My comic book history

Thanks to my older brother I got into comics at a very young age. His shelves were filled with such comics as "Tarzan", "Tex Willer", "Spider-man", "Asterix", "Indiana Jones", "X-Men" and so on. I started buying my own comics when I went to school and bought stuff like "Transformers" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". But I'd say I really fell in love with comic in 1996 when my cousin showed me this new comic book he'd just bought. It was Todd MacFarlane's "Spawn". After discovering that one I bought some random comics like "The Sandman - Preluders and Nocturnes" by Neil Gaiman (later this vanished god knows where) and James O'Barr's "The Crow" (same goes for this one). Years went buy and then around 2005 or so I got excited about comics again. I've slowly started to get more titles in my collection. Here's some series that I'm collecting at the moment as TPBs.

"100 Bullets"
"Chew"
"Preacher"
"The Walking Dead"

In the mail as I'm writing this are some critically acclaimed trade paper backs that I'm really excited to get my hands on. "We3", "Ex Machina" and "Transmetropolitan" to name a couple. Comics that I'm really enjoying at the moment are "100 Bullets", "Chew", "Preacher" and "The Walking Dead". My plan is to to get volume 1's from a few different titles and see which ones I have to get as a whole on my shelf.

When I was in my teens I used to come up with some comic book characters myself and made a few strips but nothing that really came to fruition. Now after reading all those comics I've mentioned, I'm working on a few ideas in my head. I'm not much of a drawer anymore, haven't drawn in many years, but I guess I might come up with something that looks like mine. Besides the most important thing in creating anything really, is that you're enjoying it and that you do it for yourself and not for others. If they like it, great. If not, then so be it. Then again, this is just my opinion. I just think that when it comes to creating something of your own, you should do as little ass-kissing to please others as possible.

CHILDHOOD CARTOON SERIES

My favorite shows when I was a kid were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Silver Fang (Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin) and Transformers. But I did watch a lot of cartoons (thanks to Sky Channel and Filmnet) and here's a list I managed to make spending a few hours on youtube and couple on some retro websites. I'm sure many guys my age have a lot of these on their lists. These are all from the 70´s, 80's and 90's.


The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers (1986)
Adventures of T-Rex (1995)
Alfred J.Kwak (1989)
Blackstar (1981)
BraveStarr (1987)
Captain N : The Game Master (1989)
Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990)
The Care Bears (1985)
Challenge of the GoBots (1984)
Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers  (1989)
Count Duckula (1988)
Darkwing Duck (1991)
Dennis the Menace (1986)
Denver the Last Dinosaur (1988)
Dino-Riders (1988)
Doctor Snuggles (1979)
Dogtanian and the 3 Muskehounds (1981)
DuckTales (1987)
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972)
G.I. Joe (1985)
Ghostbusters (1986)
Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin aka Silver Fang (1986)
Heathcliff (1980)
He-man and the Masters of the Universe (1983)
Il était une fois... la vie aka Once upon a time... Life (1986)
Inspector Gadget(1983)
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors (1985)
Les Barbabapa (1973)
M.A.S.K (1985)
Mitchubachi Maya no boken aka Maya the Bee (1975)
Mrs. Pepperpot (1983)
Nick Knatterton (1977)
Nils no fushigi na tabi aka The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1980)
La vuelta al mundo de Willy Fog aka Willy Fog Travels Around the World (1981)
Rambo (1986)
Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs (1987)
Silverhawks (1986)
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981)
SuperTed (1983)
TaleSpin (1990)

Thundercats (1985)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987)
Tiny Toon Adventures (1990)
The Toxic Crusaders (1991)
Transformers (1984)
X-Men (1992)

METAL GEAR SOLID 2 - SONS OF LIBERTY

WARNING: All my writings contain spoilers!

The first Metal Gear Solid for Playstation was a great game, highly praised by critics and gamers. Metal Gear Solid 2 - Sons of Liberty is also a great game. Or more like half game half movie. There's a LOT of cut-scenes that carry the plot forward. I beat the game in about 15 hours and maybe as much as half of that are cut-scenes. They are well done, but sadly much of the story is told in the familiar CODEC mode and it's not too fun to read text when there's nothing but green heads on black background opening their mouths. The plot is very complex and I myself didn't know what the hell is going on midway to the game. The plot twists are great though, but some of the twists and turns aren't that good. The voice-acting is well done, but the dialogue is more than often very cheesy, especially when it comes to the back stories of the characters. The story involving the Metal Gear itself is great. There are however quite a big amount of stuff about things like the essence of humanity and why we make some of the decisions that we do. This philosophical element grows towards the end of the game and it doesn't sit that well for a Metal Gear game. Also the ending is very unsatisfying and didn't really make sense and didn't wrap up the story too nicely.

This game has been criticized as playing itself and I agree. There are many moments in the game that are done via the cut-scenes when you'd want to play the scene yourself. The game is 10-15 hours long (which is a big improvement to MGS that was like five hours long) but there's not nearly as much of actual play time. The time you do get to play is superb though. Many of the items from before make their appearance like rations, boxes and claymores and there is a good selection of new weapons and items to use. The controls are good and this time the character has a few new moves that come in handy along the way. 


Another complaint I have is that majority of the game is played with a new character called "Raiden". You do get to play with "Snake" for the first hour or two but from there on it's Raiden only. I have nothing against new characters but Raiden is just very irritating. He's very green, doesn't know what the hell is going on and whines a lot. A thing he does a lot is that he repeats sentences said by someone else and makes it a guestion. You also get a lot of lines like "what?!", "huh?" and "...". Snake is in the picture and helps you along the way and gives a lot of information about things but it's not the same. Raiden is just too irritating to really care about.


There are some cool stuff in here, like when you input the virus in the GW, The Colonel who is a part of Metal Gear Arsenal's AI starts to malfunction and among other things tells you to turn off the console and just quit. And at one point the Mission Failed window appears but it says Fission Mailed so you know you didn't really fail your mission and you should just continue shooting the bad guys. Reminiscent to the 'change your controller to port 2' thing from Metal Gear Solid that totally confused me over 10 years ago.

Still a great game inspite of it's flaws and I can't wait to play Metal Gear Solid 3 - Snake Eater in the near future.

GOD OF WAR

The main character is a great spartan warrior with red tattoos called Kratos. His story is revealed to the player in video cut scenes that appear every now and then as you proceed in the game. He shows no mercy and he slices and dices pretty much every person or creature that comes to his path. 

I purchased a PlayStation 2 less than a week ago and my first PS2 game for it was this one. 

To me GOD OF WAR seems like a perfected combination of PRINCE OF PERSIA, BATTLE OF OLYMPUS, CASTLEVANIA, TOMB RAIDER (especially puzzle-wise) and THE LEGEND OF ZELDA games. There's even some TEKKEN in the final fight with Aries. I've never played a game with such perfected game controls as this one. They're just so responsive and when you jump to your death it's always on you, not the controls.  Kratos can jump, dash, swim, dive, climb, hang, swing on ropes, balance his way on narrow bars plus he's got tons of cool combos to use in battle all named after gods in Greek mythology. 

The levels are big and pretty varied and there's quite a good amount of them. I especially liked the swimming element in some of them. They're not as clever puzzle-wise (like TWILIGHT PRINCESS for instance) but they're still good and there's not too much backtracking which is always positive. Also the puzzles are a bit too turn-this-lever-to-open-that-door -like but they still work and bring variety to the button smashing. There's only a couple of different weapons but both have a lot combos in them.

There's a good variety of different enemies in the game such as cyclopes, harpies, legionnaires, centaurs, minotaurs, seirens and medusas (I hate those bitches and how they chase you down with their stoning sight).

The "Path of Hades" level simply made me smile the first time I saw it. You could see the doomed souls falling to eternal pain and suffering everywhere you look. There's blood and bones and fire all over the place. Even the enemies are all on fire in this level. Very cool. And I died like 30-40 times during this level so it wasn't too easy (or then I suck, big time).


Simply put one of the best action-adventure games I've ever played, if not the best. And all the cons that come to mind are very minor and don't affect to the overall experience.

Pros:

+ Amazing visuals and stunning design both on creatures and the levels

+ Near perfect controls

+ Blood and gore

+ Level design

+ Cool enemies

+ Music

+ Story
+ Female nudity (in the beginning of second level you see two pairs of bare boobs)

+ The game's brutal anti-hero Kratos

+ The mini-games in battles are fun and rewarding

+ Barely any loading times and when they appear they're like 4 seconds max

+ Huge amount of combos to learn
+ A lot of replay value with several difficulty levels, Challenge of the Gods -mode, hidden chests and secrets (like five alternate costumes for Kratos)
+ Four different difficulty levels. Even the "normal" was quite challenging and there's two harder levels of difficulty:  "hard" and "god mode". The easiest way to ruin a good game is to make them too easy (no pun intended) and this game is NOT guilty of making that mistake

Cons:

- Too few boss battles as there were only like three or four

- I'd wanted the game to be longer, at least 20 hours, I just wasn't mentally finished with it when the credits started to roll just after 10 hours

- The puzzles are a bit too easy (though I needed online help in couple of them)

- You should be able to use the red orbs faster on weapons and magic abilities that need a lot of them. It can take like 30 seconds of pressing X-button to level-up, say, a weapon that uses 7500 orbs.
- After beating the game it would've been nice to have stats of your performance. E.g how many times you died, how many secret chests you found, how many enemies you killed and so on

I completed the game on "normal" difficulty and in the end the game clock showed 10 hours and 50 minutes and it took me three days. So not a very long game but the time it lasted it was just a phenomenal experience. I started a new game instantly on "hard". If you own a PS2 and haven't played this game go and buy it at this instant.

GOD OF WAR 2 is making it's way to my home via mail as I write this, so as soon as I've completed that one I'll review that one too. I have big hopes for it as it's said to be even better than this one.

THE ODD COUPLE

Opens up with a funny scene as suicidal Felix books a room in a hotel from the 9th floor and as he is ready to jump out of the window he hurts his back trying to open it as it's jammed. The movie is based on a play (Neil Simon) and that shows and it works especially well on screen. Matthau delivers the funniest lines and the two are just a perfect pair to team up (this was their second movie out of ten total). The scene where the girls from next door are invited for a dinner reminded me of a similar scene in one of my favorite movies, SWINGERS. I'm pretty sure Jon Favreau has seen this movie before writing it.


What more is there to say. Lemmon and Matthau are in perfect form as the obsessive cleaning Felix and the sloppy Oscar. A very funny movie. I recommend. There was a sequel made 30 years later but I hear that's not nearly as good as this one.


The funniest dialogue in the movie:


Matthau: When did you take these pills?
Lemmon: I don't know a couple hours ago.
Matthau: How many pills did you take?
Lemmon: I can't remember. A whole bottle.
Man#1: A whole bottle! My god! Somebody call an ambulance!
Matthau: We don't know what kind!
Man#1: What difference does it make?
Matthau: Well maybe they were vitamins! He could be the healthiest man in the room.

ROBOCOP 3

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 ROBOCOP was a terrific movie. It was dark, violent, original and the humor was black. And it included Kurtwood Smith doing one of the coolest ad-libs in a movie, with the blood-spitting followed by the line "Give me my fucking phone call". If for some reason there are people out there who haven't seen the film, remember to watch the uncut version.

ROBOCOP 2 came out three years later in 1990. Peter Weller reprised his role as RoboCop. The movie was bad but it did have some cool scenes and the warehouse scene with new Cain was pretty chilling when I saw it as a kid. The movies in the original Star Wars trilogy were released three years apart so the third RoboCop came out three years after RoboCop 2...

The Plot: Lewis (Nancy Allen) is killed so Murphy (Robert John Burke) joins the resistance and Omni Consumer Products wants him terminated.

You know you've got hell to go through when ED-209 is re-programmed by a little girl with a laptop to say stuff like "I am now authorized to be loyal as a puppy" and "Eat lead, suckers!".

RoboCop 3 is a comedy more than anything else. All the darkness and graphic violence from the first two movies are long gone. Almost everything Murphy lets out of his mouth is supposedly a comic one-liner. They have some familiar characters from the previous movies for instance "tastes like babyfood" Johnson, Sergeant Reed and the news anchor who gives us the world in three minutes. Much of the music is recycled from the first movie.

Best of dialogue:

Splatterpunk #1: Clock it, Jack! Megazone invasion!

Splatterpunk #2: Pop a tranq, hypo head. Splatterville's ours. Shoot him in the mouth, splatter brain.

Splatterpunk #1: Cyborg eats bullets, Jack!

Splatterpunk #2: Not tonight, he don't.

Cool stuff: RoboCop catches a bullet between his fingers. He flies with his jetpack Ironman style. The end fight is against cyborg ninjas called Otomos. Oh, and remember the scene from Sergio Leone's FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE where Lee Van Cleef kept Clint Eastwood's hat in the air by shooting at it a few times? Here RoboCop does that to a man's pistol.

Familiar faces:

Jeff Garlin (CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM) as "Donut Jerk"

JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY

It was tough enough to watch part five that didn't even have Jason in it and now you're supposed to enjoy watching a Jason movie with Jason's "spirit" or whatever murdering people by going from body to body. I mean it's not like they ran out of ideas since they had like two and recycled them over and over in the previous Friday movies. Still the alien/basket case-spirit of Jason did enter a dead waitress through her vagina which was unexpected.

Half a shitty horror movie, half a shitty clone of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. I know John Woo knows how to use slow-motion in HARD-BOILED, THE KILLER and A BETTER TOMORROW but they don't work on this flick that well. This one does have the tightest ass of the series (the female agent in the beginning) and the best make-up effects. This movie looks great on Steven Williams' resume next to THE BLUES BROTHERS and THE X-FILES TV-series. They have put some weird shit on this one, like the Necronomicon from the EVIL DEAD series and Freddy Krueger's hand played by the director himself . Jason went to hell, I wish the sole copy of this movie had beaten him to it.