Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Uncharted 2 is the kind of sequel that all game sequels should hope to be - it makes you never want to go back and play the previous one again. Which is a bit unfortunate in this case, because I still intend to replay the first game for the trophies they later patched in, but just looking at footage of it makes it clear how far Naughty Dog has come in two years. Uncharted 2 is stunning, and easily the best game they have ever made. It's possibly the prettiest game ever, both in terms of technical detail and enchanting art direction. Few games have ever impressed my programmer side (how did they do that?) and my gamer side (woah, that's awesome) at the same time, but Uncharted 2 does it constantly. This is a case where technology is used not just to make the game look nice, which most serious gamers will appreciate, but actually improve the depth and variety of interactions Nathan can perform, making it more fun, which most serious gamers will tell you is more important. There's just things it does that no other game has done, and it could end up being a real watershed moment to transform the action genre into something more dynamic and interesting than just a series of encounters with a bunch of dudes with guns.

The core of the game is still the cover-based shooting, and that's improved over the original. Most people seem to be comparing the aiming and shooting itself very favorably to the first game, saying how much better is. I'm not so sure it's the shooting itself, just that the design and pacing of the encounters is much more thought out and interesting that it often was before. I mean, there are definite improvements, especially where things like controlling the hand-to-hand and grenades are concerned, but what makes the game better is a better understanding of how to make a game like this that comes from doing it repeatedly. Still, if the game was all hiding behind walls and firing guns at people's heads, I'm not sure how much I would like it. The elements of traversing difficult terrain and solving some environmental puzzles are still there, and improved just as much if not more than the shooting.

Drake's notebook returns, but instead of just handing you the answer to a puzzle it often gives you clues to help you figure it out, and you can also flip through it to find some amusing notes Nathan made. Nate has more ways to get around at his disposal, and the climbing is integrated into real world situations more often, when he has to find his way through a war-torn city and fend off enemies at the same time. By the end of the game, I was kind of tired of the escalating difficulty of the shooting segments and their frequency, but for the most part it's an excellently paced, exciting game. The boss fight is better, and the option to improve your odds in some situations by sneaking up on the enemy is nice, although I question the decision to put a mandatory stealth section right up front before the action gets going.

While I did complain about the constant fighting by the end, one of the things that drove me to keep playing was the story. It's no match for great literature by and means, but as far as an adventure tale in the style of Indiana Jones or something, it's one of the better examples I've seen in any medium. Like the first game, the plot is based on a real-world historical mystery, and ties in likable characters and a touch of campy supernatural elements to keep you interested in the treasure they're seeking. The main cast from the first game all returns with the addition of a few new interesting characters, and the cut scenes feel like exchanges good enough for a real movie. The banter is often funny and witty, and Nate remains one of the more likable protagonists in games right now, even if his easy going personality doesn't quite mesh with him having to kill hundreds of dudes fairly often. I'd be interested to see this team do something a little less violent with the same setting, but in the meantime Uncharted 2 is possibly the best game I've played from this console generation.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

I don't remember a lot about the first movie, other than it being mostly crap, managing to screw with the established continuity for both franchises it involves, and ending with an alien fetus inside a predator. Oh my! That's pretty much where the sequel picks up - a hybrid between the two emerges, messes up the ship kills the other predators, and lands (in a very crashing sort of way) on Earth, where it and some face huggers (Which I guess were on the ship because the predators were studying them? I don't care enough to remember or look it up) proceed to wreak havoc on a small town in the United States. I won't say AVPR is anything close to a good movie, but I did enjoy it more than the first, which seems to be an uncommon sentiment. It's sort of the typical slasher set-up, unlike what we've really seen in either series previously, as it establishes a handful of interconnected and not terribly interesting characters, and then picks them off gradually in increasingly gruesome ways. Not usually my cup of tea, but it's a formula that I guess works and doesn't seem that out of place with the idea of putting either of these sci-fi killers in that setting.

Of course... those killers shouldn't be in that setting in the first place. The predator in the movie is a badass cleaner who comes in to cover up the chaos caused by the incident in the beginning. He doesn't do a very good job of it, as before long the entire town is overrun with aliens and the government has to call in the big guns. But why do they care about the cover up in the first place? They're hunters, not galactic police men. It just leads to another annoying predator who kills everyone he comes across, which is less compelling than the original characterization. Sorry to spoil this crappy movie that you don't care about the plot of, but there's a tie-in at the end to the Weyland-Yutani corporation of the Alien movies, supposing that predator technology helped humans eventually get out into space in a serious way in the first place. Um, okay... so why do they still use flamethrowers and bullets in the future if they have a predator's energy-whatever gun, and how come the company claims to have no recorded cases of the aliens previously in the future? The entire point of the Nostromo's diversion was to get a living sample of one of the creatures, but we're supposed to think it took them that long to get one when there was an outbreak of them ON EARTH during our time? They should have just made their movie with adequately gory deaths and fan-pleasing homages instead of trying to get cute and tying it all together. Also, the Predalien looks too much like the predator. Aliens from humans don't look nearly that human. Oh well.

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.

Alien Resurrection

Joss Whedon is one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction. I haven't seen much of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's work, but he did direct Amélie, one of my favorite films of the decade. So what went wrong here? I'm not quite sure. I feel like there's the core of a solid Alien movie in here - not as good as the first two, but still passable. Cloning Ripley, while resulting in a plot development that doesn't actually make sense to me, is a fine way to bring back the character back in a new way and actually advance the time period again, unlike Alien 3 which didn't feel new. The ship of smugglers were a nifty notion, and are pretty much a prototype version of the crew in Firefly. And there are some interesting situations and disturbing scenes that work better than anything in the last movie did. It just doesn't come together into something I'd want to watch again. It might just have been that it was before Whedon really discovered his chops as a screenwriter and Jeunet figured out what kind of movies he really wanted to make. Resurrection ends up being an interesting failure.

Man, I had some momentum until that paragraph break. It was getting kind of long though, it had to be done. Um... Whedon has talked about how it wasn't necessarily changes to the script that he thinks hurt the movie, just that the overall execution of what was written on the page was totally off. And I can sort of see that. There are a lot of lines or exchanges that could have been better with a different actor or just a different way of saying them, and the movie just feels clunky, like the people in charge of different areas just were never in sync. I'm not saying the story they had would have been a good film if these problems were corrected, it's just that it compounds the problem. An awkward and unwieldy film. Some moments totally work, but most of it just doesn't, and I'm confident that the latter half of the Alien quadrilogy can be, and probably should be safely ignored in the future.