The introduction is too long and bird riding is hard.

Update: I figured out what I was doing wrong while controlling the bird, so now it's less difficult and just boring. Also, the Wii remote is not reliably accurate enough to require precise movements of players when they're fighting nearly every enemy. Half of the time the controller doesn't know whether I'm swinging left vs right or up vs down, which is problematic when I have to swing one specific way just to hit an enemy.

Skyward Sword is a game that's more about its controls than its story, which is a bad place to start. When Myst popularize the use of the mouse for personal computers, it never felt like a game about clicking on things. Clicking on things was just a naturally intuitive way of playing. Everything in Skyward Sword other than sword fighting and aiming should have been simplified to not use motion controls at all, but Nintendo is still desperately trying to validate itself. If you can't use motion controls in a way that would mimic the real-world way in which you would perform an action, don't use motion controls for the action at all.

Update 2: The only difficulty I've experienced with this game is when the controls aren't responding properly. I nearly died during one of the boss fights because the game didn't realize that I was trying to stab the thing in the fucking eye with a thrust of my sword. I eventually strapped the controller to my dick and started doing pelvic thrusts instead.

I'm a huge fan of John Carpenter's The Thing. I've seen the movie more times than I can remember, played through the game another dozen or so times, watched the entirety of 1951's The Thing From Another World just for comparison's sake, and even, for a time, participated in the Outpost 31 forum where we discussed, among other things, the precise order in which the members of the U. S. research station became infected/assimilated by the eponymous alien. In fact, the only piece of The Thing-related media that I've never been exposed to is the original novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. So I'm extremely overqualified to be reviewing the new prequel to The Thing, which is obnoxiously also titled The Thing because Kami forbid we avoid confusion when discussing the two films. From this point on I'm just going to refer to the new movie as The Thing and the old one as the original, for clarity's sake.

Being a fan, you know that this review is going to go one of two ways: either I'll love the film in spite of any glaring faults it may have, or I'll hate it for failing to live up to the original. Contrary to any impression you may have from reading anything else I've done on this site, I'm actually a very positive person who's willing to give anything a chance to stand on its own merit. Even when I reviewed Epic Mickey, Aliens vs. Predator and MadWorld, I was optimistic enough about each game to actually purchase and play it for myself before deciding it was shit. So, I like to think that I have a fairly objective viewpoint when I approach anything for review, and I'll try to keep that up as I discuss The Thing.

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Video games are dead to me. The last time I bought a new game was when GoldenEye 007 came out on the Wii, which means that a remake of what is largely considered the first great console shooter (never mind those who say "best shooter/game of all time") was the last game that I considered worthy of a week-one purchase—and even then I didn't pay full price because I'm cheap/poor. But then Aliens: Infestation came along and I had to rethink my life choices.

James Cameron's Aliens, while good, is easily my least favourite movie in the series (if you can ignore the last quarter of Resurrection, the fourth film had way more atmosphere and far less Bill Paxton than the first sequel), but it's the one that spawned everything from games to comic books, a lot of which are very good. If you've ever played any of the Aliens Vs. Predator games, the weapon options and even the sound of the marine's pulse rifle were lifted directly from the second film, so I give it a passing grade based solely on its legacy.

Being an Alien fan, though, I picked up Aliens: Infestation yesterday because it's the only game I've been looking forward to besides Mass Effect 3. I've finished the first segment aboard the Sulaco and now I'm reporting back to you to let you know that the game is aaaaaaaaall right [/thumbs up and winky face].  It was made by Wayforward, the same team that did Contra 4, so you should know that it at least has potential to be good. But Infestation takes that potential goodness and converts it into kinetic goodness using physics or some shit.

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There comes a time when we need to just set some expectations right off the bat.  This is probably the worst Genesis sports game I've ever played.  Nobody tried on any level to unfuck that which was fucked, from the horridly counterintuitive fielding controls, the very worst Genesis music in history playing throughout the game (which at least you have the option of turning off), graphics that make you think you're playing an early NES game, cheap computer play, totally offense-oriented gameplay, generic playing field, generic team names, Clemens' steroid use, on and on.  It's truly reflective of the steroid era in all ways, from the outrageously high scores to inability for anybody watching or playing to really care.

Fact is, I ought to just stop this review right now, since nobody is trying.  Not the developers at Sculptured Software in any capacity other than showing up, not Sega for half-assedly slapping Clemens' name on crap, and certainly not Clemens himself in even trying to get a good lie going to a grand jury about his steroid use other than "I swear I didn't do it!" while balding and looking more like Bane wearing a Yankees uniform rather than a blacktual baseball player.  I hope he eventually gets the book thown at him, and if it's at all possible, I wish the prosecutors could add this game to the list of charges that should get him some prison time.   The only game that could have scraped the bottom of the barrel further would have been Marion Jones' Drug Free Track Meet - I Don't Consider Horse Hormones to Be Drugs 2000.

I give this game one Fuck You, Roger Clemens.  Out of syringe.

From the moment you turn this one on, you might just be thinking you're in for a Sega sports game made by EA right when that music hits. Once you start playing, however, you KNOW it.

Triple Play 96 is far superior to its 95 previous installments, from the graphics to the gameplay to the overall presentation. Every aspect of the game feels like the developers slaved away for ages until this got finished, and such effort should be rewarded, because this is a tremendous baseball game that doesn't do much of anything really wrong. There are only two things that hold this game back:

1. No matter how hard it tries, it still lacks the total masterpiece polish that made World Series Baseball '96 so great.
2. One of the only gameplay videos you'll find of it on the internet was done by my archenemy, the gayfat pedophile NecroVMX, who I hope dies of cancer.

Those gripes aside, it still brings as much to the table as any baseball game had ever done prior to this. You can customize damn near everything, from the difficulty to the schedule to the controls, and all the cool little features are made blacktually relevant because the gameplay itself is defense-oriented and entirely playable, with halfway competent computer playing and user-friendly fielding controls.  

Had this game been able to do the honors with the team licenses, as well as more detail in each team's respective playing field, it could have been THE quintessential baseball franchise game. But alas, the mid to late '90s were a time when we the consumer got our proverbial baseball video game massages with a happy ending from a slightly monkey-faced chinese-ish girl, and thus we have World Series Baseball as the steroided track star who blows away the competition by a full second, and even got away with lying to a grand jury about her steroid use. Triple Play 96, as good as it is, manages to be a distant 2nd, sitting at home crying itself to sleep at night and begging its husband for a pity fuck and never escaping its fate as "just not good enough to be the best."

Epic Mickey is a piece of shit. You probably already knew this based on nearly every review out there, but I'm not the type to take critics at their word. They could put up a sign that says "Danger: Killer bees will sting your dick beyond this point" and I would still walk past it like an optimistic moron and wonder why my dick suddenly hurts.

I'll try to keep this review short because you should already know the gist of the game and my wrists are still hurting from playing it, which is actually my first point: Epic Mickey is the very first and only Wii game that has ever made my wrists hurt from playing. The pointer is so unresponsive and the camera tried so hard to fuck me over at every turn that I just spent the last twenty minutes wrenching my hand in order to aim the paintbrush around corners and overtop of knee-high obstructions. I'm being absolutely literal here: I couldn't throw paint at a wall that was directly in front of me because Mickey's shins were blocked by a grassy hill. He just stood there spraying paint at his feet like an idiot pissing into the wind.

The game is supposed to be an adventure-platformer hybrid yet has nothing but contempt for either genre. The appeal of adventure games is in solving environmental puzzles that give you a reason to explore a series of beautiful settings. Epic Mickey tries to emulate this, but the settings all look like shit even for a Wii game and every single puzzle involves spraying thinner at things to dissolve the scenery until you find a hidden path or area. It's the evolutionary form of the ancient art of pixel hunting (ghost type, immune to fun).

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Here's a great example of why you have GAME TESTERS to fuck around with your game before releasing anything to the public.  Other than insanely overhyped games that get rave reviews for no other reason than paying to advertise in a review magazine, sports games in particular have the unique ability to reach homes before almost every single one of the players in said homes finds at least one completely game-breaking flaw or bug to exploit, completely negating any positive gameplay review that was or will be published.  This is often because reviewers don't catch them, because most reviewers hate sports, know nothing about sports, and want to be done with the review as quickly as possible.  Such was the case with the infamous Madden '95 for the SNES.  Sometimes, the flaws are right in your face and don't even pretend not to destroy any legit enjoyment you would otherwise have unless the players decide to enforce your own honor system of rules amongst each other in a 2-player game.

MLBPA Baseball is every bit as infamous as Madden '95, but like any other sports game of the early to mid-'90s, you won't find a shred of evidence of this on the internet, because the many fans of sports video games hide in the sports forum crowds, calling each other fags, challenging each other to fights on Facebook at a location where neither party will show up because each will be caught with child pornography before the week is out.

MLBPA Baseball features authentic 1993 rosters, but not the MLB license itself, so you only get likenesses of team colors and the city name instead of the official team.  It's also very difficult to distinguish any of the locations where you might be playing, but those are nitpicky criticisms for 1992.  No, the REAL issue here is the gameplay.  More specifically, the ability to completely break the legitimacy of the gameplay by doing the following:

STEP 1: Pitch out the batter to first base.

STEP 2: While pitching to the next batter, continue to throw to first base until the last guy decides to take too big a lead off of first and gets thrown out (usually within 3 or 4 pitches).

STEP 3: Repeat.

It's a hilarious pattern, and what's even more frustrating is that playing any other way against the computer makes it nearly impossible to even get a single hit, hoping for a random home run every now and then.  Everything else is either very basic (a good thing) or, in the case of fielding, confusing as getting military instructions from a retarded dog (a bad thing unless you consider that some military authority figures are dumber than a retarded dog).  I could make countless other jokes and metaphors about playing this game and not getting to first base... IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, but that would be childish and also inaccurate, since the anger you might feel after playing will be more than enough to STEAL HOME... IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

I mean sexual assault, in case you were wondering.