Alright this is a few days late BUT this deserves to be told. It was announced on twitter a couple days ago that the next big Bat family story line after the amazing Court of Owls cross over is going to center around the freaking JOKER. The last time we saw the Joker in the new 52 was the first storyline in Detective comics. With his face cut off. Willingly. He has since disappeared and not a peep has been heard from him. Scott Snyder, the mastermind behind court of owls and writer of Batman, announced that the Joker has been planing this entire time and his palns will shake the bat family to its core and there WILL be bodies. Lots of them.
I was super excited by this announcement because Snyder doing the Joker will be unimaginably good. His Court of Owls is just wrapping up and it has been amazingly paced with great action and lots of shocking reveals. I am also excited to see Gail Simone tackle how Batgirl will react confronting Joker for the first time since she has been able to walk again. The trade of the first part of the court story has just been released so check it out before October when the Joker returns!
Friday, July 6, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Thank you, Mary Sue
Laura Croft: Bad @$$ or victim?
When I saw this cover of Game Informer I got excited. That was the most bad @$$ I had seen Laura Croft ever. I got even more excited when I read the article. It said that the new game would be a reboot and origin story for Laura. She’d be a young woman right out of college looking to make her own name, when things go horribly wrong and her boat crashes on a savage island. I got super excited when the article said she WILL be hurt and she WILL get dirty. Finally a Tomb Raider Game where Laura was realistic. She was designed like a normal slightly fit woman and her actions of running around in dark damp ancient tombs would show. I loved the premise and the new direction needless to say.
But then at E3 this trailer premiered. It shows the young Miss Croft fighting beast and landscape for her very life but it also showed something else. A scavenger on the island possibly trying to rape her. The brief scene starts at about 2:18. Now spoilers nothing seems to happen she starts fighting back immediately and eventually shoots her attacker square between the eyes. I would have thought nothing of it personally had it not been for the huge backlash fueled in part by one of the producers of the game saying in an interview that “players will want to protect her in a much different way than they would a male character”......Really?
OK so to tackle this very divisive issue let's first cover this statement that is dripping with stupidity. It implies pretty heavily that for most of the target audience they don’t want to project themselves in Laura but to act like her parent. That’s kinda creepy idea considering most players are probably going to be pretty close to Laura’s age who is in her early 20’s for this game. But I am unwilling to judge the game on this dummies comments because he is one very small part of a huge team for a blockbuster game. This is the way he views the game and he is neither a writer nor designer of the game. While his comment was stupid it in the end doesn’t matter in terms of the quality of the game.
Alright so now lets get into the real meat of the controversy, the clip itself. The game has many special interactive scenes to where if you fail Laura dies, usually in quite a gruesome way. This attempted rape scene seems to be just that type of scene to where the successful ending is Laura shooting the douche in the face. The unsuccessful result, well we don’t know what it is yet. It does seem to be that if the player fails to press the right button poor Laura gets raped and murdered. That is a very horrible thing to put into any game much less with a woman protagonist. Rape is the ultimate form of power assertion and humiliation. It has nothing to do with sex. If the unsuccessful result is that it should be removed which it seems to be. With the release date next March and how big of a backlash this 4 second clip of a 3 minute trailer seems to have made, the developers are scrambling to either change the context of the scene or take it out all together according to be a clarifying statement saying that “there is no rape in this game”. So it seems they realized their mistake and are taking it out. Awesome. I’m not going to go into the fact they thought it was OK to put it in there in the first place, that’s another article for another day.
I am going to give my thoughts (last ones for now I swear) on the other complaints of the game that the entire thing is torture porn. I disagree highly with this. Yes Laura is constantly being victimized by man, beast, savage, even her very surroundings. But you know what we also see her doing? Getting up each and every time. She is fighting for her very life with next to no tools, no experience, and no one coming to save her. If she wants to live she has to keep getting up and going forward. What I see in that magazine cover isn’t a victim but a determined woman who will let nothing stop her from getting off that island. Remember this is her origin story. She hasn’t been trained to fight for years prior to the events of the game, she’s probably never picked up a gun, never had to hunt and cook her own food or make her own shelter, never had to fight so hard to just stay alive. That makes her an even more bad ass feminist character for the 21st century, one that won’t let adversity keep her down, in my humble opinion.
note: I was highly inspired by this article which may put these ideas into better words. Check it out
But then at E3 this trailer premiered. It shows the young Miss Croft fighting beast and landscape for her very life but it also showed something else. A scavenger on the island possibly trying to rape her. The brief scene starts at about 2:18. Now spoilers nothing seems to happen she starts fighting back immediately and eventually shoots her attacker square between the eyes. I would have thought nothing of it personally had it not been for the huge backlash fueled in part by one of the producers of the game saying in an interview that “players will want to protect her in a much different way than they would a male character”......Really?
OK so to tackle this very divisive issue let's first cover this statement that is dripping with stupidity. It implies pretty heavily that for most of the target audience they don’t want to project themselves in Laura but to act like her parent. That’s kinda creepy idea considering most players are probably going to be pretty close to Laura’s age who is in her early 20’s for this game. But I am unwilling to judge the game on this dummies comments because he is one very small part of a huge team for a blockbuster game. This is the way he views the game and he is neither a writer nor designer of the game. While his comment was stupid it in the end doesn’t matter in terms of the quality of the game.
Alright so now lets get into the real meat of the controversy, the clip itself. The game has many special interactive scenes to where if you fail Laura dies, usually in quite a gruesome way. This attempted rape scene seems to be just that type of scene to where the successful ending is Laura shooting the douche in the face. The unsuccessful result, well we don’t know what it is yet. It does seem to be that if the player fails to press the right button poor Laura gets raped and murdered. That is a very horrible thing to put into any game much less with a woman protagonist. Rape is the ultimate form of power assertion and humiliation. It has nothing to do with sex. If the unsuccessful result is that it should be removed which it seems to be. With the release date next March and how big of a backlash this 4 second clip of a 3 minute trailer seems to have made, the developers are scrambling to either change the context of the scene or take it out all together according to be a clarifying statement saying that “there is no rape in this game”. So it seems they realized their mistake and are taking it out. Awesome. I’m not going to go into the fact they thought it was OK to put it in there in the first place, that’s another article for another day.
I am going to give my thoughts (last ones for now I swear) on the other complaints of the game that the entire thing is torture porn. I disagree highly with this. Yes Laura is constantly being victimized by man, beast, savage, even her very surroundings. But you know what we also see her doing? Getting up each and every time. She is fighting for her very life with next to no tools, no experience, and no one coming to save her. If she wants to live she has to keep getting up and going forward. What I see in that magazine cover isn’t a victim but a determined woman who will let nothing stop her from getting off that island. Remember this is her origin story. She hasn’t been trained to fight for years prior to the events of the game, she’s probably never picked up a gun, never had to hunt and cook her own food or make her own shelter, never had to fight so hard to just stay alive. That makes her an even more bad ass feminist character for the 21st century, one that won’t let adversity keep her down, in my humble opinion.
note: I was highly inspired by this article which may put these ideas into better words. Check it out
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Thoughts on....Justice League Doom
Holy crap. If I were to have to have a final project released after my sudden death, I'd want it to be this. Dwayne Mcduffie, the penman behind this wonderful piece, died just over one year ago after writing the script. I only recently found out about Mcduffies other accomplishments, like his Justice League animated series work as well as being the creator of Static Shock, another show I loved as a kid. Mr Mcduffie did not disappoint with his last piece of art and I know personally I am saddened by the loss of such a creative mind.
JL Doom was based off the JLA story The Tower of Babel where Batman's contingency plans for taking down each JLA member are stolen and used against the members of the Justice League. This movie is near perfect in pacing. It gives time to each character for the audience to get to know them and their personalities as well as the team dynamic. The opening scene is of a robbery by the Royal Flush gang and its an extremely fun action packed romp. The tech the gang uses for their robberies is a multidimensional projector that allows them to walk through walls. Its far beyond their capabilities of creating so they call in the leading expert, Cyborg, everyone's favorite walking computer. I loved his entrance into the movie, clothes-lining one of the gang members....like a boss! It shows the difference between him and the other heroes. He's young and sure of himself and his portrayal I feel is right out of the Teen Titans show, fun loving but kick ass. I am glad to see DC using Cyborg because because a lot of college age students know him from the show. To a lot of 20-somethings he's almost as well known as Batman or Superman, making him a great tool to draw in interest for that age group who may have fallen out of DC media. On a side note what I loved about the casting was that each of the voice actors from the 90s Justice League cartoon returned to do an amazing job once again. Don't fix what isn't broken is all I can say.
Well with the characters covered lets move on to the action. One of the reasons I think that animation should be utilized more is because it is limitless as the human imagination. You can do any camera angle, any character design, any special effect you want and in the right animators hands it will look fantastic and real. This is what happened in JL Doom. The fight scenes were well animated and well choreographed. When Superman throws a punch you can feel the power behind it, when Flash runs the speed is incredible, Green Lanterns ring constructs have a great flowing feel to them. You can tell a lot of work was put into the animation.
Now there are a few problems with the movie. For one thing I don't think that the reprecutions of Batmans scheming are fully explored. He claims that his plans were altered from non-lethal but I can't see how. The Martian Manhunter's trap was a poison to make him secrete a flammable chemical. How could that be none lethal? The entire idea is to set him on FIRE. Martian or not fire tends to make people dead. While the plot hole of not being able to see Batman's original plans is annoying, everything else from the dialogue, voice acting, and action sequences outshines that plot hole and makes for a gosh darn enjoyable movie. 8.5/10
JL Doom was based off the JLA story The Tower of Babel where Batman's contingency plans for taking down each JLA member are stolen and used against the members of the Justice League. This movie is near perfect in pacing. It gives time to each character for the audience to get to know them and their personalities as well as the team dynamic. The opening scene is of a robbery by the Royal Flush gang and its an extremely fun action packed romp. The tech the gang uses for their robberies is a multidimensional projector that allows them to walk through walls. Its far beyond their capabilities of creating so they call in the leading expert, Cyborg, everyone's favorite walking computer. I loved his entrance into the movie, clothes-lining one of the gang members....like a boss! It shows the difference between him and the other heroes. He's young and sure of himself and his portrayal I feel is right out of the Teen Titans show, fun loving but kick ass. I am glad to see DC using Cyborg because because a lot of college age students know him from the show. To a lot of 20-somethings he's almost as well known as Batman or Superman, making him a great tool to draw in interest for that age group who may have fallen out of DC media. On a side note what I loved about the casting was that each of the voice actors from the 90s Justice League cartoon returned to do an amazing job once again. Don't fix what isn't broken is all I can say.
Well with the characters covered lets move on to the action. One of the reasons I think that animation should be utilized more is because it is limitless as the human imagination. You can do any camera angle, any character design, any special effect you want and in the right animators hands it will look fantastic and real. This is what happened in JL Doom. The fight scenes were well animated and well choreographed. When Superman throws a punch you can feel the power behind it, when Flash runs the speed is incredible, Green Lanterns ring constructs have a great flowing feel to them. You can tell a lot of work was put into the animation.
Now there are a few problems with the movie. For one thing I don't think that the reprecutions of Batmans scheming are fully explored. He claims that his plans were altered from non-lethal but I can't see how. The Martian Manhunter's trap was a poison to make him secrete a flammable chemical. How could that be none lethal? The entire idea is to set him on FIRE. Martian or not fire tends to make people dead. While the plot hole of not being able to see Batman's original plans is annoying, everything else from the dialogue, voice acting, and action sequences outshines that plot hole and makes for a gosh darn enjoyable movie. 8.5/10
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