Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (2009)

In a natural progression, I've returned to review the second F.E.A.R. (this is very irritating to type) game after reviewing the third game last month. Maybe I'll review the first one as well. Stay tuned to Code Redd Net for more reviews of pretty old games.

I hear people don't like this game. It's not so bad! It's pretty good. While it's not nearly as good as the original F.E.A.R. (2005), and I can understand why people might decry the direction of 2, there's still plenty in this one to recommend.  

The story, as you might expect, is a bunch of spooky, haunted nonsense strung between gun fights. Running somewhat concurrently (at least initially) with the first game, 2 is about a Delta Force goon squad captured and augmented by the evil Armacham corporation. That's how you get your slow-motion powers. Alma has grown up and wants to have sex with you, kind of. I don't know. It's very stupid. At least the first game had the dignity to make the story sparse and often limited to items you pick up and read. It was an atmosphere, just a veneer of horror wrapped around a Hong Kong bullet ballet. It was just generally spooky, whereas 2 makes you watch and engage with the Horror Stuff much more, and it's weaker for it.

Luckily, the action in F.E.A.R. 2 is generally excellent, even if it's a fair bit different from the first game. Much of it is modernized: aim down sights, sprinting, you name it. It feels better to play, with quicker, more responsive controls and movement, although the level design is much more condensed. I can't tell if the AI is better or worse because they have so few options in how they engage with you. As a result, the combat is fairly predictable, but it is no less explosive. All the guns feel great and the Soldier Mans you shoot explode and break apart in some wonderful ways.

Unfortunately, it's over a bit quicker than you'd want at about five or six hours. And because it's a single-player FPS from the late 2000s, there's nothing else to do. You can chase some achievements if you want, but you don't unlock anything, there's no extra modes, nothing. There was a multiplayer mode but obviously that's gone now. Hope you like additional difficulty modes!

Xbox Series X Review: Robocop: Rogue City (2023)

The first RoboCop (1987) is amazing. This likely isn't news to anyone, but I still find it wild that such a brutal, truly anti-corpofascist film could ever be released by a major studio. And then they made the sequels. RoboCop 2 (1990) is ooooook, it's fine, it has that child drug dealer, and RoboCop 3 is itself a crime. I went to the 2014 reboot and remember nothing about it. They also made some RoboCop video games! They're trash too, except for RoboCop Versus The Terminator (1993) on the Sega Genesis (and definitely not the SNES version), which was stupid hard but had cheats (thank god) and buckets of blood.

Anyway, this is all to say the RoboCop franchise is a total mess. Thankyfully, RoboCop: Rogue City attempts to clean up this mess. Taking place after the events of the second movie, Rogue City is a hybrid FPS and robo-role-playing adventure game, and a large part of it is a tribute to the series. When you're not shooting dudes and walking forward slowly, you're talking to dudes and walking forward slowly. Sometimes they ask you to find cats, find their sons, and hand out parking tickets to cars parked too close to fire hydrants. These parts, especially the more open world sections where you (Mr. RoboCop) walk around the streets of Detroit and talk to folks, can become fairly boring and the conversations drone on for too long. Still, there's some good character work and writing here, with choices that have effects on both the narrative and gameplay, but thankfully this mundane activity is then offset by some incredible shootouts. Rogue City is brutal. You kill guys really good in a lot of different, upgradable ways. This is the best part of the RoboCop Simulator. The combat is incredibly satisfying, in-depth, and shockingly customizable.

RoboCop: Rogue City is a fairly long game for a modern FPS, although too much of the 10 hours or so it takes to complete the game is dedicated to long stretches of dialogue. By the end the of the game, however, I found that the commitment to so much conversation actually worked somewhat in the game's favor and the characterizations paid off. Unfortunately, the final act does wear out the game's welcome by the end with one too many reveals and turns and final final boss battles. Nevertheless, if you dig FPS action and need something new to play, Rogue City is worthwhile.

Happy 22nd birthday, Code Redd Net!

 I can't believe it's been 22 years. Long live Code Redd Net!

Nintendo Switch Review: RICO London (2021)

I play RICO London on my Switch every so often, even relatively recently, and not because it's any good. It's not. I've just left it in my system every time I return from a work trip or vacation, and then I don't touch the thing again until I'm out the door for another long trip. This is a horrible cycle in which I play RICO London way too much on airplanes and buses, and I don't really know why I keep doing so. There's a bunch of fun digital purchases on there for me to mess around with instead of this game. I own a physical version of RICO London because I imported it. I don't really know why.

Maybe part of it is probably because I loved the original RICO and wanted this to be more of that. It's not. The first RICO (2018) was a fun, unsophisticated, procedurally generated mess of an FPS with cool co-op and some really goofy, solid slo-mo shooting. You could slide through doors and enemies and bust down doors with your boots! It was therefore a good game. RICO London takes that blueprint and screws it up virtually from top to bottom. There's an oddly compelling game here, but it's hidden underneath the backsliding gameplay, dated graphics, and consistently awful performance.

They tried to add a storyline to this one! Ha ha. There's even little comic book panels with voice-over narration to transition between some floors of the building you're sent to infiltrate, as it's supposed to be New Year's Eve and you're an inspector lady trying to bust some drug dealers on multiple floors of a high rise building in London. This means you get a bunch of different floors, including a garage, casino, and penthouse, and a group of Eurotrash baddies in beautiful track suits. The rooms on the floors are mostly random, but they're straightforward and linear (unlike the first game), and they always wind up in the same place against the same boss characters. You can pick up weapons now, but there's much, much less ammo, and your enemies are bullet sponges this time around, so you're constantly juggling a bunch of random guns as you dump ammo into them. The combo system is fairly well-implemented, pushing you to run through the levels in order to keep your combo up, score higher, and upgrade your character. That part mostly works, but the rest of the game often doesn't. Performance on the Switch isn't just bad, it's broken. The game just crashes for no reason, or crashes after the framerate often stutters real bad. I hope your enjoy rebooting games often.

Just play RICO again instead. Don't be like me. I beat this game. Take RICO London out of your Switch, or don't put it in there in the first place.

Xbox Series X Review: Trepang2 (2023)

It's a new F.E.A.R. game! kind of.

If you're wondering what the heck Trepang2 means, don't worry, because it simply doesn't. The meaningless name is indicative of an equally meaningless wrapper of alleged "story" or "plot", cloaked around a series of otherwise disparate missions and locations in which hella shooting and explosions happen. This is what happens when your game starts development as mid-2000s FPS cover band, principally playing the hits from the original F.E.A.R. (2005). You play an enhanced super soldier guy, waking up in a prison and rescued by a group of mercenary people who then recruit you for some missions to do things involving a lot of death and finding keycards. As you might expect, the storytelling in Trepang2 is delivered by a lot of men speaking in thumbnail images. Thrilling!

That paragraph makes it sound like I really soured on Trepang2. I didn't. You won't either. Ignore the plot and just start moving the character around and you'll know. Trepang2 is beautiful in motion. It feels good simply to move in this world. T2 has some of the best FPS movement and shooting I've ever experienced. While your powers (bullet time, cloak, general kung fu) can be a bit much at first, as the enemy counts grow and the blood and sparks fly around everywhere and drench the screen with way too much stuff, pretty soon you'll get used to it and you'll just flow, man, with the brutal mutilation and blood splatter. There's really nothing quite like the ferocity and speed of action in Trepang2. No other game can quite match it, except maybe Doom (2016).

Still, though, it's hard to ignore how shallow Trepang2 ultimately reveals itself to be. It makes a hell of a first impression, but soon enough you'll see the empty storytelling for what it is and you'll see how the side-missions are all just wave-based survival nightmares, and the final boss is beyond irritating and cheap. I had to turn the default difficulty down in order to push throw it. Growing up is allowing yourself to turn the difficulty down because you have other things you want to do in life. Don't be too proud.

Trepang 2 is a good game. Maybe wait for a sale and pick it up then.

Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 3 (2011)

I miss writing reviews for Code Redd Net, so I'm back! Unofficially... maybe? We'll see how this goes. We started this as a Geocities page in 2001 (holy crap) while Chicken Man and I were both in grade school, letting the world know what we thought of 007 games and Jet Li movies from our world headquarters in the school's keyboarding classroom. We also brought it back in 2012 when I was a grad student, living in the world's worst studio apartment in Montreal. I'm old enough now to really miss it, and even though I have an actual job now, I'm writing this seasonally-appropriate October review of F.E.A.R. 3 because I want to and it's the last thing I (re-)played and I just found out I can still log in to this account. The world needs to hear my thoughts on this game from 12 years ago! Let's go.

I love the first F.E.A.R. game. I even like F.E.A.R. 2 a little bit more than most seem to. I suppose we'll get to this in future reviews of these games (when I go backwards in time and review the first two in the series), but I avoided these games for a long time because I thought they were just horror games and I'm not really into horror stuff. It wasn't until I watched a YouTube video on them and someone described them as J-horror mixed with John Woo that I became interested. I'm glad I did, even if 3 is by far the weakest in the series. It's still a decent FPS by the standards of 2011, but it loses a lot of what made those previous games special.

It's virtually meaningless to map out the plot of F.E.A.R. 3, or the other games, because it's both difficult and simultaneously and definitely not the point of playing something like this. You play (at least the first ime) a super soldier man, rather artfully dubbed The Point Man, on a mission with his psychic brother?-guy, Paxton Fettel, as they run from and sometimes fight a experimental haunted girl named Alma. She's going to give birth? and this future military corporation wants to harness or reclaim her powers. That's good enough. It's mostly just a lot of gunplay; the horror elements are essentially limited to a few jump scares and generically spooooky images of creepy little girls and blood on things.

Sadly, F.E.A.R. 3 is so mainstream now. Unlike the first game, with its wide-open combat and remarkable enemy intelligence, 3 is hella Call of Alma: Black Ops. ADS, vaulting, super linear level design, experience point upgrades, very scripted events, the works. It's smooth and plays well, but your options for movement and shooting are much more limited than they need to be, and once you've played through the campaign you've mostly seen it all. And your series trademark slo-mo powers have never mattered less. As in 2, in 3 you get to jump into a huge mech from time to time. It's fun and mixes things up a little bit, it's a welcome change from the normal business of shooting guys, but it's not enough (and not as good as it was in 2).

When you finish the game, you open up the option to play as Fettel. This 100% should've been the option from the get-go. As Fettel, you can possess the bodies of enemies, throw stuff, and fire little energy balls from your fists. It doesn't sound like much, but his powers make the gameplay much more dynamic, varied, fast-paced, and unique. While F.E.A.R. 3 needs it, it still isn't quite enough. We never gave scores back in the day, but if we did, F.E.A.R. 3 is the definition of a two star game: brimming with promise, but the new ideas don't matter much and the other games in the series render the entire exercise almost pointless. Give it a try if you're bored.

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Spoilers ahead.

All one really needs to know is that Mission: Impossible - Fallout follows the franchise's time-tested formula, so the audience should know exactly what they're getting. However, I'm not sure that the previous films had plots that so lacked internal coherence.

What I find particularly annoying, and there ought to be a name for this, is the phenomenon of having plot twists that are meant to surprise the audience but make little to no sense from the perspective of the characters. It seems indicative of a writer who didn't really have a story to tell but required a finished screenplay. And this is indeed what you get with MI - Fallout: the dialogue between the characters is merely filler that progress us us toward the next action scene, whether that be a fist fight, shoot out, or chase.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, especially if one has an appreciation for technical action cinematography. Here at CRN, we are rabid fans of martial arts films, which often have rather forgettable stories to move them along. There is a cost to this, however, and that is the loss of an emotional basis for the action. If the story involves characters we don't care about with generic motivations (such as preventing terrorist attacks by villains who ultimately also have generic motivations or even none specified), then it is difficult to get excited and requires more effort to be entertained. Furthermore, if the characters seem to face little-to-no real risk, such as Tom Cruise with his apparent physical invulnerability and who, even at his age, can walk off a high speed motorcycle accident, then there really is no drama at all.

It reminds me of why I find Superman so boring (coincidentally, Henry Cavill also stars) - he can do everything an dfaces no danger, and is frequently involved in fights with other super beings where seemingly devastating blows are traded yet neither opponent is the worse for wear. I'm also reminded of why I found the original Die Hard more appealing than the later films: John McClane wasn't indestructible. Things like broken glass presented a real obstacle that he had to overcome, making him seem more human than super agent Ethan Hunt.

The one thing I enjoyed most about the film was CNN's role. In one scene, a captured terrorist awakens in a hospital bed to a Wolf Blitzer news report detailing the destruction his terror polot has wrought. He is led to believe he's been in a coma and is promised that Blitzer will read his manifesto on air in exchange for the password to unlock his phone. He agrees, only to find that he's been tricked and his explosives never actually went off. The thing I found interesting about this scene was its reflection of reality: the Cable News Network is fully willing to report propaganda for US intelligence agencies, seeing themselves as the legitimate gatekeepers of what the public is allowed to know. I can tell whether this messaging was intentional or not; regardless, it was the most realistic part of this film.

XBOX Review: The Thing (2002)

Unfortunately, The Thing is more like a subpar Freedom Fighters than a truly engaging "sequel" to the 1982 film. It has the requisite squad tactics and some neat ideas governing emotional responses from your teammates, but those ideas are poorly realized and unfulfilled, and in some cases downright misleading.

The Thing is somewhere between a sequel and a loose remake of its parent film, set sometime after those events but essentially telling a remarkably similar story, at least at first. An alien race has surfaced in an Antarctic military research base, with the alien infection often taking the form of your human allies. As you investigate what happened to your colleagues, you must maintain their trust, in addition to watching your own back for lurking thing-creatures, which emerge out of your pals in a particularly gruesome fashion.

This is a fairly standard third-person action game with the exception of a neat trust/fear mechanic for your squad. It's neat-o in theory, anyway. Your squad (of up to four) get all a-scared by the alien creatures, as well as by gore, darkness, being alone, and so on. They'll hunker down and won't be helpful to you if they get too scared, so you settle them down by forking over firearms or health. You also never know when one of them will morph into A Thing, which you can check by drawing blood from them at any time. A cool idea, for sure, except that it doesn't work at all: a guy who tests positive for Human will turn around a minute later and reveal himself to be Thing the next, seemingly only because you're moving on to the next level and your squad can't carry over across the loading screen.

The Thing has more problems, unfortunately. Not only do the squad tactics barely function, but the enemy AI is generally incompetent and behaves strangely most of the time. The terrifying threat of aliens is rendered not so terrifying when they can barely navigate most doorways. Additionally, this game has some incredibly frustrating missions later on, only because the checkpoint and save systems are so poorly implemented. There's a whole lot of backtracking, repetition, and memorization depending on when you can find a save point, and how well you were doing when you found this save point.

In general, The Thing is not a good game. It's a decent quick fix for anyone desiring of a Freedom Fighters-style squad shooter, but it gets old quickly and does follow through on many of its promises.

Singular Van Dammage: Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016)

The Van Dammage is back! I watched another Jean-Claude Van Damme film yesterday morning, for the first time in a long time, and now I'm here to tell you about it because this is actually a pretty good one. More Van Damme to come, so stay tuned to Code Redd Net.

Van Damme really isn't in this one a whole lot, but still. He plays Master Durand, who lives in Thailand and trains fighters for underground muay thai combat. Very much like the original Kickboxer, an idiot kickboxing champion takes up a sketchy offer to fight the legendary Tong Po, and his idiot brother lets him. When our reigning champion is killed by Tong Po, his brother, Kurt Sloane, vows revenge and you know the deal. Durand-Van Damme agrees to train him in his idiosyncratic manner for mortal kombat with Tong Po. This involves lots of stretching, as you'd expect.

This is basically a remake of the original film, with Van Damme playing his trainer and a new actor, Alain Moussi, playing Van Damme's role, although there are all kinds of allusions to the previous film which make Kickboxer: Vengeance seem like an alternate universe. This is a fantastic action movie, right up there with recent classics like Mechanic: Resurrection (2016) and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (2017). In fact, I'd say this probably better than the original Kickboxer, and one of the most effective martial arts films in recent memory. This is a lean action film, with well-choreographed fight scenes, a goofy plot, and plenty of training montages. It just gets the job done in a way that old-fashioned hard genre films should, and, suitably, it builds nicely to the final fight between Sloane and Tong Po, which delivers. I also think Van Damme does an excellent job in his role, playing an effective secondary character who doesn't have to carry the film by, you know, talking a whole lot, which is certainly not his strong suit.

There are some problems, however. For the most part, Kickboxer: Vengeance looks and sounds cheap, and while I sometimes find low production values charmingly nostalgic in action films, in this case they were too bad to even be funny. In particular, many of JCVD's lines are clearly redone hastily with some ADR, with the actor performing the lines doing a horrible burlesque of Van Damme's accent. Nevertheless, KV is a perfect, stupid Sunday afternoon movie. It's rough around the edges, but it definitely delivers the goods in ways that most action films don't anymore.

Xbox Review: Breakdown (2004)

Breakdown is a neat idea. It's mostly a first-person beat-'em-up, but also a first-person shooter, and even occasionally a first-person burger-eating and puking simulator. Everything unfolds for you through the eyes of Derrick, who wakes up in a lab just in time for war to break out between humans and some strangely buff aliens. There you meet Alex, your emo girl companion for the bulk of the game. The two of you then set off to unravel the mystery of these aliens, and your identity a la Jackie Chan's Who Am I? (1998), through some incredibly elliptical writing and absolutely maddening combat sequences.

Everything in Breakdown takes place in first-person view. At first blush, this is novel; you shoot, fight hand-to-hand, platform, fall out of windows, backflip, eat, puke, read, and more from Derrick's POV. This novelty quickly subsides, however, and the first-person perspective becomes alternatively disorienting, distracting, or downright difficult to handle. It's often impossible to keep track of your enemies, due partially to the game's inadequate lock-on targeting system, as well as larger problems with the first-person perspective itself. Since everything takes place in first-person, including when you get knocked down (and this happens often), recovering a proper perspective to launch a counterattack is frequently impossible when confronted with multiple enemies. Similarly, later stages in the game require a great deal of platforming, always a fun proposition from a first-person perspective. Other stages consist largely of empty hallways punctuated by frustrating enemy encounters.

The fun of recovering health by consuming stray sodas and hamburgers in a Streets of Rage fashion, or driving jeeps over caverns in first-person view, is largely overwhelmed by later levels in the game. In particular, there are two combat sequences near the conclusion of the game that are among the most aggravating I've ever played. You simply can't see the attacks coming your way, so instead you're treated to a kaleidoscope of images as your character is knocked around by mutants. Sure, perhaps this is a realistic representation of being beaten up by a crew of obscenely swoll alienmans, but it is emphatically not an enjoyable experience. I wanted to like Breakdown, and to its credit, there's very few games like it. And as it turns out, there's a pretty good reason why. Breakdown is a failed experiment; fascinating and educational in its own way, but deeply flawed.

Movie Review: The Expendables 3 (2014)

I feel as though no spoiler alert is necessary, as you should know what you’re getting from The Expendables franchise, if you ever had any interest in it, by now. There are no surprises. You’re getting a movie that tries to draw upon the nostalgia of action movies and actors from the past three decades. However, the action-hero movie genre should not be thought of as a homogeneous monolith. There are differences along a variety of margins.

Consider the original Die Hard. We see John McClane as quite vulnerable. Whereas other action movies have led us to perceive a bullet wound in an extremity as a minor annoyance, broken glass presents a real obstacle to McClane. We don’t see him taking on a million guys at once, but resorting to guerilla tactics due to his comparative weakness in force. Because of this, the drama is far more palpable and McClane seems much more heroic.

Contrast this with The Expendables 3, which contains no tension at any point. The audience is never led to feel that the protagonists are ever in any serious danger at all, despite the fact that they are routinely vastly outnumbered and outgunned. Regardless of all the “action” that occurs in the film, it makes for a rather boring experience.

Also disappointing is the missed opportunity in drawing on the potential nostalgia of the characters associated with the cast members. For example, there is a subtle reference to the character played by Antonio Banderas in Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, but why not just make up some excuse to have El Mariachi in The Expendables rather than have Banderas play some generic guy?  I mean, it’s not like it would damage the plot in terms of its plausibility or cheesiness. The payoff of seeing guitar cases filled with guns or guitar cases as guns would be totally worth it. The same goes for other beloved characters like Statham’s Frank Martin. Would a story that finds a way to bring these disparate characters together make sense? Probably not. Would anyone care? Probably not. This is The Expendables, after all.

My final grief has to do with the phenomenon of the villain having ample opportunity to dispatch the good guy(s) and for no reason choosing not to. This happens multiple times in The Expendables 3. Early in the movie, the evil Mel Gibson has Rocky Balboa in his crosshairs, but chooses to wound another guy. He is able to capture most of Rocky’s team and later sets a trap that could kill Rocky and the other guys he brings to rescue them, but instead of just blowing them up, he gives them a 45 second grace period in which to disable his bomb. Why he does this, other than keeping the movie from abruptly ending, is not explained. And, in what was supposed to be the climatic showdown between Rocky and Gibson, Gibson has the ability to shoot Rocky dead but instead decides to toss his gun away in order to have a fist fight. The reason for this can’t be to see who’s the better fighter, as Rocky eventually grabs a gun and just shoots Gibson. All of this leaves one feeling as though the villain isn’t that evil (even though we’re told he did all these bad things in the past), but rather exceptionally merciful. Needless to say, this does not make for a compelling triumph over evil.

The Expendables 3 is not really satisfying in any way. It lacks creativity, plausibility, and a reason to keep watching. With Hollywood’s preference for producing tried-and-true formulas, I wouldn’t be that surprised if they tried to make another one, perhaps with an all-female cast. 

Dreamcast Review: Outtrigger (2001)

Is the world craving a new review of an old Dreamcast shooter? Thrasher sure thinks so! Join him on this journey of discovery and find out the answer to the burning question: should you play Outtrigger? The answer? Ummmm, maybe. Depends.

Outtrigger is about half Crazy Taxi (or maybe half Time Crisis) and half TimeSplitters. It's a multiplayer-focused, arena-style FPS with virtually no plot and an ever-present timer at the top of the screen. Matches last about two to three minutes and the backdrop is often little more than "Collect these coins!" or "Shoot these guys!" Wikipedia's plot summary is probably too good: "The story revolves around a counterterrorism organization called Interforce, set up in response to terrorist attacks on military research facilities." I didn't get even the faintest whiff of this story, such as it is, while playing the game.

Outtrigger's two main single-player modes, Arcade and Battle, task you with completing various training exercises and eventually missions, in which you ostensibly deal with vaguely-defined threats. Really, though, there is nothing to connect the single-player exercises and missions with anything. The Arcade and Battle modes have much more in common with Crazy Taxi's "Crazy Box" or TimeSplitters' "Challenge Mode" than anything else. Though the single-player is occasionally frustrating in spots, it can be easily completed in the course of a day. And like the Crazy Box, Outtrigger's single-player experience is seemingly designed to train players for the heart of the game, which in this case is the multiplayer.

Multiplayer matches in Outtrigger play by the same rules as the "Thief" mode in TimeSplitters 2: each kill is worth one point, while another point, rendered as a coin, can be collected by any player from the kill spot. Other than a team variation on the same thing, all multiplayer matches in the game play by the same rules. This can make for a rather repetitive experience, even with Outrigger's considerable variety of weapons and maps. Given the relatively small size of the arenas in the game, deathmatches can only realistically last for about three minutes before the map in question loses what little novelty it had in the first place. And while the multiplayer mode can be played with AI bots, many of the maps feature pits, which the AI cannot successfully navigate.

In terms of controls, Outtrigger really shows its age. Dual analog control has been a standard of console first-person shooters for a long time, and returning to the single-stick controls of the Dreamcast is difficult. Although some of the options approximate dual analog controls, none of them really come that close, and I never truly felt comfortable with the pre-set schemes. The game does allow you to switch on the fly from first-person to third-person view, which is neat at the very least, but it's hardly useful.

Like many other arcade-style games for the Dreamcast, Outtrigger is enjoyable in short bursts only. Dreamcast aficionados may want to find a copy simply for the sake of curiosity, because it is a truly strange game, but everyone else can probably find something else to play.