Saints Row IV

How much does the world itself matter in an open world game? Saints Row 2‘s Stillwater was busier and more active than Saints Row The Third‘s Steelport, yet I enjoyed the third game more thanks to its focus on a goofy story and fun missions. That said, could Steelport really support two entire games? Is the appeal of an open world game really to explore this massive sandbox? Is that why we play Saints Row games?

It’s no secret that Saints Row IV started as DLC, you could even see the roots of it in The Trouble with Clones DLC, which brought Johnny Gat back and gave the boss of the 3rd Street Saints super powers, albeit temporarily. Given THQ’s financial difficulties and presumably the ambition of that final DLC pack, Enter the Dominatrix, everything was expanded out into a new, full game. And while the budget probably limited them to reusing Steelport and many of the assets from Saints Row The Third, they managed to blow everything else out.

Extremely early in Saints Row IV, you’ll be given super powers. Specifically, you’ll get super speed, jumping, and the ability to throw elemental blasts. As soon as I got those powers, I stopped needing cars, planes, and really anything that wasn’t my character (a surly Vin Diesel, using a pitched down Male Voice 1). It’s crazy that such an important part of the game is pretty much unnecessary, but that’s kind of this game’s M.O: throw in everything you could think of, let the player decide what’s fun. And getting around Steelport is fun. Clearly modeled after Crackdown and Prototype, traversal in Saints Row IV never got old in the 19 hours it took me to 100% the game. The way my character barreled down the street, blasting cars out of the way was always fun.

The powers used in combat, such as blasting enemies with ice or fire, replace grenades. They serve more as an augment for your guns than a replacement, which I was OK with because there are a lot of really fun guns in this game. There’s a gun that shoots mini black holes, one that inflates people’s heads until they pop, and even the conventional guns can be made awesome. You can reskin every weapon in the game, for example, turning conventional pistols into Han Solo’s blaster from Star Wars. It’s a really great new touch.

In this game you’re always collecting upgrades, based on two currencies: clusters and cache. Clusters are orbs scattered around the city that can be collected and spent on upgrading your super powers. It’s really addictive. Cache is money, earned by doing pretty much anything and spent on upgrading everything from abilities, to clothes, to weapons. This is the first Saints Row game were I’ve found every side mission type fun, especially because there’s a narrative wrapper around doing them now.

Oh, right, the story. Basically, through some awesome events, the boss of the Saints becomes president. But that’s largely irrelevant because Zinyak, an evil alien, comes, abducts the Saints, and blows up the earth. Yeah, this game is going for broke. Zinyak traps everybody in simulations of Steelport were they must face their worst nightmares ad infinitum, except the boss breaks out and starts freeing the others. It’s basically an excuse to make a lot of somehow enjoyable Matrix references, and of course to give the boss super powers. I laughed a lot at this game, and I don’t laugh at a lot of games. It’s really good.

Of course it’s buggy too, I experienced a couple crashes and a weird bug during my playthough that made some weapons unusable. And yeah, it doesn’t quite feel like a new game since so much is reused from Saints Row The Third. But you know what? I’ve still got a bunch of games in my summer backlog that I need to get to, but I’ve been in kind of a funk since finishing Saints Row IV. It was just such goofy fun I don’t want to move on.

Blue Jasmine

It was interesting to see Blue Jasmine in the summer of hating on whistleblowers, because this certainly is a challenging portrayal of how it takes institutions, not individuals, to change the world. The movie is the story of Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), who moves to live with his sister in San Francisco after having a breakdown. Her husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), was exposed as a total corporate fuck, and, after losing everything, committed suicide in prison. His exposure hurt a lot of people, including Jasmine’s aforementioned sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins) and her then-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), but it is Jasmine who struggles the most to keep going.

The movie never makes it exactly clear what Hal was doing, director Woody Allen basically just tells us it’s illegal. I’m not even sure that Hal screwed over Ginger and Augie, or if it was his being caught that was their undoing. And sure, things weren’t idyllic before and Hal’s a pretty scummy guy, but things seem to be tangibly worse for everyone involved since, well, justice was served. Jasmine becomes a burden on everyone in her life, with everything that defined her taken away, she’s unable to move on at all.

It’s Cate Blanchett’s performance that really makes Blue Jasmine a movie to see, but I’ve really been taken with this serious, cynical Woody Allen. I haven’t seen much outside of his romantic comedy work, and was surprised that he would tell a story that was so damn dark. I mean, Louis C.K. is in this, and he’s practically a villain! Lovable Louis! Andrew Dice Clay is basically the most unimpeachable character in the whole movie, and that’s bananas.

The Wolverine

An admission: Wolverine was never one of my favorite super heroes. I know he’s super popular, maybe the most popular Marvel character, but even just among the X-Men, he was never my favorite. This probably has a lot to do with me not growing up with many comic books, I did have the Gambit limited series and one issue of the X-Men in which Professor X yells at everybody, leaving the cartoon as my main source for the mutant super team. So, unlike Man of Steel (is Superman my favorite super hero? Maybe…) I was pretty willing to let The Wolverine pass me by. It worked so well for Sexman: Origins, after all. But then my dad wanted to go see this, and I saw it. And I liked it.

A few years ago, The Wolverine was going to be a Darren Aronofsky movie. Remember that? That probably would have been a really interesting movie. Instead, another director with some Hugh Jackman experience stepped up, James Mangold, of Walk the Line and let’s not talk about it fame. And what did he deliver? A movie that feels somewhat in between a surprisingly faithful comic book adaptation (like 2 Guns, apparently) and another frustrating X-Men clusterfuck.

So I read Wolverine by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, and it was pretty sweet. Turns out that getting in Wolverine’s head is kinda like getting in Batman’s head. That was a pretty straight-forward story – Wolverine goes to Japan to check up on his girlfriend Mariko, finds out that she’s been married away by her crime boss dad, and basically just fights a bunch of ninjas until he can win back his girl. The movie adaptation is… Different.

You’ve probably heard that Silver Samurai is tacked onto this as a robot, but let’s ignore that and focus on the fact that the character who is Silver Samurai is in this, but not actually the Silver Samurai. He’s just a guy with a bow and arrow. There’s an added plot of Mariko’s grandfather, who Wolverine saved in WWII, working with Viper to take away Wolverine’s powers. Viper! How lame. In the comic, Yukio, one of the ninjas who ends up changing sides, acts as kind of a rebound for Wolverine after he gives up on Mariko, per her request. She’s a tough lady, and cool, and conflicted, but also pretty straightforward. In the movie, Yukio is not only a great warrior, but has the mutant ability to see the moment someone will die and is like a sister to Mariko and seriously X-Men movie people, why you always gotta fuck with this shit?

Not everything new is bad. Since this is technically the first sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand, we see that Wolverine’s dreams are haunted by the spectre of Jean Grey. As we know from The Dark Knight Rises, all super hero movies are really just big dumb love stories, but seeing Phoenix after all the years does give a nice sense of continuity and attachment to the films of my youth. I approve.

This has been a lot of talk about plot, when all you really need to know is that Wolverine fights a bear, a bunch of ninjas, and a robot. The Wolverine has some choice action sequences and some dumb ones, and ultimately it’s fine. It drags for a little while as it tries to set up a Mariko love story as plausible, but I think this version is more interesting than the love triangle from the comic. Things get a lot campier than I expected, with ninjas doing flips all the time just to get around and a ridiculously tall complex in the middle of a tiny village, but I’m not above doofy crap. In fact, I’m well into it at this point. That’s me, I like smart TV and dumb movies.