Modern Warfare 2: A story of Sane men on an Insane Earth (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS!!!)

A Plot summary of Modern Warfare 2
Act 1: 99 Luftballons

Lets Play Fire Emblem on Temporary Hiatus

Due to me being forced to give in my laptop, I have to put Lets Play Fire Emblem VI on hiatus until late January 2010. Sorry.

As for what I will be doing until then? Well....A few things come to mind....

Episode 2: I am so sorry

Welcome back to Lets Play Fire Emblem: The Sword of Seals. Now, before we begin this episode, I have some bad news. I kinda went poorly on the whole “image taking” aspect. As a result of my inexperience, I wound up with several...No, lets not be kind here, MANY superfluous shots, and little in the way of proper gameplay footage. Not to mention that, once again, an entire chunk of images disappeared.

So, really, I am really sorry, but I have to make due with what I have here. It’s too late to re-do Chapter 2, as I already saved over the file. I promise that these issues will be sorted out by Episode 3.

The Wonderful World of Fire Emblem! Part 1

The Wonderful World of Fire Emblem: Continents

Every single Fire Emblem game takes place on a single continent. Most of the games have no relation to each other, (Outside of direct sequel /prequel games) but have over arching themes, ala Final Fantasy. The formula for most of the games follows:

* There are a bunch of neighboring nations

* One of the nations is ridiculously driven by military, to the point that they are a massive war machine

* The peaceful, idilic nation that the main character lives in is invaded by the war nation is invaded, and usually has it’s shit wrecked in the process. Most of the war nations' commanders of the war nation are stupidly evil for no reason.

* Said war nation declares war on everyone else, because of dark, supernatural forces that are pulling the strings behind the scenes.

* Heroes team of with other nations to curbstomp the evil nation and the forces behind it. Usually with a legendary Sword of some kind.

This was the case in this game, Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance. Blazing Blade and Radiant Dawn followed a different formula.

We will eventually learn all about the nations later in this game. So let me talk about the other Continents

Sacred Stones: Magivel

The unique thing about Magivel is that at one point, it was embroiled in a war between humans and monsters. These monsters were things like Zombies, Floating Eyes, Cyclopses, Centaurs, Gargoyles, Giant Spiders, Gorgons (Medusa’ for those of you who are not fluent in Greek mythology) and Zombie dragons. They were all led by the Demon King. Long story short, he was sealed in one of the Sacred Stones: Five magical stones that are used to protect the nations from the monsters. During the actual events of the game, the monsters were released.

The nations were:

Renais: The main characters’ Erika and Ephiraim’s homeland. Is a peaceful nation that was allied with Grado. Until being invaded by Grado and being more or less shredded in the process.

Grado: The military/evil nation that was at once at peace with Renais, until they broke the peace and started invading. And for some reason, the Grado soldiers commit brutal atrocities upon the Renais people, despite them being former allies.

Frelia: The nation allied to Renais. The heroes spend company with the nation for a good part of the game. Nothing else remarkable, except for them having the most pathetic cutscene NPC’s in the entire series.

Rausten: A religious nation that is essentially Paladin land. The nation is home to the bulk of Light mages on the continent, and their actions lead to the defeat of the Demon King.

Jehanna: Desert nation protected by it’s surrounding territory. The prince, Joshua, ran away, leaving her mother in charge. The nation was invaded by Grado and betrayed by a crazy stalker.

Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn: Telius

Telius had gone through almost 800 years of a racial war by the time of Path of Radiance. The continent was home to two races, Beorc, normal humans, and Laguz, people who had the ability to shapeshift into animals (Message to people who make furry jokes: Shut up)

There were three tribes of Laguz:

The Beast Tribes: They occupy the country of Gallia, and consisted of the Cat Laguz, Tiger Laguz, and the Lion Laguz. The Red Lions are the royal family and rule over the rest of the cat and tiger laguz. In human form, their distinct features are their cat ears and tails.

In Radiant Dawn, another beast tribe are revealed: The Wolf Laguz, who live in Hatari, the lost nation.

The Bird Tribes: The bird tribes are the nations of Phoenics, home of the hawk laguz, Klivas, home of the Ravens and Serenes, former home of the Herons, who are essentially a Monk race. I say former because a major plot point is that they were massacred by Beorc 20 years before the events of the games.

The Dragon Tribes: Rulers of the country of Goldoa, and the most powerful of all Laguz. They decided to go all Howard Hughs on the rest of Telius and hid their society from the world.

The Beorc nations are:

Crimea: A peaceful nation that is mostly countrylands. Take a guess what happens to it. It’s soldiers dress in white uniforms. Said soldiers are mostly mounted units

Daein: A snowy, mountain filled land that invades Crimea under the rule of King Ashnard. It’s soldiers wear black. People who have been following me on Gamefaqs, TvTropes and That Guy With The Glasses may note that this is what I got my username, “Emperordaein” from. In Radiant Dawn, it kinda becomes the bitch nation of....

Begnion: The largest nation on Tellius, which most of the story of the two games revolves around. Is a massive empire ruled by the Apostle, the Empress who is tasked with speaking to the godess, and the senate, a group of aristocrats, who as you find out in Radiant Dawn, are some of the biggest douches in the world. Their soldiers wear red.

Lets Play Fire Emblem: The Sword of Seals! Episode 1

Fire Emblem: The Sword of Seals. Released for the GBA in 2002 as a Japan exclusive, it was the sixth installment in the Tactical RPG series. Most of you may know the main character from this:

(Roy is the one on the farthest left, in case you did not know)

Yes, Roy's appearance alongside Marth, another Fire Emblem character, made the series know to the west. Roy's incursion was a bit of product placement by Nintendo, as Sword of Seals was released around the same time as SSBM did in Japan.

But after the popularity of Marth and Roy, Nintendo released this game for western countries:

This is Fire Emblem 7, or Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. It open the series up to the west, and to me. See, a friend of mine got this game for Christmas, and he asked me to finish it (Being regarded as a games buff by my friends). due to it's difficulty (I will get to that in a minute) I played the game, and was hooked. It's story, characters, music and gameplay got me completely addicted, even when I felt inclined to throw the game into a wall for how merciless it was. It even took up a portion of my trip to Europe in 2005 (Damn you game). I became a fan of the series, buying Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance that same year as well (And I got Radiant Dawn this year).

Blazing Blade was a prequel to Sword of Seals, and since it was never released outside of Japan, most western gamers never found out the conclusion to the story. Since Blazing Blade had my favorite story of the games, I was hooked into this one. Along the way in this LP, I will be presenting my feature: The Wonderful World of Fire Emblem, where I explain trends, points of intrest.

So lets dive in!

Coming Soon

I recently obtained a Visual Boy Advance emulator. After discovering it had a screen shot editor, I would like to show you the project I will be doing these holidays:

Something I have been wanting to do for a long time. The game that we never got, but we all wanted to know about...

From an unknown character in Super Smash Bros Melee....

An epic tale of war, man, dragons and magic....

Ladies and Gentlemen....This is....

Let's Play Fire Emblem: The Sword of Seals!

My very first LP. I want to do this LP after finishing my main file, so this may have to wait a bit. However, I will upload the first few chapters early, to get some first impressions from viewers.

Coming Soon, This Holidays!

The Day of Red Dawn

Photo Courtesy of Yahoo.com

Wow.

When I woke up this morning, I almost thought it was the Apocalypse.

I have a habit of experiencing freak weather in September. First the 2004 Father's Day snow, now this.

Why didn't I take any photos........ :(

An Ode to Countdown

In light of Linkara finishing his Countdown review month, I decided to show off the poem I made on the series:

In the year 2007

The comic editors at DC

Wanted to fill a missing year

And prepare for a Final Crisis you see

They made a team of writers

Who made things good and bad

To write this big event

Yet no power these writers had

For the editors held the power

The editors called the shots

They wanted it their way

They had what the writers did not

But soon it went all wrong

As from this chaos emerged

A disaster like no other

Worthy of a song

“Make this plot a jumbled mess!”

“Pay no attention to the details”

“Base the story on a game of chess!”

A recipe sure to fail

“Have this sweet girl turn evil!”

“Ruin her and an enemy!”
“Send a clown and a cat to a training academy,

For fan service you see!”

“Send a boy and a girl on a pointless quest!”

“So shall a reporter and a bug!”

“Along with a piper and a trickster on the run”

This is sadly not a jest

“And have a group of men and women”

“Led by a being named Bob”

“To go from universe to universe”

“Looking for an Atom, that’s their job”

“All this and more be scattered across tie-ins,

As a cheap marketing ploy.”

“While having billions die and universes destroyed,

“At the hands of a whiny adult who thinks he’s a boy”

“He will whine about his life,

And torture a fifth dimensional imp”

“All so he can kill some more,

“And perform more moronic stints”

The writers and editors looked at this abomination

They all helped to make

So get ready boys and get ready girls,

It’s Countdown to Final Crisis, there’s no escape!

51 issues of pain, over a year

All there for you and me

To suffer for what we actually see

To forget this will take a lot of beer.

The Unbelievable Connection

Have any of you seen the Nostalgia Critic's review of The Garbage Pail kids? It looked like the worst movie he had ever done. Worse than Batman & Robin. Worse than Tom and Jerry: The Movie. Worse than Good Burger. Those trading cards he also described also looked like utter crap. I just really hate things that are gross for the sole purpose of being gross.

So I wanted to research this movie on Tv Tropes wiki. And I discovered that the Co-Creator of the trading cards was Art Spiegelman.

He was the creator of the graphic novel Maus (which I found in my local Library. I love that place. It's where I first found Watchmen as well), a VERY brutal, sad and sombre novel. Basically, it's a retelling of his father's survival of the Holocaust, except with people portrayed as animals (Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, Poles as pigs, ect). It is an excellent novel, which I would recommend reading, if you can find it.

So how could he have made this, yet also created those disgusting abominations mentioned above?

What next? It turns out Alan Moore created Planet Sketch?

I Watched the Watchmen (WARNING! MASSIVE SPOILERS!!)

Now everyone, I love Watchmen. The novel, that is. And I would have to think the Movie trailer for that. When I first saw it, I decided to see the novel, and it quickly became one of the greatest things I had ever read. It's brilliant deluge into human nature, politics and the idea of superheroes made it truly inspiring.

So naturally, I had to see the movie.

So my opinion? Well........Let me say this.

It's as if someone took Watchmen, and completely plastered it with blood and semen.

I don't want to be saying this. I wanted this to be good. I wanted to rave about this. I wanted to have this as an example of how you should do a movie. I should not be here saying this. But I feel that I have to spew out this massive load of bile that is my Watchmen movie experience to just get it out of my system.

Was it a good movie? Yes it was. Did I like it? No I did not. Here is the thing: I hated this movie. I hated what it represented and I hate the people who made it like this, namely, Zack Snyder.

See, here is the thing. Watchmen the Novel was down to earth. It was simply realistic and logical (Except the Squid, but I feel that being outlandish was the point). The movie did not understand that. Zack Snyder, this movie is not 300. That whole slow motion malarky you put in this movie? It's stupid. It is utterly, utterly stupid. It just makes this seem pretentious. 300 was mostly action. Watchmen had only around 4 fights in the whole story. Sure, the fights are all well done and stylish and all that stuff, but this is not why I want to see when I go to see Watchmen. Which leads me to my biggest problem with the movie. The violence and sex.

Now, let me tell you, I am squeamish. I dislike violence. I don't think it is necessary. The Watchmen novel was violent, but it did not revile in it. It existed to show brutality. It was trivial. It did not need violence to be dark. It had it's own intense themes and stories that made it dark. This movie decides that the only way to be dark is to have people die horribly with loads of blood. This is complete and utter tripe. It is the most unnecessary thing I have ever seen. And the sex. Let me just say this: Why was it necessary to have Silk Specter and Nite Owl have sex again in the Owl Ship again? We already saw them have sex. It's not edgy. It's just moronic.

The ultimatum for this is that they chose this violence over what I loved most in Watchmen. The insight. For example: Rorsharch's scene with the psychiatrist. That was one of my favorite parts in the novel. It truly gave us a look into why he became Rorsharch. It was dark, subtle and insightful. They ruined it in the movie. They thought that we should get: OMG HE TOTALLY JUST CHOPPED UP THAT GUY'S HEAD BLOOD EVERYWHERE OMG OMG!! Yuck. Let me tell you something Snyder, Violence and Sex is not subtly. It is a f**king sledgehammer to the face. That is not storytelling. That is just pretentiousness. And it could be easily taken out. Remember The Dark Knight? That did violence right. It was there, but it did not revile in it. People like Christopher Nolan and Stephen Moffet have very little on-screen violence. And look at thier recent works. Christopher Nolan? Made a movie where the villain is a psychotic clown that shoves pencils into eyes and carves smiles into peoples faces. Stephen Moffet? His episodes of Doctor Who had statues that come to life and kill you in the blink of an eye (literally), and shadows that devour people. And yet they showed little violence in them. In fact, I have a feeling that this movie would be better if Christopher Nolan had directed it. TIme constraints be damned, that would make this one hell of an experience.

I could go on, but I won't. But let be say who I blame for this: SOCIETY. We are in a world where people think that Violence and Sex make everything edgy, and pay no attention to meaning or insight. That may not be the case, but if it is. Then this movie is the symbol. This is not Watchmen. This is a putrid mass of F-bombs and Gorn that thinks it's Watchmen. I cannot like this movie. There were some great moments. There were some great performances, Rorsharch's actor did an amazing job, the soundtrack was great, and there were some moments of great quality in it, an it stayed mostly faithful to the novel. I know there were criticisms about the cuts and the ending, and I disliked that too. But really, what I said above was all I needed to hate this movie.

And you know what Zack Snyder? If you think that buying your tricked out "Extended edition" DVD will make me change my mind, then screw you. I don't want to see this movie again. Why would I want to see this screw up instead of a wonderful story of the same name. You fail. 

Okay, I defiantly have been nothing more than a ranting fanboy during this whole ordeal. And I am sorry for that. I don't want to be like this. I have fun ripping in to things I hate. I just find it fun. But ripping in to this is not fun. It never would have been.

Well, at least I can look forward to my next anticipated movie: 9! Bizarre sack people in the apocalypse? How can I lose! 

EDIT:  Okay, I have calmed down. Looking back, the movie was a respectable effort. It was an okay movie, but, really, Ill' take the book any day.

TGWTG ambitions

Have any of you heard of That Guy With the Glasses? It's the home site of the Nostalgia critic, a hilariously brilliant video reviewer who tears into awful nostalgic works, doing so with great comedic timing and funny skits. He inspired alot of other people to do video reviews on his site. While none of them could match the Nostalgia Critic, a few were very good in their own right (Such as Spoony, Suede, fellow blogspot user Linkara and the Nostalgia Chick).

I myself wanted to join their ranks and make my own series. I unfortunately ran into a number of crippling issues that put my ambition on hold:

1. I can't act. When I talk to people I can put on an eccentric personality, but put me in front of a camera and it all turns flat and lifeless. I tried doing some test samples using the video function and I was NOT happy with what I saw. I have no sense of timing, I have no sense of flair in my voice and I usually stutter with my lines. All that added to my terrible memory of lines.

2. I don't know how to be different. The few mental drafts I composed in my mind seemed like nothing you wouldn't see in the Nostalgic Critic, the Agony Booth or even the image Let's Play (Something which I am considering doing. No one had done one on Call of Duty 4 yet....) . I have things that I think might be entertaining but unoriginal at the same time. What I am trying to splutter out is that I can't figure out how to be non-derivative.

3. I don't have a wide enough range of review material. My focus was going to be looking at modern works, or being a modern version of the Nostalgia Critic (I was going to call myself "That guy in the Modern Era" The following name is copyright of C.R.P at The Estate of Lord C.R.P. If you attempt to copy it then I will know where you got it from. All rights reserved 2009.). The problem is that I don't know enough terrible works to keep going. I was going to do Ben 10: Race Against Time and Alien Force Season 1, as well as Home on the Range......but everything else I thought of wasn't QUITE bad enough to rip into, unless I counted the Naruto and Pokemon movies, I which case I could have done the first Naruto movie and the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon specials, but that would be deviating too far from my main focus. I was hoping to do some of the recent superhero movies  that were unpopular(ala Nostalgia Critic's Batman & Robin review) but there either weren't enough to choose from, ones that I actually liked (I liked Spiderman 3. I was hoping to hate Transformers, but was foiled when it turned out that the movie was actually good) actually liked them or had already been done better (I can never top Spoony's review of Fantastic Four). 

4. I have no idea how to properly edit these kinds of videos. The best software I have is i Movie, which does not have expansive enough editing tools for the type of videos I was aiming for. And I don't think think I can buy a better editor. Plus, I am completely in the dark on how to intergrade footage from the show/movie into the actual video clip and edit it appropriately.

5. No spare time or Space. At the moment, I am about to enter a busy time at High School. So my time for making these sort of videos would be greatly limited. Also, I like to do projects like this in privacy and with little outside interference, but the way things are in my household.......It would not be possible to achieve those two conditions properly.

6. My lack of motivation and commitment. Wonder why my blog hardly gets updated? Really, I have real motivational troubles with doing these sort of things. When I try to think of an idea for this, I either can't be bothered, or get bored halfway. I may chalk that up to my sheer lack of views on this blog though. But it is a problem, and one that would seriously interfere with my ambition, were it to become a reality.

So with all that evidence above, my TGWTG career is a very distant dream. But I want to have one final shot at seeing if I could even do this. I may do text reviews for my blog. And if I actually get viewers then the results may finally judge whether I am fit for such a hobby......

Next Time: Maybe a retrospective on 2008. It was a big year indeed.....