Jan 25
2009

  • The destructible furniture. I miss being able to run into a room with my Xbox Livey pal and just go apeshit on chairs and desks using the “machine gun + chainsaw = weapon perfection” Lancer. I miss that specific room in Gears 1 where both players knew instinctively to hold the thumbstick just-so, whilst also mashing a thumb into the B button, so that when the level began you’d both aim straight for the first destructible desk in an unspoken, desperate race. That one room was a perfect ice-breaker; you’d forget about the story and the proper gameplay for twenty seconds of unadulterated, unneccessary furniture-based carnage, just because you could. I miss it (to be fair, the destructible desks make a very brief return near the end of the game, but they’re a bit shit).
  • The story. Well, not exactly – both games have stories, but where the first one went from weird to batshit insane, the sequel actually has a half-decent plot. There’s beats (plot beats like what films and novels have). There’s a little sprinkling of emotional content (Bruce Lee would be proud). It holds the batshit insane stuff til the very end. The first game had B movie written all the way through it, the sequel is trying to be taken a bit more seriously. Although it’s good, it’s damn good, I miss the B movie feel.
  • Decent AI. Not for the enemies, but for your teammates. Jesus H Titty-Fucking Christ, why the hell have your in-game teammates all been lobotomised? You get shot, you hit the deck, and you wait for a teammate to revive you. You wait some more. You look around and find your teammate is right next to you, but instead of saving your ass like they should, they’re trying to hit an enemy fourteen miles away with a pistol. Get rid of Dom, Baird and Cole and replace them with bananas on tricycles. At least you know the bananas really can’t get off their arses to help you.

Having said all the above, and I’m hoping I got this across already, I fucking loved Gears of War 2. From start to finish, it was entertaining and enjoyable as hell. It was even quite intentionally sad in places; while I was expecting it, the game handled it in such a way as to surprise me anyway.

And the last level? Best last level I’ve played. Just wish it was longer!

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Jan 20
2009

Oh, and also – these rolling papers are amazing. Butterscotch is highly recommended!

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Jan 20
2009

Let’s say you’ve had an idea for a movie. Let’s say it’s good enough to get the Hollywood suits tossing themselves into a froth over it, and are shovelling spunkfuls of money at you to make it. Let’s say you sort out a crew and a cast and catering, and you get on set, and you panic. The script isn’t strong enough. The cast has too many unknowns. The budget consists of your gran’s Xmas cheque.  You panic, the cast panics, the crew panics, the suits panic, and it’s all going shit-shaped.

STOP.

My theory is this: If you are convinced that what you’re about to commit to film and display to the world won’t be as good as it can be, then there’s something tried and tested which will work. Hire Randy Quaid. If he can take someone else’s role, get firing. If he can’t, just write him into it. It’ll work out cheaper and easier in the long run.

Randy Quaid has a habit of turning films that would usually be just “bad” into “entertainingly bad”. And I mean that as a compliment. He was the only person who looked like they got the fact that Independence Day was horseshit, and decided to just fucking go for it. While everyone else tried too hard (Will Smith), or didn’t try at all (pretty much everyone else), Randy Quaid aimed his performance at “fucking ridiculous” and nailed it, just like his plane did in the film. The only reason I’ll ever watch that film again is to see his character top himself, and watch Bill Pullman’s face when he realises the only decent part of the film just finished.

On top of that, there’s his run as cousin Eddie in the National Lampoon’s Vacation films. He was the heart of them; you didn’t necessarily have to like Clark Grisowld, but you couldn’t help but like the fat ignorant drunken slob Eddie. The loveable gormelss prick.

Then there’s Days of Thunder, where the film was tiptoeing over the line into cheesy way too much. Randy played his character right down the line, offsetting some of the overdone shite that the script called for from the others. They really did make him look like a monkey fucking a football out there.

Oh, and he was in Kingpin. Which was awesome.

So there you go. He’s been in some of the shittest films ever put on screen, and yet he’s come out of them all smelling of roses. Randy Quaid = legend.

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