For Saint Seiya Fans: The Bronze Saint Victory Charts

Pegasus Seiya's Method
Step 1 - Arrive acting exactly your age: goof about, be overconfident, boast, threaten, brag, assume all the traits of the "party leader", make like you're the Gods' gift to this troop.
Step 2 - Realize your best hit can't touch this guy and have about a minute's worth of complete panic. Give the enemy a chance to explain to you why it failed, because, you know, they always do that and you could use the hint.
Step 3 - Make like you're a sandbag for the enemy and get hit like it was getting out of fashion.
Step 4 - Have an epiphany. Doesn't matter where it comes from. Depending on the season, your source may be Athena, your Master, your estranged sister, your Cosmo, your friends or repeating several lines about your duty and how you can't let everyone down now.
Step 5 - Depending on the season, either don the Sagittarius cloth, don the Sagittarius cloth with added parts borrowed from the other Saints or find a new hidden sense in your cosmo, no matter how many you have as it is. Your goddamn cosmo spawns new senses the way slum mothers spawn children: often, insistently and almost without noticing.
Step 6 - Win the fight by yourself, in one hit. Preferably the same that failed at the beginning.
Step 7 - Do some sexual tension scenes with Athena. Hug your friends. Cry. Spend a week in the hospital being pestered by orphan kids and that girl who likes you.

Andromeda Shun's Method
Step 1 - Get to the match crying over your brother's absence and dreading the fact you've gotta fight.
Step 2 - Show your opponent some attacks so he has a chance to tell us the Andromeda cloth is one of the most powerful, if not the ubermost powerful, of the Zodiac.
Step 3 - Be tossed around by the opponent like a rag doll, looking even more like a girl in Barbie pink armor. Think of your brother.
Step 4 - Get beaten. Yell for your brother.
Step 5 - Get beaten. Yell for your brother and claim you can't do this by yourself.
Step 6 - Watch as your brother saves your sorry butt AGAIN, and get scolded about never fighting your own fights. Unless this is the later seasons, completely ignore him.
Step 7 - Watch your brother leave and go seek the next guy whose arse your brother has to kick for you. In case an ally is fallen, further reinforce you're a guy who looks like a girl in an armor that only a girl should've worn by lying down next to him.

Cygnus Hyoga's Method
Step 1 - Go to the fight quietly and appear mature.
Step 2 - Throw in a few good punches, get a few good hits, and keep at it until someone mentions your Mother or your Master.
Step 3 - Go angsty over the fact Mama is at the bottom of the sea or someone iced your master (HA!), depending on what the enemy picked. Note: Should your enemy force you to revive these events by illusion or flashback, get totally into it and whine like a little girl.
Step 4 - Get distressed, whine, lose your concentration and get your nose punched in several times over, in this order.
Step 5 - Call out to Mama, Master or the Master's Master, depending on what season you're in, and whine some more.
Step 6 - Beat your opponent into a pulp by drawing strenght from your despair.
Step 7 - Whine, whine and whine until the audience is sick of you, and then whine some more. Enough for people to assume that had this series be set in modern days, you would most likely be portrayed as a member of the emo tribe. Be perfectly okay and calm for the next conflict.

Dragon Shiryu's Method
Step 1 - Get to the site and boast about in how many pieces you'll be sending your opponent back home. In a respectful and honorable manner of course.
Step 2 - Get the living shit beaten out of you for a whole episode at least.
Step 3 - Strip (this step may be taken before or after steps 4 and 5) and show off your dragon tattoo.
Step 4 - Lose an amount of blood you could fill an Olympic pool with (this step may be taken before or after steps 3 and 5).
Step 5 - If you are blinded at the moment (highly likely), open your eyes like you could see and vacantly stare at the distance for several close shots. If you are not blinded, go blind somehow (this step may be taken before or after steps 3 and 4).
Step 6 - Get the shit beaten out of you a while longer, and eventually win with a single punch that could throw down an entire New York block.
Step 7 - Drop on the floor and bleed quietly until you either regain your strength, your sight, or someone comes in to pick you up. Priority goes to the last option.

Phoenix Ikki's Method
Step 1 - Find somewhere quiet to stay, preferably where nobody goes to bother you. An active volcano in the middle of nowhere is good.
Step 2 - Sit there being awesome and "lone wolf" like for most of the fighting, until both Saints and the audience are tired of wondering when you're gonna show up.
Step 3 - If your brother calls, wait another thirty minutes and then go to his aid before he gets his ass handed to him. If anyone else does, wait fifteen minutes and go show them how it's done.
Step 4 - Arrive to the battle site and beat the shit out of your opponent. If your brother was the one to call for your help, scold him. If not, completely ignore your allies for the duration of the fight.
Step 5 - Ultimately defeat your opponent in the most badass way available.
Step 6 (optional) - Should you die, shrug it off and pat away the dust from your cloth. You're the Phoenix Saint, man! You're like the curse in Ju-On, it just won't die!
Step 7 - Go back to your seat and stay there. Wait until someone is about to get killed horribly and repeat.

Athena's Method
Step 1 - Stay at a distance and pay aid to your Saints by manner of some God-leveled power which only does half the job, and that's if they know how to properly use it.
Step 2 - Pull a Princess Peach and get kidnapped and taken far the fuck away. Atop a set of stairs that could make Rocky quit is good. Somewhere in a frozen wasteland too. Bottom of the sea? Why not. Hell? Ohoho, you totally got it...
Step 3 - Socialize with the enemy. Because, you know, a lady's gotta have manners.
Step 4 - Pray for your Saints. To whom, I wonder? You're a Goddess, lady, who are you gonna pray to? Well, pray anyway.
Step 5 - Socialize with the enemy some more. What else is there to do, anyway? If it's a man, take the chance to practice your flirting skills. If it's a woman, be a passive-aggressive bitch all the time you're there.
Step 6 - See your Saints arrive and do the epic last battle while you hold onto your staff and look pretty.
Step 7 - Just before they manage to retrieve you, get kidnapped again. The "We're sorry, but our Princess is in another castle" line is optional. From here on, forget step 1 for the duration of the series.

Silent Hill is dead. Someone shoot the refresh.

Well folks, it's hard to admit it when a good franchise dies. Or a fairly decent franchise with a top dog game, but you know where I'm getting. It's time to pull out the gun and shoot Silent Hill out of its misery, and having been a fan for so long and over so many years, it might as well be me. It had been pretty obvious since the fourth title that this was going nowhere. But Silent Hill's fifth instance (not 0rigins, mind you, that wasn't exactly great, but it wasn't god-awful either) and its newest bastard child, Shattered Memories, can be truly interpreted as the signs the final Seal is opened, and it's all downhill from here. Now let me make something perfectly clear: I have not played Shattered Memories. I know how the plot goes, I've seen others play and I've seen a few walkthroughs. But I know Silent Hill, and I know what isn't, and well, do the maths.

A tendency has manifested itself lately, in movies such as the new Star Trek, to "reset" franchises long gone in a vague attempt at resurrecting them from the dead. Instead of having everyone downloading the original works or remaking them, people seem to now opt for re-doing things. "This is how it would look like if I had thought of it today". Well, I didn't have much to say about the new Star Trek, although if you were at the theater with me, you probably heard me bitch and moan by the movie's end. The same goes for Silent Hill, sadly. Shattered Memories has been called a "refresh" on the series instead of a "remake". I call it a "reset". We all know any other game coming out will go by this one's standards, since Shattered Memories is now... "the modern first"... how did we get to this? Sit down for a while and keep an eye on the SPOILERS, child, I'll tell you.

Konami had a good thing going, back in the day where you could suggest things to people in video games without them trying it in real life, and without seven hundred and nineteen members of Mommies Against Video Games coming to TV to whine and spoil the ride for those of us who are actually sane. There were plenty of titles that made you play against all types of monster, shooting all that moved like bullets were being given away with gum, but very few had the gruesome, passive-aggressive hatred lying in Silent Hill. Back then, they introduced a simple story, not unlike those you have seen in plenty of horror movies throughout the years: death cult, missing child, hero daddy, yadda yadda yadda. On the surface, the game was plain like your breakfast porridge. It was only when you began to sit down and actually think a little about what you saw that the complexity behind the game began to unveil.

Its sequel is arguably the peak of the series. Once again, and perhaps more so than on the first title, not a single aspect of the game was left to chance: the monsters had meaning, the people had meaning, pretty much everything and anything you saw during the game was tied in with the idea they wanted to reveal, and the twist came as a true shock for many of us. The more you play it, if you did, the more you can tie in those messages. It was a work of crow-damned-video-game art. We aren't sure if Konami planned all of Silent Hill 2's tie-ins, but even if it didn't, there was enough material to establish a consistent, logical interpretation. And, of course, the prime aspect of the first game was maintained: ambiance. The town of Silent Hill. The fog, the dark, the noises, the unnerving soundtrack. As I see it, this is something other games of the same period never managed to pull.

On came Silent Hill 3, because something worth doing is worth doing three times. And because so many of the fans didn't truly grasp the meaning of the first game, thus needing a sequel that would provide an answer to all of those questions. It's still a Silent Hill, and still adored by many. Unfortunately, it would pretty much be the last instance you'd see of it. Because Konami thought something worth doing is also worth screwing. On came The Room.

I repeat this every time the game is mentioned, and this is how my friends know I have a problem. As a standalone game, The Room could've pulled it. As a part of Silent Hill, it looks like something made at the last minute to resemble the rest of his brothers and sisters from afar. That's probably because, this is exactly the case. The Room was made as a standalone, and only crammed into Silent Hill when Konami started fearing the game wouldn't stand on its own two feet. My questions: a) when in Silent Hill did we ever have ghosts attacking?, b) how is this Silent Hill if we never even go to Silent hill, and c) a limit to items that can be carried? No flashlight? No radio? I'm not saying that it's bad on its own, on the contrary, the game is fairly entertaining and has that delicious gruesomeness we usually go to Silent Hill to find, but it would've been a perfectly decent game on its own. In order to cram it into the series, they picked one of the most farfetched missing links the history of Silent Hill ever had: a guy who killed himself with a spoon in prison, whom we only know from Silent Hill 2.

0rigins... was odd. With Silent Hill 5 already in the making, and the clear notion that this was not only a prequel but borrowed greatly from the asinine movie adapted from the series, we the fanpeople expected the worst. It was actually much more decent than either The Room or the fifth title, as I see it. Because... this is Silent Hill! We're in the town, puzzles must be solved, enemies must be avoided, and we can walk around with fourteen portable TVs and nine toasters in the same menu. It's actually an improvement from its predecessor. Hell, I can even live with the fact Travis can sucker-punch his foes and we have control over the swap between the normal town and Dark Silent Hill. While the game looks rather incomplete - you can easily see a lot was scrapped from the original plans - it was still good to play. And crow knows it had critics: the presence of the Butcher as an attempt to duplicate the success made with Pyramid Head actually makes sense from the story's perspective: James had Pyramid Head because he needed a punisher, and Travis has the Butcher because that is what haunts him! It surely made a lot more sense that Pyramid-chan's appearance in the fifth.

And oh crow, the fifth! Again, Konami missed the hole by about a mile and a half with this one. Pyramid Head's appearance was pure catering to fans, ultimately destroying any sense the entity might've made in the past. Again, most of the game isn't spent in the town of Silent Hill. Like with The Room, the connections to the series are so tiny you only very briefly heard about them. And while I do accept Travis' emotional luggage in 0rigins as rather well-made, Alex Shepherd's is so in the face it ends up not being fun at all. It's a half-assed game, with half-assed motivations and a half-assed plot, on a series of games well-known for its character depths, its amazing ambience and its near-flawless plots. I hated it.

And so we reach Shattered Memories on a long line of major titles released in the franchise. Where do I begin...?

Up first, and with just E3 information to base my claims on, I thought I would criticize a lot of things. No combat, the fact that it's a "refresh", no monster variety, loss of a lot of depth, the works. But it's way worse than I figured. This is not a refresh, it's the ultimate death of the mystery.

All this history of the town of Silent Hill as a holy place, the cult, Alessa, it's all gone. The ambiance is gone, there is no longer a lingering, passive-aggressive hatred, no uneasiness anymore. The fog is gone, and has been replaced by icebergs that spawn out of nowhere - a very aggressive change if I may say so myself. All that underlying bit that made a name for Silent Hill has been tossed aside like yesterday's diapers. But wait. We haven't gotten to the worst part. Sure, the game has a lot of problems... the puzzles are rather nice at times, with a few (very simple) heads-up to the original title (replacing the piano puzzle, which was the cross of many Silent Hill players up to then, with a toy piano puzzle. Ingenious or proof that the more mankind evolves, the dumber they get?)... the lack of combat seems to be a standard in horror games these days, more and more. Seems "get out of dodge" is a more likely reaction to something horrifying than "I beat it with my lead pipe!". Still, most original characters are there, even if simply to take a nod at the original game. This seems like a game made out of inside jokes between Silent Hill fans... maybe that's exactly what it's supposed to be, I figured, and that's not as bad as just another shitty title.

After a while watching, though, I just assumed they were just poking fun at the original game.

Dahlia, chief of the Silent Hill cult and mother to Alessa? A punkish high-schooler. Kaufmann, another high-profile member of the cult and responsible for the traffic of the drug White Claudia? Your psychiatrist, actually trying to help you. Nurse Lisa has one of the worse cameos ever thought of for a "refreshed" character. There is no Alessa. What the fuck am I looking at here?!

And then the epic twist Konami seems to have decided to include in every single Silent Hill since fans went batshit bonkers with the second title: it's all in Cheryl's head. The ice, Harry Mason's quest, all things happening in town, everything is in Cheryl's head. Yeah, it seems they accepted the worst ending of the original title as canon and Harry died in that car crash, and then his daughter hallucinated the rest on the course of several years of denial and making up. What...? So... Silent Hill is a completely normal town? It's not even a ghost town, since real people live there? What...?

And you know what actually grinds my gears? You know what actually pisses me off in Shattered Memories from what I've seen of it? The fact Konami decided to claim the game psychologically analyses you. Meaning, different aspects of the game change according to your answers to a series of psychological tests. To this, I do have something to say.

A few years ago, when the PS entered the market, I bought a puzzle game for my Mum called Puzzle Bubble 4. I bought it because my Mum actually liked to play that sort of game. One of the features of the game was the fact that when you finished one of the campaign modes, you had a tarot reading done by the system. It only covers the amorous life, but my Mum enjoyed shooting bubbles to solve puzzles and found that feature funny. She had her tarot read several times. Even today, if she happens to fire it up, she will go for the tarot reading. Why am I telling you this story? Because the tarot reading my Mum so enjoyed is about as accurate as the psychological profiling done by Shattered Memories. Namely, it's a cute feature, but not to be taken seriously.

Psychologically profiling a person based on her answers to a couple of tests and questions? Damn, why are there even psychiatrists?

Why do it like this? Is the game supposed to be made to fit me? And you know what bothers and scares me based on the answer to a few simple questions? Why so obvious, Konami? Why not move the game according to choices made in game? Oh right... because then you'd have to sacrifice the whole psychiatrist bit and lose your ending twist that invalidated Silent Hill as we all knew it. So you gave us a painfully obvious game mode to aid in your ugly-as-sin ending twist! How am I not supposed to be. Pissed. Off. My. Brains?!

... alright. So. My final diagnosis. Shattered Memories can be fun, and it does contain a series of inside jokes to Silent Hill fans, provided you decide to approach it as a game made in honor of a better one. This is the only way a true blue fan of Silent Hill can enjoy it. If you never heard of Silent Hill, find the first title and play that, and then the two first sequels, before you drive head first into this sorry piece of crow. I promise any of those three games are well worth your time, and will make you feel like you're playing a game. Shattered Memories wins plenty from being on the Wii, since this is likely the best way to play it - you may enjoy a lot of what the Wii has to offer for this one, and it will improve your gaming experience. Not by much, but with this one, all help is needed.

To all of you who know and love the original series, don't come here looking for Silent Hill. It's not the same. Hell, more of the usual would be welcome here! Using the same basis, several more stories like James Sunderland's could be told, with different approaches. I can point you several decent horror movies which have gone by with one basis and several different plots! 0rigins did it, so can others! Now open a beer, and pour a couple of drops for this franchise, toast to it, and chug it down. Sometimes we just have to admit it - it's not coming back.

'Avatar'

There are many tried-and-true formulas for movie making. Some have been repeated so often they stink to high heavens, but continue to be used still. Hollywood is all about cash, movies with a gigantic budget need to originate equally gigantic box office income. No matter how much innovation you're willing to put into a movie, when the chips are down and the dollars must somehow show up, you'll open the movie plot drawer to seek something you know from the start will work for you.

Avatar is one of these cases of tried-and-true formulas used on a different context. You may in fact have seen this movie already, only with less special effects. It goes more or less like this: a wheelchair-bound Marine is sent to a far-away planet called Pandora to participate in a special program that will have him control a fake body that slightly resembles the ones of natives (the Na'Vi) as if it was his own. While his mission is to make friends with the natives so he can peacefully kick them out of their home later, he ends up turning bravely against his own species in defense of this amazing new world.

James Cameron is the man behind it all... you may remember him from awesome things like Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2 (1991), and from not so great things like Titanic (1997). Playing our paraplegic Marine is Sam Worthington from (oh crow!) Terminator Salvation (2009), Zoe Saldana, who was Uhura in the new Star Trek (2009) plays the chief's daughter. You will see also Sigourney Weaver (from Aliens and a shitload other movies) and Stephen Lang (who was Charles Winstead in Public Enemies, 2009) as the colonel Miles Quaritch. Watch out for SPOILERS in fake Na'Vi bodies from here on, by the way, because I don't plan on being merciful either.

When I say the movie is predictable, I mean predictable. Let's put it like this: you can tell the end of Avatar, as well as its whole development, based on the first fifteen minutes of the flick. Hell, you can go at it from the trailer alone. They tell you there's this wheelchair-bound Marine called Jake Sully who will be given the chance to use legs again (instead of his own, those of a giant furry blue cat-like creature, but legs nonetheless). Right here, you know he'll be biased when it comes to his mission. Even the promise that he will have his legs again after the mission is completed seems futile in comparison to the body-switch: this guy has legs the size of toothpicks, atrophy has clearly installed and it'll take him months, years of recovery to be able to walk again. In seconds, he can be inside the body of an athletic, fully functional, strong as a bull creature. Imagine your PC is busted, and you know it'll take months to fix and will never be like it was before the bust. You can have a new one - are you really gonna try to fix the later? Of course you're not! You're gonna go out running like a crazy blue furry instead!

One of the biggest failures of this film was convincing the audience that Jake actually had an interest, at some point, in completing his mission to the end. From movie start, you know he'll kick the army in the ass at the first chance. And the first chance comes soon enough, when Jake gets lost in the woods and is conveniently found by the chief's daughter, Pocahontas-style. Naytiri is her name and although she doesn't jump down waterfalls, she can go around the tree branches like Prince of Persia on a good day. Now, let's approach this first meeting and all the bullshit it brings.

First and foremost, and since Jake doesn't speak a word of the Na'Vi language, Naytiri conveniently learned English from the first visiting humans, like several of the young adult members of her tribe. Then, she is set to kill Jake, only she never gets around to it because she receives a message from.... the Tree of Souls (gee, didn't Pocahontas receive a hint from her grandma, who happens to be a willow?), which seemingly gave her a "This guy is alright!" heads-up, and so she takes him to the tribe instead. Once there, you find out something you already knew as well: she's the chief's daughter! Of course she is. How else would Jake be accepted into the tribe, if he didn't have the chief's daughter on his side? If she was just some girl, he'd have been killed straight away! Furthermore, Naytiri is promised to a warrior of her tribe she doesn't love, and he and Jake don't exactly hit it off, on the contrary. Because this guy seemingly watched Pocahontas as well and knows Naytiri is gonna fall for the handsome white devil. We're a raccoon short of a Disney movie here, at this point.

And so Jake begins to learn the customs, religion, language and life philosophy of the tribe. Again, we know already Jake has pretty much abandoned his mission unofficially by now. He tells Naytiri, further ahead, that he came here to do this and that but then fell in love with the forest and with her... don't give me any of that. Either this is a very rookie actor who couldn't transmit the message clearly, or the plotline itself told us so. He can be a paraplegic Marine in a concrete jungle or a fully functional Na'Vi in an awesome landscape. Not a difficult choice at all. Not much room for indecision. At any moment of this flick is our hero torn between his duty and his calling.

They say it's very unlikely for him to become a full-fledged member of the tribe. He pulls it.

Then they say that long ago someone tamed the biggest bird in the sky and became top dog of the Na'Vi people in the blink of an eye. Jake does that too.

Even when the cat's out of the bag and the Marines march in to drill, and Jake's kicked out of the tribe for being a snitch, you know very well they will accept him back when he comes flying in, triumphant, atop the largest bird in the crow-damn planet. It's not just accepting him back, either: the only reason why he doesn't order the tribe around already, seeing as Naytiri's father died because of Jake's betrayal, is-

... wait. Naytiri's father died when the Marines marched in? Because at any moment Jake could have told them why they sent him in and kept quiet instead? So... all those Na'Vi, including the father of the one Jake supposedly loves, died because of him, and he's welcome into the tribe no hard feelings? Oh for crow's sake! This is leading the plot where you want it to go. It's not logical at all. Mid-movie, Jake is given the get-out-of-trouble hint, and when he returns with the bird, the Na'Vi forget this is the son of a bitch who got them into trouble in the first place! Naytiri, sister, wake the fuck up. Your daddy died because of this ass, you're A-OK with that just because he brought you back the biggest flyer in the sky and that means, in your tribe, he's cool? This line of plot suggests the Na'Vi are completely dense as their customs are concerned, they don't think or feel, they have traditions and guidelines and those speak louder than everything else! What the eff?!

Finally, we come to the movie's climax: Jake joins up all tribes of Na'Vi and goes against his own people in defense of Pandora. Our stereotype Marine colonel is killed after a long and arduous fight. Jake asks for the aid of the whole nature, and he gets it because he's that awesome. The humans leave Pandora with the exception of Jake and a couple friends who helped him throughout this ordeal, they find a way for Jake to stay in the Na'Vi body forever, it's a wrap.

For you maybe. I'm not easily impressed. It's a bunch of crap, that's what it is.

And sure, effects are awesome. But the movie is 60% CGI and in some places, namely where I saw it, they have it on 3D only. If the effects weren't at least great, Avatar wouldn't have gotten its feet off the ground. Depending on plot only, it would have been a mediocre movie at best. And James Cameron knew this more than well, folks. Avatar was delayed over 15 years precisely because CGI technology couldn't make it good enough for it to have any success. Plenty of people told me the sole reason for watching this was special effects, and I'm tempted to consider it vallid. The plot is a bore, effects are the only thing you came in to see, right?

Well... effects, and one curious approach, which managed to keep me fairly interested for at least twenty minutes out of the whole thing.

The idea that we are all connected and being one with Nature is not new at all, but in Avatar, it was made so that everyone and anyone can grasp it. The connection isn't merely spiritual, it's a physical, palpable thing. Every Na'Vi has a tentacle or sorts protruding from the back of their heads and usually covered in a tress of hair. As do most trees and animals from their environment. What they can basically do, is physically connect themselves with almost everything around them at any given time. This allows them to easily domesticate animals and even control them telepathically. If I want to make a comparison, I could say every Na'Vi is born with a standard USB cable on the back of their heads through which they can interact with anything else that has a similar one.

At some point, they even manage to connect the whole tribe to the planet itself! So... is this like the Internet or what? It's a pretty good approach of the concept, given the movie is intended for people more likely to work with USB than to know something or another about being one with Nature. I speak for myself: it is hard for me to grasp the concept of spiritual connection with everything, but I - and pretty much anyone else - can grasp a physical connection which leads to this spiritual one. Good job here, Cameron! The rest of the plot was recycled from Pocahontas with some Dances With Wolves tossed in for good measure. And you thought we wouldn't notice because most moviegoers these days were born after Dances With Wolves came out. Silly Cameron.

What the Hell. Go watch it. They say some stories are timeless... I say I bore easily. But that's me: Avatar has that nice concept and overall was well-executed, visual effect wise. Try not to think of Pocahontas while you're at it and you'll be okay.