Film Review #31 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

     After a bit disappointing Thor sequel, Captain America makes his return on the big screen in the post Avengers era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in The Winter Soldier, which is one of Marvel's best films to date. Now I haven't seen The First Avenger, but The Winter Solider is more of a standalone film, with the references being explained through flashbacks. The story itself is insane, and in a good way. The risks it takes with the MCU is surprising, and the events will surely have dramatic consequences on the future Marvel movies (in fact it's already affected ABC's Agents of SHIELD, a TV show based in the same universe). It's gripping, exciting, and well written, and allows for some fantastic set pieces visually impressive moments. A minor gripe I have is that the actual "Winter Solider" isn't really present in the movie that much. He shows up, causes trouble, and leaves. Rinse and repeat. It's only after his identity is revealed that he appears more often, but he's still not involved enough in the plot for the movie to be subtitled after him.
     I don't know how Marvel's going to top this one off. They've got plenty in store - plans for movies up to 2020 if I remember correctly - but I hope it's as good or better than this. I'm definitely excited for the future of these movies.

Film Review #30 - Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories HD (PS3)

     

      An HD remastering of a remake of a Gameboy Advance game. At this point, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories has been on three platforms: the original GBA game, the PS2 remake, and the HD remastering included in the 1.5 HD ReMIX collection on PS3! The game was a significant departure from the original game back when it was originally released. Instead of an action game with some RPG elements, the combat system was based around cards. The system definitely has a learning curve, but once you learn it's intricacies and how to build a good deck, you'll be having a lot of fun during the 20-30 hours it takes to beat Sora's campaign. Once you beat it, another campaign unlocks: Reverse / Rebirth, where you play as Riku and get to see his side of the story. This campaign lasts from about 6-8 hours and is fairly similar to Sora's campaign. You go through all the same worlds, fight the same bosses and go through the same rooms as you always do thanks to the map cards. These worlds are shorter though, due mostly to the fact that the Disney side-stories in these worlds have been cut. The combat is also more action oriented, you're forced to use a premade deck that doesn't include any magic spells, and you don't have any sleights (combinations of cards that activate a special move) but this is offset by the awesome "Dark Mode" version of Riku, and the Duels.

     Story-wise, it's very much a Kingdom Hearts game. It's nonsensical and crazy, but effectively tugs at your heartstrings during it's emotional moments. It also ties Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 perfectly, making the convoluted story easier to understand when you boot up the sequel. It's a beautiful looking game with a great soundtrack, a good story, and a robust battle system that changes up the formula. It's definitely worth checking out, though probably only if you've played the first Kingdom Hearts game.

Processing Assignment: Interactive Application

     "Synergy" is a simple interactive application: if you press the mouse button, white and cyan lines draw across the black background according to the (X, Y) and (Y, X) position (respectively) of your cursor. Text is printed at the bottom telling that if you press a button, the screen clears.

Film Review #29 - How I Met Your Mother Season 9

     Nine years after How I Met Your Mother graced our TV screens, the comedy series comes to a long overdue close. So how was the final season overall? To put it in one word: disappointing. You have to commend the writers for trying out a new style of storytelling for sitcoms (that is, cramming an entire weekend into one season) but it mostly fails to stay relevant to the overall plot. So many episodes are just filler episodes and aren't even that funny. When the episodes are relevant to the plot however, it really reminds me of the early seasons of the show. In the end though, the season is invalidated by the first 10 minutes of the finale.
     Let's talk about the final episode. Since it's aired, fans have taken to Twitter to either say how much they loved it or hated it. I believe the finale was very good and satisfying, the main problems coming from the structure and content of the final season itself rather than the final episode. So much happens in that final episode that you could make an entire season about it, which is what they should have done instead of focusing the entire season on an event that takes about 48 hours.
     How I Met Your Mother will be missed, but it was about time that the show ended. Kudos to the writers for sticking with the ending they planned 9 years ago, and I hope the spinoff "How I Met Your Dad" isn't terrible. Will have to keep an open mind about it.