The Binding of Isaac...

...has got to be the creepiest, sickest game I've ever seen/played.

And I don't mean in a Human Centipede gore-kinda way.

[Ew.]

The opening scenes are in scribble form, which kinda looks cool. It tells of a little boy, whose religious mother suddenly starts hearing a voice from above tell her that her son is in fact, corrupted and therefore, needs to be sacrificed. The little boy, who at that point was locked up in his room by his mother to "remove all evil from his life", realises that his mother is about to kill him and manages to find a trapdoor to escape into.

To give you an idea on what it all looks (and feels) like, here's a video showing the opening:



That's when the game proper starts.

You play Isaac, the little boy in the prologue, as he wanders around his mother's basement, fighting twisted deformities and mutant suchlikes, and gathering power-ups/life-hearts, etc. Each level is quite short, but deviously difficult, and since there is no 'save' point whatsoever, if you die (which I did, very easily), you need to start over.

Despite the cutesy artwork, the look of the game is plain demented, as evidenced by the monsters and bosses that you have to defeat to get to the next level. The mechanics are very simple (just shoot whatever that moves, and whatever that doesn't, for goodies), but it's fiendishly difficult as the levels are randomly generated every time you play, plus you don't get too many soul-hearts to spare and half the items I collected I don't know what they're for, so they pretty much went to waste when I died.

[And I died a lot! I played this for two hours last night, and I did not get past Level 2 at all.]

I'm intrigued, and yet I'm freaked. I'm rather repulsed, and yet I want to keep playing because the game itself is very well-made. It's atmospheric (music always helps), and there's just so much symbolism and dual meanings and imagery to the entire premise, so much so that The Binding of Isaac Wikia has theories on the meanings of the endings, and also that the monsters may actually be Mom's miscarriages/abortions, dumped in the basement and subsequently mutated into monsters that spew blood and flies and flop around.

[Yes, it is that disgusting!!]

If you're like me (as in, you don't really think it's the journey that counts), YouTube has videos with all endings combined. Since there are 12 endings altogether, this means that you must play and sit through the entire game WITHOUT PAUSE for twelve times.

[But you can pause after you end each game. Just to be clear.]

I'm the type of person that is actually patient enough to go through a game 12 times just to discover anything and unlock everything. I can actually stand the blood and the mutant creatures and the slight gore and creepy imagery.

It's just the endings themselves I can't stomach.

I'm a happy-endings kind of person. You can put a person (in this case, a perpetually-crying naked little boy) through a ton of literal crap and flies and monsters, but if he makes it through the end, it kinda balances things out with what he's faced. Kinda like a "I survived" type of thing.

As I'm typing this, I've already spoiled myself so far that I would only be playing the game just for the challenge, and not because I want to see how things turn out. Even though majority of the endings show Isaac finding a locked item or character (that can be used or played next time around), the more-proper endings range from bleak to depressing. There's one that's particularly horrific, but that's not the point.

The reason I'm blogging this is because I've to get it out of my system. That such a unique game comes my way, and I can't go on any further because I can't handle realism. I mean, there's only so much you can take watching the poor little boy run around and lob his tears at monsters and poop. If you get the Stigmata power-up, you'll be lobbing blood instead, which apparently is more potent than water.

Sigh. After I played this last night, I went to bed and had some nightmares. I know, I'm a wimp.

Anyway, here's something more upbeat and adowabul, though no less twisted. From the same guy that created The Binding of Isaac, jump to 1:04 and 2:40 to skip gameplay.



[Just ignore the voices, the player was Skype-ing his friend, apparently.]

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How not to lose a tail...

...by slowing down so much to the point of stopping as you turn your car 'round the corner, and then repeatedly whip your head back to the direction you just came from.

While still at that same corner. In everybody's way.

Women drivers.

P.S. I am very easily annoyed these days.

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Hey y'all! Short fourth-wall post...

I finally modified my blog template! :)

I was reluctant to do so at first because I generally do not want to touch any HTML code, as I'm totally unfamiliar with all that tech stuff.

But I figured, since I'm really, really good at building up walls o' text, and the narrow body does make it difficult to read, I might as well widen the whole thing just so my posts don't seem too formidable to take on.

[And no, I still refuse to give in to Pictures! Unless I'm doing my Melbourne trip posts and possibly the Italian ones. Don't hold your breath. For the posts, I mean, they won't be for a long while :P]

Anyway, I think I maaayyy have a little more time on my hands on weekends (that would not have been spent on sleeping in front of the telly), so I'm gonna start customizing my blog a bit more! Nothing radical like, full-on background template changes or anything, but one thing I'm really interested to explore further is Pages, which I feel can be really useful for my book and movie reviews.

And yes, I know the Pages option has been around for like, 10 years, but I'm very much a not-rock-the-boat kinda girl, soooo... um... hurray again for... minute changes? :P

Well, that's about it from me now. I'm currently working on the holiday posts, along with some book/movie reviews, like, simultaneously; hopefully I can get those up soon.

Till next time, toodles! :D

P.S. I just realised that the widening will affect the YouTube vids I'd posted. Argh.

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I so have no luck with KFC.

I even went to the same outlet that I went to last Friday evening.

Even brought along the ol' ball and chain. Which is to say, my backpack, laptop and technological stuff.

Anyway, this week I didn't have the misfortune of having a shirt-flapping, belt-buckling fatty in my line of sight. I also didn't really have to wait in line that long, which sounds like a promising start.

What I did have to wait for, was the chicken.

That's right, folks, the chicken joint ran out of chicken, and was out of it for 15 minutes. Oh, the brutal irony!

And if that wasn't enough, the guy mixed up my order and gave me a drumstick instead of a breast. The second time I sent it back (after 15 minutes waiting time), he exchanged my thigh for another thigh, and retained the drumstick.

Sweat.

The lady next to me was quite pissed also, because she was expecting her chicken to come sooner than expected. I don't blame her, since it is dinner time and you're not supposed to run out of chicken during rush hour. But then again, she misheard her server and thought her chicken would be ready in two minutes.

To her server's credit, I did hear him say 'twenty', as in 'minutes'.


['Yeah'.]

And the best part? She'd actually filled in a comment card and dropped it into the box before paying for her take-out.

[Then she spent the next 15 minutes glaring at the servers, at her watch and then at her Blackberry, not in that order.]

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Boys can be so disgusting.

Just because you held the door for me going into KFC, doesn't mean you're allowed to adjust the tightness of your belt in front of me. 

For five straight minutes. 

I mean... dude, quick and easy, please. Unbuckle, shift, shove in loophole, buckle, tuck. 

But no. He didn't miss out on the shifty-eyes-for-watchers, but he missed out on speed. And holding down the bottom of his shirt. Unfortunately for me, I didn't avert my eyes quick enough.

I glimpsed flesh. Of the mid-girth variety.

And he was repulsively fat. Not obese; obese fat is a different thing entirely. Obese fat can be cute. 

This guy was neither here nor there. He definitely wasn't thin, but he wasn't full-out fat, either.

He's the kind of fat that hangs around the stomach and man-boobs. The kind that flops with every minute movement. 

And move like Jagger, he did. He never stopped jigglingfidgeting. In my line of sight.

In other words... repulsive.

By the time the order was completed (they ordered five-six sets with drinks and added wedges), he'd finish half of the drink and snitched half of the wedges. And he did all that, shifting from right leg to left, bounding (drink in hand) to the table where the rest of his party was seated, back to where his mother was waiting for the rest of the food, and then burping in his mother's face.

Now that we've gotten the grossly-pubescent teenager out of the way, let's get started on his mom.

She kept repeating, "paha sama wing" to the KFC dude serving her. By the fourth consecutive time I heard this damn phrase, I was ready to grab her Gucci handbag and beat her to fucking death with it.

I mean, haven't you heard of the word, 'dan'?! It means, 'and', lady. You don't use 'sama'; 'sama' means 'same'. Essentially, she's been saying, "thigh = wing" over and over again to the KFC dude.

I was stuck behind these two asshats for 15 minutes. The fact that I hefted my laptop-laden backpack along didn't help.

The day I leave my backpack/bag/item of value in my car will be the day that my car gets stolen.

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Ebert... didn't... like The Avengers...

...I think...? :S

Check out his review here. He gives the movie three stars (out of four), but his review seems a tinge snarky than usual. He barely even seems to be on the fence.

Sigh. It really does seem that Ebert has written off allmost comic book movies.

[Still can't believe he enjoyed Green Lantern more than Thor.]

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Marvel's The Avengers (2012)

True believers, I bring glad tidings! :)

*spoilers*

I wasn't sure whether this movie would work, seeing that Robert Downey Jr's star is still cruising along the Ascension Drive, I was a bit afraid that The Avengers would revolve around him. Thankfully, the film keeps its eye on the word 'ensemble', and gives everyone their time to shine. Even Scarlett Johannson's Black Widow does her fair share as part of the team, and I'm really glad that she has purpose and is not just there to be eye candy, like in Iron Man 2.

[I always thought that making ScarJo a spy was just an excuse to get her in the movie. And into a black catsuit.]

This brings us to character development. Marvel Studios has a very good track record with this, as we can see from Iron Man, Thor, etc., and The Avengers takes the time to flesh out the possible conflicts between all these characters, from their own movies, meeting/working/coming together for the first time.

This is where the movie gets a bit draggy.

In setting up the foundation and formation of the Avengers, there's roughly an hour and a half's worth of in-fighting and quibbling, so much so that in the second half, you don't disagree when the big bad of the piece, Tom Hiddleston's Loki tells Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark that they (the heroes) are too busy fighting each other to combat an invading alien army.

All these catfights (physical and verbal) were only alleviated by some action sequences in-between (either hero-on-hero, or hero-on-Loki), but barely. At one point, all the heroes were even put in a room to see how far and furious egos and mouths can fly. This entire bit was noticeably tedious the second time around (yes, I watched this movie twice!).

Other than inner conflict, the pacing is superb, and the movie starts with Loki arriving to Earth and causing a lot of property damage in his wake. Since we already know the cast from the previous movies (with the exception of newbie Mark Ruffalo, but then again, who doesn't know that he's playing Bruce Banner/the Hulk), little time was spared on introductions to the major characters.

Another highlight of the film is the screenplay. Iron Man has to be credited with some of the funniest dialogue and back-and-forths that even made us moviegoers forget that a comic book movie should have more action, and I'm glad this tradition (humour, not non-action) is carried onto The Avengers. There are just so many priceless quotable gems from this film that I could rave about, most of them from Robert Downey, Jr., because what would a movie be without good ol' RDJ sarcasm, eh?

I also noticed that Thor and Loki's speech pattern is a lot more... formal (still no 'verily's or 'thou's, but close) than they were in Thor, but maybe that's just me; I haven't seen Thor in a year.

[For some reason, HBO doesn't seem to want to air it :S]

One of the bright spots in the film is when they tone down the action (and the arguing!) and focus on regular one-on-one conversations/interactions between characters, may it be hero or villain. This is especially where the actors shine, and you can see how comfortable they all are in their roles, since most of them are playing the same character the second time around. Scenes to look out for are Stark/Banner, and Thor/Loki, when Thor first lands on Earth. I've a vested interest in Thor/Loki, but I think you can tell from my Thor review I'm biased somewhat.

[Hiddles!]

The second act is where the Avengers get their act (pun totally intended!) together, and where the action is kicked up a notch. The humour is also knocked out of the park from here on out, with a very, very, very unexpected character being a major source of that humour. Watch the movie and you'll know what I mean. We also get to see Chris Evan's Captain America organising the team and plan of attack, which is a fantastic nod to the comics since in canon, Cap'n is the leader of the Avengers.

CGI? Don't get me started. Huge explosions, huge set-pieces, it's all very grand and awesome. 'Nuff said.

This is one of the rare films that actually lives up to the hype generated, and unless you've... not been in touch with the world lately (is it me, or is 'living under a rock' cliched?), the hype is MASSIVE! Four years' worth of excitement building up to this moment, and it surprisingly delivers.

Three, fairly oft-used sentences, people: Best. Entertaining Movie. Ever.

[Yes, even with the in-fighting.]

By the way, don't watch the 3D version, it really isn't much to shout about.

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