Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

So this was a strange movie. The whole thing is practically one long drug trip as Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro wander around Vegas hallucinating and acting crazy. It's frequently very funny, although just as often merely bizarre. I struggled to find a point to the whole thing, as it's based on a semi-autobiographical book by Hunter S. Thompson and just seems to be a snippet of one of the crazier times in his life. Based on a few old interviews I've seen, Depp's portrayal of the fictionalized version of Thompson was pretty spot on, although with some extra flair on some things like the odd way he walks everywhere while tripping. There's a lot of brief appearances by recognizable people sprinkled around, like Cameron Diaz and Christina Ricci. I got the sense that they enjoyed making the movie, although in practice it's not as fun to watch. I liked a lot of it for the most part, but in general it was just a bit too intensely strange and wandering for my taste. For some reason del Toro's always been a bit of an enigma to me. He plays a lot of interesting parts and does unique things with them, but I rarely think of his performances as truly great or memorable. He gained a lot of weight for this part and has his moments (I love how he couched all his advice with the "as your attorney" bit, even when it had no relevance whatsoever), but in the end I struggled to find a point to his presence. Sort of like the whole movie I guess. I like Terry Gilliam as a guy, but so far I've yet to see his style really make a whole movie work. This was interesting but flawed, and I thought 12 Monkeys was held back a bit. He's allowed to keep trying, though.

Predator 2

I think the original film is one of the best action movies of the 80s, but I wasn't a big fan of the series' step into the 90s. It takes place in Los Angeles in the then-future of 1997, and replaces the terminator and the jungle environment with city streets and a guy who is perpetually too old for this shit. It's from that dated style of film where gratuitous blood and violence is obviously better than the alternative and a swear word that we haven't heard in four minutes is as clever as it needs to be. The first movie had some corny bits - "stick around!" comes to mind - but it somehow felt different. The predator itself was a deadly enemy to be feared, and the guys it was hunting down were serious, dedicated men. In Predator 2, Danny Glover sneaks up behind gang members in a shootout with the cops in the middle of the street during the day and shouts "Hey, assholes" anyway so he can see the looks on their faces when he mows them down. He's surrounded by as cliched a group of cops as you can find, and this is in the middle of the period where Bill Paxton had the market on over-loud obnoxious douches absolutely cornered. The police angle did absolutely nothing for me, and unfortunately a lot of the movie hinges on it.

The predator in the first film had a goal - he was on a hunt, collecting the trophies of one of the best fighting forces on Earth. In this movie any actual goal either doesn't exist or is so unapparent as to be trivial. It just goes around killing anyone it wants to - mostly those at least brandishing weapons, yes, but there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just pointless, going around killing while the police futilely try to track it down. Later a special team investigating the creature and trying to acquire its technology - a team surprisingly willing to divulge its secrets to any cop tenacious enough to confront them say two or three times - tries to take it down in a warehouse, and from there is a prolonged, poorly paced sequence of events where Glover follows it around as the two play cat and also-cat. The film lurches to a conclusion promising a sequel that never really came, and ties up a truly disappointing successor to a pretty darn good movie. Just like with Alien, the first half of the series is all you need to see.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The second game in the vaunted trilogy. It didn't make the same leap from 3 as 3 did from 2 or San Andreas did from it, but it was still an important addition.

After 3, some wondered where the series would go from there. Not many expected it to go back in time. 3 was basically contemporary, but you didn't get that much of a feel for the setting or main character. That was probably Vice City's biggest contribution to the series. Instead of a nameless, voiceless criminal, you played Tommy Vercetti, a person with goals and opinions. It was refreshing to play someone who could think for himself and often took matters into his own hands instead of just taking orders. Sometimes he was still doing grunt work, but he was in charge of his own fate. Along with the character, the game's radio played a huge part in placing you in the world. Instead of some generic house and pop music, there was a variety of stations playing a bunch of real music from the 80's. It set the mood about as well as it's been done in a video game. The music, along with the general aesthetic of the city and people in it went a long way. I don't have that much nostalgic attachment to that decade, being three years old when it ended, but it still made the experience more entertaining. The talk radio wasn't quite as good as 3's Chatterbox, but there were two stations and they were both good.

There were a lot of small gameplay tweaks and improvements that made the experience better. The addition of motorcycles might not sound that significant, but they were quite useful, and I still usually pick them over cars unless I know I'm going to be taking heavy damage. They're more maneuverable, allow you to fire straight ahead, and can be bailed from without injury. The only problem is that crashes can be pretty hazardous to your health, especially when you go flying over a railing and into the river, which Tommy still couldn't swim through. There were much better boats though, and helicopters and planes were a fun way to get around quickly. The variety of melee weapons instead of just the bat was cool, although it stifled the more dangerous part of your inventory quite a bit. There was more freedom progressing the story, too. You had to build up a criminal empire by taking over and improving various businesses like a club or marina, And it was cool buying up safehouses all over town. The story was more interesting than 3's, easy when your protagonist is so much deeper, and the missions featured more variety and complexity. My only problem with the gameplay was the design of the city itself. Part of the fun is always the car chases, either pursuing traitors or evading the cops, banking around tight turns and barreling down hills. There just weren't that many hills to be found. There were nice jumps sprinkled around, but it was all just a little flat in places. Still, it was a fine game that improved over 3 in almost every way.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

This is the fifth GTA game I've played on the PS2 using the same engine, and I have to admit I'm pretty glad to admit it's the last. A new GTA game used to be an event, and the new games were always impressive in their scope and what they added to the series. But the gameplay has gotten tiring, and these ports of PSP titles don't do much to stay fresh. A lot of the allure of the "Stories" PSP games is that you get to play GTA on a portable system. When you put the same game on PS2, that allure is gone. Liberty City Stories had the same problem, but it wasn't as long, and so it didn't wear out its welcome as much as this does. There's nothing that really makes Vice City Stories inferior to LCS, it just feels even more played out. The city is familiar and Lance Vance is as irritating as ever. He's seriously one of the worst game characters in existence. He has no redeeming qualities. He's an idiot, not funny, and doesn't help. All he usually does to a mission is make it harder than it needs to be. His brother, the guy you play is, is better, but not by much. As a person he's not unlikable, but his motivations are a little messed up and it's hard to care knowing he's going to die in a couple years. That's a big problem with both Stories games - finding the will to try when half the characters you're protecting are going to get killed anyway. The biggest problem was right in the game - an extremely frustrating mission, the entire point of which is to save someone, which results in that character dying anyway. Gee, great.

VCS does offer some stuff the original game doesn't. Helpful additions like swimming, trip skip, being able to buy back confiscated weapons, et cetera make the experience less frustrating. Despite some shitty characters, the story is pretty decent and well-written, the radio stations are still hilarious, and they're filled with lots of great 80's songs. Visually, it's improved a bit, with nice draw distances and lighting, plus the blur effect they introduced in San Andreas that happens when you're going extremely fast. The load times are much better than the original games, but I wish they could have taken out the load between parts of the city. If they can stream all of San Andreas, they should be able to stream all of Vice City. There are some creative missions, but as usual, as it goes on it all devolves into a lot of shooting and exploding. The targeting continues to be terrible, and it's just disgusting to see the final battles always playing out with you sprinting away a little bit to protect yourself and just holding down target and fire. I can't wait for Grand Theft Auto IV, which looks to be more realistic, and hopefully will have a decent combat system. VCS is annoying sometimes, but it's definitely not a bad game for $20.