Devil’s Third WII U [REVIEW] | Big Mouse Strikes Again

It’s the spooky-ooky season, so it means nothing but it’s a good enough excuse to review some shitty videogame of fecal magnitude, or ones that were so bad they made many “worst of year” lists, and come with some depressing and-or absurd history to them. For indeed, “the horror!”.

And Devil’s Third definitely fits the bill, being one of the many titles that confirmed once again that sometimes you should just quit when you’re ahead, or before tarnishing your own legacy due to boneheaded behaviour in mismanaging projects that languish for years due to an accolade of deals falling through, changing engines and platform targets, only to eventually release and make one realize that maybe you can actually lose talent over time.

And as they do, stories like this just highlight how even successfully rebooting the Ninja Gaiden franchise for the original X-Box… won’t stop your career from having a “Tommy Wiseau of The Room” moment, highlighting that sometimes these legendary creators might have actually needed the company they supposedly left to do whatever they wanted, not the other way around.

Especially when the finished game had to basically receive a “pity publishing” deal from Nintendo, as no one else wanted to publish this one for years (including Nintendo Of America), so it became a Wii U exclusive because we were already in the death years of the system, and i guess Nintendo could use an action game that look like it could be on PS3 or 360. Or a game, stat.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] 4#: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

By now it was official and expected to get a new Resident Evil film sequel every 3 years, and in like clockwork in 2010 arrived Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth one, which also brought back to directing Paul W.S. Anderson, whom passed around the director duties after the first one, but was always writing the scripts, and as we will see, he would stick around for the rest of the film series as director & writer of his wife fanfic adventures in this Resident Evil canon.

And since we passed the third entry already, i guess they felt necessary to also go the 3D route, as the entire movie was shot this way, for obvious gimmicky (and lucrative) reasons, with the obvious parts meant for 3D as easy to notice in 2D as usual.

We immediatly continue from where Extinction left off, with multiple Alice clones attacking the Tokyo Umbrella hideout as promised, wielding kunai, double uzi, double katanas, and their psionic power, so yeah, Anderson it’s so obviosly and strongly back at the wheel, for better or worse, and it’s definitely not in the mood for hotdogging, so we jump straight into the bombastic action at the beginning, we’ll do the exposition and new and returning characters later.

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[EXPRESSO] The Expendables 4 (2023) | Crank 3: High Hospice

You know, when the first Expendables movie release, it was a fun little idea: let’s make an all stars action B-movie that’s a tongue-in-cheek throwback to 90s action cinema, with all the big name actors from that era and the modern ones, spouting one liners over huge explosions and so on.

Now it’s more of a coffin race for most of the actors… or so it would be if most of the people that were supposed to be in or back into… didn’t make the cut in Expendables 4, the plot of which barely matters even discussing, but it has something to do with a Gheddaffi old chemical plant, a nuke, a mole, and the team avenging the death of their leader, Barney.

Meaning one of the franchise’ selling points is borked to hell right away, but then again this the boring kind of trashy movie, as any energy or committment to the formula is gone, with the actors seemingly embarassed of delivering the awful dialogue, and quarter-assing their way through this boring, uninspired rethread with all the cliches but devoid of anything that made the Expendables movies endearing… and also looking very cheap, with embarassing CGI for a 2023 big budget release marred to subpar choreography.

Also, in what it’s mostly an obvious tactic to pass the torch to Staham for sequels, Stallone is barely in the movie, with Staham’s character as the focus, making in another vehicle for the actor…. which makes some “sense” since the climax is basically the same as The Meg 2 (it really is), also with Staham and released this year, coincidence or not.

Some fresh utter trash, that’s also sadly a mostly boring affair, a worthless, joyless relic for this day and age, filled with new, better and already iconic modern action franchises.

[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #3: Resident Evil Extinction (2007)

3 years after Apocalypse, we’re back with the Adventures of Alice in Resident Evil spin-off cinema land… but she wakes up as she did in the first movie, has some flashbacks, faces some traps, then dies and she’s retrieved by scientists?

Yep, considering the finale of Apocalypse and the opening act leading to a reveal of a mass grave of Alices, it’s not that surprising that we would eventually see the series go hard on the clonatron, upping the ante by explaining that Umbrella didn’t contain shit, and the epidemic spred all over the world, eventually turning the globe into a post-apocalyptic barren, withered zombie wasteland.

The Alice clone that survived/was let go now roams on a motorbike, alongside other survivors as they try to escape the zombies by moving to Alaska through the Mojave desert.

And stopping by Las Vegas, nominally for fuel, factually because its Las Vegas, where they don’t actually stay much, despite the marketing for the movie emphasizing the “Vegas trip”.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #2: Resident Evil Apocalypse (2004)

Last time we left Alice waking up in the hospital of a zombie infested Raccoon City, grabbing a shotgun and heading for the ruined streets for sequels’ sake.

So obviously this was setup to loosely mirror the plot and setting of Resident Evil 2, while keeping the Alice and Red Queen subplots, meaning you could expect Alice to wander around Raccon City and tag along canon named characters called to intervene on the pandemic situation of the city and trying to escape it when they hear of Umbrella’s plan to just nuke it all.

And you would assume correctly, though it’s made a bit confusing as she’s instead joined by Jill Valentine and Carlos Olivera, the protagonists of RE 3, and they’re followed by the Nemesis mutant of RE 3 as well, which is even odder when you remember RE 3 is basically taking place at the same time of RE 2, let alone that RE 3 was originally conceived as a spin-off entry.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #1: Resident Evil (2002)

Its 2002. The latest mainline Resident Evil games are RE Zero and Code Veronica (plus Gun Survivor 2 released the previous year), and the remake of the first RE game was coming a week later, but something else related debuts, and it’s the first feature lenght, live action film adaptation of the franchise, produced by Constantin Films via Sony’s Screen Gems label, with direction and script by Paul W.S. Anderson, previously known for the 1995 live action Mortal Kombat movie, and cult sci fi horror film Event Horizon.

So he already dabbled in the early wave of videogames films for the big screen, and fittingly enough the Resident Evil live action film would be his legacy, for the most part anyway, enough that eventually Capcom would collaborate with him again to make another film based on one of their IP, in this case one that started as a niche title but launched the popularity of “hunting games” and eventually became one of their biggest franchises, Monster Hunter.

But back to the zombies with what is now the first of the Resident Evil live action film series, and not even the only RE film series, as we looked upon the CG animated one some years ago.

In terms of what “Resident Evil 2002” it plucks from the games…. let’s consider the first one for reference, and it clearly a case where people from Capcom had a list of things that had to be in the movie to make it Resident Evil”, but never specified how and why these things should exist in this new continuity, because Paul W.S. Anderson clearly had little interest in making faithful adaptations of the games’ plot, and did its own thing, playing fairly loose with the videogame canon, which was reviled as it’s often now but was less lamented upon, at least compared to modern standards of backlash, “outrage” and rampant reactions from the internets.

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[EXPRESSO] The Nun II/2 (2023) | Valak Has Somehow Returned

No joke intro or sequel title mockery, The Nun 2 doesn’t need nor deserve it.

Really, one for the textbooks in terms of obvious franchise milking that exists only because of money, which is always the case, but while you’re hooking the demon nun to the device, you might as well crank out a better movie, try to pretend you care at the very least.

In reality, we get a sequel to another mediocre spin-off of the Conjuring films, one that really wasn’t needed nor adds anything of value to the overall mythos. Valak is back due to the magic of asspull writing, so we learn that she copied notes from Soul Eater’s Medusa, so it actually survived by possessing a guy working as a janitor in a French all girls catholic school, because is searching for (check notes) a holy artifact, maybe because Valak was a fallen angel, or something, the lore dispenser guy-christian librarian-priest is most likely making this shit up on the fly.

To stop it the Vatican hires back half the team from the first movie, because the priest guy conveniently died of colera offscreen in the meantime (the actor most likely is fine), so it’s up to the young nun and her sassy black nun friend to find and stop Valak once and for all… in a stupid fashion.

In a way, it’s intriguing how at least this one also manages to not be completely tosh thanks to some scenes (the baphomet does give it points), decent casting and budget… just meaning it’s another pile of strikingly efficient mediocre, despite being a pointless, unrequired cobbled together mass of horror styrofoam that’s also borderline boring and struggles to justify its own existence as a sequel.

Kinda amazing how many shades of monstrous mediocrity can actually exist.

One Piece Odyssey: Reunion Of Memories PS4 [DLC REVIEW] | Overdrawn At The Memory Bank

For disclosure, i pre-ordered the super duper deluxe edition of the game that came with the big Lim & Luffy figure, and the expansion content also included in the Deluxe Edition version, so i didn’t cash out extra to access the DLC story expansion for One Piece Odyssey that released in May 2023, Reunion Of Memories. Otherwise, to buy the DLC normally the MSRP is 25 bucks.

Keep that in mind because it will come back later in the review, but before beginning i will preface by saying while i will keep this DLC review spoiler free… i’d recommend either reading my full review of the base game or finish the game yourself before reading, because some plot details regarding the finale are simply impossible not to touch upon.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

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The Cinema Show Experience Debate Cycle (2nd Round)

Told you we’re gonna do this dance again, and i feel now it’s the time to address some of the issues left unchallenged and unchanged, as anyone with any foresight could have told you before.

I guess the catalyst for new lamentations is the new blockbuster releases mostly doing very bad, regardless of quality or marketing employed, as even movies coming from recognizable and renowed studios and carrying recognized names and brands come out to basically big box office woes most of the time, in what most people have accetted as a “post-Covid 19” world, even in countries where it’s still far from over because reality and consequences and such.

Because i’m a dumbass, instead of making a thumbnail with a load of nonsensical buzzwords on it for a “video essay” (really, words mean nothing anymore to a certain subset of creatures) that’s somehow longer than the movie it discuss… i’m gonna say it’s obvious this wanna gonna happen.

Even if we collectively agreed to pretend the pandemic is over everywhere and forever, even pretending and disgarding the argument/issue as a thing of the past, this newly found “box office bombagery” should really not surprise anyone that has been to theathers more than once in recent years.

To avoid repeating what i said before, i’m just gonna link the previous editorial so you can check that out instead. Consider this an addendum more than a “follow up”.

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Pirate Warriors 4… New DLC characters?

honestly can’t believe i’m talking about Pirate Warriors 4 again, but suddendly, out of nowhere, a week ago, there was a tweet announcing that One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 would receive more DLC characters in the near future, and info would be revealed during One Piece Day 2023, meaning the 22th of july, as in a couple days after the announcement was made.

I tuned it, and among other many announcements and stuff – including a new trailer with new footage for the Netflix live action One Piece series, which seems less awful than expected as we see more of it, but i’m reserving judgement for when the series drop at the end of August – and yep, it’s definitely what was reasonable to expect.

Yep, after 3 years of when the game launched (and all the DLC characters, which were released in 3 waves, the last one in December 2020), 3 years of what i guess now can be called “inactivity”, there’s new paid stuff coming for Pirate Warriors. As in a new Character Pass has been announced, with 9 new playable characters for PW 4 , divived in 3 packs that are gonna be released over time, each including 3 characters that are tied by a theme.

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