Zenith (Written by Grant Morrison, Illustrated by Steve Yeowell)



It's interesting to look at Klaus and Zenith back-to-back, Klaus being one of if not Morrison's last comic (for now) and Zenith his first. You can see a lot of the tropes and themes that pervaded Morrison's work through his career like aliens from a higher reality, order from chaos and the Dreamtime (Zenith calls it "the Chaoetheric" but come on), and there's even a part in Klaus where Grandfather Frost whisks Klaus to safety using a teleporter that manifests as a giant bubble. In Zenith, people travel between the Alternatives through something called "Einstein-Rosen Bridges" which manifest as, again, bubbles. Heck, when Bruce returns to the present day from the far future in Return of Bruce Wayne he emerges from a giant bubble.

As for the comic itself, it's about as close to a superhero deconstruction as you can get with Grant Morrison. Morrison lacks the cynicism towards superheroes of Alan Moore or full-on contempt of Garth Ennis so while Zenith is a stuck-up ass he draws the line at people getting hurt. To be honest a lot of the ideas it plays with were done better in later Morrison books - heck, sometimes it feels like a proto-Flex Mentallo with the protagonist being a musician, superhumans wanting to elevate ordinary humans to their level, subconsciously-implanted hypnotic phrases, and the beings of the higher reality being relocated under the lower reality even if their goal was different - but it's fun to see where those ideas started.

Rating:

BoxBoxBoy! (3DS)



It's an expansion on the first BoxBoy, but now you can make two sets of blocks. The other gimmicks are the same, only a little more complicated to account for two stacks of blocks. I mean, there's not much to say about that I didn't say about the first one: it's a cute little puzzle game.

Rating:

Metal Gear Rising: Reveangence (PS3, M)



I wanted to love this game and while I did like, I didn't love it. The combat is smooth, the free-range slicing is a neat idea, it's fun to thin the enemy ranks with stealth before cutting loose on the stragglers, and the boss battles are well-designed blends of real-time combat and flashy set pieces. So why did I walk away from this game less satisfied than I wanted to be?

Mainly, the fucking camera.

I mostly spent the boss battles getting progressively more irritated because I'd be trying to keep track of where the boss is and what attacks they're telegraphing and if I need to parry or get out of the way, but the camera kept wanting to focus on Raiden's ass (Monsoon and Senator Armstrong are the worst with this). Also, the parry is based on where an enemy is in relation to you based on where the camera is and there were times where I'd parry an incoming attack just as the camera decided to move, so I'd parry in the wrong direction and eat shit. Also, at the end of the Sundowner fight there's a set piece where you're riding a flying mech up a shaft while debris is falling on you, but the damn mech takes up so much of the screen I couldn't see the incoming debris.

I thought I was the only person experiencing these problems but a quick search revealed, no, a lot of people think the camera is donkey butts.

There are also obvious signs of padding and things being stripped out (MGR apparently had a very troubled development). I'm pretty sure the escape from Denver is just the infiltration mission played in reverse. There's a rematch against two bosses out of nowhere, one of whom was fought literally the previous level. Jetsteam Sam doesn't even get a level. The final level consists of two outside areas and one building before Armstrong crashes in, and I know it's not the game's fault (or maybe it is, memes are the DNA of the soul and all that) but I could only hear every word that came out of his mouth as "my source is that I made it the fuck up."

Rating:

ByeBye BoxBoy! (3DS)



We're back to only being able to make a single set of blocks, but with a new batch of gimmicks like water and escort missions. And a crap ending. I even completed all the optional puzzles hoping for a better ending, but all I got was the option to dress up as a pretty princess which was a bit of a letdown.

Oh, and being able to dress up as a cat was introduced in BoxBoxBoy! but that game doesn't let you take your own pictures.

Rating:

Mega Man Battle Network 4: Blue Moon (GBA)



When I say I beat this game that comes with a disclaimer because you're supposed to play through Battle Network 4 three times to see all the scenarios and here's the thing: I don't fucking want to. If I'm not allowed to review this game until I beat it three times, then disregard my score and consider this my "Fuck this game" of the year.

Battle Network 4 is ostensibly about a meteor that's on a collision course with the Earth and evil chips that corrupt Navis that use them that but never mind that, you're spending most of the game competing in a series of tournaments and running errands for your opponents before you can actually fight them. I think the opponents you get the fusion souls from are fixed (which led to a baffling scenario where Protoman loses a battle to some generic Navi, which is like a tournament of Mario characters where Wario loses to a random Toad) while the rest are randomly chosen. But the game's story has to work regardless of what scenarios you get and what version you have, so Battle Network 4 is seventeen hours of random bullshit that doesn't build on or connect to anything, and then you go to space.

There's a video from one of the South Park writers explaining how a properly structured story goes "This happens, prompting the characters to do this. Because of that, this happens. This prompts another character to do this, so the characters do this. But something goes wrong, so they have to do this." while a poorly structured goes "This happens. And then this happens. And then this happens. And then this happens." Battle Network 4 is the latter.

But hey, surely those random scenarios still have some cool story beats, right? Nope, it's all fetch quests, backtracking, motherfucking boulder punching, and forced stealth sections. In the Metalman scenario there's this old man you have to talk to to learn the secret to boulder punching, but before he'll train you he wants you to go to another area and get him something to drink. So I did, thankfully had the chip the Navi with the drinks wanted so I didn't have to grind for it, and brought it back only for the old man to say "I told you to bring me some snacks and something to drink!" I was actually hoping I'd get back to him and he'd tell me "I told you to bring me snacks, a drink, and a dirty magazine!" just so I'd have a reason to pack it in right there. Or when your next opponent effectively says "Hi, I'm your opponent in the next round of this big global tournament that's going on RIGHT NOW! Hey, I know, let's fly to the OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET so I can make you chase an idol around the Internet!" Like, we're fighting after the current battlers are done, right? How do we have time for this shit? Which is ironic because those breaks in the story where you'd have to go to bed before the plot advanced, giving you downtime to grind chips and complete Official HQ requests and shit are gone.

In the ending the bad guy tells Lan "You're just as evil as I am! You chased my Navi around and deleted a Navi who had no idea what was going on!" and I genuinely had no idea what he was talking about. Was he talking about when Mega Man's Dark Soul possessed another character? Or me chasing that Heel Navi through the Undernet? Or something during the theme park scenario with Shademan that I forgot about? Maybe if he didn't have to be vague to account for Battle Network 4's story being a bunch of randomly generated garbage that scene could been impactful instead of baffling. It's also great that the game ends with Lan being cheered on by characters he barely interacted with in the game.

Remember how in previous Battle Network games, if you had some chips that weren't useful for a given fight you could discard them to get a larger selection of chips to pick from in the next round? That's gone. Five chips per turn is all you get, unless you equip customization parts that take up a HUGE amount of space in the customization field to give you more chips. If your hand is glutted with useless chips all you can do is select them to get them out of your hand and hope for a better selection the next round.

Also, what's this game's obsession with Boktai? It's like it knows it sucks and is trying to tell me I'd probably be having a better time with this other game.

I got to the final boss and kept getting pounded into the dirt within two minutes because I only had 430 hit points and that was with a program to give me an extra 50. And no, this wasn't because of Dark Chip usage, I had only used a Dark Chip once and that was when you have to use the Dark Sword on Shademan. I just hadn't found very many of the HP upgrades, and you can't even find them all on the first playthrough. After the fifth or sixth attempt I decided to do some money grinding to purchase the HP upgrades I hadn't bought yet, do the side quest for the hoverboard, and check out the Undernet which is almost completely optional in BN4, at least the first playthrough. And something strange happened while I was in there: I actually started having fun. Gee, it's almost like I picked up a Battle Network game to network battle, not to punch fucking boulders.

Battle Network 4 gets a few other things right. It finally figured out how to make Mega Man change forms - just discard a chip corresponding to the form you want to switch to for a few rounds. The Topman and Junkman scenarios weren't completely awful. Forcing you to use the Dark Sword against Shademan instead of Mega Man doing it in a cutscene gave the scene more punch. And some of the music is alright.

By the way, I know everybody says Red Sun is a little better and I do have it, but Blue Moon is the version young me had unsealed so I just went with that. Maybe Red Sun doesn't have an equivalent to Metalman's godawful boulder punching minigame, but I don't think Roll's healing abilities are going to fix the fundamental flaws with this game.

Rating: