Tag: Tiger

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Sadness

POSTCARDS FROM PARADISE

Recently I’ve been traveling off the island quite a bit. The pools have maintained their chlorine freshness with the help of my faithful companion, Cookie. For a few fish and cigarettes a day he doesn’t mind cleaning out the filters and even performs a little Sea Lion show for the guests in the afternoon.

So on these long turbulent flights back home to try to take my mind off of Monsoon season I usually comb through the movie section aboard each flight. Most flights have the same movies and almost all of them are bullshit. They know it and you know it. But what are you going to do? Not watch them? Stare at the suspicious guy two rows over for eleven hours? Sleep? HA! Right.

But on a red eye back to Paradise from Siberia West I found myself basically alone in the cabin with drink in hand and my headphones plugged into the auxiliary jack. I had found an old favorite. A movie that I fell in love with so many years ago. (A movie I actually paid for on Pay-Per-View back in the day). The feudal Chinese fantasy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Let’s spend this space celebrating Ang Lee’s cinematic achievement, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon based on the novel of the same name written by Chinese author, Wang Dulu.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is actually book four of five in Dulu’s Crane-Iron Series. Crane-Iron being named after the first characters in the first and last installments of the series. The series’ five novels chronicle the struggles of four generations of youxia (simplified Chinese: 游侠; traditional Chinese: 遊俠), often translated as wandering heroes. Each novel contains elements which link it with the others. (Wikipedia)

He did not write the novel for it to become this game

Wang is not only considered a pioneer of the modern wuxia genre but a writer that perfected it. Wuxia is a genre of Chinese fiction that literally translates to, “Martial Heroes”. Usually blending fantasy with martial arts and romance – characters are often from lower social classes and are driven by chivalry or righteousness.

Born Wang Baoxiang 王葆祥 in Beijing 1909 he was said to have written as many as fifty novels between 1931 and 1949. Thirty six of those novels being wuxia novels. Sadly after the Chinese civil war Wang was denounced as “reactionary literarti” by the ruling Communist party and sentenced to hard farm labor where he would die from an unknown illness.

Wang’s legacy in the west was cemented by Taiwanese screenwriter and Director Ang Lee’s adaption of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Ang Lee OBS is a cinematic powerhouse. Born in Pingtung County, Southern Taiwan he was educated in both Taiwan and the United States. His works have found international acclaim and he is a critically and commercially celebrated writer and director. His notable works include: Life of Pi, Sense and Sensibility, Hulk, and Brokeback Mountain. Aside from winning a multitude of awards he has also been awarded the Order of Brilliant Star – the second highest civilian award bestowed on citizens by the Government of Taiwan.

He did not direct the movie for it to become this game.

In 1995 the LA Times named one man, “The coolest actor in the world”. It wasn’t Samuel L Jackson or Speed Star, Keanu Reeves. It was the face of Gun-Fu. Total-stoic-badass-John Woo-regular, Chow Yun-Fat.

Chow Yun-Fat did not come from nothing to be in this game

Born in Pok Liu island, British Hong Kong, Chow Yun-Fat SBS was raised by his mother Chan Lai -Fong, a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer and his father Chow Yung-Wan who worked on a Shell oil tanker. He grew up in a farming community with no electricity waking up early each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and work in the fields during the afternoons.

At 17, he took odd jobs to help the family any way he could. It was around this time his actor-trainee application was accepted by the local television station. He was signed to a three year contract and made his acting debut in 1980. Working his way through TV as a rising star and heart throb and on to the silver screen with John Woo Chow Yun- Fat has carved himself an extraordinary career. Even being awarded the Silver Bauhinia Star – the second highest rank star in the honors system of Hong Kong. Awarded to those who have taken a leading part in public affair or voluntary work for a long period of time.

Starring alongside Chow Yun-Fat in the film is the dazzling, Michelle Yeoh PSM. Ranked the “greatest action heroine of all time” by Rotten Tomatoes in 2008 – Michelle Yeoh – known for performing her own stunts and fight scenes has been dominating screens for nearly four decades.

Behind that smile is a stone cold killer that has already killed the game’s developers and soon me for bringing the game back up.

Born in Malaysia, Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng PSM to Janet Yeoh and Yeoh Kian Teik, a lawyer and MCA politician respectively. At an extraordinarily young age Yeoh was keen on dance and began ballet by the age of four. In her teens her parents and her would move to the United Kingdom where she would attend UK’s Royal Academy of Dance.

A natural beauty at the age of 20, Yeoh won the miss Malaysia beauty pageant and even move on in competition to win an international, “Queen of the Pacific” pageant. But she is hardly a delicate flower. She has cultivated a reputation for a legendary work ethic, and expertise in choreography. She would become world renowned not only for her acting prowess but her physical capability as well.

I was going to go even further on about the lovely accomplishments of both Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen but do we even have to? Did either of them work their entire lives only to have their likeness exploited in this dumpster fire on disc?

The answer is no. No they didn’t and none of these people deserve this. These are real human beings with real feelings and aspirations. They don’t deserve this. No one does.

FANCY VIDEO INTRO

There really isn’t that much I can say that I haven’t already said about really sad games before. What is extra infuriating about this game is that:

1.) It’s actually based on a good movie. Most aren’t.

2.) The movie’s fight scenes are breathtaking. The movie literally has done everything for you. All you have to do is take a super entertaining movie fight to watch and add buttons.

I mean.. HOW can you fuck this up?? They’re like three back drops in the entire game.And yes I understand that a majority of the film takes place in the same area but is it so absurd to ask a room full of writers – whom I would have assumed enjoyed the movie (before I played the game) to use their stupid imaginations and get creative with the game’s plot??

Instead of playing the same exact three areas with three different characters like nine times maybe we could branch out a bit? Like say I don’t know – make the game about Jen’s eventual trek to Mount Wudang? Boom. There ya go, guys! Make a game about that. Fucking idiots.

But fine – say they had to follow the film to a tee. That’s fine to. Just do a better job at it. When the game begins it doesn’t introduce anyone – or anything. It assumes you already saw the movie and thrusts you into a hoard of stupid AI ninjas that constantly swarm and overbear you because the controls are fucking impossible.

Even when you do somehow learn how to defend yourself and awkwardly jump from wall to wall – none of it is remotely fun. I spent hours with this game and aside from mounting frustration I felt absolutely nothing at all. I’ve had more fun sitting at the DMV next to crying children.

In fact this game was so bad – I have felt nothing since. It has taken all of my abilities to feel anything away. Maybe it’s for the better.

SHOP TIL YOU DROP

If a general overwhelming sense of sadness isn’t quite your enough then fear not! Like most things the internet also has overpriced copies of the game – the perfect way to find yourself on that long road to financial ruin completing your self loathing sadism.

But really- the game can be found at bargain bin prices – around $3-5. The insane part to me, however is the DVD of the movie itself can be found even cheaper! Which is a crime against humanity.

If you absolutely must – I suggest buying the DVD of this film and holding a game controller while you watch it.

DESERT ISLAND SONG

PERIWINKLE’S LOWING HANGING FRUIT PUNCH INGREDIENTS

1.) A small chunk of fur from Parka (Cold Winter)

2.) A thimble of Jack Bauer’s sweat (24: The Game)

3.) A can of Reservoir Dog Food (Reservoir Dogs)

4.) A handlebar mustache (American Chopper)

5.) Blood of a Backstreet Boy (American Idol)

6.) An impossible to control Q-Tip (CSI)

7.) The tooth of a terrorist (Fugitive Hunter)

8.) One Mona Lisa Smile (The Davinci Code)

9.) One Copy of, “Night Rocker” by The Hoff (City Crisis)

10.) One blood stained trucker hat. (Silent Hill: Origins)

11.) One handful of crushed Peony petals (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

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A BIT of History Part 4 : Altered Beast (Sega Genesis)

My TALDIG had some issues working for a while but I had it fix. Now that we are  ready to travel back to the past that shows us the past again, I find myself asking, is this to weird?  Perhaps we should make these things a bit more straightforward? 

Change

Altered Beast is a well known classic for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. It started out as an arcade title in 1988 but was ported to Sega console the same year at least in Japan. The game then appeared as a launch title for the system for Europe and America and got numerous arcade releases bundle releases and was a part of the Sega Genesis Mini.
In this game you play a nameless fighter who gets resurrected by Zeus back in the days of ancient Greece (which roughly puts it at around 1200-900 BC) were you have to rescue his daughter Athena from the evil god of the Underworld Ha… I mean Neff. I distinctly remember that being somebody else though.

Altered Beast is all about changing, it’s a beat them up, the changes up the formula quite a bit. The length of the stage depends on how long it takes for you to gather three orbs that change you to more powerful forms and the final boss can only happen when you acquire beast mode. If you encounter Neff before this happens, the stage .. kind of loops on you.
You take the role of “Fighter” .. a guy in a pinkish Toga so clearly I was excited to play this one, but it left me wondering. Should I change as well?

I feel that the ‘A BIT of History’ concept might be a bit too weird to focus on. The history lessons taken from these games might be a bit too flimsy to focus on and best be relegated to a paragraph should I find such a game. So I am thinking of changing this series into “A BIT of Nostalgia’  in which  I revisit famous classic games or games that are very dear to me.
It offers me a bigger spectrum of games to play and allow me to play the games I would actually want to play, rather than have the time setting dictate which ones I should play. It took me a fair bit to get me to play this one because I wasn’t in a beat them up mood. Yet it was one of the most iconic ancient greece games. So expect some changes to this format soon. Now back to the review, because unlike the era of the ancient greeks, this game has not aged well.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures

This game features Fighter in Pink.. our hero that we all know and love! Back from the dead he has to stop the evil god of the underworld Neff and not Hadas..who turned Athena into a blue bird, which anime taught me mean she is a lesbian now. Throughout five stages you have to fight classic greek enemies such as cyclops (plural) and …. well there are Satyrs…sort of they have goat heads as well but I guess they are there? Though they are called Gory Goats here… then there are zombies, demons ant wasps and evil chickens with poisonous stingers. So clearly the greek setting is used very well. I can only assume all these creatures died out because Fighter in Pink really disliked them and punched them all to death.


The most important enemy in this game is the three headed wolf though, which came in two colours. The useless brown variant and the all mighty blue variant. Both will make the sound of a paper crumpling when you kick them and die right away, but by killing blue three headed wolves the ancient greeks could call upon the power of an orb, that turned them from buff philosophers into half naked Jojo characters.

Killing another  one then turns them into the old Dragon Ball Broly, and after killing a third blue three headed wolf the ancient greeks could turn into beastmen. The buffing up and the whole Neff  standing menacing before you, checking out if you are worth his time has a pretty big Jojo feel, this could be a new take on that series and since it’s set in ancient history I decided to name this Fighter in Pink. Jorges Jorda is a farmer who died from being attacked by animals.. now zeus resurrects him and by gathering the power of death…he can channel what caused his death.

The game does feel like a bizarre string of adventures with stages strung together like the graveyard, the swamp, the cave, the Greek building and the underworld/city of the dead. Wait.. if the hero died wouldn’t he already be in the underworld? Would that not be better to start? Now he gets resurrected and has to travel back to the underworld again. One could argue that Jorges would have to find his power orbs but Neff steals them at the end of each stage, assumingly needed to make him reach his final form or something.  Hmm.. clearly not all the ancient Greeks were philosophers. Zeus clearly wasn’t the smartest god either, then again that seems to be a bit of a theme with Zeus in games or movies, he tends to get blindsided a lot. So you heard it here first guys! Zeus can be outsmarted by uncle Fester from the Addams family.. because I am pretty sure that is who Neff is.

Too much bits

The Mega Drive was the first sixteen bit console, with amazing stuff like blast processing and an iconic sound chip.  Unfortunately it clearly shows that this game was not designed for this console and people were still a bit unfamiliar with the power of this machine. The enemies don’t look very clean. The three headed wolves look more like misshapen bulls to me and for a few other enemies I also had to struggle to look what they are. Now of course this in part is due to the home consoles being less powerful than arcade cabinets, but if we look at Turtles in Time, which although appearing later did it much better. Stages were changed up , difficulty was slightly adapted and  visuals and vocals were changed.  This games suffers from this being NOT the case in this port. In fact I like the Master System port more because it feels more distinct.

With the speech of Neff  included he welcomes players to their doom before the start of each boss fight, and doom you will face , over and over and over and over again. This is a problem with a lot of Beat Them Up ports. Most of these games were designed to be unrelenting so they can guzzle up as much of your quarters as much as possible. Basically in the arcade you have infinite lives as long as you have quarters. Good Beat them up ports thusly either give you infinite lives… as the price of a full priced game should get you infinite quarters or at least a series of lives and a handful of continues. Altered Beast on Genesis asks you to beat the entire game on three lives which basically equals three quarters. If even that!

There are NO healing items in this game so all damage is permanent. You get three “hearts”/blocks of life that can all take 1 to 3 hits depending on the enemies strength. Given that a random chicken enemy (who crossed over from Golden Axe) can take a complete life block away due to you having virtually no invincibility frames after being it.. this game is relentlessly hard.

Luckily by holding A (or 1)  plus start in the main menu you can at least continue on the stage you died on. Yet still finishing a stage is a rather herculean feat. Yet like most arcade games this doesn’t really come down to your gaming skills,but more to pattern recognition. If you know where the blue wolves will show up and you can manage to hit them quick and fast and gather your orbs fast enough these stages are fairly doable. Mostly because the bosses once you get their pattern down are actually quite easy. Except for the second boss.. whose tell of damage is so deceptive it took me five times to figure out that I wasn’t exactly damaging it when it flashes red when I hit it.. I needed to hit different hitboxes, which do not flash at all!?It’s things like this that show this game came out so early in the console’s life span, that actually influence how enjoyable the gameplay is.

Sega Does

I really wish I could be more positive about this game, but unfortunately there was very little that I liked about this game. That doesn’t make it is a bad game, just that I review if negatively, if you enjoy this all the power to you! I hope and know people do like this game, which is great, everything deserves love. I did like the variety in bosses and how you have to actually use your beasts powers and some strategy to take them down. I especially like the fourth stage boss, which is like a baby dragon with a huge lava ball. It releases some firebird minions as well as big strings of fire balls and avoiding both felt like a good challenge.

The third boss and the final boss however are total pushovers I beat them first try both without taking a hit just by using cheap tactics.  The third boss is a sort of dragonhead stuck on a helix fossil with some gooey egg sack material attached to it.. and it shoots purple balls and blobs. By using the Bear’s  (that stages animal)  spin jump while on it’s body you can defeat it without any trouble.  The third stage itself though has some awkward platform jumps which can be very irritating to get trough.

In the fifth stage we see Neff finally taking his true form, that of a white Rhino. Yet in the Master System it is Cyan and in the Arcade it is pink. It always grinds my gears when pink things are such pushovers. It isn’t much harder than Rocksteady from the first TMNT game on NES. You can easily jump over it and spam damage until it dies. No skill required. However everything else on that stage deals soooo much damage, especially the dark unicorns, so getting there.. is a long arduous process of learning where things spawn and when to punch it to death.

If you miss a blue wolf on your first roulation I found it rather impossible to stay alive long enough to reach the boss. The music is the same in about every stage with fairly little sound effects other as coming from the player so I am glad the fifth stage was the final one.  We see Athena standing next to some beastmen.. in the final cutscene and then we are done.
In the fifth stage we turn into the wolf again, we turned into the first stage as well..but this time he is golden. So I guess it’s a super Wolf?!

Also why go for choices like the Dragon and the Tiger? I get the wolf and the bear as those might be found in ancient greece but why not make one where you turn into a Bull/Minotaur and one in a horseman/centaur. So much potential here goes away with bad flavoring. I barely learned anything about ancient greece because.. nothing is done with the setting at all. The cutest thing is that they have  the chicken enemy from Golden Axe as a homage.

There was so much more they could do with this formula, even for an arcade cabinet. It’s not like the greek mythos is lacking in mystical creatures or cool enemies to fight. Yet according to this game it does, which by the logic of A BIT of History .. now means that I learned that ancient greek had plenty bland video game type enemies.. which in truth I never knew!

While I have no doubt that this game was amazing in 1988 and even in 1990 this game has been surpassed left and right by just about every other beat them up out there. Turtles 2 the arcade game, Turtles in Time, Streets of Rage, Final Fight and Towers of Mystara just to name a few. Nintendo in particular has time and time again shown that this does not need to happen to games. Sega more or less in their original IP’s as well. Yet even when we consider this one in the arcade , the better version it has been surpassed by just about everything. Sure the classic mario has been improved upon but you can still enjoy the original game, this just made me want to play Turtles in Time instead. I guess Sega really does what Nintendon’t . Because Nintendon’t age this poorly.

This cocktail has been sitting here for a while.. and it has fermented which leaves a Pine-Meh-Pple taste in your mouth if you can not add enough nostalgia sugar

All other posts in this series

Part 0: What is Pinkie Doing now

Part 1: E.V.O. The Search for Eden

Part 2: Flintstones Treasure of Sierra Madrock

Part 3: Joe and Mac Caveman Ninja’s

To be REBRANDED