Doing It Better (Or Worse): Crash Bandicoot’s Story

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I haven’t done one of these in half a million years! You guys ready for more bad ideas!? This one I thought up on the fly to be perfectly honest, so I’ll try to make this quick. Crash Bandicoot’s story is pretty ass, horribly mangled, poorly connected, left unmitigated in the remastered trilogy, and is made even more confusing by the time Crash 4 rolls around with Nitrus Brio being Cortex’s underling again. I’m not gonna mention gameplay ideas since those are pretty easy to rectify (taking out this bullshit one-hit death nonsense for starters).

So… lets have it where Cortex, Crash, and the rest of the villains.. . exist in the future. The mind control w/e that Cortex failed to use on Crash himself… would succeed here, and he would be just another member of Cortex’s army. Cortex himself would be a little more competent, a little less silly, wacky, less Megamind-ish, and more along the lines of… lets go with Megatron. That kind of dickhead. Also give him some cyborg eyes just to drive home the “evilness”, just make him look a little scary.

But like I said, Crash is already under Cortex’s control by this point, and to signify this, he’d have bright red eyes as well. He would be joined by Ripper Roo, Pinestrip Pataroo, and Koala Kong. N.Gin wouldn’t exist at all. Sorry, I just think he’s a really shitty character who only exists to be “Igor”, and that’s just not worth wasting time on. He’s also very forgettable as a villain. At least Nitrus does something, you know?

Speaking of which, during this time period, Nitrus Brio and Neo Cortex are something of scientific rivals (yeah yeah, Dr. Light + Dr. Wily). Brio isn’t necessarily evil in this instance as he opposes Cortex on the grounds of ethics. Cortex is the typical mad scientist who is deep in genetic experimentation on anyone with a pulse. He believes in evolution “by any means necessary”, something that no one agreed with. He constructs the “Evolvo-Ray”… goddamn that’s a stupid name. You know what? Lets call it the “Evoluder”… that’s even dumber… fuck it, “Evoluder” as a global dispersion ray that could turn everyone into mutants that would be capable of surviving any atmosphere, any environment, and any planet without oxygen. The whole “oh shit climate change is beating our asses, we’s got to change wit it!” However, the Evoluder requires specific “Crystals” to power it, and the only source of those crystals are locked away in maximum security facilities across the planet since, after thousands of years, could no longer form naturally in the environment. Despite his countless requests for crystals, Brio had constantly recommended that w/e ministry of science/government/who gives a fuck… to always REJECT them on the grounds of “he be up to no good”. So because he lacked the necessary resources, he could only mutate and control 4 beings, the afformentioned Crash, Ripper, Kong, and Pinstripe. He DID have enough power to mutate one more individual, however, and decided to have Crash kidnap Brio.

Back at the lab, he mutates Brio into his Hulk form, and now has an army of 5. With them, Cortex tries to attack these facilities for the crystals. However, he’s always getting thwarted by… oh lets just say “Spyro”. No I don’t know or particularly care if the franchises are connected, they might as well be. Also no, I don’t know shit about Spyro either.

Anywho, because he kept getting his ass whooped, Cortex devises another plan. He sends Pinstripe to retrieve some of Brio’s research notes (Brio as he is now is too psychotic and stupid to do anything right.) and finds that he was studying the possibilities of Time Travel. Since the crystals exist in the past, the most abundant source being under the 3 Wumpa Islands in ancient times (as they no longer exist in the future), and since the current era faces an energy crisis amongst others, it would be far more prudent to go back in time to fetch more energy crystals (or fix the parts of time that led to the present’s events in the first place). So Cortex spent the rest of his time researching the possibilites of Time Travel itself, and found that the energy he would require for this would… also come from the crystals. However, he did find that he could substitute that energy with “Gems”. Gems are…. less powerful than Crystals, lets just say that. Despite this, he learns that the energy needed for a potential time machine… is also significantly less than that of the Evoluder.

So he constructs one.

Now he has his time machine, and his 5 minions prepped to head into the past to find that abundant source of crystals. However… people suspected that Cortex was up to something. So, on the day Cortex planned to go back in time, Spyro attacks his lab in an attempt to stop him!

Crash vs Spyro! Yay?

Crash is instructed to hold Spyro off until Cortex can get the machine up and running, and is joined by Kong and Nitrus. During the scuffel, Spyro headbutts Crash so hard that he gets amnesia before Kong drags him into the time machine with the others. Spyro… doesn’t follow them.

In the “Temporal Tunnel”, Crash, being amnesiac, starts to freak out and attack everyone, causing the entire group to get launched into different locations in the past. The bulk of the group is launched onto the second of the 3 Wumpa Islands, Pinstripe and Brio on the 3rd, and Crash being stuck on the first. At this point, Crash is FERAL! So he starts going around and fucking up everything he comes into contact with.

Lets call this the start of the first game. The first couple of levels would be Crash in Feral mode. I’d probably have it where the game just starts off like this without any real prologue or opening scenes, and have Crash all evil and Feral looking. Just have it be where the players have to figure out what the fuck is going on as the story progresses.

Now… the first boss of Crash 1 was a fat guy named “Papu Papu”, but it was never explained who the hell he was or what tribe he led (I assume he was a chieftan). So lets just call them the “Wumpa Tribe”, and for added measure, have Coco, Tawna, and those Trophy bitches from CTR all being a part of this tribe, complete with Flinstone clothing. This Wumpa tribe worships Aku Aku as their God. Anywho, again, Crash is Feral and can’t quite control himself, so he cuts loose on the nearby Wumpa village and beats wholesale ass on all the Wumpa Warriors (it’s fun saying “Wumpa”, I don’t know why). Papu Papu is the last “Warrior” to get his ass whooped, and is almost killed by Crash. However, Coco manages to lure him away with a regular fruit, taking him all the way to a shrine that summons Aku Aku at any given time. There, by enciting some ancient bullshit that binds Crash in place, she begs for Aku Aku to purge the “Evil Mojo” from Crash’s body.

In doing so, he accidently gives Crash… even MORE amnesia, not remembering exactly what he did just moments ago. From there, Crash just runs out of the shrine… and gets lost on the island. Coco follows him and finds that Crash is… kind of stupid and without direction, but he’s not inherently a bad dude, so she goes to him and shows Crash the way back to the Wumpa village… where they promptly lock his ass up. After some begging and persuasion from Coco and a certain Village Elder, Papu Papu decides to release Crash and allow him to stay in the village… on the grounds that he helps repair the damage he’s caused.

During all this, he meets Tawna and hits it off. For the sake of fairness, she wouldn’t have spoken dialog either. It’d be pretty dumb if only one of them could speak actual words.

After about a week or so, Cortex would finally locate the village where Crash is located. Within, he and his other minions start attacking. When Crash tries to fight them back, Cortex refers to him as a traitor… which confuses him. Cortex then assumes that the villagers turned Crash against him, so in retaliation, he kidnaps some of the villagers (specifically the trophy bitches), and Tawna, hoping to use them as bargaining chips for Crash to return to his side.

Obviously, instead of doing that, Crash and Coco both go out to fuck up Cortex’s crew. So… they do. The next 3 bosses go on about how Crash betrayed them and such, while Nitrus Brio would revert back to his human form and “explain everything”.

After defeating Cortex and rescuing his woman, Crash and crew go back to the Wumpa Village to hopefully live out the rest of his life there, Nitrus in tow. However, as with the intro to Crash 2, Cortex finds the Crystals that he needs for his Evoluder. However, he has no way of getting back to the future. An oversight on his part. Also unfortunately for him, the technology in this time period was far too primitive to simply build another one. However, he knew of an alternative.

For Crash 2, Cortex recalls from his own research about the remains of an extinct “Wumpa faction” if you will. One that worshipped the Tribal War God “Uga Uga”. Unlike Aku, Uga was sealed away in a shrine, an event that coincided with the destruction of said faction. Understanding that Gods from the ancient world can exist “outside the boundaries of time”, he theorizes that if he releases Uga, he could learn from him the power to traverse time at will. However, he has no means of breaking the seal of the shrine. His minions were all gone as well. So he thought of the next best thing.

What Cortex does is lure Crash to the 2nd Island by… creating a fake Nitrus Brio doll, and pretending to kidnap the ugly doctor, somehow without being discovered as the culprit, while using recordings of Nitrus’s cries for help to bait Crash into destroying the Shrine, and releasing Uga Uga!

After escaping his confines, Cortex tracks him down and proclaims to be his faithful servant and follower. Though Uga doesn’t recognize his clothing, he assumes that he was confined for too long, and believes the world has changed drastically to where one’s garb is new. Cortex then pleads with Uga to teach him the ways of time travel so that he can return to the future. It’s here that Uga tells Cortex of an ability to manifest the powers of “Dark Mojo” which would allow him to traverse time itself, but he would require the “Crystals” themselves. Unfortunately for him, the amount of crystals on all 3 of the Islands weren’t nearly enough for Cortex to utilize, or so Uga said. The crystals, as it turns out, could only occur if there was enough “evil” in the world. In other words, Uga Uga’s influence could not infest the Wumpa Islands since he was sealed away. But evil lurks throughout the rest of the world. Thus, they would have to find the Crystals elsewhere. Uga decides that it is in his best interest to remain on the Islands to regain his power with what little crystals exist while commanding Cortex to find more Crystals throughout the world, on his own, since he claims to be such a “faithful” follower. Without any weapons or actual fighting capabilities, Cortex had one more trick up his sleeve now that events were going in his favor.

Going back to Wumpa Village, Papu Papu explains who Uga is before having Crash exiled for his part in releasing the Evil God, practically dooming their tribe and islands to possible extinction. This would be the actual reason Tawna “leaves” as Crash is not allowed to live on the Island. Coco goes with him because… well… he’s not bright enough to live alone. In either case, Crash is now searching for a new world to settle in. That’s… when Cortex shows up. He tells Crash that… well, it was never meant to be. As he is a mutant from the future, he could never live amongst the natives of the past. That his place was always with Cortex and his minions, and explaining that it’s best to go back to the future and set things right. Crash, of course, refuses on the grounds that “Dude, you just tried to kill me in the last game!” He’d say that if he knew how to talk. So Cortex spins a new story. That perhaps he could be allowed back into the village if he were able to seal Uga back up. Rectify his mistake! The only way to do so is to collect a large assortment of Crystals. They contain the power necessary to contain a God! “Why… you could see your precious Tawna again!” Crash eagerly jumps at the chance to save the world from Uga. Coco, of course, has her doubts about this ordeal. Despite this, she goes along if only to keep Crash out of trouble.

As for Uga and the Wumpa Village, well… he razes the fucking Wumpa Tribe to nothing but Ash! Tawna is the only survivor who tries to escape to the other 2 nearby Islands. On the 2nd Island, she meets Tiny Tiger, the last remnant of the Uga Faction, who quickly makes Tawna his prisoner of war. During this time, Uga returns to find Tiger as his last remaining worshipper. He dubs Tiger his personal Champion who wards off all who would oppose Uga and his future reign on the world.

Back to Crash, Coco, and Cortex, after they manage to find 25 crystals, they return to the Wumpa Islands. They make a quick stop on the first Island only to find the Wumpa Village and Tribe were completely wiped out, leaving Coco completely devastated. As well, Aku’s shrine was also destroyed. Despite this, a mysterious mask became sentient and started speaking to Crash and Coco specifically, telling them that Uga has grown far too powerful to defeat alone, mentioning that the Crystals that Crash had gathered only exist to strengthen Uga’s powers. Cortex demands that Crash not listen to a “stupid and cheap mask” and continue onward to the second island. Once they arrive and find Uga, Cortex quickly backstabs Crash and Coco and gives the Crystals over to Uga. But then… Uga backstabs Cortex and locks him up in some… time… bubble… thingy…. he gets locked up. Turns out, he was only using Cortex for his own means. Now that Uga has enough power, he creates a massive distortion that sucks up the 3 Wumpa islands! Crash and Coco both manage to escape the ensuing wormhole, but now Uga is planning to engulf the entire world in a distortion realm of his own creation, destroying all of existence on Earth!

Nitrus Brio then arrives to inform the duo of how this could change their future as the Wumpa Islands were not supposed to be destroyed in ancient times. As he says this, Crash starts to fade in and out of existence, meaning his very fate is tied to the Wumpa Islands. Aku then arrives to quickly inform him that the only way to counter Uga’s power is to find 5 specifically colored gems as they contain the power of “Good Mojo”, the antithesis of the Crystals. The Gems contain the powers of life energy while the crystals contain the power of death, that kind of shit. There’s no time to lose!

This part would essentially have him revisit the same worlds to find the gems in alternate paths and shit, that sort of thing.

After finding the gems, Crash continues fading in and out of existence, but they press onward to the distorted realm where the Wumpa Islands are. Aku uses his power to take Crash and Coco into the realm where they have to go through some retreads to get to Uga. There, Uga is too busy trying to maintain his Distortion Realm, so he endows Tiger with Evil Mojo and commands him to fight Crash.

Tiny Tiger seemed more appropiate as a final boss and rival to Crash, so there’s that.

Using the colored gems, Crash uses the power of “Good Mojo” to defeat Tiger and purge the Evil Mojo from his body. Tiger is severly weakened and is on the verge of death which causes Crash to fade out even more. This means that Tiger is actually Crash’s ancient ancestor, and thus he had to be saved. Using his Mojo again, he restores Tiger’s strength… which confuses him as they’re supposed to be enemies.

While that’s happening, Aku and Uga do battle, and using the five gems again, Aku defeats him and has Uga sealed away into another shrine of Aku’s creation. He then breaks the Distortion over the Wumpa Islands.

Once that’s settled, Crash, Coco, and Tawna all try to find a new world to settle in. However, when Tawna is taken a good distance from Tiger, Crash starts fading out again. This… means that Tawna had to be with Tiger as she is also Crash’s ancestor. Meaning… he has to give up Tawna in order to keep existing. Oh the depression and accidental incest.

Alas, they split apart permanently as Crash and Coco both try to find a new world to live. Aku tags along with them to guide them in this world while Nitrus just… fucks off somewhere.

As for Cortex… well, he’s getting more than he bargained for.

(Crash 3 was actually pretty difficult to think up an alternative story for, but here goes)

In Crash 3, Cortex is still trapped in a distortion bubble… until he is pulled into a dimensional hub of sorts by the Time Keeper, “N.Tropy”. Furious, he accuses Cortex of trying to break time using “blasphemic time traveling capabilities that no mortal should ever possess”. The thing is N.Tropy had a plan, a road map of sorts, of how historical events would unfold. He did not anticipate that a mortal being would possess the capacity to travel through time and change the course of history. As such, he decides to turn Cortex to DUST!

Yes, Cortex dies here. However, that wasn’t good enough for N.Tropy who felt that so long as Cortex’s lineage still exists, then eventually Cortex would return and continue along his plans of time travel. So he figures it’s best to wipe out Cortex’s lineage starting from the beginning.

So back to Crash.

Crash and Coco, now joined by Aku, try to find a new place to settle into as said before. However, Crash once again starts fading in and out of existence. Aku immediately senses that N.Tropy was manipulating events of his own accord, so he uses his powers to warp Crash and Coco outide of the boundaries of time so that Crash would not be affected by any changes taking place, and so they can find out what those changes are. As it turns out, Cortex’s lineage was being killed off in rapid succession. Coco figures that Crash’s very existence is tied to Cortex’s as Crash would never have come to being if not for his evil plans. Crash… begrudgingly decides to save the ancestors of Cortex in order to maintain his own existence.

Here, there would be 6 distinct time periods including the prehistoric era. The crew finds that Cortex’s lineage extended throughout all corners of the world, going from the era of Camelot all the way to Ancient China, and even Ancient Egypt itself. But in each era, they find that each Cortex they run into is something of a rat bastard, with “crystals” that tend to grow around them. They’re all tyrants in their own way, and they refuse Crash’s help on the grounds of “Well he’s a disgusting creature! KILL IT!” So Crash and Coco have to beat their asses, and then… technically kidnap them, bringing them all to the outer boundaries of time, or “Time Twister” as the game called it.

Caveman Cortex
King Cortex
Sultan Cortex
Dragon Emperor Cortex
Pharaoh Cortex

All bosses in their own right

After 5 of them are “rescued”, they all start to argue and fight each other to determine “Who the real and best Cortex is”. Unfortunately, their fighting gained the attention of N.Tropy himself who took advantage of them all being gathered into one place… and dusts every last one of them! If not for Crash being outside of time, he would’ve disappeared immediately, but finds that if he returns to any time period, he’s a goner. So he’s practically a prisoner who has to deal with N.Tropy himself, he who is determined to reset time and go back to his original blueprint of history, and will destroy any and all who gets in the way of his plan (which includes Crash himself since he is a product of Cortex). The group finds it impossible to beat N.Tropy as he is a being who can exist in multiple timelines all at once, allowing any temporal version of himself to essentially “tag out” with another version of himself to continue fighting Crash. Thus the fight is virtually impossible to win.

It’s here that Coco gets an idea. Since the Cortex’s were pulled into the Time Twister, the timeline should be unaffected by their absence as they exist outside the boundaries of time, meaning that it’s still very possible to go back and save them, much like Crash himself.

Unfortunately, she would have to leave Crash behind to deal with N.Tropy while she and Aku go into the future, the 6th world/time period to go through. Only Coco would be playable for this portion of the game. There, they find Nitrus Brio who, as a result of N.Tropy, has no idea who Neo Cortex is. They do find out that Brio had notes for a time machine. Coco then begs him to help build the time machine from his notes, and though he is initially reluctant to do so, he only agrees for the promise of vast historical knowledge!

So they build the time machine, Coco gains her unique engineering skills (I guess), and they go back in time! This time around, Coco tries to prevent Crash from “rescuing” the Cortex’s by having to battle him and her past self. During this time, Brio finds that all of these different Cortex’s were evil tyrants and questions why they would bother to save any of them. In the process, all the Crashes and Coco’s they beat also joins them… in a weird sort of way. If anyone remembers that 4 parter from AOSTH involving time travel and 4 weird ass Chaos Emeralds, the idea is the same here with Multiple Crash’s and Coco’s and shit.

So after once again saving the Cortex’s and keeping history unchanged (for the most part), they all travel back to the outerboundaries to save (Prime) Crash from N.Tropy. Now that there were an adequate number of Crash’s and Coco’s (giving them 12 different people to work with), they could team up against N.Tropy’s multiple temporal versions. IE the final boss is comprised of 12 different “mini levels” where each version of Crash and Coco race to the end to tag/hit a different version of N.Tropy, thereby weakening the entire collective. It… sounds more complicated than it should be. >_>

Anywho, after that’s done with, N.Tropy is on the ground, severely weakened and unable to maintain his various temporal selves. It’s at this point that everyone is ready to get the timeline set straight. However…

Nitrus Brio decides to snag N.Tropy’s… tuning fork… w/e the hell it is, proclaiming that he isn’t about to allow the descendent of the various Cortex’s to be born at all, feeling that with all these different tyrants, a Cortex from his era is bound to be just as evil and tyrannical as his ancestors. Thus, he plans to use the… tuning fork to do exactly as N.Tropy already tried to do. However, because Brio doesn’t understand what he’s doing, he’s on route to wipe out ALL OF EXISTENCE!

So all the Crash’s and Coco’s and Aku move about to stop him in the nick of time. Doing so knocks Brio into a pocket dimension or w/e, he’s basically gone. Prime Crash gives the fork back to N.Tropy… which confuses him. “Why would a creature of Cortex be so willing to hand over the power to one that wishes to erase his existence?” Coco and Aku both vouch that even if Cortex is evil, Crash has a good heart, that kind of shit. With that, N.Tropy feels that perhaps he was too hasty and eager to wipe out all that were tied to one specific individual. Suggesting that perhaps the sins of the son shouldn’t be revisited upon anyone else but the son. He decides to set time back into it’s proper place, resetting everything to how it should’ve been, while overwriting the portion of Time Travel being at all possible. Everyone would be returned to their proper time period. On the other hand, to keep Crash the same, N.Tropy would turn Crash into an “Enigma”, a being that exists regardless of history… which basically means that, despite how he got here, Crash in his present state will remain so regardless if Time Travel is possible or not (since in the beginning, the reason he is the way he is now is because of Coco in the past). Coco herself decides to stick around with Crash in the future, seeing him as the older brother she never had, and because she’s fascinated by all the technology of the future. N.Tropy of course warns here that there is no way back to her time if she does this. As for Aku, well, he’s a God, so he’d see Crash and Coco in the future regardless.

With all that in mind, N.Tropy resets time and puts everyone in their respective eras. Brio and Cortex are returned as well, having no memory of the events that transpired from the first game onward, and continuing their intellectual spats with each other. As for Crash and Coco, they’re eventually reunited with Aku after some archeology work, and they live well… until an Alien invasion by Nitrus Oxide and Velo. This time without the Kart Racing crap.

I don’t know, I might’ve made this shit worse with how convoluted the concepts are, or how any of the characters are able to do any of these things. The goal was to make something a bit more coherent than what the original trilogy provided. Details that were probably relegated to manuals in the 90s, but were never elaborated or expanded upon in the remakes. Why Tawna left, how Cortex was working with Uga while he was still sealed away, why Nitrus Brio couldn’t use crystals for his weapon and instead needed an alternative power source IE Gems, where Aku came from, where the Time Twister came from, all that shit. Yes, they were all excuse plots that were secondary to gameplay, but if you don’t care about the plot, why should I waste time trying to get 42 gems for the “good” endings? That’s a little obnoxious, wouldn’t you say? At least the first game allowed you to have your happy ending without going on a tedious fetch quest for 42 gems, they wanted you to find “42 gems” for a good ending, wtf! Suddenly, going through 14 Blue Sphere Special Stages in Sonic 3 doesn’t seem so bad now!

For Crash 1, I wasn’t a fan of how Crash just escapes, but then goes “Oh damn, I forgot my hoe!” And how does he end up landing 2 islands away from Cortex Castle!? He didn’t drift out to the 1st island, he LANDED RIGHT THERE! That’s one thing I wanted to fix up.

Crash 2, obviously the part where Crash willingly assists Cortex after being enemies in the past, that’s NEVER given a good explanation whatsoever outside of a Manga? Definitely wanted to change that.

Crash 3, N.Tropy seemed like a more plausible antagonist than a Minstrel Mask. Since N.Tropy is supposedly the master of time, you’d have to wonder why he was relegated to a mere henchman of Cortex and Uga instead of being the big cheese. Plus, seeing Cortex as Caesar in 3 gave me the idea of having multiple Cortex’s from various time periods and regions.

Obviously, I havent played any of the other games aside from one mutant shit to know much else about the series, though i’d like to believe they got better in the narrative department… maybe… idk.

I was looking into Crash 4 to see if I’d actually like that game over the trilogy. It’s handled by a different developer… and by the balls of Ra, it’s aesthetic style is incredible. I absolutely love the character designs and the distinct colors it has. It almost looks like Ratchet and Clank All 4 One, or even Rayman. Well… Tawna withstanding. I don’t care if she has ass for days, I don’t like that hairstyle. It’s a little to “Teela man at Arms” for my taste. But that’s neither here nor there. The thing is… Toys for Bob (shit names as usual)… might actually have been worse about the difficulty. The gameplay is about the same, one-hit kills and all, but beyond that, they also have this thing about flooding the scene with so much shit at once to the point that you can’t even focus on what you need to do. I’ve seen the vids of these boss fights and I’m already thinking “these people are fucking psychopaths”.

SOR4 is Officially Perfect Now (Anniversary Edition)

This’ll be quick because in reality, not a whole lot was added.

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HAHAHAHAHAHAH! MAX THUNDER’S BACK! MAX THUNDER’S BACK! MAX THUNDER’S BACK! MAX THUNDER’S BACK! MAX THUNDER’S BACK!

Ahem… you’ll have to excuse me. It’s not everyday that you get what you want out of certain games. My elation is a tad unnatural… but DAMMIT, HE’S BACK!

Well, I am officially happy with SOR4! Not necessarily with having to buy the same game twice considering the BS idea of waiting an entire year before making HD Max, HD Shiva, and Estel into actual characters, or the idea of them being DLCs in the first place, but the fact that Max Thunder is no longer shit! In fact, he and the other 2 characters in the game are overpowered as hell!

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SOR4 Anniversary Edition saw fit to be the SF2CE of beat em ups by way of making unplayable characters playable, as well as including a survival mode that is less fun than the actual game… as well as a training mode. Huh… a training mode. That’s all it really adds, but who cares!? MAX THUNDER IS BACK!

When I saw the original trailer for the game, the whole “Mr. X Nightmare“, I assumed that this was an entirely new campaign with brand new levels. Instead, these were just tiny rooms in survival mode where you just have waves of tedious enemies while dealing with cheap and ever increasingly random stage hazards. You get these little upgrades after completing each survival level with varying degrees of usefulness. So much so that it doesn’t feel like a challenge getting through Survival mode in the first place.

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But the reason it becomes so boring is because it serves as means to gain new moves for already existing characters. Because Max, Estel, and Shiva are all overpowered as fuck shit, it only made sense to give the already existing characters some upgrades to deal with them should players desire a few matches in Battle Mode (which is usually fucking never). Thus, in order to get new moves for every single character in the game, you will be spending an inordinate amount of time in Survival mode, getting sick of all the rooms, all the multicolored enemies, all the random stage hazards, all of it becomes routine and boring after a while.

But who cares!? MAX THUNDER IS BACK!

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A lot of the new moves in the game are quite useless so it feels as though you wasted a lot of time trying to get them in the first place. I think the only idea was to breathe new life into old content by refashioning some of the characters other attack animations into quote “new moves” since that saves the team a lot of time and effort. Of course, they could try making most of the new moves GOOD (Cherry’s offensive special is just thrusting her guiter forward like she does with regular weapons. That is just lazy and shit!). Still, at least they made the effort to teach old dogs new tricks so that you have a reason to go back and play the old characters. Having the ability to mix and match moves was also a good choice as it means you can easily take all the useful moves and blend them into a fighting style that can destroy most levels with ease. There’s plenty of player choice and experimentation to be had with several possibilities in fighting styles that mirrors that of games such as Custom Robo or LBX. Shit like this is amazing for a beat em up! AND MAX THUNDER IS BACK!

The game also sports a new difficulty mode known as “Mania+”, a mode so sadistic and unyielding, you would think the developers of Doom Eternal had a hand in it since much of this difficulty is based on flooding the scene with so many enemies at once that it becomes impossible to focus on ANYTHING! Praise Amma this is optional, of course, but since this is the only other new thing in this “Anniversary Edition”, there is something a tad compelling. Having these new characters and new moves at your disposal, you may feel a sudden urge to really test out some of their abilities if only to see how far you can get. Mania+ isn’t the most insidiously difficult game mode out there, but you won’t beat it with just one player…. unless you have the power of MAX THUNDER!

The training mode pretends to be a fighting game where you have “Combo challenges”, that annoying shit where you have to do these very specific combos dictated by the game, combos that you could do in your sleep during regular play, but struggle to deal with when commanded to do so as prompted, like some sort of psychological mind game where instructions on what to do actually hinders your ability to do when otherwise you could do it with ease, thank you every math problem in the world demanding a one-way solution to EVERY FUCKING PROBLEM, and then having the balls to dictate I “show my work”! The only problem that is to be solved is to face an atomic drop by MAX THUNDER!

So yeah, that’s all SOR4AE offers. New moves, 3 overpowered characters, and a Survival mode. AND MAX THUNDER!

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MAX: Good, are you happy now?
HERU: FUCK YEAH! LETS GO!! ATOMIC DROP!
MAX: sighs Sure… lets go.
HERU: STOP!
MAX: What!?
HERU: You forgot to do the thing!
MAX: “You’ve gotta be kidding!”
HERU: Mother fucker, I’ve waited a LONG DAMN YEAR for this shit!
MAX: sighs Fine…. READY TO KICK ASS AND TAKE NAMES WITH MY AWESOME ATOMIC DROP, BODY SLAM, ROLLING GRAB, AND THUNDER STRIKES!?
HERU: HELL YEAH!!!
MAX: THEN LETS GET DOWN TO THE STREETS OF RAGE!!!
HERU: YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
MAX: “WATCHA GONNA DO WHEN MAXIMANIA RUNS WILD ON YOU!?“
HERU: …. Pause… The hell was that!?
MAX: Look, they wanted me to have some wrestling quotes like Hulk Hogan or something-
HERU: That shit was corny!
MAX: That was the point!
HERU: Dude, never say that whack shit again!
MAX: It’s about as whack as “The Thing” as you call it!

*sighs*

I’ve never been this satisfied with a game from this generation since Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I swear…

Hollywood doesn’t give a fuck.

There’s a reason why people hate Hollywood adaptations of videogames. At least now more than ever.

They NEVER get actors that fit the goddamn roles!

Mark Wahlberg is Sully… why? Why not have him as Nathan Drake? Hell, Chris Pratt would be a better Nathan Drake, but instead he’s playing a Jesus Freak Mario Mario. Tom Holland’s voice or looks are anywhere close to Nathan Drake, what the literal hell is this!?

You know, I thought I was taking crazy pills being the only person that was against Jim Carry as Robotnik, and is the same case seeing as Jack Black is Bowser. I suppose the villains matter less than the heroes seeing as people take issue with the castings of both Mario and Nathan Drake, but never for Robotnik and Bowser.

You guys see the Resident Evil trailer that came out a while back? Tokenized Jill and Leon? Why? Why not pull Sheva Alomar from RE5 if you want a diverse STARS unit. Oh wait, you don’t have to! You’ve got KENNETH AND ENRICO! It ain’t like this movie is going to follow the games down to the letter! I don’t care how good the trailer looked! As bad as the old RE movies were, at least they took the time to make Jill and Leon look accurate to their gaming counterparts! Ada Wong too! That dork playing Leon in this movie is unrecognizable on all fronts!

Why does Hollywood keep making videogame movies if they’re not gonna put any effort to try and capture the essence of the games? Actually, no. Uncharted doesn’t need a movie. Nothing about Uncharted is unique to itself outside of 2 characters. Other than that, you’ve got National Treasure and Indiana Jones. The trailer for Uncharted looks far too basic, and Tom Helium looks like a kid still.

Jebus, we’ve got like… 4 videogame movies coming out in less than a year, and only Knuckles has good casting. Ironic, no?

A funny story…

Well, it’s not really funny considering the context.

Last week, I was visiting my folks on a Monday when the story broke that Colin Powell had passed away. I saw this news with my Pops when the story broke, with them announcing that he died from Las Plagas. My Pops was saying “Dammit, Las Plagas ain’t no joke!”. Now normally, this convo would steer into the Narc since they’re still in denial after all the months of proof, but… during the same story, they actually admitted that, yeah, he was narced up. Whatever words Pops had to say, he spoke no more.

That’s the funny part to me. I shouldn’t be elated to have this level of vindication considering that anyone dying shouldn’t be treated as a tool for an argument… but some people have to learn things the nasty way.

It’s really sad, tbh, that people had become so arrogant over an untested, unproven drug, and even more sad that people overwhelmingly took it, thinking they were a part of some upper echelon of society… and now most of them (not all, not all) are now seeing the folly of their hubris.

They’re too arrogant to admit they were wrong, however.

Now we’ve got so many people narced up, and most of them don’t even know what to think when the mask mandates are still around, Draco’s Mandate is wrecking America, I mean… fucking MEDICAL WORKERS are being pushed out by the thousands, and you got that old dirty bastard talking about “Look at the big picture, now that 50% Narc rate jumped up to 90%!” This old dusty jackass basically said “fuck em!” We’re heading into the Winter where the Plagas apparently goes Super Saiyan, but these fucks in Government are bragging about costing people their jobs. And yet, we still got dumbasses who still believe everything they tell them.

All I can think about is the end credits of RE8, something that was disturbingly relevant. How Miranda gave people this Narc to cure them from a plagas, but it turned out to be a serum that turned them all into zombie werewolves. I think the most disturbing part of Resident Evil is how accurate it is to the real world.

lol, American Game Design (Crash Trilogy)

• 

Crash Bandicoot isn’t in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and that has a lot of Crash Bandicoot fans very…very… miffed about the whole ordeal. Some have already given in and said “well yeah, I guess it’s cool Sora is in the game“, but alas, I cannot help but fathom that they too are afraid of reprisal as the next person who goes on to review MCU movies. Kingdom Turds fans have shown in the 10s of thousands that they will argue with anyone who dares speak against the series or the inclusion of the character. Youtube video after Twitter Twat about all the “poor arguments” for why Sora is a poor choice for a character in Smash Bros. once again boiling down to dictating what characters are deserving of being in Smash Bros., a party fighting game that started out as something so cheap that it had static fucking menu screens, and couldn’t be arsed to be taken seriously in the first place. Unfortunately, the argument of “I wanted someone other than this Shonen Animu fuck to be the last DLC character because I actually like that character over this Shonen Animu Fuck” makes for a poor argument unlike “This character doesn’t deserve to be in the game because he is mostly associated with the Sony Playstation brand… as well as a Megalithic Corporation that is 3 steps away from Yurugu for having the audacity to ruin the Mandarin, Ultron, Spider-Man, Star Wars, and the Lion King all in one fucking decade, as well as fucking over fans who simply wanted to make a fan film about Darth Vader!” Hmm… no wonder Nintendo went with Sora, they saw in Disney a Kindred spirit!

Subjectivity is the reason for people to be upset over the roster, but because people like to deal in absolutes just to win petty arguments, subjectivity is never admissable as a reason for being upset over anything! Dissatisfaction has to be “valid” for no reason other than to shut up some arseholes over the internet who’s entire creed is “deal wit it, we won, so shut the fuck up and cry in a corner, you arse wanker of a Custom Robo fanboy!” Shit like this is why it’s best to make your own games, but because companies are greedy fucks who think they’re too good for anything, shit like this is why people get pissy. They don’t have any real alternatives to Smash Bros. aside from that old Wii Cartoon Network game, that new Nickelodeon game, an old Ninja Turtles game, and Playstation All-Stars which also decided not to include Crash Bandicoot (or fucking SPYRO for that matter!). Thus, the outlets for people to play a Smash clone with the characters they actually want is few and far between. That energy seems to be spent on non-videogame entities like Spongebob, or completely brand new fucks like Brawlout.

For all we know, Activision probably refused the invitation, but so far, nothing has been confirmed from them or Nintendo on the matter, so the only thing we can go on is “Sora is Japanese, Crash Bandicoot is not.” That and… well… American third parties don’t like Nintendo for good reason. Many of them went “Team Sony” because of Nintendo’s (and Sega’s) absolute shit policies that, while helped to desaturate the console market of any potential shovelware, completely alienated developers from their platforms. Suffice to say, Crash Bandicoot probably would never have happened if not for the Playstation brand, and if people are looking for legit reasons as to why Crash (coughs) “deserves” to be in Smash Bros. (why such an idiotic sentiment exists, I’ll never know), we could argue that it goes above “success”. Kingdom Turds is successful, but that’s all it really is. Just a bunch of successful games. Crash Bandicoot, on the other hand, were also a (handful) of successful games, but more to the point, Crash Bandicoot was the original mascot of the Playstation brand, was probably the first original 3D platforming “character” (Not game… before you dipshits come in here talking about “OMG, MARIO 64 CAME OUT FIRST!”) and most importantly, showed the world that the West could create a platforming character that could rival both Mario and Sonic, the 2 dominant JAPANESE Platforming mascots of that era. See, America can’t claim Sonic since he’s been raped by Sega of Japan, and they’re dead set on disassociating Sonic with anything American based (except Chili dogs). But America can claim Crash Bandicoot, and America can claim that they created something on par with the other 2 console mascots of the 90s.

I’m willing to bet that’s something Nintendo wasn’t about to acknowledge. “These Baka Gaijin think this Western brand RAT is equal to our Plumber!? NEVER!!“

• 

  Why did they give him a belly button?

But it did make me curious as to why Crash Bandicoot holds such dear memories for so many people. I’ve never given a damn about Crash Bandicoot, having had no PS1 to give a damn over, and the Sony fanboys alienated me to no end because I wanted the 3D Mario game at the time. Hell, I didn’t even know Playstation was a thing until 97, and even then, I couldn’t pull myself to give a shit because “HOLY SHIT STAR FOX 64” and “HOLY SHIT MISCHIEF MAKERS!” Fuck, I miss Mischief Makers. The point is Crash Bandicoot was a game/franchise I’ve only ever seen in magazines and kiosks, but never had the capacity to give a shit about. No one in schools ever said anything about Crash Bandicoot, the series was invisible during the 6th and 7th Generation consoles, and the only Crash game I played was “Mind over Mutant”, and that shit was so boring and poorly designed that I was already sick of it before I could get to the second world. That and the characters just looked retarded. Crash Bandicoot looked like the pet sidekick of Lobo from DC Comics, but he couldn’t talk, had the brain the size of a lima bean, and made stupid gibberish noises. That… and the typical… fucking… American… Cartoon… humor… of the modern age. Extremely… labored… gags!

But hey, some remakes of the first 3 games came out years ago, that overrated ass racing game came out some years ago, and recently, a Crash 4 is here looking like it ripped off Ratchet and Clank. I just remembered. Fuck Insomniac or Sony for keeping “Rift Apart” exclusive to the PS5 that I don’t want, you pieces of greedy fuck shits! So if I wanted a fix of Western Cartoon platformers (which is usually never, but I needed a Ratchet fix that it’s crappy remake of the first game couldn’t provide me), I figure these games (not CTR, I got enough racing games) will do just fine.

Then I find that these games were originally developed by Naughty Dog.

FUCK… ME!!!

You guys are probably already aware of this, but I can’t stand Naughty Dog! Not the developers on a personal or ethical level, but they have the same fucking problems that both Capcom and Namco have. Deliberately designing the games to be harder than they necessarily have to be! At least in the cases of Jak 2 and The Last of Us, those 2 games of which comprise my worst experiences with their game design. I absolutely DESPISE the Jak and Daxter series for being boring, unpolished, and downright frustrating at the worst of times!

Lemme rephrase. Jak 1 is boring as all fuck, Jak 2 is frustrating as all fuck, Jak 3 is marginally ok but drab and boring, and LOU is a shitshow of fake difficulty that punishes you for trying to be clever when the game clearly wants you to play one way over another (why the fuck am I not allowed to progress through the city until I’ve killed all the enemies in a city block!? What sense does that make!? The story says to AVOID these assholes as much as possible! I sneaked passed all of them, let me progress and stop dictating that I waste resources on every chump within a 1 block radius!). About the only game I’ve ever enjoyed from them was Uncharted 2, but that seems to be the go to game for all the people to go on about “how far vidya gaems have come” so I feel a bit dirty for having enjoyed it. Uncharted 1 suffered from shit mechanics and gun combat, Uncharted 3 was just a massive chore to playthrough, and I didn’t even bother with 4 as I’m sick to death of Troy Baker!

…. So back to Crash Bandicoot…

These remakes were developed by a… “Vicarious Visions”? I could’ve sworn they made Spider-Man games back on the Genesis. Anywho, lets get on wit it!

First and foremost, the idiots who thought it was a genius idea to have a minute long intro of logos and a polygon version of Crash turning himself into an HD retard… they need to be eating shit out of a garbage can. Why the fuck can’t I skip the opening credits sequence!? IT’S TOO LONG!!! I also have to endure a million load screens because… nostalgia, I guess.

• 

• 

• 

((CRASH 1))

• 

  This was more of a puzzle than a boss fight.

• 

Youtubers have made much Hallabollu about the game’s sheer difficulty, equating them to “Rage games”, which line up perfectly with my experiences with Naughty Dog games so far. So hearing this, I decided to do as I did with Code Vein… and took it slowly.

And.. perhaps I should’ve rushed through it to have more of a headache. The game… isn’t really all that hard. Hell, I’ve only struggled on like… 2 levels and a single boss, the game is cake otherwise! Slippery Climb and that… dark ass level where you have to rush through before the lights turn off… those were some bullshit ass levels. I was actually surprised by all the people who struggled on “the High Road” level since it’s very easy to cheat by walking on the rope. I tell yah, I beat this shit in 2 DAYS!! What the hell are these Youtubers doing wrong!?

Anywho, Crash’s origin story sounds a lot like Sonic’s from the old STC European comics, where Crash was supposed to be a servant of the Dr. Cortez… or something. He starts off being experimented on, but shit goes wrong, he escapes… and then randomly, some tall furry magnet comes out of nowhere and starts beating the breaks off the scientists before… giving up on her escape attempt. “Well at least she looks better than Candy Kong!”

Bad joke as it is, this game reminded me too much of Donkey Kong Country than it did Sonic. The map screen is the same, the jumping physics are the same, the fake difficulty is similar, the island jungle theme is the same, replace the Bananas with the Wumpa fruit, sidekick is more mechanically inclined than the somewhat braindead protagonist… yeah, they did NOT base this game off of Sonic the Hedgehog like they originally claim.

• 

  Damn motion blurs make it impossible to take good snaps!

Anywho, the game is very basic. It’s definitely a gameplay game where the noveltly was in being 3D. I suppose in a way, it’s nice to not be relagated to a fetch quest as the goal is to reach the end of the level with minimal mistakes. I tend to not like games with 1-hit kills as it cheapens the difficulty, and I can’t imagine that by 96, this was considered acceptable when several games gave you health pieces/bars by that time. Even Gex had that shit. FUCK I miss Gex! Anywho, most of the challenges are pretty standard. The best way to approach the game is to take your fucking time and not rush through it like a moron, but even that isn’t enough as the game feels a little… wonky to say the least. I’ve heard from some people that the Collision mechanics in the game were purposefully designed to make the game harder than necessary, and I’m inclined to believe that. You have to be precise… as… fuck… to not die in this game. A lot of deaths in this game can be attributed to shit physics and shit Collision detection. You’re likely to not notice this until the final stretch of the game were dodging enemies and projectiles often doesn’t happen for some reason. For the final boss, I’ve died often to just “being near” one of Cortez’s bolts from his gun. I didn’t have to touch them, and I just die. There were also issues in earlier machine based levels where just being in the enemy’s space can kill you. It’s really easy to die just by being near danger rather than actively touching danger, if that makes sense. Another thing I’ve heard was that… Crash’s Collison box was “pill shaped” (dafuq?), which basically means that his ability to land on a platform is neutered. This was claimed to be done so that it’s easier to slip off the edge of platforms (IE deliberately shit design to make the game harder than it needs to be) You have to land dead center on platforms half the time in order to not slip off the edge. It also makes jumping on certain enemies harder than it needs to be. This became evident when fighting Nitrus Brio (FUCK THIS FIGHT! FUCK THIS FIGHT IN PARTICULAR!). Having to jump on the slimes (while the top down view is slanted, fucking up your depth perception in the process), WHILE the little shits are jumping around at high speed made for a more frustrating experience than need be. I actually found myself pining for Jak and Daxter 1’s physics! That is a TRUE failure of game design when I want to play the most BORING platformer in existence! “THE POWER CELLS!”

So you have physics and collison deliberately designed to fuck you over more often than not, completely ignoring player ability in favor of creating a more difficult game. In other words, Vicarious Visions apparently thought that making the game more difficult simply by making it easier for the player to die rather than have a legitimate challenge would automatically make the game better, having such an outdated mindset of “Hard games are automatically good”. Fuck that noise. This becomes an exercise in torture when you’re dealing with the afformentioned Slippery Climb and Lights out levels. I said earlier that you have to take your time and plan your next jumps precisely, otherwise you’re going to die a thousand times. These 2 levels take away your ability to take your fucking time! What with scripted platform jumping on birds with little to no checkpoints, to having to rush through a level while you have a light on as well as prompting you to play as perfectly as possible so as to not hit anything in order to KEEP your light on, made for a far more tedious and frustrating experience since the game’s physics were deliberately designed to kill you more often than not!

And yet, those 2 levels and boss were the real culprits of the game’s difficulty, made worse by the very physics that don’t allow for adequate platforming or combat. Youtubers talk about the High Road, they NEED to talk about Lights out and Slippery Climb! Those 2 levels, back 2 back btw, are total BULLSHIT!

The rest of the game is fine, however, and I didn’t find any reason to spit venom at a majority of it’s levels. Most deaths were accidental at best. There was one moment in the very first level where I treid to jump this pit… only to hit a tiny outcropping of a stone arch that caused me to fall to my death. Stuff like that is annoying and is a testament to stupid design, but is infrequent. There were other moments that I could’ve sworn were bugs. One was where… I think it was the “Native Fortress” level where I jumped up to this ledge that had a lizard enemy on it. Instinctively, If I jump on an enemy, I often do the spin attack as I get near the enemy because I know for a fact that landing dead center on an enemy isn’t going to happen 100% of the time thanks to shit collison physics. But when I did that, my character would slide off the edge and into a pit… every time I did the spin attack. The ledge wasn’t slanted either, they would just slide off for no reason. Had to be a bug. So… hell, most deaths won’t even be your fault, the game does have some bugs here and there that make the experience lousy most of the time. But it’s fairly simple for most of the game. The good thing about this ordeal is that the game is very generous with the lives you get. If you’re good enough, you’ll be able to hold onto at least 25 by the last several levels. They’re realy easy to farm so most of the frustration is just.. well… minimal.

I kinda thought there would be more to the game, though. Most of the game covers I saw for Crash Bandicoot in the 90s made the games seem like they were more than some dumb Looney Tunes shit, but the story for this game is… exactly that. I remember seeing one cover where Crash had this biker suit on, had this girl nearby, and I’m thinking this is some Street Sharks shit. But… no, this is nothing like that. The game’s overall music, sound effects, and story make it a point that this is a series of comical cartoony gags… which is disappointing to say the least. The ending was also overly simple, you beat Cortez, you rescue Furry Magnet… and I guess they go off to do some Discovery Channel shit, maybe.

There’s also this extra character, “Coco”, who I honestly thought was Crash’s daughter given that she came from a “time machine” to be a playable character. Blond like the Furry Magnet, yeah Nature called for those 2. But actually, this was Crash’s sister, and I’m like “dafuq? Why wasn’t she mentioned at all in this game!? And why the hell does she go through a time machine to be playable?” I thought maybe she was some sort of advertising for Crash 4 (Because time travel). Playing as Coco isn’t all that much different from playing Crash, though it feels like her jumps are weaker? Idk, she feels off when it comes to general “platforming”

Overall, Crash 1 is just… average. It’s not fantastic, it’s not the best game in the world, but I’ve honestly played worse. Considering this was a remake of Naughty Dog’s first 3D platformer, I expected MUCH worse than Jak 2, but it’s just kinda… meh, really. It’s got some rough patches, but overall it’s just… there.

((CRASH 2))

• 

• 

• 

Much like any secondary installment in a given series, Crash 2 is essentially the first game with marginal improvements. There’s less emphasis on the game’s deliberately shit mechanics and physics killing you, but scripted and gimmicky level design that is further hindered by depth perception, the achilles heel of 3D Platformers.

The story… not so much. So ok, you beat Cortez from the first game… only for him to discover some island crystals, but instead of being smart and mining the damn things (he should still have a factory or 2 left over since only the castle was destroyed in the last game), he waits an entire year to trick Crash into helping him.

Dafuq?

The trip part is that Crash just… goes along with this without question! Who cares if Cortez tried to turn you into a mind controlled slave!? Who cares if he tried to go doggy style on your girl!? “YEAH, LETS HELP CORTEZ FIND THESE CRYSTALS!” I get the feeling that Naughty Dog didn’t know where to take the series after the first game, and thus came up with an excuse plot.
Then there’s Coco… who’s so lazy that she can’t get up and find her own damn batteries. I assume she’s supposed to be “Tails” considering her hacking skills, but the series is so damn Donkey Kong that she might as well be Dixie! Hell, her spin attack involves her pony tail much like Dixie.
Then… there’s Nitrus Brio who, for some reason, is now against Cortex, and promises to help defeat him so long as you collect gems instead of crystals (gaaaaaaaaah fuck). I hate when the story is just a dumb excuse plot as it makes the overall experience feel pointless. And… what the hell happened to Tall Furry Magnet? The hell is her name!?
Eventually, Coco unmasks what Cortez is up to (hopefully no one minds my intentional misspelling of “Cortex”. It just sounds better to me), we beat his ass, and well… the station’s still up there. I ain’t about to get 42 gems just to see it get blown out of the sky.

The challenge of this game, surprisingly, has less to do with deliberately bad mechanics, and more to do with deliberately retarded level design, made even more obnoxious than before thanks to said bad physics. Crash 2 has some of the same tacky blemishes of Crash 1, but with an added emphasis on gimmicks. At the very least, the difficulty feels more natural, and isn’t prone to accidents or scripted nonsense. Then again, much like the first game, it has at least 2-3 levels that can honestly fuck right off. Ruination, Bee-having, and Spaced out in particular. 2 of which are scripted nonsense, and the other is just plain fake difficulty. An issue that crops up more often than before is the issue of Depth perception. It’s a lot harder to gauge the distance you are from objects than in the first game, often because you have more standard “hallway” levels where the camera is situated directly behind you. Sometimes even your character obscures the path forward. The camera is static, but for a game like this, I really wish it wasn’t as it’s more often the cause of your deaths thanks to always being situated in a position where you can’t quite tell how far you have to jump. Ruination was a pain in the ass as a result. Many reviewers back in the day apparently likened Crash 2 to being full of Trial and Error. They weren’t kidding! A lot of that is the result of the camera. It wasn’t an issue in the first game because most of the platforms were the same distance, and most levels were in 2D.

• 

  I wish they would buzz off!

Thus the game is, again, harder than it needs to be. It’s clear that Naughty Dog wanted to make the game easier than the first, and they’ve largely achieved that (most notably with boss fights), but with certain levels (the afformentioned 3), they fell back into their bad habits. The Bee-having level was rage inducing due to, once again, being forced to rush through the level while being chased by fast ass bees, all the while demanding you deal with mallet swinging hunters, electric gates, and literal Pirhana Plants that spit fire. The way the enemies are placed feels cheap as you can spawn from a checkpoint and be instantly KILLED by an enemy’s attack.

The game also introduces the “Nitro” boxes which, by merely touching them, you blow up and die. I would assume these were created because the devs were too lazy to come up with unique hazards in certain levels, and had these cheap pieces of dogshit to crowd up certain areas of the game. The spaced out level makes this apparent by placing these green blocks in one section where you have to perform tricky jumps while dealing with electric tentacle robots, a scientist with a shield, and a walking fire bot. It’s like they said “gee, we really want to make this game hard enough, but we don’t feel like designing the levels to be more sadistic than they could be or already are, so lets just place these things around and let those do the work for us! Brilliant!” That’s the old Naughty Dog bullshit I know and don’t love!

• 

• 

• 

• 

  They have this shit surrounding a CHECKPOINT!

Again, their nonsense is mostly contained to a few levels and not the entire game. If not for those specific levels, I’d say Crash 2 is the more enjoyable of the 3 games, but alas, the tedium of having to repeat levels thanks to what might as well amounts to troll design holds it back. This is also made worse by the fact that you can’t farm lives as easily as the first game. I suppose the caveat of an easier game is “well you don’t need all these lives, now do you?”. This wouldn’t be an issue if not for those 3 aforementioned levels that tear through your livestock like an all you can eat buffet. Since losing all your lives means losing all your checkpoints, that means restarting the whole level from scratch, meaning you’re likely to spend at least 20 minutes or so trying to farm lives from the easier levels early on.
Some of these obstacles, for me, were just not possible to get through without one of those… idk, Wumpa masks that makes it so you can take a hit or 2? Yeah, I had to literally drag those things with me to those annoying parts just to get through them.

Now as it is a sequel, the devs tried to “spice things up” by giving Crash a couple of new moves, specifically crouching, crawling, sliding, and ground pounding (yay, he copied Mario 64! Is it better now!?). These moves are largely useless and are just there to service the sadistic obstacle courses they call levels, but largely have no real use aside from some metal crates. The slide does make for a nice alternative attack to spinning and jumping, but it’s hindered by it’s short range and horrible recovery. For some reason, Crash stops dead in his tracks after a slide, and is left standing there for a brief moment UNLESS you make for a sliding jump (more Mario 64 shit). Meaning you have to be really close to the enemy to pull it off without a hitch. Also, the sliding jump feels… like ass, honestly. It doesn’t give you a whole lot of distance coverage %100 of time. I think it depends on when you decide to jump off the slide itself, but because the damn move lasts for a split second, timing it to give you good distance is more tedious than it needs to be. I’d sooner claim that the game would’ve benefitted from actual momentum physics, but considering how the levels are designed, that would make the game virtually unplayable.

But… what IS useful for distance coverage… comes right after you BEAT THE GAME! You get the “running” ability which, by holding R2, allows you to run faster. So… I tested this on Bee-having, and wouldn’t you know it? I wiped my ass with that level! You know why!? Because I was fast enough to outrun the fucking bees!

So you mean to tell me that tedious piece of shit level would have been NOTHING… if I had this one ability!? Throughout the whole game, I kept thinking to myself “Damn, wouldn’t be nice if you could unlock some new moves to get through this shit without so much stress?” And there you have it! Fucking running! The problem is this comes AFTER you beat the game!? Meaning it’s fucking useless by that point (unless you’re one of those kids who thinks Time Trials make for good replay value)!

Crash 2 is a much better game than Crash 1, but it’s not perfect. The few levels with the most obnoxious level design out there sours most of the experience, and you end up more frustrated after finishing the game because of those levels. But overall, it’s essentially “repeat the verse, same as the first”… or… however that saying goes.

((CRASH 3))

WARPED!!!

>_>

• 

• 

• 

Crash 3 is… the same shit. Though it is piss easy compared to the first 2 games, it took me longer than 2 days to beat, ironically. That’s largely because of the damn racing levels. Nothing else in this game matters when you have to get the racing elements down pat. Nothing says scripted nonsense like having to hit every speeder and driving perfectly, which is frankly impossible given the game’s awful handling controls. The idea that you HAVE to get first place on each of these races in order to “complete” the level given how absurdly shit the controls are reeks of an outdated, archiacly terrible game design philosophy that went unmitigated thanks to Vicarious Visions thinking they can 1-up Naughty Dog.

Other than that, the game is… nothing. If not for the tedious racing levels, Crash 3 would ultimately be the easiest game in the Crash series. Thanks to it being the easiest, it is… rather boring. Then it hit me! “Oh dear lord, the only reason people like Crash Bandicoot is because of the difficulty”, and that leads to the problem of American Gamers and American Game industry, but more on that later. The game has a few minor improvements in other areas. Now you can gain new moves after defeating bosses, and some levels allow the option to ride dinosaurs. Other changes are that certain boxes now spin around themselves, changing into certain items on the fly, it’s one of those things you have to smash when it shows itself as something… you know how that works.

This time around, the story writers started making shit up as they go. Now the weird Wumpa mask is an actual character who has an evil brother that represents an ancient tribal minstrel show that, somehow, wasn’t on an SJW’s shit list. Hmm, now that I think about it, Greg Eagles (Voice of Jax Briggs) is doing the voice of the invincible Wumpa mask, with big red lips… Nah, probably just my imagination. Now all of a sudden, Cortez was just serving this thing that was TRAPPED in some ruins? So the idea is that Cortez and.. idk, “Uga Uga”?… They go through time to steal crystals. I don’t think the last game explained exactly what the crystals do, or even SHOWED what the crystals can do! Bah, excuse plot gonna excuse. Crash and Coco have a house? They have a pet Polar Bear? There’s a picture of the Tall Furry Magnet!? Cortez has more random henchmen that work for him? Is Dingo Dile a Dingo/Crocodile!? Crash Bandicoot has a Yo-Yo!? Ahh… I remember Yo-Yo’s. “YOMEGA“!

Like I said before, the game is ridiculously easy, and as a result, it’s just boring. The racing levels take a while to complete because of the insidious demand to get first place with ass controls, but other than that, this game seems to have been made because Crash Bandicoot was popular or something. They didn’t seem to give a fuck this time around so it’s a tad more relaxing than the first 2 games. Sadly though, Crash 3 runs into the same problem of Crash 2 in which the worlds feel like glorified and disorganized level packs. Between this game and the last, the worlds/rooms don’t share a consistent theme, meaning they didn’t give a shit about world building. While it’s not entirely necessary to have consistent themes throughout the game, Crash 3 just makes no sense in that regard. The hub has these 5 domains with an overall theme of “Camelot, Arabia, China, Kemet/Egypt, and Cortez Land”, but the individual levels are whatever the fuck they want to be. One minute, you’re in Camelot, the next you’re underwater for some reason, then you’re on the great wall of China, and then you’re on a jet ski, then you’re in prehistoric times, then you’re in the desert playing NFS Payback… they clearly didn’t give a fuck what they put into the game, and that’s probably why it’s so easy now. Because the passion wasn’t there anymore. It’s both a blessing and a curse as it meant the patented ND bullshit wasn’t there to sour the experience, but it also felt very repetitive. Having a consistent theme means you feel some level of expectation from the rest of the game. Worlds that have yet to be explored or conquered. But by having levels that take place outside of their respective hubs, you pretty much sample everything before you’ve settled in, and that reveals a much bigger problem with the series overall.

• 

  Symbolic, no?

Crash Bandicoot is just a very mechanical experience. The games are treated as these rigid obstacle courses where the difficulty is the selling point. The level themes are just background noise that is inconsequential to what mattered to the developers. Because of this, the games lack a soul. You don’t get the feeling that these games ultimately matter, and is what I believe drove the series to irrelevancy as the 6th generation of consoles rolled around. And from I hear, I wasn’t missing much. The games apparently got worse and worse as the series got passed around to different developers while ND went on to make Jak and Daxter, games that are spiritual successors to the Crash series (not good ones, mind you).

I think the real issue is that the goal of Crash Bandicoot was to have a mascot for the Playstation Brand, something to give Sony a face when comparisons came around for Mario and Sonic. The issue, however, is that Mario and Sonic are handled by people who (however briefly) cared about the characters to a certain degree. Those games have a consistent lore and universe with characters that are timeless. Crash Bandicoot, because America, is simply a “product”. A tool to be used for a certain end. Maybe it’s my fault for expecting more from a company that is known for their “thrilling stories” to have something on par with Ratchet and Clank. As it is, the Crash series just seems rather… stupid. Looney Tunes style antics, jokes, and gags that do nothing to convey that the developers give a shit, and it’s something that is consistent with a LOT of American-Based 3D platformers. They’re all these super silly ass Looney Tunes knock offs. Again because America. Americans didn’t take this shit seriously, they just saw Mario 64 do it, so what happened is that they pumped out a lot of 3D platformers to sell to people, but they had no plans to do anything with them after the fact. Crash Bandicoot is not far removed from that since, again, it’s only purpose was to be a competitor Platformer to Mario and Sonic. The stories are a good indicator since important details are absent, characters appear and dissappear at random, and basic logic is thrown out the window. Crash 3 randomly introduces a villain and a time travel concept out of fucking nowhere, and I’m supposed to care?

I bring this up because, as tedious as the first 2 games were, I had no real motivation to press through either of them. They were just glorified obstacle courses, and that by itself isn’t fun. I need something else, something more than level packs. The games don’t have a solid structure or any fucks given to it’s content. They’re “gameplay games” first and foremost, and the gameplay is archiac as fuck. I’m not a fan of “one hit death” games as I figure those games should be relegated to the 80s from wench they came, and it just gives developers an excuse to be as sadistic as they want to be. But this seems to be a uniquely American problem.

American Gamers and Developers have a sick… sick obsession with the “Concept of Challenge”. It could be because Americans are guilty of looking at things purely from the surface. Everyone who had an NES only seem to remember how hard the games were, and nothing else. We all know it’s because the home console market was just “Arcade lite”, and we all know Arcade games were deliberately hard for the sake of wealth extraction. But because of that, Americans got this idea that “games are not good unless they’re hard”. As I’ve said multiple times in the past, there’s nothing wrong with a hard game as it’s difficulty is there to keep you awake. What is ALWAYS the problem are the fucking lengths Americans go through to make shit hard. Those who play custom fan levels on Mario Maker, or the thousands upon thousands of rom hacks on the internet KNOW what I’m talking about. Americans act like good game design is when the game is hard, and that has NEVER been the case. It’s merely a cultural thing (a “failing” if I may) of surface level vision that prompts their games to be stupidely hard for no reason. A lot these games boil down to artificial difficulty, handicaps, purposefully bad controls, and scripted nonsense. Doom Eternal and Valfaris are good examples of this. The issue is because a lot of popular NES titles were also pretty damn difficult, but it’s never because the game’s design was “intentionally” so. With the possible exception of Mega Man, you don’t really feel overwhelmed by the game’s overall design. Most NES games boiled down to just avoiding shit and killing enemies. Not having to put up with scripted nonsense and gimmicky one-hit death hazards that are deliberately put into the level to make the games harder, nor were the player’s abilities to properly land on platforms handicapped by the developer’s desire to make you slip off the edges of platforms. This hyperactive drive to make the hardest games ever just for the sake of “being hard” is why a lot of American games have no replay value. Unless there is a large focus on multiplayer and computer centric genres like FPS’s, American brand games lose a lot of their luster and appeal after just one playthrough. All they do is create fatigue and frustration which turns most people off.

It’s because of this surface level vision that Crash Bandicoot suffers from it’s own design. The games were rigidly tedious before, and Vicarious Visions only sought to EXACERBATE the problem! Why the fuck would you want to make a “hard” game even harder!? It’s as though these assholes only found value in Crash Bandicoot’s difficulty and nothing else. Then again, I suppose I can’t blame them for it, because as Crash 3 shows, there really ISN’T much else! The games feel as though they were designed by amatuers that only saw games as these mechanical and intricate showcases of difficult level design mirroring that of old NES games. They could not give a fuck about anything else. It’s also this attitude that makes it impossible for certain franchises to last for more than a decade, making Ratchet and Crash extremely lucky to last this long at all!

With all of that said…

These remakes are…. “ok” at best? Maybe I’m being too nice because I don’t see myself replaying these games anytime soon. Most of the levels were boring at best, and the few that were so-called “hard” were just tedious and frustrating beyond all reason. Again, it’s because they’re glorified obstacle courses with one-hit kills being the name of the game, and that simply isn’t fun for me. At least not for multiple times. When the games demand that you play a certain way, there is no point in replaying the game. Games are at their best when the player is allowed to do a number of playthroughs in different ways that make replaying the game feel fresh, exciting, and enticing. You won’t go into Castlevania tackling the same enemies and hazards the same way you did. You’ll move differently, try a new position of attacking, you’ll get to experiment with different strategies which makes replaying the game a non-issue. Crash Bandicoot, however, is mostly a compulsory experience that demands you play one way without any regard for individual player freedom. The only reason I can fathom these games having any sort of following was because we all had lower standards in the 90s. They were in 3D which was a big deal, and the character had a cool design with a fucking kickass name to boot! “Crash Bandicoot” is a badass name for a character that always carried a big toothy grin! Unfortunately, that essence doesn’t seem to have been maintained as the games and character come off as.. well… retarded. He has a high pitched voice, can’t actually speak, and acts like a mute Spongebob. He’s a dolt through and through, and is likely to remain a comedy character for the rest of it’s existence. The games lack content and serve as excuse plots to the gameplay which is tiring and repetitive at best. All of this bullshit (Content, obnoxious level design, nitro box crowding) could’ve been rectified in the remakes, but VV only sought to make it all worse. It’s almost a perverse pleasure they took in finding one measily way to kill players easily than ever before which causes several other issues in hitboxes and collison detection (like the slimes of Nitrus Brio’s fight) which border on… well… “N’sanity”.

Do I still think he would’ve made a better character in Ultimate? Of course! Anything is better than that little Disney fuck! You don’t necessarily have to like the games in order to vouch for a character (I didn’t like Path of Radiance, but was ecstatic for Ike to get into Brawl). But it is true, I don’t dig these games. I suppose it’s expected, these were originally made by ND, and they seem to take pleasure in overall shit design that people praise just because. So far, nothing they’ve made has actually aged well outside of Uncharted 2, and I’m inclined to refer to them as the Capcom of America as every game they’ve made is overrated to the highest of heavens (well, except LOU2). However I feel about ND matters less since the remakes were fucked by V.V. These jackoffs who decided to make it even easier to die in the games where even the veteren Crash fans can’t even enjoy them, citing the collison boxes and wonky controls as major detriments. This collection would’ve been just fine had they not went ahead and fucked it up just to make them even harder than the originals. But alas, such is the way of American game developers, desperately clinging to the notion that a hard game is the highest quality one can achieve.

Amma, I wish Rift Apart was on PS4….

Crash Blade (Smash Again)

I was completely unaware as to just how much people love Crash Bandicoot. So much so that this is a thing.

Ignoring the fact that they used Seth Rogan’s voice clip for Donkey Kong, signifying yet again the level of bad taste that Nintendo fans constantly show, this is not the first time this has happened. Smash Bros. brings out the worst emotions in gamers primarily because Sakurai is notoriously inadequate when it comes to picking and choosing characters to be a part of the game’s roster. In both Smash 4 and Ultimate, both games have seen this immense surge of “Animu-inspired” characters primarily from Fire Emblem, and at least 3 from Xenoblade. If that wasn’t enough, you have 4 guest fighters that have the trait of “Animu Swordfighter” as the fans have called them. Of course, because Nintendo fans and Anime fans both are hypersensitive and highly combative to any form of criticism, they tend to go overboard when coming up with counter arguments to the critiques. We’ve seen this when they constantly rant about people who say “anime sucks” (something that is more true today than it was 14 yearsago), which honestly shows how truly insecure they are about the medium they choose to consume. Afterall, living in American society where masculine attributes are valued, a medium where more feminine attributes (or anatomy, give or take) are highly valued is subject to plenty of ridicule. Anime fans are among the most maladjusted fandoms on the face of the planet for this very reason. This hyper insecurity is what causes them to be hyper combative, and equally as immune to basic reason. They are in a constant state of arrested development, preferring to act like children to any sign of criticism whatsoever. They cannot handle it. They cannot stand it. They have consumed so much anime that it’s become a part of their identity, and therein lies the problem.

Now if I wanted to be a sexist dipshit, I’d go even further to suggest that, because Anime is hyper feminine, that the fanbase takes on those hyper feminine attributes and becomes emotionally unstable as a result- I’ll stop there. 😛

This sounds like Nintendo fanboyism 101, but there are subtle differences between the 2 fandoms. Nintendo fans, despite being psychotic and cultist, only seem to act that way when nintendo products are criticized. Otherwise, they “appear” to be rational, even willing to help people with hardware related problems unlike other console users (particularly Sony fans). Anime fans, however, are far too unstable even when you express praise. I assume Steven Universe fell prey to the anime fandom if that suicide is anything to go by. The many shipping wars are another insidious indication (of feminine attributes :P). As much as we complain about the likes of certain gaming fandoms or even the MCU fanboys, anime fans are on a whole nother level of derangment. A whole new dimension of psychosis. Those within the Sonic fandom experience this on a daily basis (Thank you Sonic X, I don’t give a damn who thinks it’s innaccurate to imply that show had something to do with the influx of idiots). Even certain Nintendo fans despise them, which is why those fans in particular DESPISE the inclusion of Sora.

Fox pointed out recently that Sora is actually owned by Disney full stop… which is vomit inducing and anxiety provoking to see so many people on board with the character. So much so that I’ve even seen recent comments… on Youtube no less, where users casually imply that Disney would buy Pokemon and Persona in due time. So trust and believe, if Disney can gain a foothold into anime fandom, then just imagine the terrors that could be inflicted in the future!

But I’m rambling. As I’m seeing now, Nintendo fans have (in some instances) RECOILED at Sora’s inclusion, seeing it as a blight upon the game. Some players have declared that they will quit Smash and uninstall it. Even you, audience of 3, agree this is an utterly SHIT decision! I wonder if the massive disdain is because of the character itself… or the knowledge that anime fans will invade Nintendo forums by the assload, invade Smash servers and flood the lobbies with Sora parties where they go on and on with Square characters and Sora over and over if they’re not doing that already. Perhaps it’s the realization that Nintendo is catering to Anime fans as they know they have even lower standards than even the most diehard of Nintendo fans!

They see that Nintendo fans are starting to have their limits when concerning microtransactions. Their lootboxes. Their pay to win nonsense in Pokemon Unite. But anime fans… that’s where the golden goose is! They’ve started this train back on the Pii U, and they’re not slowing down! They turned Zelda into an anime (Skyward Sword is practically a highschool, and everything about Hyrule Warriors), Fire Emblem has otaku nonsense (cutscenes focused on lady parts, and petting women like bitches), Star Fox (an entire promotional trailer done in horrible animu CGI), Pokemon (more anime productions for quote “older audiences”), that one Pii U crossover game (I think it was a rhythm game or something), ruining Xenoblade’s artstyle to pander to otakus (Everyone loves big titty women), heavy promotion of Bayonetta, Persona 5, and NOW Kingdom Turds, there’s no escaping it! Even Metroid wasn’t immune to their anime transfiguration!

Nevertheless, it is… refreshing! To know that even the most diehard Nintard has his/her limits! But back to Crash Bandicoot.

For what it’s worth, I do agree he would’ve been an excellent choice (OVER Sora’s bitch ass, at least). Imagine him taking on Banjo Kazooie! 2 Western Platforming characters from completely different consoles! But who cares about those BAKA GAIJIN!? This is a JAPANESE PARTY FIGHTER! We’re only gonna give you Banjo and Minecraft (which was an absolutely terrible addition in the first place, and people actually voted for that shit!? No wonder entertainment sucks, this is the dumb shit people ask for!) and a little dinky ass costume for our retarded Mii’s. But this is for JAPAN and ANIMU FANS! Beyond that, I’ve noticed a plethora of derision coming from both sides. Crash fans are foaming at the mouth raging about Sora’s inclusion, and Kingdom Turds fans are declaring that Crash was “not important enough” (whatever the fuck that means) to get into a party fighter. I think this wouldn’t be made into such a big deal if this wasn’t intended to be the “FINAL” DLC character, and to see that Nintendo wasted so many slots for characters that literally have no business being there (like Kazuya and the fucking plant), this is basically pouring salt on an open wound. Seriously, if you are not a fan of Fire Emblem, Xenoblade, or Final Fantasy, you have nothing to look forward to in this game. The choices for characters outside of that narrow spectrum are complete and utter TRASH! The last time Nintendo fans had anything to look forward to was with Brawl, and that piece of shit wasn’t worth the wait or the hype. There’s no denying the saturation of higher quality ANIMU SWORDSMAN than there are of characters outside of that spectrum. The anime fans (emotional as they are) came up with an apparent counter narrative of “Scrimbalo… Scrimblo Bimbi…” Oh fuck off Twitter! Essentially, they’re mocking people for wanting something other than the typical Animu shitstain to grow the cancer that is Smash Bros Ultimate Animu Bugaloo. I’m counting Ryu, Terry, and Kazuya as well. Much as I love Terry, sorry, you don’t fit in this game! So the argument that people are being “irrational” complaining about Animu Swordsman is completely unfounded. There wouldn’t be any complaints of saturation had the quality of other characters been present all along, but what you have in place of that is a bunch of retarded choices. Duck Hunt and a Piranha Plant!? Village Idiot and an avatar for Wii Fit!? MIIIIIIIIIIIIIINECRAFT!? Ridely and Little Mac are the only good ones, and maybe even Banjo Kazooie, but you have to be sippin on 3 yacs at a time to think THAT makes up for the deficit of… ANIMU SWORDSMAN which practically comprise a good quarter of the roster! No, people have every right in the world to be pissed off about this result! Sakurai let his own fanboyism dictate the roster, while people have to PAY for the characters they actually asked for! That… is… bullshit! And on top of that, he adds EVEN MORE anime characters! Joker was ONLY included as an advertisement you PAY for, how the fuck can you argue against this game being strictly for anime fans while ACTUAL FANS OF VIDEOGAMES are left out in the cold!?

No, Crash Bandicoot would’ve been a better choice, and I’d STILL be pissed off about the lack of Geno and Ray 01! Custom Robo was an excellent game, but they get JACK SHIT for 3 straight games! Custom Robo is some anime shit too, but it’s a REAL fucking game, not some nonsense where you’re mashing square all day trying to hit some airborne fuck while a duck and a dog do fuck all to help you take him down, while also being filler for when the fangirls get to draw up some Yaoi porn of the main 2 characters! Not to mention Ray 01 actually looks fucking BADASS! Witness this intro and tell me you wouldn’t want to use this guy in a fighting game!

Do you know what it’s like to look at this beautiful mother fucker… and know that he gets virtually ignored because robots aren’t popular in Japan without some titties to sell them?

OH WAIT! NO EXCUSE THERE! Damn this roster is ass!

Half the reason people aren’t looking at Smash Bros as fondly as they did back on the gamecube is because the rosters remain terrible. They’re significantly imbalanced in terms of what characters are of desirable quality, and are heavily stilted toward one archtype. Lets just get this out of the way. Human characters don’t look all that impressive in Smash Brothers. The characters that draw your attention in are the more uniquely designed characters, the kind you see in your “oh so dreaded platformers”. Fire Emblem characters look boring and generic. Nothing stands out about them. Because they’re so “human”, they’re less enticing. Link, Marth, Roy, Ike, that’s already too many generic swordsmen. At least Pit has wings or some shit, C.Falcon is designed as a Comic Book Super Hero, Ganon is Black (hehe), and Mario has that giant nose on him. Snake looks like a generic little soldier. Ryu, Ken, and Kazuya all look like generic karate fighters. Joker is just a Tuxedo Mask knockoff that is literally “paid advertising”. After a while, all those Animu characters start to blend together, looking and feeling every bit as dull as they were designed. The fact that Nintendo did not care who or what got in shows they’ve lost their way. Everything that was uniquely designed for Link has been stripped away for BOTW, so now he fits right in with the animu fucks (looking like some Namco dork from the Tales of series), they turned Zelda into a weeb (everyone knows her TP design was the best and should be the standard look), and don’t get me started on Samus… again.

Then there’s Crash Bandicoot. He fits like a glove for this very reason. Hell, you could put in Vexx and he’d fit in much better than Sora.

Another thing that the psychopaths have been on a tear about was that “Oh Sora was the most requested character”. Was he? Last I heard, the ballots between him and Crash were neck and neck. You still had Geno way the fuck up there (for like… 3 games straight iirc), but didn’t stop Suckassrai from ignoring him again despite his lies of “wanting Geno in”. Sora’s chances where too high even if he didn’t win the vote for a number of reasons, but it boils down to at least 5.

1. Crash is an anthromorphic animal, a character type that is NOT popular in Japan unless it is exclusively cute, which Crash is not.
2. Crash is an American made character which significantly reduced his chances. Don’t bother putting Banjo-Kazooie out there, they were originally made under Nintendo’s wing. The only literal exception is Minecraft, that was such a shit choice, I can’t-
3. Sora already fits in with what the Japanese enjoy in their media. Prebuscent high school aged Shonen hero with LUST for another male lead that just so happens to be his rival. I think, I try not to play crap so I don’t know shit about it’s story outside of “FUSION HA”
4. Sora premiered in a game that, while owned by Disney, was developed by a Japanese company, Square Enix, whom Nintendo was all too comfortable with for a decade now, having already put in 3 other characters owned by the company (Dragon Quest also has no business in Smash)
5. Sora is good advertising for the Switch port of Kingdom Turds w/e, and I’m inclined to believe that by itself had more to do with Sora’s inclusion than “OH MAH BALLOTS!”

If Nintendo cared at all about “pleasing the fans”, they would’ve put in both Crash and Sora, damn the “final presentation” nonsense. But instead, they wasted time on all the shitty DLC choices (fucking Kazuya and Joker), and decided to limit the fan requests to as few characters as possible. I still want to know what people were smoking when they voted for a Minecraft character, maybe those damn E-cigarettes. Maybe the Narc’s Prions activated too early.

I’m sure someone out there is making the argument that “voting is a waste of time” for this very reason, but eh. A lot of people are simply celebrating Sora’s inclusion out of spite for Smash and Crash fans because “Everyone said it couldn’t be done!” That’s fine in and of itself. Like I said before, Smash Bros. fans have a sick obsession with dictating who is worthy of being in the game, and they easily EASILY shut down people for merely wanting a character in the damn shit, and if we’re being completely honest, Crash Bandicoot fans can be a tad obnoxious themselves (Using Sonic games to claim that they are more relevant is a major sign of desperation and insecurity), as well that several people just hate Activision (as if that’s the character’s fault, the franchise is just passed around like a prostitute), there’s all kinds of reasons that don’t require people to like the character or franchise.

They’re just supporting bad taste, oversaturation, horrible horrible fandoms, and DISNEY in doing so.

Celebration out of spite is still a vice that fandoms have yet to outgrow because for them, proving some random names on the internet wrong is more important than the product that comes out. A plethora of people celebrated the removal of wave dashing in Brawl out of spite for the smashboards crowd since they were (and still are) some of the biggest asses on the internet, but celebrated exclusion and bad mechanics in the process. Having a character appear in a Smash Bros. game despite popular consensus amongst the fans is an addictive drug for people, and having their arguments and stances be based on the whims of people they do not control is laughable, but woe is a fragile ego. If that’s the level of maturity one can expect out of Smash Bros. fans, Amma only knows what’s going to happen when the Kingdom Turds fans flood the goddamn Smash scene.

I kinda had an idea of a party fighter based on this nonsense, actually. I’d call it “Crash Blade” where you have reps from Western games fighting against reps from Japanese games, with Crash Bandicoot and Sora representing the “leaders” of each side. Have them be known as “Westside, Eastside”.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… ahem.

Honestly, I’d pay to see Scorpion fight Ryu Hayabusa, or Lara Croft fighting Tifa Lockhart (Battle of the Bewbs, anyone?). Or hey, maybe even Kratos vs Sepheroth. Yeah, it’d never happen. Closest we got to that was Playstation All-Stars.

And no, I’d probably be interested in that Nickalodeon fighting game if I cared about Nickalodeon. Never really enjoyed their cartoons. I was always more of a Cartoon Network guy, but I don’t want to go back to the Wii just for Samurai Jack.

Is Smash Bros for fans anymore?

Is Smash Bros for Nintendo fans anymore?

Dave Chappelle’s latest special reminded me too much of Nintendo’s conflict minerals and Tomodachi Life. Y’all remember that BS years ago? How the deaths of African workers had people running to their defense, “OH BUT SONY AND APPLE DO THE SAME!”, but the mere rejection of putting gays in a crappy life sim was PURE FUCKING EVIL to the point that even the most diehard Nintards would NOT go to bat for them!? Yeah, that DID happen, didn’t it!? 😛

And what the hell is a “Stan”?

Sora from Kingdom Turds is in Smash Ultimate, and is supposedly the last DLC character to be released. You know the kinds of responses I’ve seen in regards to the trailer?

“They really show that Sora is a boy of purity and innocence who would rather be friends with all rather than destroy people! I love that Nintendo portrayed him that way!” This… for a kid in a “FIGHTING GAME”!!! The trailer’s presentation is just plain sickening!

Now I know for a fact that people will bitch at anyone with a “negative” opinion on Sora’s addition as people who need a life (you know, the twats on twitter and youtube), but at some point, you gotta think how this looks and how certain people are catered to when… they would never even consider playing Smash Bros in the first place. I don’t know any fan of Street Fighter who, at least this day in age, would pick up a Nintendo console since Capcom has made it clear that Street Fighter’s home is on the Playstation and Xbox. Same with Tekken and King of Fighters. If you want fighting games, you don’t go to Nintendo since for 4 straight generations, they’ve never been the type of people to have controllers that are comfortable or suitable for fighting games (their insistence on making Control Sticks dominate on their controllers says it all). What I’m saying is that the type of people who are into Street Fighter, Tekken, Final Fantasy, and yes, even Kingdom Hearts… you won’t normally find them on Nintendo consoles. Nintendo fans have shown earlier this year that they don’t give a damn about any game that does not have Nintendo’s seal of approval. They don’t get excited for anything other than Nintendo games. They’ll give a passing mention to Bayonetta or No More Heroes 3, but overall, they don’t really care about any Switch game that doesn’t have Nintendo’s logo on it. The brand loyalty these fans have borders on pathological cultism.

So… why the fuck is nearly… idk, 15% of the roster dedicated to characters from franchises that practically have zero presence on Nintendo consoles? I don’t know any fighting game with more than 4 guest characters at most, but Smash Ultimate is filled to the goddamn brim. When Smash 4 was announced and had all these retarded elements going around like the village idiot and wii fit bitch, I had accused the developers of paying more attention to Nintendo’s history rather than trying to make a competent fighting game. That opinion hasn’t changed now, but it’s almost easy to back peddle on it seeing as most of the hype and controversy surrounding Smash Ultimate now focuses almost exclusively on characters that have nothing to do with Nintendo. We had that one nontroversy over the tit monster girls from Xenoblade 2 being in the game, but at least those were Nintendo characters. People had all of these memes running around about 3rd party characters being “their new main in Smash”, and you’d have to wonder why they’re more excited for non-Nintendo characters. I blame this entirely on Sakurai as he’s been a little fuck boy when concerning the rosters for the last 3 games in the series, you wouldn’t have the wildly imbalanced presence of Fire Emblem characters if it wasn’t for this guy having a raging hard on for Fire Emblem. But hey, at least those are Nintendo characters. But the problem is at some point, you would think this dipshit would put in characters that ARE cool and would also serve the purpose of making known some other Nintendo franchise that may deserve some sequels. Little Mac being the only exception because hey, Boxing is awesome, and this guy has some testosterone on him.

But instead of doing research on games produced by the company he WORKED for, he instead tosses in all these bastards from franchises that aren’t Nintendo. Why? One could blame all the popularity polls running around desiring characters that should never have been realistic choices (I will never understand why Kazuya Mishima is in this game. Never), but if we’re going by that, then we’d have to blame the audience exclusively for not actually caring about Nintendo’s games… which is oxymoronic because the people who play Smash Bros or ANY Nintendo game would less likely care about 3rd party games in the first place. It kinda goes back to the original Wii where people complained that Nintendo was ignoring their core audience to go after the “dreaded casuals”, fomenting this false dichotomy because the industry itself was so anti-Nintendo and anti-consumer that anything that seemed remotely interested in giving the people what they wanted was against their very nature. That’s how I feel about the last 2 Smash games, or I should say last game since Ultimate is just an updated Smash 4. It’s made more so for fans of other franchises, and by putting in so many guest characters and giving them far more prestige, and then having anime trailers for certain characters, so much animu influence and focus by way of Dragon Quest, Fire Emblem, Xenoblade, and Final Fantasy, they want to cater to otakus who just live and breath anime bullshit, and I absolutely hate it. Nintendo only puts in their dumbest characters like Bowser Jr, Village Idiot, Wii Fit, a goddamn Pirhana Plant and what not, but all the cool characters with the exception of Ridely and Little Mac… are dedicated to the most animu of Nintendo franchises. I can’t stand the direction this franchise went in as it feels too pretentious and focused on anime. The last DLC character being an animu Disney stan is the last straw.

When Smash Bros first appeared, it wasn’t treated like this prestigious game, it was treated like a wacky fighting game where most of the marketing was like “LOL, Mario pounding Pikachu, whats going on!?”, but the original game was very modest, treated itself like a game first and foremost, and just took all the cool stuff about Nintendo and put them in this “PARTY FIGHTER”, which is the appropriate definition of this game. I love the old menu screen music and character description music. It was very chill, very oldschool, and didn’t look at the characters as these important bastions of honor, yah know? The backgrounds for the menus were also very low budget, very modest, didn’t give a fuck how cheap it looked, but you got the sense that the game didn’t treat itself seriously… and ironically, that was fine. The premise of the game didn’t demand it to be taken seriously where people talk about what characters are “deserving” of being in Smash Bros. based on criteria that never mattered. Cause if that was the case, only Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon would be represented as those were the most popular Nintendo franchises at the time. Maybe even Star Fox since it used to be good.
But presentation wise, I loved the original Smash Bros. I loved it’s modest feel, I loved that it didn’t try to convince you of it’s importance with overly done orchestrated music, I fucking hate the theme songs for Smash Bros. after Melee. Smash 64 also had actual artwork for their individual character endings, something that made each character stand out from each other rather than fall on cheap screen shots that do NOTHING to make each character feel unique. There was something… “important”, I’d say, about the concept of having the game revolve around a kid just playing with his toys, pretending all of these assholes were kicking the shit out of each other.

Melee wasn’t all that much different from 64 in terms of presentation, though the intro certainly was a step in the wrong direction. It’s not bad, but you started getting the sense that the game was treating itself like more than just a party fighting game. But for the most part, it’s nearly the same as Smash 64 in terms of presentation. I did miss the individual menu themes from 64 where now all the menu music is shared. The title design and font was also changed to something less silly to something more basic (which I’m not a fan of). But overall, the game was more or less a suped up Smash 64 with all the BEST fighting mechanics and physics, and still focused on the cool side of Nintendo.. except Game & Watch. He eats shit.
The same idea exists about the “kid playing with his toys”, but the human hand is very brief in the game’s intro. But it IS there, so in large part, the game was treated as a proper sequel to 64.

Then… Brawl happened.

Brawl is, in my opinion, the absolute worst game in the series. I haven’t played enough of Smash 4 to know what’s what with that game, but with Brawl, it’s like the game was designed by a completely different person. Sakurai left the company before now, and I think he changed as a result. Brawl was shitty. Slow as molasses, shit roster, and presentation that makes me cringe. When the first trailer dropped, it felt like the game was taking itself TOO seriously with a much slower and… completely DEPRESSING orchestral soundtrack with a chorus that wants you to feel dread and despair rather than hype. It fucking SUCKS! It’s at that point that I felt that this game was being made for a completely different audience, the ones that love all the “artistic” aspects of Nintendo, and it shows with them REMOVING all the characters that I enjoyed. No one asked them to remove Mewtwo or Pichu, or Young Link. Or hell, maybe they did for some arbitrary reason. Brawl is when Nintendo fans got really… really obnoxious about the characters that are included, about who was most deserving to be in the game even when there were fan polls over it. Yes, I’m still sour assed about Mewtwo getting snuffed for Lucario and having a bunch of jackasses mock people for being pissed over it. No I don’t care that Ultimate reversed this.

Gone is the “human kid playing with his toys concept”. No, the toys now play with themselves. They are fully sentient and have no need of a human “God” to give them life. No, now we have the entire roster standing atop a cliff, looking at a dramatic sunrise symbolizing a new dawn for the franchise in which Smash Bros would become “Art”. It’s kinda fitting since Nintendo and Sakurai don’t allow the players to play the game the way they want (All those Smash tourneys being fucked over comes to mind).

Mine Craft? Seriously?

But it’s also the first game to have guest characters, and when Solid Snake was revealed, everyone lost their fucking minds over how this was a thing. Then Nintendo did a poll on what guests fans wanted in Smash. So here’s Sonic because 90s rivalry still lives on even though you’ve got goofy assholes talking about “Oh Nintendo owns the rights to Sonic without… owning the… rights to Sonic”. The problem with Snake was this obsessive need by Nintendo (and fans) to pair him up with Samus… simply because she’s in skintight latex, and things just started getting disgusting from there. We’ve got Animu Pit over here with Animu Fire Emblem characters (I admit, I was excited for Ike getting into the game. Not so good in hindsight), and a more sexualized Samus… which is honestly still weird to me.

Yeah, that’s something that’s been bugging me lately about Nintendo and their overwhelming focus on being mainstream is the increase in sexual content. It’s not something I expect (OR DESIRE) from Nintendo games, but here we have Samus with cybernetic high heels, and all the brawl trailers usually focusing on Samus’s ass, that was just weird to me. You’d think “Oh Samus is a respected female character”, but here comes Brawl and Other M putting a disturbing focus on her ass, that’s weird to me. Fire Emblem Houses of shit.. w/e has a whole scene with this purple haired hoe with the camera lingering all over her merchandise, that’s weird coming from Nintendo. This ain’t even about not trying to be “family friendly” anymore, this is just straight up Japanese Otaku perversion. It’s weird coming from Nintendo, and they do this shit constantly with Samus for some odd reason. It explains some of the more pervy designs of female characters in Pokemon these days, but it’s still fucking weird. It’s like they’re trying to pander heavy to otakus, that’s probably why they have these 2 heavily animu females in Hyrule Warriors, 3 if you count the genderbent Link with the crossbows, I hate all 3 of em.

You can see all of this Otaku pandering all over Xenoblade 2 and Smash Ultimate. Yeah Sakurai is a fan of Fire Emblem, but all the franchises represented damn near caters to anime fans. Putting in Joker from Persona 5 to advertise Persona 5 is stupid and nonsensical (again, Nintendo fans don’t care about 3rd Party games), but still panders to Otakus. All of this shit, as I see it, started in Brawl. The Snake and Samus sexual tension nonsense was all people could talk about for years, it was memed to hell and back. Goddamn Samus was ruined. Sure she never talked until Other M, but I wish she went back to being purely a mute. The focus on Samus’s ass was just weird, especially in Other M. You got Samus talking about why Adam would sacrifice his brother, and immediately afterward, there’s her ass! That’s fucking weird coming from Nintendo, I fucking hate it! Main reason I can’t watch Anime anymore is damn near all of it focuses on sex, I don’t want to see that shit out of Nintendo. That shouldn’t be neither here or there when concerning Smash, but here come the bimbos from Xenoblade 2.

“OMG why are you holding Nintendo to a different standard!?”

Because they themselves told us they were “different”. I expect them to hold up their end of the bargain.

“But complaining about sexual content in vidya games makes you an SJW!”

Fuck off with that nonsense. I don’t wanna see that bullshit coming out of Nintendo games, least of all Metroid. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that shit to be dialed the fuck down.

What I’m trying to say is that it feels like Smash Bros went fully corporate, went fully pretentious, and went fully otaku. It’s how I felt when Brawl came out, that it wasn’t a game for me. I fucking loved the first 2 games, but with Brawl, I got the sense that I was being shunned from the game in favor of these hipster anime fans who lost their shit over Lucario, Pit, and Lucas. At one point in time, it was just this simple fighting game designed as an imagined fight from a kid playing with his toys. I enjoyed that because that’s exactly what it is. With Melee, they started focusing on figurines since those are the more “grown up” toys. Melee was basically darker and edgier than 64, but the same idea exists. It’s kinda like Dragon Ball transitioning to the very first saga of DBZ, it’s basically the same show but more mature. Then Brawl comes out, it’s basically the shitty Majin Buu Saga, and Ultimate comes off like DBS with it’s incredibly bloated roster of unwanted scum. There’s no concept of anyone playing with anything because it’s not about the kid or the toys. The characters don’t exist as toys but more so beings that are controlled by the God “Sakurai”. The kid is supposed to represent the Player, at least I assumed. By taking the kid out, it meant that the player was no longer important. It’s all about fulfilling the desires of the God who made the game. Otherwise, and again… Geno would be there.

Again, I have to reiterate how obnoxious it is to include 4 Square characters, 2 of which have never been on a Nintendo console, but the one square character that WAS originally designed for a Mario game is NOT in the game. In his place are 4 Animu sword fighters from games that are celebrated by “Playstation” fans. That… is a slap in the face. But it tells me that’s what Sakurai “approved” of. He has a sick obsession with anime as shown by his preferences in character choices. So even though Geno would make more sense given that he is a Mario character, he goes and shoves in the characters that, while requested by fans as well because they’re totally juvenile, were the ones HE agreed with. Smash Bros. has become a vehicle for his own enjoyment and fanservice rather than the actual fans. Or at least the Nintendo fans that swear by him. Sure, there’s a large contingent of Square fanboys who are jerking off to Sora right now, but the cost of appeasing them is losing out on the one Mario character that people had desired for a long time. That window is now closed.

Smash Bros. basically said “fuck me” back when Brawl first came out, but now the series is saying “fuck Nintendo fans in general”. One must ask who Smash Bros (and Nintendo games in general) are being catered to. The influx of anime games and characters is impossible to ignore, and should’ve been of concern to people. But alas, even at this late date, “Nintendo can do no wrong”.

I’m still annoyed that Nobuyuki Hiyama was replaced as the voice of Link.

I also don’t understand why they keep using random starters as playable characters, but Victini and Zoroark would be obvious choices for obvious reasons, but whatever, we like the dumb frog ninja and wrestling cat.

Friggin “sigh” (Smash Bros)

Originally posted by Bucko

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww……..

Great, now Nintendo fans and Disney fans can get together and spread their love of bad entertainment to the world stage of a fighting game that is all but Mugen in name only.

I don’t know if Geno was put into the game beyond being some costume for Mii’s, but if not… then what the fuck, Nintendo!? You can go out of your way to put in Cloud Strife, Sepheroth, and now fucking SORA from Kingdom Turds, but you spare every expense in the world to put in Geno!? Nevermind the fact that he’s literally the coolest Mario character ever to be created (he’s practically a puppet God), he’s been one of the most BEGGED for characters since Brawl. The excuse being that “Well Square owns the rights to the character”. There’s no excuse for that now since you’ve put in 3 fucking Square owned characters! I don’t understand this mindset where characters that have been in actual Nintendo games get less attention than characters from outside of Nintendo’s history of games.

That’s another thing that bugs me about the (if we’re being completely honest) unwarranted appearance of so many guest fighters. Kazuya Mishima was pushing it, but most of the excitement for Smash Ultimate has been in DLC guest fighters. It almost communicates that Nintendo doesn’t think their own characters are good enough to be in Smash Bros, so they bypass a LOT of potential to go after these fucking guest fighters. The Japanese have a bad habit of doing unnecessary collabs with each other, but this is something else entirely! It’s like… they feel they can’t bank on their own characters and franchises when concerning DLC, but these guest fighters are what makes the money. It gives the impression that Nintendo has become fully corporatized and are only looking at the bottom line. That’s the only reason I can see as to why they’re not offering more NINTENDO BRAND characters through DLC, purely focusing on characters and franchises they had no hand in creating. People have wanted Krystal from Star Fox. Ashley from Wario Ware. Geno from Super Mario RPG. Personally, I wanted Vaati from Minish Cap! Ray 01 from Custom Robo! Takamaru from Nazo No Murasame (they already DID the work on him for Samurai Warriors 3!). Hell, slap in Sukopon from Joy Mecha Fight! We didn’t need Ice Climbers or Fire Emblem to be popular before those assholes could show up in Smash Bros., how the fuck are we gonna ignore ALL the Nintendo shit in favor of characters and franchises Nintendo fans likely wouldn’t give 2 shits about anyway because they don’t BUY 3rd party games in the first damn place!? What, did Sakurai look at the name of his company and think “yeah, let me put the actual Sora in here!”

I would’ve killed for Victini to be in this bitch, but we got old firecat from the forgettable Gen 7 of all things. But no, lets shove in that fucking dog from Duck Hunt…I don’t get these people anymore! You have a long list of GOOD, COOL, POTENTIAL CHARACTERS from your OWN franchises, but none of them get the majesty that the Mickey Mouse Animu fuck gets, I don’t get it! Next thing you know, they’ll actually put in Goku for all the cheese and jizz in the world!

Capeshit #13 (Let there be CRINGE!)

*sighs*

*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighs*

We’ve all been there before. Being a fan of franchises, big or small, you always have to make room for dissappointment. Not every installment in a series you enjoy is going to be a hit, thus you must learn to lower your expectations. Might as well be a way of life for Sonic fans, but I digress. If you enjoy something enough, then regardless of how bad it is, you will more than likely be interested in a follow-up, likely in the hopes that it will remove the stench from the last thing you’ve watched or played, or because it was still intriguing enough to be a guilty pleasure of sorts.
This is how I felt with the Mark Webb Spider-Man films (what a fitting name for a director!). The movies are really… really bad. That’s not up for debate. Directing and pacing style is tacky at best, and is poor writing at it’s finest. Despite that, I would argue that they feel more like Spider-Man than even the Raimi Trilogy. At least… in regards to “eras”. Raimi Spider-Man is more reminiscent of the 60s-70s era of Spider-Man, while Webb Spider-Man is more 90s & MTV CGI Cartoon. The Raimi movies focus more on Peter Parker’s personal life while the Webb movies focus on Corporate Conspiracies and Bioterrorism. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but we can genuinely agree they kick the shit out of the Spider-Fan films. That is also not up for debate.

All that said, the Webb Movies left a hole. I genuinely wanted to see where the 3rd Amazing Spider-Man movie was going to go, even with how shit the second movie was. Idk, it had something going for it that… in spite of how shit it was, I’d go back to watch them twenty times… even before going back to the Raimi movies. Andrew Garfield was also a FUCKING GOOD SPIDER-MAN, lets give the man some props! Miguire’s cool and all… but Garfield had some genuine fucking love for the character! His line delivery was also much better. I think Miguire more so has the better films and writing, but Garfield had the better character overall. He can’t fill in the Spider suits he’s given (just LOOK how much he struggles to keep his second costume tight!) but the guy was hands down a fucking… AMAZING Spider-Man!

What’s this got to do with Venom? Well other than being a part of the same series, I’m making a point that… I would kill for a sequel to Amazing Spider-Man 2 even at this late date. Unfortunately that won’t happen since the MCU fanboys are masturbating to the bastardized version appearing in the post credits scene, but dammit, I STILL WANT IT after 6 years. I have no such desire for a Venom 3.

I’m gonna get this out of the way. I’ve never picked up any of Venom’s solo comics. With the exception of the Knuckles comics, spinoff series piss me off. Often, they’re unwarranted and never really do anything to make the characters more appealing than they already were before. We didn’t need Wolverine’s adventures in Japan or.. or Cable’s Six Pack (his crew, not his physique), or the countless numbers of X-Men teams that make keeping track of any fucking thing in the X-Men universe a major pain in the ass. I say this because the characters by themselves were interesting because they brought something to the table that wasn’t seen in the other characters that appeared. They distinguished themselves in personality and abilities, not because they had an interesting backstory. Hell, I don’t think people care about the several million backstories for a large number of characters outside of the main ones because the main characters are those we know from the beginning. Backstories are tales that are established prior to us getting to know the character which makes connecting to that character rather difficult since all the “fun stuff” was done beforehand. It’s the same concept with character relationships that are established beforehand. You wouldn’t naturally care about say… the death of Gamora and why that makes Starlord sad if the GOTG “just” appeared in Infinity War. It’s kinda why people bitched about Justice League as the characters didn’t have their individual movies like the MCU does (which is a cop out since no one needed Spider-Fan to have his own movie before Infinity War, but that is for another topic).

But what I’m saying is I know less about Venom outside of the fact that he was the coolest Spider-Man villain ever to exist. I know of Klintar and the Symbiote God Knull, and for the longest time, I thought I was the only one who knew about “Scream”, but aside from that, I never really payed attention to Venom and Eddie beyond them being “frienemies” of Spider-Man. So… yeah, it was quite easy for me to enjoy the first Venom movie despite knowing full and well that they FUCKED UP Venom’s character! Venom himself is treated like a joke. He’s just a CGI buddy who gets Eddie into a bunch of random and hilarious hijinks. I suppose what made the movie enjoyable regardless… was the fact that Venom was still MURDERING THE SHIT out of people! Venom kicked copiuous amounts of ass in one movie, destroying SWAT teams, decapitating fools with his fucking teeth, and genuinely being creepy as fuck. The Venom film had an aesthetic style that worked really well to bring out that combination of “creepy as shit” and still being “bad ass as all fuck”. The only thing wrong is the character of Venom. He’s a fucking goof ball! The only thing they get right… is him being a killer!

Riot was, for some reason, the main villain of the film, and not Scream when it was clear that Scream was the leader of those 5 Symbiotes, and he wasn’t born from Venom’s DNA like those five, so even with what little I know of Venom’s solo shit, it’s clear that the makers of the film couldn’t care about the source material either. They’re probably like “meh, if people don’t care about Spider-Man’s character being wrong, the most popular and recognizable of all Comic Book heroes, then why would they give a shit about his most popular and iconic villain?” Indeed. As wrong as Venom 1 was, it was still a pretty entertaining movie, and I wanted to see what came next.

Well folks, after 3 years of waiting, we finally get to see Carnage on the big screen! Well… not if you refused the Narc, but you get the idea. What the creators of the sequel have done… was double down on all the shit that sucked about the first movie… and created nothing but pure CRINGE! Much like Venom, Carnage is practically a different character. You won’t notice until Cletus gets the Carnage powers that something is terribly wrong here. But he isn’t the worst part of the movie. Nah, the worst part comes after the movie ends. But as a result, unlike any other movie I’ve seen, I do not care for a sequel afterwards. Why is that? Well, we shall see, won’t we!? Lets get ON wit it!

We open up with a haunted house… or something. Some shit we don’t care about goes down, and we flash forward to the character of Shriek who I’m sure caused loads of controversy for being race bent, and not being powder white and ink black like in the comics. Uhhhhhh… here’s, she’s treated like some X-Men mutant and not the horrible accident of Cloak and Dagger, and is being transported to Ravencroft for reasons. Because the idiots transporting her have no idea what she’s capable of, Shriek uses Banshee’s Sonic Scream to obliterate this Cop dude’s ears. The punk fires a round into Shriek’s eye which causes her to fall out of the back of the car (Why the hell were those doors open in the first place!? Don’t they know “Safety first”!? Fuck the Police, man…). Then… we flip one scene to see Cletus Kassidy in his prison cell… just to let you know this movie is about Carnage and not Shriek (Or so they say).

TITLE!!

So, we finally go to Eddie Brock who’s doing an interview on Kassidy, following up from the end credits of the first movie. He, of course, talks crazy because of course he does, yet he doesn’t want to talk to anyone except Eddie Brock. Why, I don’t know. I think we’re supposed to assume it’s because “insanity”, but what I assume is that he wanted Eddie to give a “good story” for Cletus Kassidy. Could make sense seeing as most killers (in america) look for infamy in some way or another. Eddie, apparently, leaves out of frustration of not getting anything good out of it (while also having Venom take a peak at the walls or… something), and goes down to the police station where Cop Dude (I think his name was Muller or something) from the Shriek flashback lays into him for his shit journalism. As such, Venom appears and tries to bite his head off before Eddie drags him into a bathroom or closet.

That’s the main conflict in the movie in that Eddie is trying to control Venom’s ravenous cravings, but every waking moment, Venom is getting sick and tired of pussy footing around the hunger. “I’m a predator!” For the most part, Eddie tries to give Venom chickens to eat, but he refuses for some reason. Chicken’s are delicious, the fuck’s wrong with him!? So… Eddie tries to curb his appetite with Chocolate by visiting his obligatory Chinese friend in the market (Cause Tencent). But the bitch doesn’t have any, and he wants to eat Chen as punishment. Afterward, Eddie gets a call from his Ex to have dinner with her. But… the only reason she does this is to announce to him that she is getting married. Honestly? Fuck her! As a dude who’s never been in a relationship (*cries*), if I break up with someone over some shit, WHY THE FUCK would I want to hear about her getting married to some punk ass doctor!? Maybe it’s just me, but I see that as one big “fuck you” from the chick you used to bang! Idk man, it just seems insensitive. All the while being bitchy that he isn’t “happy” for her! Why the actual fuck would anyone be happy about losing their partner to someone else!?

That brings up another point. This woman is FAST! You remember in the last movie when JUST AFTER SHE DUMPS EDDIE, she finds another man in the blink of a fucking eye!? She’s clearly been fucking him behind Eddie’s back! Ain’t no way in hell you can find another man that damn fast!

Anywho, Venom is equally as pissed off about this arrangement as Eddie is. For some reason, Venom forces Eddie to cry in order to win sympathy points. I don’t think Venom can control his bodily functions like this, but I found myself laughing for some reason. After the biggest “fuck you” any guy could receive from an Ex, the next morning, we go into “hilarity” where Venom tries to make Eddie breakfast as well as fetching his mail… without anyone freaking out about a random black tenticle that just appears out of nowhere.

This movie is fucking weird with how everyone is absolutely chill with Venom being in Eddie’s body.

Anywho, in the mail, Eddie receives a postcard from Cletus… oh fuck, I forgot to put this in. Earlier in the movie… before the Ex makes an ass of herself, Venom drew up some sketches of what he found in Cletus’s cell. These sketches were, in actuality, the locations of where he buried the bodies of his victims. Why… no one on guard duty actually looked at this over security cameras or… w/e else, I’ll never know, but because Eddie and Venom actually do their own detective work, we never got to this point until now. But because of this, Eddie reports on this, and his story leads to this next bit. In the present, the postcard was to let Eddie know that Cletus is going to be executed by lethal injection. Because of that, Eddie decides “Eh, what the hell, I might as well pay him one last visit”, which I guess is supposed to make him look like a decent bloke. So he goes down there, but instead of a so-called “friendly chat”, Cletus apparently blames Eddie’s story for why he’s facing execution, not… you know, being a fucking mass murdering psychopath! They get into an argument that leads to Cletus laying into Eddie’s past history of abusive parents, and I think this exchange was included ONLY because Venom fans hated the fact that Eddie Brock’s backstory was never a factor in this movie. Well, I guess Serkis listens to fans unlike Disney when concerning Uncle Ben.

Because of that little jab, Venom takes holds of Eddie’s body and tries to strangle him! “YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Ok… lets pause a minute here and talk about how Hardy’s delivery ruined a pretty tense and/or deep scene.

See… in the first movie, when Venom made his presence known, he spoke in a very demonic and ominous tone. It made Venom seem creepy, scary, violent, and FITTING given the character! He spoke in a very low tone with enough bass to convey that he isn’t the heroic type of character. Thus, you take the character seriously! It isn’t until later on in the movie that he starts…. sounding like a fucking moron! “On my planet of Klintar, I am something of a loser, much like you!” He speaks faster and at a slightly higher tone which makes him seems “zany” and utterly retarded. Unfortunately, he doesn’t drop this for the remainder of these movies because the writers and director thought that “if he’s too fitting or terrifying like in the comics, movie goers will pan this shit like Batman vs Superman, because much like Sonic 06, God help us if we EVER do something serious with these Comic Book characters ever again!” Nevermind that brand loyalty has more to do with the reception of the MCU than anything else. You’re never going to see a large contingient of people taking a massive shit on Disney movies… except Star Wars fans because they actually have some fucking PRIDE in the object of their fandom! But the point I’m trying to make is that by making Venom stupid and comical, you’ve destroyed any real tension these movies could have with characters that are designed to look menacing and violent! We can toss out F-Bombs all day, but actually having an uber tier rape train… well, we won’t have that anymore because we’re not making Deadpool. This is still technically a Spider-Man movie so the characters have to have that sense of whimsy and dumbness! So… when Cletus gives Eddie that armor piercing “Reason you suck” statement which indeed would get under Eddie’s skin, it’s FUCKING RUINED when Venom immediately goes “YOU SON OF A BITCH” in the most silly, unconvincingly tone deaf manner possible!

Maybe if Venom was more of a taunting parasite, going “Oh, consider that nerve touched!” or some shit like that, it’d be better as it would convey that Venom isn’t exactly Eddie’s “friend”, and is merely using him as a host to survive (AS IT SHOULD BE!). But… no, Venom just has this random emotional outburst because OH THEY’RE BEST BUDS!!! Fuck this “gotta tone down hardcore badasses for pussy ass moviegoers” bullshit, man! Give me DREDD, you son of a bitch!

Anywho, when Eddie tries to strangle Cletus, the bastard bites his hand. You saw this in the trailer, but what they didn’t show was Cletus wiping the blood from his mouth to get a good look at it. He SEES THE SHIT MOVE! And then he proceeds to eat it anyway because he’s psychotic. Ok, see that’s fine! Show that he’s deranged enough to still eat moving, sentient blood! That’s fine!

Moving on, to try and get away from that noise, Venom gets hungry again and wants to EAT SOMEONE! So they find some corner boys mugging a lady behind an alley way (seriously, why the fuck would anyone go down a dark alley at night in the city these days!? What the hell do these people need to do down here that this cliche gets overused?). After beating their asses, Venom tries to eat them both, but Eddie, for some reason, urges and urges Venom not to do so… which goes against his declaration in the first film. You know, at the end where Eddie basically says to only eat bad guys, right? So… why does Eddie stop Venom from eating bad guys!? If you guessed “manufactured tension”, you are correct!

Also also… remember in the last movie that Venom basically threatens Eddie, declaring that if he doesn’t get to feast on at least one asshole… he’d start eating Eddie’s organs. Right? That happened, right? So… why does that not happen!? Was Venom just fucking with him? It’s quite possible, but that would fall in line with the comics, wouldn’t it? If he doesn’t like the host he has, he’ll just kill em, right? Not only that, but it was practically established in the last movie for fuck’s sake!

Ahh fuck it. So the 2 idiots head back to the apartment… and get into a fight with each other! Not something serious, just some slapstick bullshit where a comedy moron gets into a fight with the CGI Buddy where said CGI buddy will win because often times, he’s the supernatural being of the 2! So… that’s what happens. Venom separates from Eddie (an act that should’ve KILLED Eddie by now! This was the SECOND separation he’s had from Venom, and I recall from the old cartoon that Eddie even needed a major medical operation to separate Venom from himself, with said doctor telling him that a SECOND separation would KILL HIM! What the fuck is going on with this bullshit!?), he then attaches himself to some random hobo on the street, gives Eddie the finger… leaving Eddie to go fuck off somewhere.

Again, how is Eddie not fucking dead after that!?

Moving on, we now go back to Cletus Kassidy being executed for his crimes. Of course, the Symbiote Blood he ingested earlier responds to said execution and finally transforms Cletus into CARNAGE! And BOY does he look underwhelming! Oh well, CGI rarely ever does look good. But whatever, CARNAGE IS KILLING PEOPLE, THAT’S WHAT WE CARE ABOUT, RIGHT!? Sure we saw all of this in the second trailer for the movie, but HEY, RIGHT!? I kid, it’s an alright scene, and it’s awesome to see this bastard just revel in his new powers! Though I do question how he can just randomly make tornadoes. Uh… could he always do that!? I know Carnage is supposed to be more powerful than Venom, but… was this what they were referring to!? Control over the elements!? I thought all he did was turn his limbs and body in bladed weapons all day, not… random twisters!

But hey, it’s fun to watch if not confusing as all fuck.

So now that Carnage has been unleashed, what’s Venom and Eddie up to? Well…

FUCK THIS MOVIE!!!

No, really, FUCK THIS MOVIE! You have a character who’s bitching and moaning about the fact that Eddie won’t let him EAT PEOPLE… so when he splits from him, all he does is go out CLUBBIN!? He’s up here wearing glowing necklaces, getting on stage talking about dumb shit like “Aliens and Humans are supposed to stick together“, what the literal fucking shit!? Where did ANY of this come from!? It’s just random and has no rational basis for existing as dialog for the character! Oh and we have him doing the Mic drop shit for some reason because “hey, it might be funny seeing Venom do shit like this!“. What kind of outdated mindset did the director have!? The age of “CGI buddies doing random real world shit for a laugh” is fucking over! The Chipmunks ruined it all!

If Venom really was serious about EATING people, he wouldn’t be wasting time at a club! He jumps from host to host, killing them… BY ACCIDENT because “oh shit, we’re not compatible”, ONG… the amount of logic Serkis ignores in his own fucking movie for the sake of a story that literally goes NOWHERE is a sight beyond belief! And yet, this is STILL more tolerable than Spider-Fan whining about the lack of Tony Stark in his life!

Back to Carnage because Eddie Brock isn’t doing shit worth talking about, Carnage steals a car and goes… idk… some random convenience store. But while in the car, he takes a gander at the rearview mirror to reveal that… Cletus and Carnage are infact 2 separate entities.

Again, FUCK THIS MOVIE!

For the uninitiated, Cletus and Carnage are one and the same. Cletus has Symbiote powers, but the Symbiote itself isn’t merely a parasitic being where Cletus is just a host body. Cletus IS Carnage! It’s basically his super suit.

Now at first, I thought this was the writing staff being clueless about the comicbook counterpart as it is a pretty easy mistake to make. Afterall, other Symbiote characters like Scream and Riot are simply parasites with host bodies, so I figured they assumed that Carnage was the same way. But having watched the movie all the way through, I’m thinking this was more of a deliberate change on their part! We’ll get to that later, but I want to make the point that because of this change, Carnage doesn’t feel like a unique character as a result. There’s nothing to distinguish him from Venom or Riot aside from being red. Much of what we see Carnage do was already done by Riot in the original movie (aside from his magical tornado bullshit). Carnage was already ruined by the time Riot appeared on screen! Smart people would look at this and say “We gotta do something unique with this character. Establish and distinguish his differences from Riot and Venom in a way that validates him having his fucking name in the title!” But no! They basically just have Riot in a red color palette and called it a fucking day! No fucks given to how this makes Carnage feel completely redundant! All because we have to make Shriek important somehow simply to tie in with their partnership in the comics!

Then again, there was that alternate universe thing where Carnage actually separated itself from Cletus and went on a rampage to fuck up babies. I GUESS that counts?

But eh. Carnage finds a random convenience store, kills the clerk working there, and uses his Carnage tentacles to, get this…. hack into the mother fucking computer!

Ok yeah, I guess that IS unique to Carnage, but DAMN is that retarded! Oh and better yet, he can also travel through ethernet cables to where ever he wants to go! Because that makes sense! He uses this to find Ravencroft where Shriek is being held, travels there, kills fools, and frees her while also trying to assure her that he might be a little fucked up, but it’s all ok.

Uh… what!?

Carnage… being soft… and compassionate for other people!?

FUCK THIS MOVIE!!! Carnage is a psychotic killing machine who would murk a mother fucker just because of his name! He infected BABIES just to get back at Spider-Man! HIS OWN FUCKING SON EVEN! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON-… *breathes*… ok, there’s some angle to this shit… as Shriek was actually in love with Carnage after he busted her out of prison… but I was always under the impression that it was a one-sided romance! Back in “Maximum Carnage”, Carnage took advantage of her love for him to use her psychic powers to drive everyone in New York insane! Just because! Here, it’s treated lik true wuv!? FUCK THIS MOVIE!

Ugh… moving on, Muller contacts Eddie about what went down at the insane asylum, noting that Cletus had become the red death and massacred everyone inside. Eddie instantly connects the dots and realizes “Oh shit, he bit me, that’s why he became awesome for a brief time!” So now he decides “I must find Venom and put an end to this!”. I swear, the plot of the first movie was so much better than this. I feel like there was something mildly inventive going on with potential alien invasions, this shit just feels like it was made for money and thinking that having Carnage at all would be enough of a selling point.

Speaking of Venom, he wears out another host body and goes to Chen to stay for a while. Meanwhile, Eddie contacts the bitch-I mean his Ex to help track down Venom. Why? Don’t know. Guess he’s afraid of Carnage enough to hide or… something. Muller is equally as terrified since he shot Shriek in the past, she might come back for revenge. All the while, Carnage and Shriek go about fucking shit up, but because most of this action is what we saw in the trailers, it has no real impact. There is one important detail in all of this! Shriek tries to help Carnage when he doesn’t need it… by screaming! Doing so damages Carnage a lot! So with that, we manufacture a conflict with the characters of Carnage and Cletus. Carnage wants to KILL Shriek in order to ensure that she is not a threat to him, but Cletus constantly begs Carnage NOT to kill her!

Again… FUCK… THIS…. MOVIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

This is what I was talking about earlier! See, in the comics, Venom could never beat Carnage without help from Spider-Man, and vice versa. Simply put, Carnage is just too damn powerful for the both of them to handle alone (too bad Peter never thought of making Sound cannons… or maybe he did later on, idk). So… how do you convince audiences and fans that Carnage is a bigger threat than Riot since… Riot kicked Venom’s ass as well? You don’t! Instead, you have Shriek as a crutch! This is actually the real reason she’s in this movie, not because of an established relationship in the comics. 😛 But again, MORE ON THIS BULLSHIT LATER!

So… later on, Ex and dumb ass doctor cuck find Venom in the body of Ms. Chen, and Ex has to literally sweet talk Venom into rejoining with her to get back to Eddie. It’s a really… cringy exchange, I’d rather not delve into it. But… later, Eddie and Ex find each other, and Venom basically forces Eddie to apologize and admit that he wouldn’t be shit without Venom.

………..*sighs*

……. You know…. for a really stupid and manufactured conflict between these 2…. there is literally no basis for why Eddie has to admit he’s wrong for anything! Perhaps going back on his word to allow Venom to eat bad people (which could be because he has Muller breathing down his neck), but otherwise, why does Venom have such a false sense of entitlement!? Venom cannot survive on Earth without a host body to leech off of, and the only one who is compatible with him is Eddie Brock! If anything, Venom is shit with Eddie! He practically admits that the only reason he attaches himself to Eddie… was because they’re both LOSERS! He saw Eddie for a kindred spirit or some stupid shit. Venom made the choice to attach himself to Eddie, not that Eddie actually WANTED to be with Venom! The only conflict of interest is that Eddie Brock is not ok with just killing people, yet that’s all Venom wants to do!
Now this could’ve been an EXCELLENT subplot in the movie where indeed, Venom is only using Eddie to further his own insatiable appettite, but is being held back by the weak and puny human host he’s attached to! Eddie, being free from the tyrannical Venom, would find that he joins with Venom out of necessity to defeat a deadlier foe. Venom, who likely tried to fight Carnage by himself, would find that Eddie was a a stronger host for him to take on Carnage. Thus, they both realize, whether they want to admit it or not, they need each other even if reluctantly. They’re not “friends”, but rather partners out of necessity.

BUT BECAUSE VENOM IS TREATED AS THE FUCKING CGI BUDDY… we get dumb shit like this. Talking about “who the bigger man is” and who is actually shit without who. As a guy who never cared for Venom being the good guy… this is insulting! The way this potentially awesome plot was handled is so afraid of going that extra DARK mile because “oh movie goers won’t like it if it’s as serious as Batman vs Superman”! Again, THANKS ALOT MCU FOR RUINING SUPERHERO MOVIES! The old 90s cartoon handles this soooo much better! Eddie deliberately throwing himself into a vat of Symbiote ooze in order to save the love of his life, sacrificing himself to an endless void and all. Hollywood proves once again that they have NO RESPECT for these characters! This is STILL better than Spider-Fan, how the fuck!?

So… Carnage and Shriek… decide that it’s time to randomly get revenge on Venom and Muller. So they kidnap Muller and Ex, and drag them to a church in the middle of the city, warning Venom to come see them with the tentacles.

So they meet. Venom pusses out from the mere sight of Carnage… which is insulting, Venom doesn’t simply “puss out” in the face of a strong enemy, this part made the trailers look worse as a result. But after a while… IT’S FINALLY HERE! VENOM VS CARNAGE!!! And… well… yeah, it is a pretty decent fight! It’s blisteringly fast paced, and I’m glad they didn’t make Carnage weak in the fight, he literally kicks the shit out of Venom… but… then they made Venom weaker just to make the fight seem more tense. When Venom was fighting Riot, he at least got some good hits in, and used the full extent of his abilities. Here? All Venom does is run, jump, and maybe punch a few times. He doesn’t use his tentacles at all while Carnage uses everything at his disposal! So it’s not nearly as satisfying as it could be.

But sadly, not everything can be golden. We see during the fight that Carnage keeps fucking with Shriek, warning her NOT to scream at all, and Cletus constantly tries to keep Carnage from hurting her (FUCK THIS MOVIE!!!), and this becomes the catalyst for his defeat. See, because Carnage and Celtus are at odds with each other over Shriek, this shows Venom and Eddie that they have a super special bond that Cletus and Carnage don’t. This motivates them to keep fighting! Yay right!?

I swear, this is the gayest shit they could do with Venom. I mean… the basic premise is fine… but it’s HOW they go about doing it that throws this shit off! Venom is NOT the kind of character where you turn him into a stock CGI Buddy that the “real boy” has to learn to love and work with in order to win the day! Venom is a dark character! He’s supposed to be treated with a modecurn of SERIOUSNESS! But… I’m aware of why they ruined his character, but again, more on this later. BUT… you should understand why Carnage was RUINED in this movie! To establish himself as a moral plot device for both Venom and Eddie to realize that they truly needed each other! Carnage as a character is completely inconsequential to the movie, he’s not even the focus of the film. He’s the excuse plot. Thus, his character was dumbed down! All to help Venom and Eddie realize that they truly needed each other! Fuck me, this aggravating!

So anyways, Carnage injures Shriek to keep her from screaming because… she thought Carnage was going too far. By this point, Cletus has lost all control of the being as it snags Ex and drags her to the roof of the church. Venom goes up to rescue her, and I think here that the filmmakers were showing that they wanted an Amazing Spider-Man 3 to happen as this scene LITERALLY harkens back to the end scene from AMS2 where Gwen Stacy dies… by having Venom’s Ex DANGLE by one of his tentacles. But… because this movie is too damn scared to be dark, she lives!

“LET THERE BE CARNAGE!”

Dude… shut up. You were ruined minutes ago, your movie has no fucking “Carnage” in it. Anywho, Shriek does one last scream that weakens Carnage to the point of separation. Shriek is killed by a falling bell, and the day is finally won!

BUT WAIT! Cletus is still alive! And the Carnage Symbiote tries to crawl back to him… only to be picked up by Venom and eaten! Goddamn that’s weird! After a brief exchange with Cletus, Venom goes “FUCK THIS GUY” and bites his head off, finally getting something he’s wanted since the beginning of this film! Now… if these guys were serious about a Venom 3, they’d have it where the Carnage symbiote Venom just ate… would go through his digistive tract to find the remains of Cletus’s skull… and would himself out of Venom’s body that way JUST to be as fucked up as can be! But… wishes never come true in the world of Hollywood.

After this rather drawn out battle, the cops come, and Venom decides to go on the run… for some reason. Did I miss something!? Why the fuck is he leaving!? The cops are rolling into the area because hey, shit was happening, the Church is destroyed, etc. They’re not gonna automatically arrest anyone on the scene. They’ve got the complexion for the protection, and as far as I can tell, Eddie Brock was never wanted on suspicion of some shit. That and Muller was kidnapped by Shriek, and he seems to be the big cheese of the PD so he could easily inform people that “hey, Eddie Brock is the hero, he did not intentionally destroy the Church. It was Cletus Kassidy and his crazy bitch Shriek! I repeat, Eddie Brock saved my life!” Then again, Muller was looking and talking crazy at the end there, so maybe not.

With that, Venom goes to the Bahamas or… idk, Cuba? Some island vacation spot… to live out their lives? This movie’s ending makes no sense! But… that’s ok because the actual ending… is much… worse.

So post credits starts off with some random woman… doing something, idk. But then we cut to Venom and Eddie talking about Klintar until the room changes. From there… we get the bullshit… from Spider-Fan 2. Yes people, the greatest form of diaherra comes in the form of the fucking “Multiverse of Madness” where franchises that Disney never had a part of… can be used as the major gimmick of Spider-Fan. But while people were so busy masturbating to the “possibility” of Venom appearing in Spider-Fan 3 (cause usually these things mean jack shit in the MCU), people don’t realize exactly why Venom 2 was ruined as a result of this bullshit!

See… Venom and Carnage both had to be massively toned down in terms of “dark”, “Edgy” and downright “vile”. Because for some reason, Disney is branded as “family friendly” entertainment. So for Venom and Carnage to be CORRECT and respectable to their source material… would be something they would never want their pussified version of Spider-Man to ever be associated with! This is (possibly) why this movie turned out to be a massive turd that focuses on comedy and stupid shit above all else! It is to acclimate people to having this shitty ass version of Venom to fit right into the MCU for this crossover! Think about it. Most MCU characters are all about jokes and being idiots! Venom in this film doubled down on the stupidity, and was FUCKING NERFED in terms of combat prowess! Venom pusses out from enemies and gets into retarded antics, making breakfast in the sloppiest way possible. Because of this was the REAL Venom, he would be completely out of place in the MCU, in the Spider-Fan movies! We can’t have Venom BITING OFF HEADS on a regular basis, oh no! We can’t have Venom being a straight up rapetrain bad ass! We can’t have him murking bitches left and right…. because he wouldn’t fit in the mold of the “family friendly” Spider-Bitch movies!

Yep, I’m calling it. This is going to be the reason Venom went full retard. Because of some BS mandate that said “tone this fucker down if you want to cross over into the MCU and get more credibility with your movies!” Yeah I hear there’s some shit going on where Disney and Marvel want to ignore the movie’s success or whatnot (probably because they don’t want Venom in Spider-Fan 3 in the first place), but how much you wanna bet this is the reason? Well, nevermind. Whatever the fucking reason, again, FUCK THIS MOVIE!!! I’m not going to sit down and pretend this is even remotely cool! You see… I wanted to see these movies without having to be reminded of the fucking MCU. And here’s this movie saying “NOPE, LOL WE WANNA BE A PART OF THE MCU TOO!”

See, at this point, people are only concerned about the optics of seeing Spider-Fan and Venom together on the big screen. They don’t seem to care that both versions of these characters are absolutely fucked beyond all recognition. You’ve got some goofy people talking about how much chemistry these 2 characters have with each other even though they’ve never fucking met, and what’s worse, no one has any thoughts or expectations as to what these people are going to even fucking do in the movie. That’s another thing that’s been bugging me about the multiverse hype. The only thing people care about is just seeing these characters (actors and all) in the movie. They don’t care how it’s going to be done, they don’t care how the characters will be portrayed, they don’t care about anything except seeing the assholes in the movie, to confirm their little internet theories of who’s going to appear (everyone won’t shut the fuck up about Miguire or Garfield appearing, nothing about what they would even be doing in the movie). Movie goers and MCU fans are like a cancer of low/no expectations. This is how easily pleased they are with just the mere appearance of a character! One guy suggests the overwhelming hype of the post credits scene was that the movie was so bad that this one scene was “cool enough” to be likable. Essentially the same reason people enjoyed the post credits scene of Sonic Shitshow. This would be cool… if Andrew Garfield were still Spider-Man.

Thing is if Spider-Fan and Venom ever got into a scrap in these movies, realistically speaking Spider-Fan would get ripped to shreds! Garfield’s version would actually stand a chance! From what I’ve seen of Spider-Fan, he is completely inept at combat. He seems to lack a Spidey-sense after Civil War, and whines so fucking much about not living up to some rich jerkoff’s expectations when the mother fucker is dead (with a certain satisfaction, I might add!). He is a pussy punk bitch! When I watched the first Venom movie, I’m seeing this bad fuck whoopin all the ass in the world without a single fuck given, I’m thinking “ain’t no way in hell Spider-Fan would stand a chance!” That’s not me being super biased against the character, though I contend that is a LARGE part of it… but just from what I’ve seen, you gotta be realistic! Spider-Fan would get his pussy ass ripped to shreds in a real fight against Venom! But see, that’s why Spider-Fan is made into Iron Fuck’s successor, having all the access to his technologies and what not. It’s to give the little bitch a crutch! It’s like giving King Kong an Axe or some random lightning powers, this shit was GIVEN to him by the screenwriters to make him an actual, tangible threat to someone who would kill him in the blink of an eye!

Now look at Garfield’s version. Or hell, even Miguire’s version. These 2 mother fuckers know how to throw hands!

So… in Venom 2, we nerf the shit out of Venom, make him less menacing, less intimidating… to give people the idea that he might actually stand a chance with his Iron Man bullshit… because now Venom and Eddie are too dysfunctional now, and much like Scorpion and Rhino in the PS4 game, would fight amongst each other before dealing with Spider-Fan. How much you wanna bet that shit happens if Venom actually has any role in Spider-Fan 3? Because we haven’t humiliated the character enough as it is!

But I’m done rambling on that front. Venom 2 is just a piss take on the idea of a darker and edgier antihero, a darker counterpart to the often goody to shoes main hero of a series, the sort of thing that makes Wolverine stand out amongst his X-Men peers. The problem is that Venom is a character that truly shined in the 90s because that was the era in which being a bad mother fucker was the name of the game. The Darker and Edgier shit that is now considered a bygone era of what is considered “Juvenile” as we now live in an age where a bunch of fairies from Twitter and DeviantArt make up the vast majority of movie going audiences unfortunately, thanks to a steady diet of MLP (Amma, I can’t believe there’s a CGI movie coming soon) and bad anime which taught kids that the more pussified a character is, the better they are because “they show emotions”. Venom was not supposed to fit that mold. But his brand of awesome is “Too Juvenile” for a populace who thinks Sonic farting in a towel is quality fucking writing. Where turning Thor into an obese Fortnite nerd is acceptable portrayal. No, Venom would never catch on, they say. And well… because we all kissed ass on the first movie, they truly believed it. I was expecting Dredd and Punisher War Zone with fucking Carnage, but that’s “too dark” for our sophisticated new age audience that think Guardians of the Galaxy is quality writing… where an alien can burst out into laughter over Mantis revealing secrets. Where Justice League can be considered inferior to something as godawful as Thor Ragnarok simply because WB didn’t waste time making several movies to establish characters beforehand. Where nothing matters so long as brand loyalty reigns supreme, then nothing anyone else does will fucking matter in the end if the Mouse isn’t the captain of the project.

But yeah, Venom 2 is pretty bad as a result of ALL of this. The plot is just a series of unfortunate events that eventually lead up to a big fight. There seems to be very little thought into how the writers would lead up to these events as the crux of the film’s conflict, IE the separation of Eddie and Venom, is resolved with no issues whatsoever. They did not care how they did anything, they did not care how the characters would come off, they did not how redundant the action would look. All they knew was that “Carnage was a popular character 30 years ago, lets make a movie with no effort”. It’s hard to blame them for that mindset. Movie goers are all about optics rather than substance (when regarding Disney), but they seem to establish some standards for everyone else. Venom 2 is getting review bombed heavy, and I would understand all of it if there wasn’t some descrepancy about the lack of political messages going on, that kind of shit. Because of this, it’s difficult to actually guage the overall consensus of the movie. As I see it, it is a lazy cash grab, and no amount of connection to the MCU will change that… mainly because that connection is tied to a character I openly despise, but I digress.

Eddie Brock/Venom are flanderized characters. Their antics from the previous film were honestly modest in execution as it was the first time these 2 were joined at the hip. But so much of what these 2 doin the movie hinges on retardation. Where the fuck does Eddie find the time to get some random chickens around the apartment!? How could he afford them when he’s basically unemployed? Something that the movie glossed over simply because they don’t care about details. At the same time, I have no idea why Eddie is automatically against the idea of Venom killing bad guys when he stated that only innocent people are off limits? I could understand if he was talking out of his ass and wasn’t at all comfortable with just killing random criminals even when they deserve it because “he’s the hero, and killing is just wrong”, but otherwise, you made a deal. Don’t back out of it just cause!

Then again, Venom is no better. Why is Venom suddenly picky about his food choices? He was willing to eat shit out of the garbage or live lobster from a restaurant without a care! And… wait a minute, why the fuck does so much of Venom’s character revolve around FUCKING FOOD!? That wasn’t a thing with his character where he wants to constantly eat people! So much of this conflict comes about because Venom suddenly only prefers one single food group, and there’s no good reason for it! Goddamn this is stupid! Because Venom is so childish and demanding, we have a situation where he abandons Eddie because he wouldn’t permit him to eat a criminal… and then he proceeds to NOT EAT ANYONE at some midnight because he feels like bitching about Eddie Brock not giving him what he wants. GODDAMN I hate this version of Venom! He was fine in the first movie (for the most part), but they turned him into this petulent child who causes strife just because he can’t get his way with people! We can definitely say they ruined this character now!

The Ex is basically the same character she was in the first film, though with the added bonus of being a “fuck you” bitch. Nothing to say here, really. I’m supposed to find it “heartwarming” that she warms up to Venom so much, telling him to take care of Eddie. That… made me nautious just hearing it.

The punk ass boyfriend/future husband is the same character as well.

Muller is… well… he’s there.

Carnage was RUINED! Both him and Cletus! There’s no need to elaborate more than I already have.

Shriek is another character that just seems to be there as well, and her role is simply that of a plot device. A Catalyst used to defeat Carnage in the end. I’m legitimately upset that she never actually attacked Venom at all, and this can be attributed to Carnage telling her to fuck off with that noise. And then she dies in the end. What a waste of a character. She didn’t even get to use her psychic powers to cause a mass riot!

Overall, another lack luster Superhero movie ruined by the MCU. Venom is ruined, and it’s set the prescident that if you want your heroes to be respected at all by the movie going populace… just drop everything that people love about the character and turn them into jokes. That way, people will ove them even when they hate them. May Amma help us all.

Tokenism was just a racket!? (Marvel Lawsuit

Before I move on to the topic at hand, I need to get this little thing off my chest.

It’s amazing just how much things can change in under a month. Now it seems like everyone who’ve been grouped under this false dichotomy of “Narced” vs “Unnarced”… are now all of a sudden in agreement with President Draco being the bastard devil that he is for trying to force this upon people. Time certainly heals more than reason, though in the case of the narced, this will not be the case. Vindication is nice and all, but it’d be a bit nicer if people were a wee bit wiser in the past 9 months. The only people still on the kool-aid are the elderly who have forgone any real research of their own accord and are still flaky about this shit. Old folks treat healthcare like a goddamn religon even though Healthcare doesn’t gaurantee shit. Especially now with so many of them planning to quit the healthcare industry. That’s gonna be a problem when Winter really hits since this bug goes… idk… “Super Saiyan Mach 12” during cold weather, but the healthcare industry, these motherfuckers who were paraded as the heroes of the One Year War against Buck Bumble… they’re telling you “kiss my ass, you rotten mother fuckers!” The powers that be are really gonna lose their shit when they find out the NBA players are refusing to narcotize.

But yeah, this is fantastic. People are waking up, albeit slowly, to the reality of Tyranny that we’re dealing with. The only people agreeing with these sentiments are those who are “paid” to agree. So special “fuck you’s” go out to Don Lemonade for his Nazi rhetoric, Rochelle Walinsky for being a lying and duplicitous whore, the Youtuber “Second Thought” for agreeing that Gain of Function research is beneficial in some capacity, whoever that cunt was that literary stated “The time for Cajoling is over. Draco should use the full authority of the Government to make life shitty for people to remain unnarced”, the always corrupt FDA for it’s illegal approval process to the point that even their own people are quitting the FDA out of disgust and good sense, Chris Rock for being a narced up coon, Jessica Ballinger for mind fucking her kids, Patricia Karvelas for trying to make Narcotics fashionable over social media, the Erie County Medical Center for planning to fire thousands of employees which is the highest point of insanity in the middle of a goddamn pandemic, the Australian Government for instating a literal prison state (also kudos to the citizens of Australia for finding a pair at the last minute), and fuck all the punk mother fuckers who can’t seem to process the logic of not being afraid of Unnarced people when they’re supposed to be “fully protected“. Lets hope I don’t get suspended for those thoughts.

I now return you to your regular schedule of dumbshit. 😛

So… so wait!

You mean to tell me that Miles Morales, literally the only celebrated Tokenized mother fucker in comics…. was just a ruse to maintain some level of control over the Spider-Man Mythos!?

This is actually interesting for a number of reasons, but the main one is this. I always found it strange that the entertainment industry would constantly shove in all this political (why the fuck is this term being used for female characters in fiction, I will never know), tokenized shit when people clearly don’t like it… and insult people for when they constantly bring this shit up because they hate it so much. Cause I’m thinking “don’t these assholes WANT money!?” So originally I’m thinking “maybe they have enough money to never give a shit anymore”. But this here? This makes perfect sense! These different character designs or alternate characters could all be attempts of these mega corporations to maintain copyright over characters they never made in the first place.

Maybe that’s why the MCU has such weird and retarded interpretations of these characters. Why Spider-Fan dick rides Iron Man and has a lousy Spidey costume without the web motif. Why all the Spider-Man characters are completely off in the new shitty movies (I had no idea the fat Asian friend was Ned Leeds because… OBVIOUSLY). Why there’s no mention of Uncle Ben,why Flash Thompson is some punk ass Middle Eastern kid who doesn’t throw a punch. Why Starlord is a douchebag instead of Han Solo. Why “The” Suicide Squad is a band of misfit morons instead of hardened criminal badasses. All of these unnecessary and unwarranted changes to beloved characters over the years had nothing to do with “well you don’t want to see the same shit in a movie like you do in the comics, do you?” which was already a bullshit argument, how are you gonna tell me what the hell I want to see in a movie, am I right!? Or “Well you can’t turn everything in the book into a movie, right?” which honestly depends more on the ahem… “political climate” and not “because it wouldn’t make sense”. The X-Men cartoon practically adapted entire storylines from the comics and made them work, the movies have no excuse in this regard. These nonsense arguments people kept making because they don’t like long time fans complaining about shit they have more experience in. “Well I don’t know what this is, but I won’t allow YOU, long time fan, to have any fucking input on it!” Rambling, goddammit!

But if THIS was the real reason for all of these changes, then holy shit, these mega entertainment corporations are NEVER to be trusted with ANYTHING that we enjoy! It’s proof positive that these bastards will rape and ruin everything they touch purely for the sake of control and ownership, not because they think it’s a good idea!