Muramasa: The Demon Blade impressions

So I've actually re-connected my Wii to my TV and turned in on for 3 days in a row now because Muramasa is kind of awesome. And kind of hard. The art style is spectacular. The sprites and backgrounds are all hand drawn and don't look like ass on an HDTV.

The art may look simple at first, but when you see it in motion and realize that there are several layers to each background, you begin to appreciate what the developers did. The combat is pretty simple on the surface too. It's all 1-button combat, and if you hold the A button down you can do special dash attacks. Your character can hold up to three different blades a one time and each blade has a different attack power and special attack. There are several different enemies you will randomly encounter while traversing the Metroid style rooms.

Another thing it has in common with Metroid is that different portions of each area can only be accessed after you get a certain sword that can destroy the barrier. The boss fights are completely old school and feature you learning the pattern of the boss and exploiting it to win. Some of them are downright frustrating, especially when you have a boss that can hover above you and randomly drop high damage attacks down on you. Also, even with over 1/3 of the swords owned and me being at a higher level than what the game is pacing me at, I'm never more than one bad encounter away from dying. This game is hard. If you land somewhere between two enemies at the wrong time they can hit you for a lot of damage fast. It's like Ninja Gaiden in that aspect where even the lowliest of enemies can kill you if you don't watch what your doing.

The story so far (of the one I'm playing apparently there's an alternate story path I have yet to start) is that some super badass samurai guy was dying and used some hidden technique to steal some girl's body to continue his quest to kill someone. It's very Japanese and the original voice language track is in tact with English subtitles all the way through. It's a very pretty game and it's really fun if you can get over the fact that you will die more often than you'd like (there are 2 difficulty settings one where you have to defend yourself and one where you don't and they can be changed on the fly - I'm playing it on the harder one). The death penalty isn't all that bad either. You usually just spawn one or two screens away from where you were at the worst. They also don't make you have to go through the whole "this is why I'm here to kill you..." business if you die and have to restart a boss fight either. Muramasa is definitely a Wii game that's worth it.

The Beatles Rockband review

One year later and here I am again gladly parting with $60 for a new Rockband game. The difference is this time I'm not just buying a new disk to put into my 360, I'm buying an experience. Not only is The Beatles Rockband an evolution of the franchise as a whole, but they were able to do so much more with the entire focus being on just one band who happens to be one of the greatest bands of all time.

The nuts and bolts of the game are all there. You play guitar, bass, drums, or sing in the same manor with notes or words scrolling across the screen and you are judged based on your performance. If you play drums you will notice that there are no longer any places for drum fills. Instead once you have enough overdrive the green column will glow and you can activate overdrive by hitting the glowing green note when it appears. I welcome this change as it keeps you in the song and doesn't allow you to limp your way through a hard song by not activating the overdrive. You will also notice that before and after the song you can't play around hitting random drum pads. I thin maybe The Beatles had some say in making sure no notes get played that aren't theirs.

What shows that Harmonix has grown are the changes they've made to the guts for this game. Difficulty is no longer an issue when trying to clear story mode. As long as you pass all the songs you can continue through to the end. Songs do not need to be unlocked. No fail mode is activated upon anyone choosing easy difficulty. There is an achievement menu that is accessible from several places in the game which tells you how far along you are toward getting certain ones and what you need to do to get others. Quite frankly, this is the most user friendly Rockband game ever.

As I stated, this game is The Beatles experience. The story mode is executed wonderfully starting you off in Liverpool in '61 playing the groups early hits all the way to the rooftop of the Apple Corp. building in '69 with all the haircuts and wardrobe changes in between. Every song in the game has its own background performance and for every one of the eight chapters the band gets a new look. Once you reach the three Abbey Road, the game really begins to shine as the music becomes more psychedelic so do the performances. For Yellow Submarine and Octopus' Garden, the band becomes submerged under water, Within You Without You has them floating through tie-dyed space, I Wan You (She's So Heavy) has them literally pulsing and vibrating toward the end of the song before the classic cutoff. You can get lost in the backgrounds and forget what notes you're supposed to be hitting sometimes.

Going a steap beyond making some cool backgrounds, you also unlock some cool photos of the band from throughout their career. Each one comes with a caption about what was going on with the particular song it unlocked with or that time in their career. After unlocking a certain amount of photos you get prizes in the form of videos of the band. One is an outtake from their first US tour, another a rehearsal for their 2nd appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. There are six in all and well worth it. Finally after clearing ever chapter in story mode, you unlock a challenge where you play a continuous set of music which will also unlock band photos if you recieve the full amount of stars.

This game is loaded with fun. There are 45 songs on the disk and if you have a 360 connected to the internet you can purchase the exclusive DLC track All You Need Is Love (all proceeds are donated to charity). There is also more DLC on the way in the coming months. I was a little upset at the fact you can't import the songs into Rockband 2 and vice versa, but in retrospect having this be a standalone game makes more sense especially after the Kurt Kobain fiasco that the Guitar Hero people are having. The people at Harmonix say that all future DLC songs will have their own unique backgrounds as well with $2 still being the price which is quite a deal considering what they're giving us. So yes I've bought three Rockband games in three years time, but every single one has been absolutely worth it.

Grade A-

Meta Grade 90

Criminal

For the past week I've been reading a series of comics entitled Criminal by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips. I picked up the first 4 volumes after Amazon recommended the series to me for my interest in Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets), and I have to say these are some of the best stories in comics I've ever read. It's very reminiscent of Frank Miller's Sin City (Miller even writes him an introduction in the 2nd volume) in that all the action takes place in the same geographic area in that hard boiled detective writing style.

Stories are either narrated by the author or the protagonist of the story line and each text box fills in all the minute details making every page more succulent than the last. There's the war vet who returns home after his brother turned up dead that can't seem to shake his daddy issues, the expert thief who's always been able to keep off the police's radar who gets sucked into a heist he can't make a clean escape from, and the son of a mobster's advisor who just wants to make his own way and live a crime free life. There are femme fatals, bullets, guns, American muscle cars making Bullet style getaways, and plot twists that you will never see coming - I guarantee you. There are no full page splash panels here.

The art in these books is there to serve the story only. Ever page is divided into thirds and the most real estate on piece of art will get is 1/3 of the page. That's not to say the art isn't great, in fact every panel captures the beat of what's going on in the story better than the best directed, best acted films of today. Aside from a fictional city, these stories take place in the real world and real things happen. There are no deus ex machina elements to complain about. No one is invincible, everyone is vulnerable and I have yet to finish a story without uttering "wow." Every volume is a self contained story so you can guilt free read an issue without worrying what will happen to so and so next month. The series is still ongoing though so you will be waiting on edge for the next volume to drop just like I'm waiting to get my hands on Mass Effect II this winter. Give this series a shot. You will not regret it.

Grade A-

Meta Grade 91

(While I love the series, I still haven't come accross any super awesome quoatable lines like Frank Miller's Sin City is full of. I guess "Worth Dyin' for, worth killin' for, worth goin' to Hell for, amen" and "It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes that means killin' a lot of people" are hard to compete with.)

Asterios Ployp

Another comic I just completed is Asterios Polyp, written and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. Feel free to read into the name, the author wants you to as there are several interestingly named characters throughout the book you'll run into. The book, named for its main character, is all about Asterios, his life, what shapes him, and what shapes us all. Asterios is a very successful "paper architect," meaning none of his designs have actually been built. We're introduced to him at his absolute lowest point when his apartment building is struck by lightning and he makes it out with only the clothes on his back and three items he couldn't leave without: an old watch, a Swiss Army knife, and a Zippo that's out of fluid. Asterios has a twin brother that dies in child birth who helps narrate from time to time and fill in pieces of his surviving brother's story.

The events of the book take place out of order and cover three periods of his life. It reads like a Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) movie elegantly weaving between time, plots, concepts and emotions and the art while appearing simple on the surface, is the absolute correct choice to tell the story. Characters are broken down into geometric shapes, colors, outlines, and are even between worlds at times all relative to what is going on. The story is one that presents and challenges concepts and ideas. Aside from Asterios' "I'm always right" self obsessed attitude, you'll get to know his artist wife on some level, you'll meet a bombastic theater director, a meat-and-potatoes car mechanic, a self proclaimed goddess, a revolutionary, and several other characters, each with something to say. To say the story is a beautiful mess is to disgrace it as every word and illustration is there for a reason. Not one of them feels as if it doesn't belong or only exists to fill the page, and I wouldn't change a pencil stroke.

Mazzucchelli's artwork also managed to surprise me in that he knows how to use white space as good as any advertising copyrighter. Characters are pushed to the side to create a sense of chlostrophobia or anxiety, they are isolated on the page, they are larger than life and as small as an ant all at once. There is a section of this book where Asterios is thinking about his wife that can bring tears to your eyes. There are portions that will make you laugh out loud such as Asterios' opinion of why men don't make noise during sex and things that will seriously make you think like how Mazzucchelli was not only able to suggest that memories are a recreation of an event, but illustrate the concept in such a way that the entire presentation brings perfect understanding of what he is trying to express. No, this book is not a beautiful mess. It is simply beautiful. I've not come across anything else like it. This is probably one of the beast works of art that I will ever read.

Grade A+

Meta Grade 100

Back in action

So I've been gone for a bit which I apologize for. Having too much free time every day is actually quite worse than have little time to spare in a lot of ways. I haven't been wasting all my time and energy though and I will be retroactively reviewing the content I've been consuming. In fact two new articles about some graphic novels are going up minutes after this post is finished. I'll be at PAX this weekend in Seattle and I'll try to live blog it if I can get a decent connection. At the very least I'll post the messages I'll be sending to my e-mail stream on this site and my examiner page. Please do read my review of Asterios Polyp and buy it. You will not regret it. Other than that, please read on, and keep checking back.