lords and the capacity to randomly execute people and other such silliness (along with riveting diplomatic intrigue), but simply isn't that interesting if you've played any other Dynasty Warriors in the past, RoTK is a better simulator of the book and DW is a better vaguely strategic slaughterhouse game.

Final Score: 6/10

Unknown

Unknown has one of the more intriguing premises of any movie in recent memory. They don't really do a ton with it but excellent action scenes and Liam Neeson's continued storied acting make this otherwise average movie into a worthy followup to Taken. Additionally the supporting cast, save for one, is outstanding almost universally. For some odd reason shaky cam has infiltrated most action movies over the past 5 years despite it discombobulating any and all action scenes, but this movie actually avoids that quite well. While there is something of a dearth for action in the first hour or so of the film at the end there is ultimately a satisfactory amount and every single scene is well shot.

Bruno Ganz, aka Hitler, is a former communist secret police agent who assists Liam Neeson in identifying who he actually is after Liam loses his memory in a car crash and winds up being impersonated at a biotech conference. He is outstanding in every scene he's in despite only being in about 10 minutes of the film, as is Frank Langella who only appears right toward the end. Diane Kruger is actually in Germany for the first time ever, but turns out not to be German despite being German as she plays the cab driver that crashes the car and afterwards saves Liam Neeson's life before fleeing the crime scene. All three of these actors do exceptionally well, and even the silent, dangerous pursuers of Liam seem to fulfill their roles quite well even if they aren't visually imposing.

So, who then dares act incompetently in this film? Was there any doubt, it's January Jones from Madmen who can't act worth shit. Fortunately she doesn't really have to act in this movie and mostly just stands around looking pretty, though toward the end there is one particularly bad scene with her in a stairwell; albeit something quite satisfying happens immediately afterward that makes one forget such troublesome trespasses. I don't think it would have changed the movie much to have another good actress in this mostly silent role so that seems fine.

Critics felt about the same about this movie as they felt about taken (within 1%) which was extremely mixed in reviews. I feel this movie is just as good as Taken and the feasibility of the plot twists is actually enhanced compared to that film. Of course you won't see the plot twist coming since it is completely out of nowhere with no real indication of what's actually going on up to that point. They do a good job of highlighting a bunch of alternative scenarios for you but don't have any shred of foreshadowing to the actual situation, and I suppose foreshadowing is not mandatory in films.

Overall this is a very good film for mid-February and while it has very little chance of matching Taken's success (which was achieved by staying in Theaters for over a year) it still made me quite content even though I had anticipated its arrival for 2 months. I do not think Battle: LA is going to be better so if you only see one movie before May make sure it's this one. Liam Neeson remains one of the finest actors in Hollywood and I will almost certainly watch whatever next Euro-Action/Thriller he does next, though I suppose people want him to take other roles as well. He is excellent in most every film I've seen him in so I have no argument with wanting him to fulfill a variety of roles, but unfortunately he was already in Batman Begins so hope for continued enhancement of that series is fading.

Final Score:8.5/10