Boy meets Boy

Before you read this I want you to do two things for me. One, forget your vindications and two, remember the last thing that truly, honestly, warmed your heart and made you smile. Once you’ve managed that please continue.
Among some recently rescued items from my previous home was a book given to me by a friend. A small young adult book that is not quite two hundred pages long. It’s titled ‘Boy meets Boy’ and just as the name implies it’s a high-school romance between Paul and Noah. They aren’t faced with the prejudice of an unforgiving town and social structure (quite the opposite). They aren’t torn apart from their truest of love by a ludicrously evil schoolmate. This is a vary real story about two real teenagers learning to become two real people in love in a fantastically bizarre and real town.
If you couldn’t tell this is a gay story that comes with some staples of any good gay flight of fantasy (or so I’m making up right here and now). A drag queen who is the prom queen and the star quarterback. A friend’s parents who are vary Christian in the sense that they think homosexuality is a sin. And of course, drama. If there is one thing gay people are supposed to have more of then straight it is drama. However unlike most teen novels where I can hardly say I like much less sympathize with the drama llamas I read about every thing that happens in ‘Boy meets Boy’ isn’t unbelievable, it’s strangely familiar, like I’ve had similar conversations, had close to the same out comes. Not once did I get pulled out of the story because the way someone reacted was to over the top.
Most of all the way it’s written… It’s not just written in first person, Paul being our narrator, it feels almost like I’m reading metaphors. It never draws from the story and almost always makes the picture of what’s really going on all the more clear in my mind.
Not that the entire thing is flawless, there are some practical issues I have with the town it’s self but I didn’t honestly think of them while I was reading the book. It’s only now that I stop and look back that I see that this anytown gay-topia was maybe a little too perfect to be really believable. However these thoughts come after I’m done and thinking critically about it, not while when those kinds of thoughts can ruin then entire story.
I’m not going to tell you what happens. I will say that compared to the end of this book the end of Disney and Pixar movies seem empty and shallow. It’s not the kind of ending where everything is the way it should be. Instead everything is looking brighter; everything really will be ok no matter how it turns out. And being at a point in my life when nothing seems to work out I have found a bit of hope from this story. Not even about love, the ending is so much more then just Noah and Paul live happily ever after. It’s that hope that no matter what’s wrong you can over come it. You can be who you really are. You can be with the person you love. You can move on and be happy.
I’m not an avid reader. I simply find most books to dry and shallow because humans would much rather be shown something then be told something. But ‘Boy meets Boy’ is a painting, a wall sprayed with angry red and sad blue. Happy yellow and fiery orange, friendly green, flamboyant purple and hopeful white all mixing together and colliding with perfect shades of mixed colors and emotions. It grabs your attention because of it’s sharp contrast to everything around it and it keeps you staring into the swirling colors because there’s so much to take from it.
For such a simple book it’s had a fairly great deal of impact on me. I recommend this to anyone who loves romance and colors and songs and true friendship and real people and an ending that will stick with you for a good long time to come.

‘Boy meets Boy’ is written by David Levithan. Weather he meant such a simple but well developed story to be so inspiring I don’t know but I sincerely thank him. He may have pulled me out of one of the darkest pits I’ve ever been in. Thank you vary much sir.

I will say that now I sadly want a girlfriend with no prospects in sight. I just think it’s a bad idea to go to a gay bar before you can actually drink.

Shadow of the Colossus

After nearly a three years of waiting I finally got what I thought was the Indy RPG game that would eventually lead us all off to a beautiful land where original ideas where not only applauded but encouraged and not stepped on or reused constantly for countless horrible sequels. I got it for Christmas and I nearly slaughtered my entire family when I found out I’d have to wait until the day after to play it.

When I played it I found that I was automatically hit with a bit of confusion and a story line I felt like I was awkwardly walking into the middle of. Sort of the feeling you get when you’ve come up on a group of people at a party and one of them is just finishing up a particularly naughty story. The only thing you can do is to laugh nervously and just try and go with it.

The entry sequence has our main character (I didn’t even know his name until I looked it up and found out he does not even have one, he's called Wanderer) cross an excruciatingly long bridge to a temple on his trusty horse carrying his dead girlfriend. We don’t know why she’s dead but she was supposedly a sacrifice or something. But I wasn’t really buying into it because she looked to damn pretty to have been a sacrifice or accidentally killed. Honestly she lays on a stone alter for the entire game looking pretty and surrounded by doves that I can only assume gathered to get a free meal every time I left her alone.

Anyway, apparently Wanderer has come to seek out an entity called ‘Dormin’ to ask for him to revive the dead girl. At first he laughs at our feeble mortal attempt but because we chased off a few shadowy shapes with a shiny magical sword he agrees to let us try. He tells our hero that there will probably be dire consequences and sends us out to kill the ONLY living things in the land, giant and slightly hairy creatures called colossi.

Fair enough, I sort of figured because we where talking to this guy through the sunlight coming from a huge whole in the roof that he was some sort of old world god that I needed to show just how strong I was and that the consequences where going to be something along the lines of ‘she’ll be fine but you’ll never get to see her again’, something a bit cliché’ but altogether not a whole lot on the bad side.

So I hopped on my horse (which was freakishly large for a regular horse… perhaps I know a bit to much about what size a horse should be..) and headed out to kill off my first giant Robin Williams imitation. This wasn’t all that hard to find, your sword points the way and even though it’s a fairly large world for just you and some baddies it’s actually not that hard to get around. I will admit that the horse gets twitchy sometimes but it doesn't (mechanically) ever really keel over and die so that's all beside the point.

I arrived at the bottom of a cliff and found that I needed to climb it. Alright, no big deal, the controls are fairly straight forward, given to you in a timely (and not secretive fashion like in some games) and only needed a few tries to get down pat. Getting to the top however seems to send that friendly little box that tells you helpful information into a fit of crap yourself fear as you are face to face with the first Colossus. Without any inkling of what to do I pushed some more buttons and found out that I had a bow!

So, like the brilliant person I am I waited for my enemy to turn its giant face around and I shot it in its eye. This however didn’t seem to have the wanted affect as it rounded on me and smashed me into little heroy pieces of pulp. I died four times, trying various methods of killing off the damned thing before I found that I could crawl up the back of it’s leg and stab it for some actual damage.

It was only then that the helpful little box of directions popped out and told me I could find it’s vitals by holding up my sword and when I was on a hairy part I could stab it. Well, that’s great but why couldn’t you tell me this about half an hour ago when I had only died twice. I understand sometimes programming doesn’t always click and the games can screw up due to a manufacturing error but dying four times just to learn about a step I had already skipped?

But it was fine. I figured out that I needed to get to his head and I felt a great satisfaction when the thing crashed like a sack of potatoes to the ground. When I was done I headed back to my horse and promptly was attacked by black and blue tentacles of chest invasion and dropped dead.

A brief cut scene later (during which I thought I had actually died and was cursing up a storm) I find my self back in the temple and I get to start all over again with a new colossi. This happens over and over again, it’s never explained why just like nothing else is explained but our hero doesn’t seem to bother questioning why he keeps getting chest raped by black and blue tentacle… energy… things. Alright, it’s something sort of original and all this trauma seems to have an effect on Wanderer as he gets stronger, has more health and his hair turns from red to black as he kills off all sixteen of his foes. It added an interesting touch and I was constantly wondering where this would lead my hero.

When I finally reached the final boss it took me a while to figure out just how to get to the most gigantic skirted evil thing I’d ever seen because he could shoot energy laser things out of his finger which nearly killed me a few times before I relised there was a hole I had to drop into and a sideways path to follow under it’s skirt.

However, just like all it’s brethren before it the jumping, climbing, vitals hitting puzzles where conquered and I was triumphant! At last Wonderer would have his girlfriend back or possibly go find one that required a little less maintenance!

I didn’t even care when I dropped a hundred feet to the ground from the top of my foe’s head and got KOed again. However, when we wake up in Temple Wanderer's apparently half dead and there’s a cut scene where these masked men on horses that have come to stop me enter the temple and find my girl’s dead body, then me. I guess killing has a bad affect on heroes because he has got horns, his body’s covered in tattoo looking blue and black stuff… it’s like someone took him to emo camp, he got drunk and got some tattoos to express his anguish in not getting laid for all his hard work.

As it turns out ‘Dormin’ was a demon that the masked men had locked away in the forbidden land or something by splitting him into sixteen pieces. Just after they try and ‘put me out of my misery’ by stabbing our guy through the chest Dormin takes over the body. Usually I don’t really want to share the confined space of a body with another being but Wanderer turned huge, demonic, shadowy and supposedly even more powerful. My mind swam momentarily with the story ending with our hero/Dormin bringing girlfriend back to life and taking over the lands to cover them in a thousand years of darkness.

No such luck. I got to swat at them for a while before they escaped and sucked Dormin into a cleansing pool of something or other and ran for the hills, leaving not only the hero but his horse and his girl to death (though I thought the horse died earlier when he fell down into a canyon). But as promised Dormin delivers and somehow manages to bring the girl back. She and the horse find a baby hero with horns and take him up to the top of the temple.

That’s it.

No really, that’s all there is to the story.

I wish I where kidding. When I reached the end I couldn’t believe it. I waited until the credits had gone and the save screen had come back around before it really sunk in.

Then I lost my mind. I couldn’t believe it! This was what I had been waiting to get my hands on? This was what I had been waiting for THREE YEARS FOR? I don’t need a good ending for all my games but that wasn’t even a bad ending. It wasn’t an ending at all. From the vary start I had it figured out and didn’t even know it. This is only a third of a story. Some middle child orphan that should have been in a trilogy that just couldn’t afford a kid that was awkward when telling people about it’s self..

The beginning didn’t make any kind of sense even at the end but a first game would have cleared things up without even worrying about telling us about the ‘forbidden land’ or ‘Dormin’. Sure it would have ended with the death of our potential hook up but that would have been cleared up in ‘Shadow of the Colossus’. The third game could have gone with our hero growing up and getting out of the forbidden lands to save the vary people who had turned him into a demon seeking child with a magic sword by sacrificing his love interest or have him seek his revenge on them by hunting them down like the dogs they are.

If the Ico team can make an epic about a nearly empty large map world then they could have made it work.

However, the game play is fun even if sometimes the camera has a bit of a seizure in close spaces. It’s difficult but it’s not like it doesn’t want to be beaten, on the contrary, after figuring out just how to get the gigantoid to kneel down or crash into a wall or bend over of something that lets you climb up to its head and stab its brains out I found an extreme satisfaction in the fall of my only enemy thus far. It was challenging with a fairly well placed difficulty curve. This was an extreme improvement over Ico which I actually gave up on after two weeks and a busted controller. The game isn't as difficult as Ico had been and the puzzles are not so much puzzles as just challanges that have to be overcome. It's still engaging, far more so then the average 'wack them till they die' RPGs.

I’m not going to comment on how amazing the soundtrack is because I feel a bit mixed about it. It was like they where weighing out what to spend the most money on, epic music that would place you in the perfect mood for epic battles or a story that made some kind of sense.

I will however note that when I looked at some other reviews that I had seen people complain about the frame rate. I myself had seen nothing wrong with it, the thing shook and made you twitchy when you couldn’t see at the moments when one of the giant feet or weapons hit the ground but I saw no problems with that it made the battles all the more real as you dodged out of the way and tried to run for you life only to smack into one of the feet you'd been trying to avoid. Seeing as this game was originally intended for the PS instead of the PS2 I think they did vary well graphicly as well as with the overal visual smoothness of the game.

I did find out that after you beat the game once they give you the chance to play through in time attack or even hard mode again. I put the game away under my guitar amp for that little move. It was like it was taunting me, it hadn’t pulled out the big guns to begin with and expected me to play through the story that wasn’t more then half finished again just so I could show it who’s boss.

All in all a fairly good game though I will not be getting my hopes up the next time an indy game hits the discount shelves.. Maybe one day I’ll have enough money to review some more recent games.

The Long Kiss Goodnight

While recently spending a weekend with my father I saw a movie, ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’ that he dubbed one of the greatest movies of all time. Automatically I was skeptical but we sat down to watch it anyway. Because I was sure this would be the next topic of my critique I pulled out my notepad and went to take some notes on this supposedly great movie.

Before I go any further, The Long Kiss Goodnight stars Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. Now if that doesn’t get your attention and also tell you what kind of movie it’s going to be then get your head on straight and pay attention.

Yeesh.

So Long Kiss Goodnight is the story about a secret agent (Geena Davis) who almost dies eight years prior and losses her memory, thus becoming Samantha Caine. For a while she hires detectives to help her find out who she was but is never able to find anything. One of the cheep ones (Jackson), who makes his introduction blackmailing a guy for hiring a prostitute that he set up and has a habit of singing about what he does, finds some old belongings of hers and they begin to follow the trail to her past, uncovering a terrible fund raising scheme that would kill thousands of people and Samantha’s old personality Charlie.

Now that I’ve vary vaguely ruined most of the plot for you I want you to keep reading, I’ve told you before, this only gets better. So while I was watching the movie I had my note pad out and I’m usually vary good about taking down points that I think are important. When I looked down at the end of the movie all I had where three points about the beginning and then it just sort of drifted off into reactions. ‘lol’ ‘wow’ ‘holy shit’ all graced my page (in that order). The level in which the movie had drawn me in was extremely surprising.

The Long Kiss Goodnight is by no means a terribly deep movie, it deals with basic themes and some overdone character flaws, but it does it so well and in such a shiny and explosive way that you don’t even think about it. It reminds me a lot of Indiana Jones in the way that the real nuggets of hilarity are not the witty banter (of which there’s quite a lot and vary well done might I add) but instead at the little looks, facial expressions and silent actions. The best example of this is when Samantha/Charlie and the detective are on the run and their in a car. Charlie thinks that she doesn’t really have any use for the other around and literally pushes him out of the car while their headed up a New Jersey street.

His response to this is to lay where he’s rolled, still on the side of the street, and pull out a cigarette. Him sitting there calmly was far funnier then when she picked him back up about fifty seconds later and his response of “Found a use for me huh?”

This movie is not without its small plot holes and oddities. Like for instance there’s a point where Sam and her roughly eight year old daughter are caught in a basement full of gasoline drums. Somehow, before they are surrounded by the bad guys that had been chasing them and being faced with the threat to be blown sky high, she uses her daughters doll’s ability to realistically pee to get some of the gas into the doll which she later uses to blow the door (and most of the building) off of a meat locker.

But they’re so small and you’re so wrapped up in the rest of the visual play that it doesn’t really matter.

So for all of you who like awesome hilarity and lots of explosions with some of the best acting and directing this silly genre has ever seen I suggest you go find yourself a copy, I know I have.

Oh, and Dad, if you’re reading this, I think mom borrowed the movie.

Because I know I don’t have it...

Persona 3

Persona 3 is a JRPG (Japanese Role Play Game) that I played quite recently and I have to sadly say, the damn thing has quite an affect on me. I either end up playing it until I emerge from my room like a brain sucking zombie because I haven’t eaten in a vary long time, or I play it for roughly fifteen minutes before snapping my controller in half and locking the game in my closet for a few days.

But enough about my personal issues, Persona 3 is about a team of high schoolers who can use a different sort of personality inside them that comes out when they shoot themselves with invoker guns. No, I’m not kidding. At least three times in a single battle you pull out a gun and shoot your self in the head with a pistol, letting a monster come out the side where the blood and brain matter would have sprayed from. It comes out with a lovely shattering sound to fight creatures called shadows. Shadows come from your school that for one hour at night turns into a giant tower of changing doom, while normal humans turn into coffins so they’re safe and don’t remember a thing.

You play the fairly quiet hero who wares headphones and has blue hair (It’s a JRPG, what do you expect?) who joins the shadow fighting group consisting of your regular JRPG stereo type characters; The cool older girl, the fighting older male, the perverted cocky guy and the daughter seeking revenge. No, that’s not all there is but that’s all you start with and that’s all I’m willing to go through.

This game is played as a cross between those odd Dating games you find on the internet and a regular “chosen one” fantasy game. Magic hurling, sword fighting, every female character succumbing to your manliness a little too easily… blah de fricken blah. If you really want to know what it’s like it’s the same as every other RPG that’s come out of Japan. The system looks a little different; it’s a little more Macob then most fluffy-happy-bunny-bleed-out-your-eyes-because-there-are-so-many-bright-colors-on-the-screen games but it’s the exact same thing.

Oh and it doesn’t end there. The difficulty curve is awful, let me explain. While you try to get to the top of the big… tower thing that houses almost all these shadow baddies you kill a lot of them, and quickly. Probably enough to worry about the little jerks becoming extinct because all of them die so easily (you can choke them with a cordless phone). About five floors after I started playing I began to wonder why it would be this easy. It was rather sad actually, I’m not a big fan of turn based combat to begin with but if it was going to be as easy as whacking the evil glove of littleness twice then I don’t really see the point in fighting them to begin with. Then somewhere around floors ten or fifteen I get to a small floor and my intelligence person (the cool older female, naturally) tells me she senses something big and to be careful. I, excited finally, run out to fight this gigantic shadow. I didn’t think it would be the shadow of instant death. To beat the first boss I had to fight him three times, and it’s the same exact thing for every boss no matter how hard you train your little characters up.

Now, I’m not saying that the game is worse then baby eating and that you shouldn’t go get yourself a copy. Chances are that you already know if you like this game or not. If you like JRPGs, you’ll find this game fun and possibly even challenging, giving a new look on the beaten, dead horse that is all JRPG story lines. If you don’t like them then don’t worry about it. This is not a game that will change your point of view and I certainly think you could do better in the way of cartoony games, like buying the Sly Cooper series.

This is Only the Begining

Hello and welcome all to In Reveiw, a blog about...... well if I honestly had to tell you I think I might as well just delete this thing right now. However I will let you know that this is reviewing viewed from a slightly different angle (roughly 5 1/2 feet off the ground), that angle being from the stand point of a 17 year old with a love of fuzzy objects and large explosions (you know, just like every other 17 year old). My name in Frendell and I will be your guide in the lovely land of sarcasm and underage reviewing. So join me while we search through movies, games, books and whatever else tickles our fancy. This is only the beginning of a beautiful thing.