NEW TRAILER-SPLOSION EXTRAVAGANZA!

Whelp, it's almost Summer.  Which means that the greatest time of the year is almost upon us. Summer blockbuster season.  But since Summer blockbuster season is almost here that means that right now is the second greatest time of year.  Not christmas you sadist!  Tis the season of new trailers!

Lets begin with Jurassic World.  The second official trailer for this behemoth was released two days ago and it looks even bigger and Chris Prattyer than originally anticipated.  When I saw the first trailer for this film I was skeptical despite everyone else in the world ruining the pair of pants they were wearing with a combination excitement fluid lets just call "gross juice."  My skepticism came from one particular part in the trailer where the female business lady says that they decided to make a super dinosaur for lol's.  It was at that point where a small part of my brain stood up and said, "alright other personified brain people, I know this is a movie about dinosaurs but this is too much." He then shook a few hands hugged his wife and child and retired.

In this second trailer, they not only continue the stupidity, but they embrace it!  Yeah we made a super dinosaur and you know what?  She's super smart too!  She's such a badass she ate her own brother!  Yeah we made two super dinosaurs you got a problem with that?  So for half this trailer I was back in.  This was going to be a slasher movie where you root for the dumb teens having sex to be murdered by the big bad killer and I couldn't wait.  But then... The unexpected.  Vincent D'Onofrio showed up.  And that part of my brain that retired and was gone for weeks kicked the door in and ran into the room shouting, "No you can't kill Detective Goren!" So you win Jurassic World.  You've got me.

Next up lets take a look at Terminator Genisys.  I hope I spelled that right, why didn't they just call it genesis?  Anyway, this movie looks awesome!  I hope they explain why the hell they sent back an old and decrepit Arnold Schwarzenegger model Terminator to fight a young and hot Arnold Schwarzenegger model but aside from that... This movie looks FUCKING AWESOME!

Moving on, we have Batman V Superman Dawn of Justice.  Okay, before we get into this trailer I have a confession to make.  I really like Man of Steel.  I know, I know, die hard comic book fans hate Man of Steel because Superman did more harm than good.  He killed as many people as Zod and his people and I know all of this.  For all of these reasons and more I love Man of Steel.  Superman is a child wielding a sledgehammer for the first time.  He has never used his power to such an extent before and when he does, things get destroyed.  This first teaser trailer does not show us much but it looks like Dawn of Justice is in direct response to fan criticism.  The reason that Batman wants to take out Superman is because he uses his power like a child swinging a sledgehammer.  Like I said I love Man of Steel so if they take all of the problems I did have with it and address them, then great!

Now lets discuss the trailer itself.  First of all what is the pose Superman is doing for that statue? It looks like he's about to throw a shot-put.  I like the way that the scenes in the beginning of the trailer are juxtaposed between people bowing to Superman and just generally being in awe of him, and the stupid shot-put statue that has been gratified to say 'False God'. It really sets the two-sided tone for the movie.

Now lets talk about Batman.  Ignoring the fact that Ben Affleck already played this exact same role in Daredevil, that one scene of him as Bruce Wayne looking kinda sad looked alright I guess?  But then he puts on the suit.  I was really not sure what to expect when it came to the Bat-suit.  Being an avid comic reader I know that Batman is able to hold his own in a physical altercation with Superman in his regular old Bat-suit using only a few gadgets and good old Gotham moxie!  However, I knew that a regular man in a rubber suit fighting what is essentially a God would be a hard sell to your average movie going audience.  The compromise that we got was pleasantly surprising.  Batman has kind of got an Iron-Man thing going on.  The armor explains how he will be able to take a punch from Supes without dying and how he will be able to hit him and actually get him to feel it.  Best of all the armor modulates Ben Affleck's voice so now we will not have fans complaining about how stupid he sounds when he is doing his Batman voice even though HE HAS TO CHANGE HIS VOICE SOMEHOW WHAT DO YOU WANT?!

All this talk about Batman being able to hurt Superman and vice versa leads me to my biggest problem with this movie and that is the premise of the movie itself.  Comics have a long tradition of having heroes fight each other for every reason you can imagine; but just because something is a tradition does not mean it is good.  Every time I come across one of these issues, after sighing for an hour straight without taking a breath, I think to myself, "couldn't this entire fight be avoided by a simple conversation."  Avengers Vs. Xmen, Civil War, World War Hulk, that time Jason Todd came back and was a villain because Batman never killed the Joker, all of these times and countless others could just be avoided if the heroes involved just sat down and talked.  But in reality that's not possible. Much like movies, comics need to have explosive action scenes on every page because if they don't they might not sell.  Which is probably why independent comics are starting to dominate the scene.  I'm getting off topic.  The point is that Bruce Wayne is one of the most intelligent people in the DC Comics universe! That is a universe that makes up multiple universes, if you can understand that.  He is not the type of character that jumps to conclusions.  The fact that the entire plot of this move revolves around Batman being so afraid of Superman that he acts without all of the facts, is laughable...  But that's comics.

What's Been Going On In My Neck Of The Woods?

Whelp it's been almost a year since my last update so it seems like I may be due for a new post.  I could say that I've been too busy to post and that work has been taking up most of my time but you and I both know that's just bullshit and lets be honest, you've heard the excuses before.  Now please forgive me if this post seems dissimilar to some of my others but The Coffin Chronicle has always been meant to be a bit of therapy session for me and... well sometimes therapy sessions get loud and angry.

Lately people have been asking me if I am okay or if I'm feeling alright and the answer is no I am not.  I am far from alright and I certainly don't feel well.  I don't feel right about my station in life right now and when I think about the fact that I am twenty-five, still live with my parents and have contributed virtually nothing to society worth while I feel physically ill.  I have quit everything I have everything I have ever started.  I dropped out of high school, I dropped out of college and quit every job I've ever had!  I even consistently quit my very own blog which if you are reading this you are already aware of.

The only thing that has been consistent in my life is video games.  I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember.  My earliest memory of.. well anything is sitting on my bunk bed with my dad and my brother playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES.  I think that the reason I love video games is because they allow me to escape into a reality that is in a lot of ways better than my own.  When I'm playing Shadow of The Colossus I'm not some pathetic loser who can't get a date.  I'm a man who will topple giants and take on unreal odds to save the love of his life.  This is also the reason I'm so critical of bad games.  If I can't get immersed in the experience and the world that the developer is trying to make for me than I'm just stuck here in real life, and real life can be painful.  This is also the reason I've decided to go back to college.  Hopefully, I won't drop out again.  I'm going to become a video game developer.  If I can help somebody else escape their shitty reality and feel better even for a little while than maybe I can stop feeling so shitty myself.

I hope this entry wasn't too depressing for everyone but if you made it this far thank you, sincerely thank you.  I wanted this to be a short post just to let everyone know I'm not dead but I guess I had a lot of stuff to get off my chest.  I know I said earlier that I continuously quit this blog but I would never stop doing this for good.  The Coffin Chronicle will always be here no matter what.

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.