Current music:	0712. SNK - [King of Fighters '99 Arranged Sound Trax] Tears
Entry tags:	anime, gaming, rant

Two short reviews
It's just as the title says!

Bioshock Demo (PC)

This game is awesome.
The demo lets you play about 45 minutes of the game, and doesn't have any saving. I had to turn off high quality shaders to get the game to run without crashing after the intro sequence, but you know what? It STILL looks freaking awesome, and has tons of atmosphere. The ruined city of Rapture really feels like it was transplanted from the 1960s, and the game is great at building a creepy atmosphere. The voice acting is excellent and adds a lot of creepiness at times. And of course, the water looks absolutely fantastic.

Oh, and the gameplay? Similarly engaging. The controls are easy to get used to quickly if you've played any FPSes before, and while the weapons you get are fairly pedestrian, the plasmid powers you can wield are loads of fun. The demo gives you access to two powers, electricity and fire, and even with these you can do all sorts of cool stuff. Oh, and don't forget the hacking. There's something ridiculously cool about zapping a sentry robot with your lightning plasmid, then hacking it to work on your side and watching it have a shootout against another sentry. Or zapping the security camera that summoned the robot in the first place and hacking IT so that it triggers when enemies show up and sics security robots on them. Oh, and electrocuting enemies who are standing in water while all this is going on. And setting them on fire too, of course. I'm sorely tempted to play it again, solely to try other creative ways to dispatch the splicers who will come at you.

It's a short demo, but damn if it hasn't gotten me excited for the full game!

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And from one end of the spectrum to the other...

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Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

I recently watched the finale to this season over the weekend.

Around the time of its premiere, Code Geass was hailed as the "omfg best show of the season" by many an anime fan. It certainly did start on a high note. However, soon thereafter I began to realise one fact. Namely, that the narrative woven by the writers is less than compelling.

Way too often, I would be watching something and find myself wondering "uh yeah, but what happened to..." The writers seem to enjoy jumping from one subject to another with no regard for plot flow or even common sense. One example of this is the character called Mao. He was called into existence for the reason of explaining one plot point, which he did, and was disposed of after this purpose was fulfilled. So what did the writers do? THEY BROUGHT HIM BACK, and made him take up an entire episode which was of no consequence to the overarching plot whatsoever.

This isn't really an isolated incident either. There are even two episodes dedicated to nothing but recap when the series is only 25 episodes long. Virtually none of the plot points brought up at the start of the series have been resolved at the end (Lelouch is no closer to figuring out who killed his mother, for instance) and in fact dozens more have been introduced, many of them pointless (what the hell was the point of the whole Villetta subplot anyway?!). And to top it all off the season ends on a ridiculous cliffhanger, pretty much guaranteeing Sunrise an audience for the second season.

This isn't to say it's without its good points. The animation is nice, the voice acting is good, and some of the mecha fights are pretty well done. I also have a soft spot for some of the characters like Kallen and C.C. However, if you ask me, the people calling Code Geass one of the best shows of last season need to take a longer, harder look at it.