Seion 'The Fangirl' VS 'Super Hero Squad Show'

My friends, I'm glad to say I have found my calling. I am going to quit my job, buy a whole lotta C4 and a large dildo - a 3 footer, shaped like a dragon's dong, with realistic spurting motion (bet you thought no such thing existed huh? Stick with me, I'm on the internetz). I shall then buy a ticket to the States, stalk Stan Lee for a while until I figure out which cave he's hiding in these days. I will shove the aforementioned dildo up his and hook that baby up to the nearest water source to give him the enema to end all enemas, maybe he'll recover some of his mind back.

I will then rent a car, drive my way to the Disney headquarters, spread a generous layer of the C4 evenly around the building, and blast the thing to the Moon. I will then barricade myself in the crater, hold the company CEO hostage, and my demand for letting him go alive and delivering myself to justice will be that not again, for as long as the company exists, another abomination such as the one below is born.



Seriously. I've started screaming as soon as I laid eyes on it and I'm still screaming on the inside. I saw this on Saturday. My inner child has gone inside the closet again and it's being Hell to get her back out. She's been in there so long in fact I think she turned into Kanye West at this point.

Okay. Usually I'm not one to take things too seriously - some parts of that clip, I accept, are a bit funny ('Tis Hammertime!!). This is also comics after all, and comics are meant for kids, (not all they ain't - you ever heard of Milo Manara? Yeah...) and Marvel has done much bullshit on their own, without Disney's aid. But seriously... "Time to Hero Up?" I'm the first to enjoy parodies of the stuff I like. The Marvel Universe is no exception. My problem: a parody this ain't. This is the new Marvel Universe series for the kiddies - this is to the new generation what the 80's X-Men series was to us. It's being aired. If you thought X-Men: Evolution, the X-Men movies (that one in particular seems to have been written by a 14 year old fanboy with a serious case of the runs) and Wolverine and the X-Men (better than I expected, actually) were a load of crow, take a gander at Disney's approach.

What in the name of all that is good and holy happened?! You're killing my goddamn childhood! The Internet can get away with that, you can't! Come on, Marvel! Even amongst some of the worst plotlines you guys made, you had some meaning. You just tossed it all to crow by chibifying everyone, making it politically correct and jumbling your time, space, character depth and-

Look, I'm not even gonna rant about this. I'm a fangirl, I'm supposed to rant, but I'm gonna stop here. This is a different toon for kids who have a different notion of "great". I'm a 20-something woman, who am I to judge cartoons? Stan Lee lost his mind, Marvel lost its balls and shit's marketed to brats to whom the concept of "old-school cartoon" means Dexter's Laboratory. Different generation, that's it. Back then we liked different stuff, this is actually what kids nowadays want to see... shit, this generation blows. It took us years to see some blood in Marvel comics that actually looked like blood, and now this.

Ah. And obviously we have a different notion of what a "cool theme song" is, too. Biker Mice From Mars had a cool theme song. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had a cool theme song. The Ghostbusters had THE theme song. Hanna Barbera's Swat Kats had a better theme song. Street Sharks blew the big one as cartoons went, it had a better theme song than that! Seion out!

'Dante's Inferno' First Impressions - A Demo

Seion loves deadlines. She especially loves the whooshing sound deadlines make when they go by. Which would explain the obscene lack of updates to this blog. I know you expect a movie review from me, and I have kept myself active, but allow me to pull you aside for a moment and rant about something. Yeah, you and me in the corner, all excitedly, as if we were going treasure-hunting.

As a working person, I never have any money. All my funds, which I work very hard for, usually go into maintaining my house and person in good order, and crow knows I fail at even that at times. Since I don't have any wealthy relatives, despite having a PS3, I don't have a lot of games. This can be a problem, once I get tired of leaping out of hay to slit people's throats. Assassin's Creed is fun, but everything gets old. My brother and I seemingly also make a sport out of torturing ourselves with games we cannot purchase, we decided to go to the PS3 store and download a couple of demos, amongst which was once of the most discussed games that came to the platform - Dante's Inferno. We did this in an attempt to figure out, in our current financial status, which games we should spend gold with, and which can wait... I'm sorry to say we reached a conclusion with this one. Step away O ye of impressionable nature, for ravaging SPOILERS lurk below.

Having seen a review by Yahtzee at The Escapist Magazine, some four thousand webcomic parodies and enough YouTube clips to choke a horse on the game, I am led to believe my first impression of the game is accurate. Yahtzee labels some games as "like God of War but", and this one is simply "like God of War". Let's put it like this: I didn't even have to look at controls. The same battle rhythms. The same sort of finishers. And we further proved it by downloading the God of War 3 demo after we were done. Let's get one thing straight: slap a helmet on Kratos and give him something bulkier and more ridiculous for a weapon, change the warpaint into your Mum's doily sewn to the chest, bang, we have Dante.

On that weapon and how he acquires it, I also have something to say, mind you. I was raised with Castlevania, and if you played the right ones, seeing the Reaper as a boss is nothing new. In fact, at some point, the Reaper became the boss before final by excellence. This happens because, of course, if Death is the boss before the final one... who the Hell is worse than Death?! That's something to sweat about. Furthermore, notice you never killed Death. You defeated Death. That's mandatory in Castlevania because well... a vampire is a living corpse. You sorta need to beat Death to achieve that. Killing Death gives way to a lot of questions, namely, if Death dies, how will anyone else ever die now? And yes, I know there's this Family Guy episode where that sort of happens.

So your game begins, if the demo is to be trusted, with Dante in the Crusades, spreading whoopass to whatever moves in pretty much the same way his ancestor Kratos did a few centuries in the past... he hops onto a ledge and after kicking every available ass in his field of vision, in comes an assassin (and not an overly skilled one, mind you) who goes stabitty in his back and runs away giggling like a little girl. (You know, this sort of scene always makes me facepalm: there is a guy who is virtually untouchable, kills everything that even faintly breathes within four miles of him, and then some douchebag with a dagger runs in, stabs him, and gets out of scene. Just like that, you're dead. It's just stupid.) The Reaper promptly shows up to tell Dante that the bishop gave him a load of crow: his sins in the Crusades are not excused, and so he's going to Hell. But Dante doesn't agree. In fact, Dante doesn't play that: he pulls the dagger from between his shoulder blades and decides to kick the Reaper's ass.

Right here, we have a problem. Seriously, game developers. Death is the FIRST boss?! What are you hoping to accomplish? What are you telling me, as a gamer? That every single boss from here on will be worse than Death? I've been playing for ten minutes for crow's sake, set your standards a little lower... oh wait. You would be telling me that... if Death in Dante's Inferno wasn't the puniest thing that ever went into a game since fat guys in leotards stopped being called as enemies, circa early 90's!

Let's go back to Castlevania's incarnations of the Reaper. One thing the series taught us was, as Ash used to say in Army of Darkness: Death is a bitch. A stupid bitch. Death is a creature that stays away from you for the sole reason that it has no motive to stay close by... it can attack you from a distance. It's a pain in the butt just to get close enough, and if you do get close enough, it's another pain to score a hit, and when you eventually do score a hit, you feel like you just nicked at the side of the robe it wears! When Death hits you, however, and it will, repeatedly and with great intensity, your HP bar behaves as if it just had an intimate encounter with a rabid wolverine. This is a fight with Death. Fuck around, the Reaper don't. In Dante's Inferno, Death gets its bony ass turned into an ashtray for a Florentine crusader! You defeat the Reaper in the same way you defeat anything else: bash it into a pulp. It stays conveniently close to you, as if it wasn't carrying a five foot scythe. No barriers, no armors, no mystical unwordly powers shield it from your mortal weapons. And then you disarm it, get the scythe (and let me just slip this in: touching the scythe should mean instant death. That's what it's there for), and the bullshit really begins. Death begs for help from your ass-kicking. Let me remind you that this happens within 20 minutes of you turning on the console and popping the game in. What happened?!

Not only did you discredit the moolah-mogul of next-to-final bosses, you have also set a tone for the rest of the goddamn game. If we managed to kick some Zeus ass within the first level of the first God of War, what could the producers possibly throw at you that you find awesome? Congratulations, you're the badass to end all badasses. Now go get a sandwich, step outside and find yourself a life.

Try to see this from my perspective. I'm not even gonna go with the "if you killed Death, how do people die now?" Within 20 minutes, I defeated Death. Now these producers will have to run really hard and really far to impress me. Death is the most powerful force in the Universe, in that even Gods can die - try to make me feel awesome now. You just killed my perspective of this whole game. It's like if I'm playing any Silent Hill and God is my first boss. I just killed the biggest mother in this game. What else can possibly pose a threat?

Alas, Dante survives his encounter with Death (pretty much in the same way any four year old with a baseball bat would) and goes home. To find someone killed his lass and she's on her way to Hell. See, Beatrice decided to do the nasty with Dante, figuring he'd remain faithful. Since Dante was given a free for doing whatever the fuck he wanted in the Crusades, well... he did. Which by some obscure law of Christianity I wasn't aware of makes her a whore and so she's going to Hell. Dante doesn't even give half a fuck about who did this: well, she's dead anyway, might as well try to fix my part of the screwing up. So he starts chasing after her soul.

So... why did she go to Hell again? For the sin of lust, that makes sense. She was doomed from the moment, however, if I know my religion... supposedly, if she did the hokey pokey and she wasn't married, that's a trip downstairs regardless if the other part of the couple's faithful or not. Why is Dante to blame for this? If you guys needed a reason for him to go to Hell, why not the original one? She died, he simply wants to see her! Where does the obligation come from?

Although let me sneak this in: I did like the animation parts of the demo. That was cool. Mute out the music on that and take a look. Yum.

These were my first impressions of Dante's Inferno, and this is why I find that playing demos without the actual game is tricky. A demo is good when you need to pick between two buys, for instance. And I'm sorry to say I have some five or six games I would definately buy before this one. You killed Death in a demo, man!! Show's over! Now I've heard art design is quite good, and one of the reasons to play the game is the look of everything. After seeing concept art and YouTube vids, I truly believe it. But graphs don't make the game, son - they make a game that generates awesome wallpapers for your computer, but they don't make the game. Unless there is something really very good up this game's sleeve, I doubt it will be able to impress me after I, and once again, killed Death in the first 20 minutes of gameplay!! That is all. And if you mean to flame me, find me a copy of the whole thing, and I'll review it, let's see who was right.