Just A Quick Update

So I'm sorry I haven't been posting anything lately but I would like to attempt to explain why. I have been very busy with work as I've said before but that's not really an excuse since I only work until four. The truth is I've been miserable at my current job for some time now and I've come to a decision. I'm going to go back to college for journalism. I want to be a game journalist and do this stupid little blog for a living. I sincerely thank all of you for continuing to read The Coffin Chronicle even though it is so infrequently updated. Hopefully that will no longer be a problem since I want to do this as a career.

I also started a YouTube let's play channel with my  friend Dan Kurtzke called EpicGhostPunch. If you read this blog you should watch the channel. I'm also adding an episode of the two of us playing Alan Wake at the bottom of this update.

Lastly, I'm back on Twitter you should follow me I am @RobCoffin.  Also follow Dan Kurtzke @DanKurtzke most of my posts are re-tweets of his so get them from the source.  Thank you again.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

 

First of all I would like to apologize for the lateness of this review but really if you are a regular reader of my blog you are probably used to it by now.  The reason for the timing issue is because before I played this game I set a mental rule that I would not play another 3ds game until I completed Pokemon Y.  So, you may be asking yourself, why am I not reviewing Pokemon Y?  Because I have almost nothing to say about it.  It was good.  It was fucking long but it was good.  But let's move onto another Smash Bros. character, Link.

In this adventure, the inspirational, disabled mute hero we all love so much is a blacksmith's apprentice.  He lives a quiet life (ha mute, quiet) in a home not far from the Blacksmith's.  A strange homeless man named Ravio who dresses like a rabbit has asked to move in with Link and Link is totally cool with it.  I just went back and read this paragraph and realized how fucking weird the plot of the early game is.  Anyway, Ravio gives Link a bracelet as thanks for the food and shelter and no expectation of rent which is totally fair right guys?!

 

Link's boss gives him the job of bringing the Captain of the guard's sword to him.  He is eventually found in the castle squaring off against a wizard named Yuga.  The Captain is grateful to have his sword but it doesn't do him much good when Yuga turns him into a painting.  Princess Zelda is there and mentions that Yuga is trying to summon Ganon.  Boom painting!  Link grabs the Captain's sword and tries to attack Yuga but guess what, BOOM PAINTING!  Yuga, feeling confident strolls out of the castle and presumably into somewhere evil.  Link's wrist then pops out of the painting first quickly followed by the rest of his body.  It seems Ravio's bracelet saved Link's life.

 

Now it's Zelda so at this point you have got to get the Master Sword.  But how do you do that, Link may have asked if he wasn't a poor disabled mute forced to play charades whenever he feels compelled to speak.  Well the game gives you some stupid convoluted answer involving pendants but the point is go do dungeons until you're able to get the sword.  Now you have the master sword HOORAY THE DAY IS SAVED!  So go to the castle which is big and evil and guess what Yuga is inside.  CALLED IT!  Link confronts Yuga and Yuga flees through a crack in the wall.  Thanks to Ravio's bracelet, Link is able to follow.  He pops out in the dark world of Lorule (I see what you did there) and Yuga summons Ganon and forms this weird pig monster thing.  Just look.

 

So Links dead right? Wrong.  This chick Princess Hilda (I see what you did there) shows up and imprisons Yuga/Ganon.  She also quickly explains that there are seven sages that protect the tri-force but Yuga has imprisoned them in paintings.  Now go get 'em tiger.  To make a short story even shorter, Link goes out and saves all seven sages and comes back to confront Ganon/Yuga.  You may expect him to still be imprisoned but instead, all we find is Princess Hilda.  She informs you that in Lorule the tri-force was fought over so viciously that it was decided that it needed to be destroyed.  Her land was then plunged into darkness and chaos.  When she learned of another world with another tri-force she needed to have it.  She sent Yuga to take the sages and use their power to steal the tri-force.  This left Link speechless (HA!).  Time to fight Yuga/Ganon.  After he/they are defeated, Princess Zelda is freed but Princess Hilda still has the tri-force.  She is going to use it to remake Lorule and leave Hyrule to fend for itself.  It was at this this moment that I was thinking to myself, 'If there is a Zelda Lorule counterpart, why isn't there a Link Lorule counterpart?' As soon as I had finished my thought, Ravio entered the scene.  My next thought was, 'Why can he talk?'  Anyway Ravio takes off his hood and reveals that he looks just like Link but with black hair.  He talks some sense into Hilda and stops her from committing genocide.  Hilda gives Link and Zelda the tri-force to do with what they would like and they use their power to bring Lorule back to it's former glory.  Everyone has a happy ending... Except of course for Yuga who was just following orders from her princess and was then killed.

Let's get into how the game plays shall we?  Something that bothered me in the early stages of the game was Ravio's shop.  You do not acquire items in dungeons like you did in classic Zelda.  Instead, you went to Ravio's shop, which is just your house, and he would allow you to rent items.  This is all well and good but whenever you die, you lose your items and have to make the trip back to his shop to get the necessary items to complete the dungeon.  This can be a real pain in the ass until you get to the point where he allows you to buy items.  The prices to buy items are pretty high compared to the rental prices, but I was never low on money and I never rented an item after that point.  Something I highly recommend is buying the hookshot and upgrading it as soon as possible.  Yes, there is also an upgrade system that surprisingly has nothing at all to do with Ravio.  In the North-East corner of the map in Hyrule, you can find a friendly squid monster who lost her babies.  For every ten of her babies you find scattered throughout the world, she offers to upgrade one of your owned items.  The hookshot is the best buy I've found although there are some items, like the boomerang, that I had no need to use at all.

I have heard a lot of people criticizing the game for being too easy but I don't think that's true.  A hardcore gamer could breeze through this game rather quickly but he would also want all the collectibles.  And the difficulty certainly ramps up at the Yuga/Ganon boss fight.  The bottom screen of the 3ds is only used to manage items and can be used in the pause menu, which is the way it should always be.  Instead of focusing on making a neat gimmick for a specific system, game developers should focus on making a solid game and then make it work for that system.  It's nice to see Nintendo doing that.

 

Me Doing Stand Up

So first of all I would like to apologize for the lack of activity as of late.  Believe it or not I have actually been busy.  I have been working a lot, spending a good amount of time with friends, recording several different podcasts and I even started a Let's Play channel with a good friend of mine Dan Kurtzke.  You should check it out here.  So that's all stuff that's been going on.  I'm sorry I haven't found time to update my blogs more frequently especially Green Acre School Paper since I just started it but I do hope to change that in the near future.  Well thank you for reading this list of excuses and plugs but please enjoy this video of me doing stand up comedy.

Sleeping Dogs

If you have an Xbox Live gold membership like I do, every month they put up a new game that is completely free to gold members. At least they do on the 360 I don't know if they do it on the Xbox One.  The point is, most of the time they are really good games.  A couple of months ago, the game of the month was Sleeping Dogs a game by United Front Games and published by Square Enix.  Which is weird because I really liked it and usually Square Enix games just make me feel uncomfortable.

In Sleeping Dogs you play as Wei Shen (seen ripped and sexy above), a man who is torn between two lives.  He just got got back to his home in Hon-Kong after a few years living abroad in America.  Wei gets up to his old tricks right away and the first time you get to play as him is during a drug deal that goes south and Wei ends up in jail.  He bumps into his old friend Jackie in his cell and he starts telling Wei about how bad things have gotten since he left.  Jackie is part of the gang the Sun On Yee under the command of Wei's other old friend Winston.  A lot of rival gangs are out there after the Sun On Yee but at the moment their biggest problem is another faction of the Sun On Yee led by this asshole named Dogeyes.  After all this catching up, Jackie informs Wei that he could probably get him in good with Winston when they are released.  Wei is finally brought to speak to a detective.  A man named Pendrew (I know it seems like a lot of people but stay with me it's not that bad).  Pendrew interviews Wei alone and turns off all the cameras in the interrogation room to make sure there will be no witnesses.  It turns out Wei is an undercover cop and his current assignment is to get in good with the Sun On Yee and destroy them from the inside.

Jackie introduces Wei to Winston who is at first hesitant to trust him.  Winston asks about Wei's sister because they grew up together and he informs him that she recently overdosed and died.  Dogeyes was the one who got her addicted to drugs in first place.  They quickly bond over their hatred for Dogeyes and Wei is very good at what he does.  During a few of his assignments for Winston Wei had to kill people, use guns and in one situation blow up a building.  Naturally, his superiors in the police department were not happy with him and were beginning to question his loyalties.

Meanwhile, Winston no longer has any question of Wei's loyalty.  Winston is getting married and all of the leaders of the different Sun On Yee families will be there including the big boss himself, Uncle Po.  So all of the leaders of this gang are going to be in one place at the same time?  I can't see this going wrong in any way.  Of course a rival gang attacks and kills Winston and his wife in a really really sad scene.  This is like the red wedding before the red wedding.  Everyone gets shot except Wei of course because he is essentially Japanese Batman.  Wei finds Uncle Po shot and bleeding and manages to get him to a hospital and saves his life.  Pendrew gets sick of Wei's bullshit and has Jackie arrested to spite him.  Uncle Po promotes Wei to a higher rank in the Sun On Yee as thanks for saving his life.

Wei manages to track down one of the shooters from the wedding and he tells him that Dogeyes was actually behind the shooting.  We finally get the confrontation we have been waiting for.  Wei against Dogeyes.  Both of them now leading their own gangs.  When Wei captures Dogeyes there isn't much of a fight.  It's like he is beneath Wei now.  He is nothing to him.  Wei takes Dogeyes to Winston's mother to allow her to inflict whatever kind of justice she deems fit.  He could have taken Dogeyes in to the police but that wouldn't really have been justice would it?  Believe it or not there is still quite a bit left to this game's storyline, but this seems like a good end point doesn't it?  And I should probably talk about the gameplay a little bit before I end this review.

When I first picked up this game I assumed it was just another Grand Theft Auto clone but it turned out to be so much more than that.  It takes hours of gameplay to even unlock a gun.  I have compared the fighting to the Arkham series of games but I'm not sure if that's accurate.  In Arkham its basically button mashing and then you get attacked and you press a different button to counter.  The fighting style in this game is button mashing early on, but then you learn new combos and grapples.  I would say the fighting style is more like that of Yakuza then anything else.

Alright, this is supposed to be a review isn't it?  Thus far I haven't offered any of my own opinions.  Most gamers believe that gameplay is number one and story is secondary.  I am the opposite; I can handle bad controls and gameplay but it has to have a good story.  This is why I believe Assassin's Creed 2 is the worst game ever made.  Some games are exceptions to the rule like any Mario game or Cloudberry Kingdom but for the most part I look for a good story in games.  I was very happy to find Sleeping Dogs because it is not only one of the greatest organized crime stories I have ever heard but it is also one of the most fun games I have ever played.  Square Enix has confirmed a sequel set in the "Sleeping Dogs universe".

Scenes Out of Context: Stolen (Part 2)

This is one of the strangest scenes I have ever seen.  I have no jokes or anything.  Please subscribe to my youtube channel here and enjoy the video.

Scenes Out of Context: The Wicker Man

I would like to thank you my loyal fans for helping me reach over 1,000 views on this, The Coffin Chronicle.  I know it has been a while since you have heard from me but fear not I have returned.  Anyway, here is a very special episode of Scenes Out Of Context thanking you for your loyalty.

Scenes Out Of Context: Phineas and Ferb (Part 2)

Hooray I'm back on schedule!  So, we're back with Phineas and Ferb.  It's amazing the mileage I am getting out of this show.  Don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channel here to see these episodes and more first.

Scenes Out Of Context: Power Rangers

 So Scenes Out of Context is back and about the same as ever but hey you didn't actually think I'd be improved or anything did you?  Anyway, here's the video I hope you like it and please subscribe to my youtube channel here.

And Now For Something Entirely Different

First of all I would like to thank all of you loyal readers for sticking with me all of this time.  Sometimes working on a blog on a regular basis can feel just like that, WORK.  And it can feel thankless if you don't get a lot of views on something you really liked and cared about and put a lot of time into... So I am happy to announce that I am starting a secondary blog in addition to this blog!  It is an ongoing fictional dramady set in Green Acre High School.  It can be read at greenacreschoolpaper.BlogSpot.com or you can just click here.  I have a lot of ideas for this so hopefully this school paper will be going on for years to come.  Please join me on this journey and continue to visit the old coffin chronicle as well.

Batman: Arkham Origins

 

Well as you may have guessed I still do not have the software required to make Scenes Out of Context.  I will still be doing the show it is just on hiatus for the moment.  This review has been a long time coming, I've just been avoiding everything about it.  When Arkham Origins came out, I was so young and naïve that I was actually excited for it.  As time went on I realized that there was just absolutely no need for this game.

 

Arkham City was the perfect Batman game.  I worded that sentence very carefully.  Arkham City was not without its faults but it was as close as you could get to being Batman without putting on a cowl and attempting to fight crime.  Arkham City also had one of the greatest endings to any game I've ever had the pleasure of playing.  It was emotionally taxing and brilliant at the same time; even more so when you take into account that this was the last time Mark Hamill would be voicing the Joker.

 

 

Arkham Origins takes place at an unspecified time before Arkham Asylum at a very early point in Batman's career.  Black Mask has placed a 10,000,000 dollar bounty on the Bat's head and eight assassins have come out of the darkness to claim it.  The eight assassins are Bane, Deathstroke, Dead Shot, Fire-Fly, Copperhead, Killer Croc, Shiva, and last and certainly least the Electrocutioner.  It is unclear why Black Mask decided to put the bounty on Batman's head but if you ignore that fact long enough it gets explained.

 

The controls are the same as the previous two games but unlike the previous two games, they just feel shitty.  Often times if you press the attack button multiple times in order to perform a combo but then try to counter an oncoming attack, Batman will instead finish his combo.  This will usually lead to him getting beat up and some very frustrating battles.

 

 



One of the reasons I was so excited about Arkham Origins is because the plot was about Black Mask and a bunch of B-list villains.  This series told their Joker story, it was genius and they did not need to do it again.  Unfortunately, Arkham Origins is a Joker game in disguise.  Yes, it turns out Black Mask never put the bounty on Batman's head at all.  It was the Joker wearing a Black Mask... well mask.  He has some stupid plan to blow up the GCPD or something I don't care.  At this point, I was so angry that it was the Joker I was just playing to finish the damn game.

 

At some point, the Joker gets blown out of a window of a skyscraper and begins falling to his death.  Batman saves him much to the Joker's surprise.  He gets sent to Blackgate Prison where he meets his doctor Harlene Quinzelle.  This scene was actually really great.  Joker is talking to Harley about how he met someone who really surprised him and changed his life tonight.  The entire time he is thinking back to his origin story when he was the Red Hood.  As he is speaking, Harley thinks he is talking about her when he is actually talking about Batman.  It was really well put together and it could have only been better if my game was not constantly SKIPPING AND GLITCHING DURING THIS SCENE!  Luckily the audio still worked fine and I was able to make out what was happening.  This is where the game should have ended.  Unfortunately, there was still about three hours left.  Believe it or not nothing of note really happens so I'm just going to end my summary here.

 

I realized that these games are essentially Zelda games.  You roam around doing quests and helping people until you unlock a dungeon.  Inside the dungeon you will inevitably find a new gadget that you will need to fight that dungeon's boss.  The only real difference is that the dungeons in Gotham are just large buildings.  Also, unlike The Legend of Zelda series, all of the Arkham series of games take place along the same time-line.  The reason that that is significant is that when Batman acquires gadgets such as glue grenades and shock gloves in one game, it makes no fucking sense when he doesn't have them in the games that take place after!



The Wonderful 101

 

Hey look I'm back to actually writing blogs; well don't get used to it.  The sad fact is, I'm sick and have nothing better to do at the moment.  In addition to that, I just got a new computer and haven't got around to loading all the video software I need to make Scenes Out of Context so it may be a bit late this week... But boy is this computer nice!

 

What was I supposed to be talking about?  Oh yeah The Wonderful 101.  This is a game by Platinum Games, creators of titles such as, Madworld, Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance (that's a hard word to spell) and of course The Wonderful 101.  As I understand it, this game came about when Nintendo bought exclusive rights to Bayonetta 2.  When Platinum signed the contract Nintendo gave them free reign to make a passion project and it could be whatever they wanted.  The Wonderful 101 was the result.  And boy you can tell they had a lot of fun with this game.

 

It is a character action game that puts you in control of a colorful super-hero leading a team of up to ninety-nine other similarly named heroes.  The game feels very different than any other game that's like it because... well there really are no other games like it; but when I was playing it I was reminded of games like Lollipop Chainsaw and Bayonetta and what's interesting about that is because in those games you play as an individual character trying to control the crowd.  In The Wonderful 101, you are the crowd trying to survive individual enemies.  The game controls very well considering that you control 100 characters.  It also makes very good use of the Wii U gamepad.  There are sections of the game where you will enter a building and you will need to look back and forth from the television screen and the gamepad screen in order to solve the puzzle.  There was one in particular where the characters entered a spaceship and it went into the two screen mode.  You control the characters on the gamepad screen in order to steer the ship and avoid obstacles on the television screen.  It was not easy.  Also, enemies continually spawned within the ship.

 

 

The Wonderful 101 opens up with a scene of a school bus being attacked by aliens.  You play as the teacher Mr. Wedgewood and you must protect the students before the bus careens off of a bridge that is under construction.  Why was the bus driving towards the unfinished bridge in the first place? Who cares EXPLOSIONS!  At some point Mr. Wedgewood manages to get the children to safety and when it appears that the bus explodes, from out of the ashes appears Wonder-Red!  That's right unassuming grade school teacher William Wedgewood is merely the secret identity of Wonder-Red.  As if you didn't already guess that.  I did put a giant picture of him above this paragraph.

 

 

 

Eventually you are joined by some of the other Wonderful 100 and a tutorial ensues teaching you how to use your powers or "unite morph." Every character has a morph that is unique to them and a unique way to activate it.  Red for example, lifts a giant red fist made up of his teammates morphed into that particular shape whenever you draw a circle on the gamepad.  There is also Wonder-Blue who has a sword, Green who has a gun and so on.  Some of the morphs are great, like Wonder-White's claws that can potentially freeze enemies and allow you to climb on walls.  On the other hand, there is Wonder-Black who throws bombs that slow down time.  It sounds good on paper but it's really only useful in situations that were designed for it.

 

 





It is the duty of The Wonderful 100 to protect the Earth from alien threats and on this day there is no shortage of those.  You go up against everything from aliens the same size as you to three headed hydras the size of skyscrapers and that's just the first level.  Of course the best villain is a character who is similar to your character but just chose to go down a different path.  Someone who has more in common than they do different but we just can't admit it.  The Joker to Batman, Lex Luthor to Superman and now Prince Vorkken to Wonder Red.  Prince Vorkken leads a team of 100 of the worst scoundrels and criminals throughout the galaxy and now they've come to Earth.

 

This game has so much depth to it I could not possibly try to summarize it.  The story is just insanity in the best possible way.  There is so much to it.  Other companies would have stretched this into a trilogy but Platinum shoved it all into this one epic.  There's really no other word to describe it other than epic.  

Scenes Out of Context: Next (Part 2)

That's right folks we are back to one of my favorite films to take scenes from and I expect it will not be long before you see it again.  Please join me on this journey back into the Cage in Next.

Scenes Out of Context: Stolen

Welcome back true believers and today is the beginning of an all Nicholas Cage filled weekend.  Though he is not in this particular clip, it is one of his movies.  I hope you enjoy your time in the Cage.  Please remember to subscribe and enjoy.