Shadowrun Snes game review 79

Sometimes when you look back on certain video games they remind you of more than the game sometimes they will remind you of a time, a place or a person. A lot of the games I have reviewed and talked about have connections like this. Combatribes for example reminds me of a local Pizza parlour in my home town. The main reason for this is because they had it in there for a long time, it was pushed in the corner and you’d stick a few twenty pence pieces in it and see how far you could get while you were waiting for your pizza to be made, most of the time this would be after having seen something in the local cinema. The cinema is gone now as is the arcade machine but the pizza parlour is still going strong but every time I pass it I look in that lonely corner and sigh wishing there was still an arcade machine there.

The game I am going to talk about today though doesn’t remind me of a time or a place it reminds me of a person, a friend.  This particular friend had a love of RPG style games that seemed to have no limit, he was the first one to get and play all of the final fantasy games, secret of mana, etcetera. Most people would quickly see what he had gotten and after listening to him excitedly go on and on about it or after him turning up at their house with it singing its praises well let’s just say they would be buying it as soon as possible. One game though he just couldn’t seem to get anyone interested in, I have to admit on first glance even I couldn’t see what it was that attracted him to it. After sitting and watching him restart the game in front of me though it wasn’t long before I was asking for a go. The game was ShadowRun.

I had heard a little bit about the original Shadowrun the pen and paper role playing game but when it came to that kind of thing the people I knew where generally into citadel miniatures Warhammer 4000. I still have never played the original roleplaying game of Shadow run so I won’t be comparing this game to it nor have I ever done but knowing this at the time did give me a rough idea of what to expect.

Ok so the story goes a little like this it is 2050 you play a guy called Jake Armitage, an information courier who is shot supposedly dead and taken to the morgue. You wake up on the slab with a sore head and no idea of who you are. Your basic mission throughout the game is to try and work out who you are and what happened to you. You’re in a world with guns which are basically based on sort of current technology, but there are orcs and trolls, not the dumb kind who walk around naked holding spears and axes, no these guys wear leather jackets have shotguns, pistols, uzi’s, hacking computers and hire themselves out as thugs, protectors, hackers, killers etcetera.  I won’t spoil any more of it than this but this gives you a basic idea of the world this game is set in and your place within it.
Ok so to get a few things out of the way this is not a graphically impressive game for a start the sprites are small, sometimes rather lacking in detail but there is often quite a lot of enemies moving around on screen shooting all over the place so you can kind of see why.

The levels of animation on the sprites are also at times rather limited and there are issues of repetition with sprites and the portraits used for faces when you are speaking with people being reused again and again. I can see why some people would be put off by this but it would be a shame if people were to judge it based on appearances and not try and get in to it.

The music is decent and easy enough to listen to, but it’s not impressive not when compared to some of the beautiful RPG soundtracks that found their way on to the SNES but it fits and it doesn’t annoy so it works.

The game almost feels like you should be playing it with a mouse, its part RPG but then there is also at times a sort of point and click element to it. You highlight doors or cupboards and select options like ‘’look’’ ‘’open’’ etcetera. You also do the same sort of thing when interacting with individuals picking what you want to say. The talking with people part is handled quiet interestingly there are various topics of conversation that you can use these form a database which  can be made larger through picking up new terms from the people you talk to. So, to explain this, imagine that you talking with a person and they mention a club ‘’the purple banana’’ then the name of this club if it is highlighted will go into your topics database, and you will able to ask anybody that you meet about the club by selecting ‘’the purple banana’’ from your list of topics (this club is not really in the game but it helps me make my point without spoiling anything). This actually makes you feel you have a lot more freedom than in some games when it comes to talking to other characters, there is a lot of un-needed answers added in just to make the world feel real and I appreciate the effort that’s gone in to this.

The graphics are not amazing nor is the sound, the story is interesting if clichéd at points but the world they have built up around the game feels big and real, if you can get past how basic it looks on the surface and get your head in the game, get your heart in to the story then you have an incredible game here. I feel very comfortable giving this game a very hearty recommendation and scoring it 9 out of 10. It only loses out on perfection due to its lack of graphical and audio polish and a bit of repetition but none of its issues can hold it back once you have found yourself deep in its clutches. It is also quite a long game so provides a good ratio of bang for your buck. An English cart typically seems to end up going for around the £35 to £40 price point which is a lot, I haven’t even seen a boxed one in I don’t know how long, but if you can play American games you can with some searching cut that price down to around £25 and this is a rare case when I would say its worth it (Also to my knowledge there has never been a digital virtual console version of this on any system). As a side note if you don’t want to invest so highly in this game either because it’s a fair bit of cash or your worried that it won’t be your thing there are some new PC shadowrun games available on steam which are very much in the style of this game. Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun Dragonfall are both about £11 each but I have seen them go down to as low as about £4 during steam or humble bundle store sales so if it sounds interesting keep your eyes open.

So what happened to my friend who introduced Shadowrun on the SNES to me? He has moved to America now and no longer plays Video games.  I don’t get to talk to him that often as he is busy with his work and family but I will always think back and remember him as that excited guy who couldn’t wait for RPG’s to come out, who would buy some of them in Japanese and just plough his way through them the best he could and I will never be able to play a shadowrun related game without thinking of him and smiling.

Games I have completed in July 2015

OK I am once again copying from my good buddy's blog here I swear I will come up with something original soon. So I am here talking about the games I have completed this month in this case they are Assassins creed 4 black flag and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. I guess to some degree I will be almost doing mini reviews of them but then I also want to talk about how long I have been playing them for, how hard or easy they were to complete and if I think I will ever go back to them again.

 

 So to start with I will talk about Assassins creed 4 black flag. To start with I have played every single Assassins creed game that has come out but at present this is the only one I have completed which I think says a lot for it to start with. I remember playing the original one on my Xbox 360, I got some enjoyment out of it, the assassinations the leaps of faith into giant piles of hay but eventually it just seemed to become to more of a chore than a pleasure. I guess some of it is that I never became invested in the characters, I never felt the need to learn what happened to them. Black flag was different though, the main Character Edward Kenway seemed interesting, I wanted to know how his story would unfold and what would happen to the people he knew and cared about. Not only this though things happened that I didn't see coming so it kept me surprised and on my feet. It has everything the past games in its series have had but I just seemed to connect with the plot and characters so much more. I enjoyed the sailing and upgrading my boat. I have basically been playing this game in quick spurts for the whole of the month finishing it a few days ago. Since finishing it I have gone back on it a few times found a few extra chests, purchased a few different outfits. I even noticed that the season pass was on half price sale and decided to purchase it. I think I mostly did this so I could play the freedom city add on because I found the character who I know features in that interesting. It wasn't a hard game to finish, there was the odd part I found a little challenging, mostly bits where it instantly failed you if you were seen but in general I would say its a medium game in terms of difficulty. I have had a brief look at Assassins creed unity and the fact that there are buttons which allow you to go up or down giving you a little bit more control when free running but in general it felt like a step backwards.

 As for Call of Duty Advanced warfare well I got it on sale ages ago, I have been playing it more or less a mission at a time with large gaps between them. Nothing with the game was really bad but I didn't feel anything was that brilliant or gripping either. It seemed to have that thing in it that lots of Call of Duty games do where they give you an interesting tool or ability to play with and then its either for that mission only or you only use it when the game dictates that it needs to be used. I would find myself playing through a level and then I would finish a level and immediately find that I had hit my threshold for it, I wanted to save come off it and go on something else. Then sometimes it would be a week or a fortnight before I would even play the next one. After finishing it I did take a dip into the online multi-player and in honesty it didnt seem too bad but I don't think I will be playing it again. So does any of the DLC appeal to me? Well I have a soft spot for zombies so obviously yes some of the zombie stuff appeals to me, particularly knowing that Bruce Campbell star of The Evil Dead films and upcoming TV series Ash Versus Evil Dead is in it. The truth is though that I don't understand what I really need to buy to get the zombie related stuff it seems like to get it all I would need to buy the season pass which is around £35, which is a lot when I am not interested in any extra none zombie related maps or multi-player or well anything other than Bruce and the Dead. The only thing I got a little stuck on was chasing a Villain and I think that had more to do with my daughter talking to me and me getting confused and not knowing where he had gone in order to follow him. The story was not that interesting but I have to admit that Kevin Spacey's performance was straight out of a GI Joe cartoon. So what would I like to see from a future Call of Duty? Well for a start if I have tools in my arsenal let me use them when I please and be able to tackle the levels in different ways. I dont usually finish a Call of Duty before its sequel is out, a large part of that is due to how I tend to play them a level every so often but its also because I wont buy them till I can get them for around half of there original Recommended Retail Price. (If my memory serves me I still need to finish black op's 2).

Hulk Hogan's firing and WWE's statement and further action.

Well I didn't really intend to discuss wrestling on here as I am somewhat of a past fan. Occasionally I will want to watch a little bit but by and large its a hobby from the past, most of the guys I used to love are either dead or retired, but every now and then there will be something which draws me back, be it someone being inducted as a legend, a special one off match or even a bit of controversy. So here I am talking about wrestling because news has dropped over the last few days about Hulk Hogan. We found out that he had been wiped from the WWE website he wasn't listed as a trainer a judge a legend of anything. The rumours started and everyone seemed to suggest it was about a racist rant he had made. This seemed to be proved true when the WWE launched the following statement “WWE terminated its contract with Terry Bollea (aka Hulk Hogan). WWE is committed to embracing and celebrating individuals from all backgrounds as demonstrated by the diversity of our employees, performers and fans worldwide.” Now there's the horror of learning that Hulk is a little less of a hero than I grew up believing he was but by now I am getting kind of used to that, I grew up during a time when I watched the Cosby show, Jim will fix it and listened to silly Rolf Harris songs, so now I am pretty much expecting everyone I ever watched to pop up as a sexual predator or to just generally be a whole lot less wholesome than previously thought. At first you might say well if he made some racist comments then he got what he deserved but lets remember the WWE (formerly WWF) has not always been the most politically correct of entertainers. I can remember DX donning Black face make up in order to pretend to be the rock and other none white stars. I can remember Vincent Kennedy "Vince" McMahon referring to John Cena using the N word. Now how you take these things depends on where your personal line is when it comes to humour. What does make me laugh though is as soon as they released the statement in regards of Hulk Hogan people started writing articles about there questionable behaviour often including links to videos from you tube videos which have been up for years videos I have shared with other people in the past usually shared along with a message saying ''Can you believe WWE did this? Can you believe they thought it was OK?''. Well now WWE has made claims that the people sharing these were unlawfully sharing there intellectual property. Now they've thrown someone under the bus they want to claim that they are this massive force of good for diversity. I am not so easily fooled though, it is plainly damage control. Just as WWE went all Wellness program crazy when it was found out that absolutely tonnes of wrestlers were injecting steroids this condemning Hogan and making speeches about acceptance is just the next step in always going forward in always trying to keep the brand protected and to be fair I have to respect Vince for the way he has managed to run his business over the years but calling a hippo a horse does not make it one. Blocking the youtube Videos will not make us all forget the things that happened, I don't hate WWE for its miss steps but I do think its wrong for it to try to sweep them under the carpet. How do I feel about Hulk? I don't really know yes he made some racist comments but they were made on a sex tape that the public was never meant to see, that doesn't make it right but it does make it a little harder to judge, we have all probably said something we didn't really mean when angry, which from the brief transcript I read it appears he was (Basically either before or after having sex with his friends wife he was discussing how mad he was with his daughter and how he felt betrayed). I think the erasing him from history idea doesn't really work, people saw the matches, people own the VHS tapes and DVD's WWE made sure that we all have his theme tune burned in to our heads.

This Months Video Game purchases

So I have to admit first that I am stealing this idea wholesale from my friend at The Game Over Yeah blog but its a good idea and I like it. I noticed that he did posts based on what he had finished recently and the recent purchases he had made. So here I am doing a this is the stuff I have recently gotten video game wise. I know this is a horror site as well so you might wonder why I am only going to mention games but its simple. With horror I tend to just watch it on various online services or litterally pick from my local pawn stores pound section, they don't tend to have the same collect-ability as games and there's not as much wheeling and dealing and hunting involved. Also I will from time to time buy digital games if there is a sale on but I much prefer owning these physically, this might be strange to some but its just the way I roll.

The main reason I collect video games is for the thrill of the chase, if they were stupidly easy to get for nothing all the time like horror DVD's usually are then I probably wouldn't bother. I tend to fluctuate with my game buying, I will buy lots and lots of retro games on the cheap and then I will sort of cool my jets and decided its time to go back to the modern, I have to admit this rhythm has been a little disturbed by the invention of Amiibo.

I would have waited for the end of the month to do this but in all honesty with knowing what I am up to I doubt I will buy anything else. For the purpose of clarification when I shop for retro I tend to count anything not this current generation as retro, I see it as cherry picking before it gets that rare collectable glaze that people just suddenly see when something is old.

The most recent item I have purchased was a cartridge only copy of Kevin Keegan's Player Manager for the Super Nintendo for 99pence in a pawn store a day or two ago. It was in good condition but yeah I know its an old sports title so not too impressive.

On the 21st I grabbed a few cheap PS2 games 5 for 2.50 almost didn't bother but I looked at all the discs inside the cases and they looked like they'd never been played... Dragon Rage, Eternal Ring, Ghost Hunter, Legion the legend of Excalibur, Alone in the dark the new nightmare. Yeah none of them are going to set the world on fire and even if I had gone looking for these titles specifically I probably wouldn't have paid more than 10 pounds but sometimes if its in front of you then you just grab them for the sake of it.

On Thursday the 16th I grabbed the following from a charity shop all of them complete boxed with manuals and in good condition.  Die hard trilogy, Future cop L.A.P.D., Wild 9, Medal of honour Underground and Excalibur all for ps1. I also grabbed Time Crisis 3 for PS2. Now the real cherry here seems to be Future Cop L.A.P.D as it sells for between 12 to 25pounds on line depending on condition but not only that it seems to have a good cult following and some good reviews under its belt. In honesty buying it I didn't know anything about its worth, I knew I could remember hearing it was good but I also knew that I would buy pretty much any PS1 game boxed with manual for that kind of price.

Really compared to last Month its been a slow month, after all last month I got a boxed Gamcube with a pile of games for 40quid but to be honest I needed a slow games buying month just to afford the Amiibo figures I ended up with. 

(Edit added 31/07/2015) 

Despite saying I knew I would get nothing else by the end of the month I did grab a few things

I picked these up all for the PS1 over the last day or two, Magic Carpet 50pence complete, MDK 50pence complete, Eliminator  50pence complete, RE-LOADED 50pence complete and Heart of Darkness  1quid complete. None of them are worth a fortune but most of them are things I have played before and enjoyed.

So Bulimia.com have recently posted an article on what Video game characters would look like with average body types. Here is the link in case youd like to take a look.

 http://www.bulimia.com/examine/video-games-realistic-body-types/

 OK regardless of if you decided to read it or not I will spend a paragraph or two briefly explaining it, if you have already read the above and want to get to my opinion then feel free to skim this. They start by mentioning the fact that there is pretty much no type of media which is not criticized for its body image depictions and that video games have grown increasingly realistic over time and are now capable of hyper realistic graphics but question why Video games can’t seem to accurately portray the female body. noting that plus-sized women are a rarity in video games. They argue that ''if video game creators are going to pride themselves on accurate digital representations, then it’s time for them to get real about women''.

To this end they altered some of the most famous female video game characters with Adobe Photoshop, showing what they would look like if they were around the average American woman’s measurements.

 OK I kind of want to tackle this topic but first I feel I need to get a few things straight to show the perspective I come from. My fiancée is what would be counted as plus size and I think she is quiet simply the most beautiful woman alive as far as I am concerned. I have also met and know lots and lots of women who are a wide variety of shapes and sizes and are beautiful but I still think the idea of some of these women being made larger is a little silly.

 Lets take one of there examples Sonya Blade. Now Sonya not only is part of a special forces unit but by the time of the game they have chosen to take her from she has been involved in a fighting tournament to decide the fate of everyone on Earth a good handful of times. She has repeatedly been called up to fight, to do her best to protect literally everyone. Now in this situation one would have to imagine that with everything on the line this Woman would have been training proper hardcore to the maximum of human endurance, after all when your going to fight Ninja's and creatures with razor sharp teeth and blades for arms you are going to have to be the very specimen of physical fitness your every nerve is going to have to be on edge and ready to fire on a dime. With this in mind the likely hood of this Lady being an average American body size is unlikely. Either she would be trim and athletic or she would be built like a female body builder. My main complaint with the way she looks and realism would have nothing at all to do with how much weight she might have around the waste and more to do with the fact we can see her waist, get that lady a hardcore police stab vest or at least something more practical than a boob tube. I am not saying that there cant be larger female fighter but given her background and the knowledge she has I don't think Sonya fits the bill. If it was a bigger person entering a street fighter tournament for the money or to try and prove that larger Ladies could get the job done then I could get behind it. After all if you told me I could enter a fighting tournament where if I lost nothing would happen if I won id get a bunch of money then sure id sign up, I am a big guy but I have a decent punch on me, however tell me if I loose the plant will blow up then I would ask you if you had asked someone more qualified like Jet Li or Jackie Chan or a professional cage fighter.


 Also the ''Bikini Girl from Grand Theft Auto V'' now forgive me if I am wrong because I have only played the game in passing but basically she is a drugged up lame girl who wants to basically become a whore/porno star. If she is taking drugs and trying to sell her body and image constantly then I think the look is pretty realistic for her. Also I don't much care what she looks like because if I found out that my daughter was looking up to a character like this or wanted to be like her I think I would shoot myself in the head. The whole idea is that she is a joke of a person, a stupid little glory hungry trollop that no one with two brain cells to rub together would want to be.

 Would I like to see more realistically shaped characters in video games and other media? Sure of course I would but at the same time I don't want you to show me a character who is a thirty six stone man and try to sell him me as a marathon runner. I want realism along with my acceptance that the world is full of diverse people who look different, who have different skills and different talents.

More Amiibo Madness

I originally wrote a post on my last blog about how crazy it could be getting the Amiibo's you wanted. I called it ''The great Nintendo Amiibo purchasing Odyssey''

It started with how happy I was at having managed to get a Shulk Amiibo for its retail price. I talked about what Amiibo's are and about how relieved I was that it was done and over with and that Id never have to look for him again. I talked about all the steps I went through the shops I checked both on and offline, and how it was crazy to have to go to so much effort to get a lump of plastic without having to pay someone who had brought a few and hoarded them just to force others in to paying them more than twice its retail value to make a quick buck at someone else's expense.

The real problem with Amiibo's though is that if your a real Nintendo fan and you start really getting in to them and trying to collect them, if you start thinking you want to have all of a particular set or all of the ones based on a set game or even if you just want to have the lot then its never really over, it just seems to drag on and on.

I had a good run, in the space of a few weeks I got a Shulk, a Little Mac, a Rosalina but the more I got the more of them I wanted, after all it would be silly to have half a set of something and then stop wouldn't it?

I set myself rules that I wouldn't pay above a set amount for any one figure and I went for it. There have been moments of pain for example a Squid boy Amiibo from splatoon got lost in the post, A delivery company decided to crush the life out of the Mario collection yoshi I had ordered and then to top it off the same delivery company told a shop they had delivered my order of a squid girl Amiibo and a Greninja Amiibo and then got caught in a lie proving they hadn't. Unfortunately due to a lack of stock all the place who had supplied these Amiibo's who went missing ended up having to simply refund me due to not having access to any replacements. There was even a few times I would order an Amiibo the order would go through theyd take my money and then refund it a few days latter with a ''Sorry we didn't get as many as we thought we would''. There have also been moments of pleasure such as finding a Jigglypuff  managing to get all of the yarn yoshis and today managing to buy the three pack containing all three of the Splatoon Amiibo's.

Sometimes when life gave me lemon I did my best to make lemonade. The Pink Yoshi you see at the top of this post is a custom I made. I made her because when my Yoshi was crushed I decided to buy another one and make the best of a bad situation by having some fun and painting the crushed one, making it in to my very own custom one.

So where do I stand now? I stand with every Smash collection Amiibo except Greyninja, all the splatoon amiibo's all the yarn yoshi's, a Mario collection Yoshi, a Mario collection Luigi, a Mario collection Silver Mario, every upcoming pre-orderable smash Amiibo preorderd and two new Greninja's orderd in the hope that one just one of them manages to make it through without being refunded

Yet I wonder is there an end in sight? Thinking about it Nintendo could make these things for years will I one day be buying alternative colour scheme goomba 47 going ''oh it would be silly to stop now''.

So is Kickstarter a good or bad thing?

So is Kickstarter a good or bad thing?

So Shenmue III has become the highest funded video game so far on kickstarter, not only that but its currently sitting pretty as the sixth highest funded kickstarter for anything ever. It has last I checked made a total of $6,333,295 in funds with a total of 69,320  Backers:

With a base goal of $2,000,000, Shenmue III reached this within one day of its kickstarter being up but even then apparently it not only reached this goal it also apparently broke kickstarter with people unable to donate do to the site being so jammed.

As most who are familiar with Kickstarter will know there is never really just an amount laid out which will decided if the project will go ahead or not there are all kinds of ''stretch goals'' Basically if we make X amount then we will add function Y or mode Z, we will print T shirts and give them to all donaters above a set amount etcetera.

Shenmue 3 met about half of its stretch goals but when they put it up on Kickstarter they were ambitious they put goals all the way up to $11 million.

The things that will be added to the game thanks to these stretch goals include Shenmue 1 & 2 cinema shorts, multiple languages , expanded Mini-Games, expanded additional quests,expanded battle events,

I suppose the speed at which this gained its goals just shows that there was enough people out there desperate enough for a Shenmue III but if this was the case then why did it need to be funded in this way? I guess basically because no one official had the faith in it to green light the project and invest in it. So like it or loath it in a world without kickstarter it looks like we wouldn't be getting a Shenmue III.

This is not the only game we are getting because of Kickstarter, my friend over at the GameOverYeah blog recently posted about Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is basically a spiritual sequel to the castlevania metroidvania style games, you can find his article here http://dstegameoveryeah.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/bloodstained-ritual-of-night.html . This at my lest check had reached $5,545,991 with 64,867 Backers.

I could continue but I think I have proven the point that Kickstarter does lead to us getting games we otherwise would not get but yet lets look at another example Project Cars 2 was announced with a crowd funding goal of £7,000,000, roughly $11 million. This is the sequel to a game which was made due to crowd funding. Surly the idea should be to help get ideas off the ground and running. You might say oh well Shenmue III is a sequel, but its a sequel to a game from long ago that people had given up on. If Kickstarter gets a game out there and in the public eye making money then surly some of the profit should be used to fund future sequels rather than them wanting users to fund game after game.

Insidious chapter 3 Review

Well I couldn't sleep, no idea why other than it was a little hot in my room so I decided that rather than just lay there and look at the ceiling I would watch a horror film. I figured that I would do this in order to kick start my new/moved blog.

I looked at the backlog of films I had waiting for me and decided for no real reason that I would watch Insidious Chapter 3. Now first things first I have seen both Insidious and Insidious Chapter 2, in fact I started writing a review for the first one and don’t think I ever finished it but the short version would be I really enjoyed it, yeah it wasn't the most original of films but it was well done and worth watching. I remember the second one being more of the same but it seemed a lot less impact, I watched it and then more or less instantly forgot it, I still don’t remember very much about it other than a sense of mild disappointment. Coming in to this film I did not even realise that it was a prequel as I hadn't really read around it or thought about it much, it was just sat with Ouija, Oculus and a few others waiting for me to come along and grab one.

Basically despite being called chapter 3 (which I hate and will talk about latter) it is a prequel set before the haunting of the Lambert family apparently two years before the start of the first movie. The films main character is a teenage girl whose mother has recently passed away, now she lives with her father and her younger brother, the father seems to be having a hard time as well and sort of relies on her to help take care of her younger brother. She has also found her mother’s passing hard and has been trying to talk to her and contact her. She visits Elise Rainier the spiritual medium from the first two films who reluctantly agrees to use her spiritual abilities to try and contact the girl’s mother. Elise is unable to complete the reading due to a demonic presence but she sends the girl away warning her to stop trying to contact her mother by telling her that when “you call out to one of the dead, all of them can hear you."  Soon after the reading, she begins to notices more and more supernatural events occurring. 

OK now I have set the story up and given a hint of the kind of film this is I will try and talk about how I felt about it without giving to many spoilers away. First the main thing people probably want to know is if this film is scary or not. This is not always an easy question to answer as what terrifies one person might have very little effect on another. Now bearing in mind it’s a fifteen you instantly know not to expect Evil Dead style buckets of blood but this film certainly uses what it can to try and catch you off guard. Yes some of the scares are jump scares which some people love and others hate but it doesn't purely rely on them, it uses a mix of tools to create an uneasy atmosphere. There are jump scares but then there are fake moments where the tension rises and rises and you can almost feel a jump scare coming and then nothing, this means that when it does pull a quick scare you will really fall for it as you never know which are the real and which are the fake. There are also scenes where one moment you can see the main character and the next the camera shots become the view from her eyes, you can see what she is seeing as if you are in her place, you can see things darting from the shadows or crawling towards you and it is done in what I feel is a very interesting way. Some of the situations it puts the lead in are things which are based on child hood fears many of us have had, the creature in the shadow, the thing you cannot see but you can hear, sure some of it might not be original but in my opinion what is there is really well used.

The standard of most of the acting is not about to win any Oscars but I do think that for a film like this it is very good, there is an excellent use of light and the sound is also brilliant, there was literally a moment where the sound alone had me cringing. I would give this film a 7.5 out of 10. I don’t think seeing it is going to change anyone’s life or make them rethink what a horror movie should be and for that reason I don’t feel I can give it a higher score but if you want something to watch to entertain you, something you can put on turn the lights off and just enjoy with a bowl of popcorn then you could do a lot worse than this.

I could end things here but I need to say that I hate the title though. Insidious Chapter 3, why do we need the Chapter word? Wouldn't Insidious 2 and Insidious 3 have worked just as well? Do they really think that the word chapter does anything? Maybe it is an attempt to make us think of it all as one giant story instead of multiple connected stories?  Or to make us think of it as some kind of higher art, closer to a great book perhaps? I suppose I would have called this film Insidious: Origins but I guess that would prevent them from making a film set before this, no idea if they will ever try that but maybe they just like the idea of keeping their options open. All I can hope is that if they make another one it’s as good as this and that they don’t hit the well too many times.

This Blog has been set up to allow me to continue to post my own projects, game reviews, horror movie reviews, polltics and news related rants plus  other bits and pieces. 

I have no reason to try and sugar coat my coverage of bad games or films unlike some websites I am sure we can all name. I am also not afraid to claim either a game or film is brilliant even if others have not been so kind. I also dont care if other people dont agree with me, we all have opinions and life would be pretty darn boring if they were all the same.

I have started this blog to replace my old one which will soon no longer exist due to the site it is hosted on being shut down.

First and formost my name is Kerr9000 and I like to think of myself as a sort of Historian of Video games and horror films. I am also a writer of short horror stories. I have also from time to time made the odd youtube video and I have previously made Podcasts for video game websites.

https://www.youtube.com/user/kerr9000/videos

Is the link for my youtube videos, there has not been a new one for some time though.

As for podcasts the last two I did can be found on the links below, they are both about Video games, one of them includes a debate about what games children should and should not be allowed to play.

https://archive.org/details/PodcastZeroX13

https://archive.org/details/ProjectZeroX14

I will end by saying if you have made it over here from my old blog then I am glad (please bear with me if I repost old stuff as Id like to keep it around online), if your a new reader then hey hi nice to meet you. Here is to the future hopefully I wont need to move this blog again for a long long time.