Topman vs Blade

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Suggested by Destroyer Topman never got to appear in the manga which hurts him quite a bit and I’m not even sure if he ever got to appear in the anime. Trust me when I say that this is just about fatal as gameplay mechanics can only get you so far. His tips shouldn’t be underestimated but I’m just not sure if Jenna’s what it takes to defeat Blade. Blade has a pretty good amount of speed and he as taken down many vampires over the years. His physical attributes are all amped up and he has a decent accelerated healing process as well. It’s a bit of a tough call, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Topman has the speed needed to keep up with this vampire hunter. Blade wins.

Beast vs Norman Bates

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Day 1 of round 1 of the tournament ends here. Norman Bates knows how to attack people who can’t fight back once they have let their guard down, but that doesn’t mean that he can defeat the Beast. Beast is stronger than the average human as well as quicker. I don’t really see him going down so easily here. Norman would need quite the arsenal to stop the Beast since even a gun wouldn’t help him much. Norman just wouldn’t be able to get the shot off in time. Beast wins.

Polar Bear vs Riddler

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This round of the tournament is rather easy to decide, but still heartbreaking. Polar Bears are some of the most hardcore animals out there. They can literally punch you in the face if they feel like it. That being said, Riddler knows some mild hand to hand combat and he has some gadgets as well. His scepter will be all that he needs to win this fight. Riddler wins.

Arcade vs Kingpin

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Neither one of these fighters is particularly powerful, but that’s why they’re down here right? Kingpin has his cane which can fire energy blasts and is simply handy in a fight. Meanwhile Arcade has his arsenal of weapons at the ready. He won’t go down easy and can also fight hand to hand if necessary. This is definitely a tough match to decide especially since both characters can pseudo fly thanks to Age of Apocalypse. I’ll give the slight edge to Kingpin, but this could easily change if someone shows me a comic of Arcade in a cool tech suit. Kingpin wins.

Tuxedo Mask vs Ant

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The first blog tourney is underway with round 1 beginning here. This tournament is made up of fighters with no wins so each win is massive. The Ant is a noble fighter who has tried his very best to rise up the charts, but I don’t think he has the skills needed to win this round. Tuxedo Mask has fought with aliens and has shown impressive speed over the years. He doesn’t have a whole lot of attack power, but he’s gotten by just fine. The Ant will not be able to stop him. Tuxedo Mask wins.

The Trouble with Harry Review

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“The trouble with Harry is that he’s always grabbing the beer. I try to tell him to let go, but he just ends up pouring himself another glass. What about the rest of us? Why don’t we get any beer? Ah well, there’s only one way to end this. Hand me that Axe Suzy, our little Harry problem is about to end. ….come here Harry” This film is also part mystery as you don’t really know who killed off Harry. The film gradually introduces more and more suspects with that question looming in the background. Nobody has an alibi and every character in the film wanted to murder Harry. Still, they couldn’t have all been in on it….could they?

The film starts off with an old man by the name of Captain Wiles. He was shooting anyone who couldn’t fight back to prove that humanity is the race with the biggest inferiority complex when he accidentally shoots a man. This man is named Harry and Wiles realizes that this could stain his reputation. He decides to hide the body so he can bury it, but that’s when an odd chap by the name of Sam shows up. Sam likes to draw just about anything and a murdered man will do just fine. It doesn’t take much convincing for Sam to join in on the operation and bury Harry. Things get complicated when Wiles tells Sam that a lady from down the road recognized Harry’s corpse and was glad about it. Her name is Jennifer and it turns out that Harry was her husband. Meanwhile, Wiles decides to forget about all of this so he runs off to a neighbor’s house. The resident goes by the name of GRAVEly. GRAVEly isn’t particularly surprised to learn of Harry’s demise and she takes the whole thing in stride and even asks Wiles to head to her cabin in the middle of nowhere later that day. Alone of course. Wiles has been in a war before so he figures that nobody can actually be a bad person here in the homeland right? He leaves his shovel and gun at home and heads to the carriage.

So, those are the key players. With the exception of Miss GRAVEly there are no obvious hints on the suspects so you want to keep an eye on all of them. While the plot sounds like an intense thriller murder mystery, it’s actually more of a comedy. You may have guessed that though when you realized that the plot was completely subverting the usual tropes. Everyone wanted to destroy Harry so they’re all pretty happy to hear that he’s dead. Since none of them have any alibis that also makes it a little harder for the cops to figure out what is going on. Yes, the cops do play a role in this and one of them in particular is eager to get to the bottom of this rabbit hole.

One thing that the film does really well is achieve the old school effect of a classic film. The atmosphere is quiet and happy as a little town ought to be. The characters are pretty nice and reasonable with the exception of Sam. The opening scene is also a lot of fun as we see Wiles continually have to abort his mission of hiding the body when random people walk up the hill. Nobody cares about the dead corpse though as some just continue reading while another one steals from the corpse. It’s a cruel world out there, that’s for sure.

To counterbalance the happy scenes, we also have some jump scares here as well. There is a haunted closet in the living room of Jennifer’s apartment and it has a tendency to open on its own. It’s almost as if someone is watching the cast, but that couldn’t be…right? Wiles is the only one who seems to notice this throughout the film, but he is too nervous to actually open the closet. It added a nice element of danger to the film and also helped with the humor in a sense. This style of humor definitely worked pretty well throughout.

My only real negative with the film would be Sam. He just comes off as a real sketchy fellow who uses terrible pick up lines for flirting. He doesn’t even seem to care that Jennifer has an impressionable little kid who is listening to what Sam is saying. The whole romance felt off from the start and I definitely couldn’t buy into it. Especially since he only gave her about an hour to think over his extremely sudden proposal. As I mentioned earlier, the rest of the characters were decent even if they were all a little corrupt at times. Wiles first inclination was to hide the body instead of telling the police. That was a bit iffy. The next door neighbor was also happy to run with this and likewise for Jennifer. They all became accomplices to the act whether they committed it or not by not telling the Police. You’ve always gotta tell the proper authorities instead of listening to your impulses to hide and bluff for the rest of your life. Wiles starts to learn this the hard way as his guilt begins to catch up with him. He brings in a lot of the comedy moments as well due to his age.

Miss GRAVEly wasn’t as interesting as some of the other characters, but she was so suspicious that she helped fill in the tension. After all, if you need someone to start digging up graves, who better than Miss GRAVEly? Jennifer’s kid was a little annoying but at least he didn’t appear much. I certainly don’t care much for his taste in toys. It was pretty sad to watch and it’s why we need video games to entertain kids instead of dead animals. We don’t want them to turn into hooligans as they grow up.

Overall, This was a well written film and it was definitely an engaging adventure. I don’t want to give away who the culprit was. That’ll be for you to figure out when you watch the film. I will say that you’ll be shaking your head at Sam a lot though. He certainly incriminates the whole cast quite a few times by leaving pictures of Harry around and just giving the cops a hard time in general. He’s certainly not the smartest guy on the block, nor is he the nicest. He makes a living off of art but constantly shoos his customers away. It’s no wonder why nobody wants to buy his art. The ending will also rub you the wrong way as he takes advantage of a rich old guy. The rich guy is just as guilty for not walking away, but it was complete highway robbery. As long as you can get past Sam, the rest is solid though. Just watch out for the jump scares!

Overall 7/10

Yugioh Arc V

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This Yugioh manga may have succeeded in making the most changes out of all its predecessors. I’m always glad to see it have a brand new plot since it makes the manga more exciting. That being said, I don’t really like the new personality they gave Shay. While the manga doesn’t look to be as exciting as the anime, it’s very early on and is a solid title regardless. After all, Yugioh duels in any context are awesome! I shall have a review for this series once it finishes.

Overall 7/10

My First Ever Blog Tournament!

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After a lot of requests and demand for it, I’ve finally decided to do a blog tournament! The main obstacle to doing one until now was that I had to make sure the characters hadn’t fought before. Clearly, this rules out a lot of popular fights like having Superman and Thor in the same bracket since they have already battled. To prevent that from happening, I had to ensure that none of the contestants in the ring had ever fought each other before. I just grabbed people who had no wins as this was the easiest way to get started, but I’ll try and think of different themes for future events or just grabbing characters from other areas. Underrated fighters? Fire type fighters? The sky is the limit. Each tournament will probably get a brief introduction post like this one to set the stage and get the hype going. To prevent any real biases, I’ll be using randomized seedings to ensure that the matchups are completely random.

We’ll see how this does and I’ll probably tweak the intro post style here and there. I do like my style points after all.

Here’s the bracket for the first tourney and pictures of the fighters are below.
















Alter Echo Review

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This is one of those games that I knew next to nothing about, but decided to buy on a whim. Lets face it, a cool cover and solid gameplay is enough to warrant a purchase. It’s why I like surfing Amazon’s retro games once in a while to find the hidden gems. Alter Echo’s definitely quite a lot of fun. It’s not quite on the same level as Eve of Extinction and Oni as those games were phenomenal, but it’s another good entry for the PS2 that holds up really well. The plot is certainly original.

So, humanity has gone pretty far. We now have telepaths to an extent who can reshape things. One day, a group of humans stumble upon a planet where they had sent a few others many years ago. It seems like their time in space has turned Paavo’s expedition evil so they now want to wipe out humanity. Our 3 proud heroes decide to stop them, but they are split up when landing. Nevin decides to find them and get off the planet while he can. He meets with an artificial intelligence that is the actual planet and it begs Nevin to help him stop Paavo. Nevin declines whole heartedly and gives this entity a hard time throughout the game, but it finally gets personal when the body count starts to rise and he realizes that there will be nowhere to escape to if Earth is destroyed. He reluctantly agrees to help and fortunately, the entity gives him a power suit and an assortment of weapons to bolster his abilities.

The plot is definitely going all in with the science fiction. That’s a smart move since it makes everything cooler. The opponents that you’re fighting are technically entities made of telepathic energies and all, but you can think of them as aliens. The designs are really cool and Nevin’s suit is also like something out of Iron-Man. The gameplay is pretty straight forward. It’s a 3D action title where you’ll be doing a lot of fighting. In standard mode, it plays out like a Link title. You swing at anything that moves. You have a beast mode which lets you climb onto objects and enemies alike. Finally, there’s Gun mode, where you turn into a large mecha and start blasting away. You’ll find that human mode is the most reliable, but you’ll have to use them all since some enemies are impervious to your different forms.

There’s an aspect of platforming to this game as well. You’ll need to activate nodes across the levels at times or get from one place to another with your acrobatics. There are also some puzzles for when you are deciphering a node. Don’t worry, they’re the good kind of puzzles. It’s all about reaction times as you must make the right turn. This also happens when you use your time manipulation to strike at enemies. It’s a really handy ability that I recommend using whenever possible since it gives you extra currency to spend on upgrades. I maxed out all of my powers and bought some combos as well, but you won’t really find yourself needing the combos. Button mashing works well enough on all of the opponents.

The game is fairly easy although the final boss will give you a run for your money. He has two phases and if you lose at any point, you must start again. Luckily, while I did die against the first phase 2-3 times, I never lost to the final one. That would have been demoralizing. It was very tense though since I won at the very end of my health bar. I always give my clutch factor some credit there along with the developers since nothing is more satisfying than winning at the very end like that. The same thing happened to me in Breath of the Wild and Kingdom Hearts II. It’s a good feeling. For the final boss phase 2, I recommend just baiting out his attacks and then punishing them. It’s a fool proof plan.

Alter Echo also ends with a big cliffhanger although a sequel is unlikely. Spoilers are present for this paragraph to skip it if you must. You ready? Well, it would appear that the entity is also evil and the heroine lives after all. She had seemingly died a while back so it’s good to see that she survived. That being said, she’ll probably be turned evil or not given a choice so that’s too bad for her. The other villains are also alive as well. The sequel probably would have been a blast so it’s a shame that it didn’t happen. The plot wasn’t particularly strong, but it still would have been enjoyable.

The graphics are good. They aren’t anything special, but the levels are fun to look at since the space theme is good. I will admit that all of the levels look the same though. There is no real variety to speak of since all of the levels are on the planet and in the caverns. This was a little lazy on the side of the developers so that’s something that could be fixed in a sequel. The time stop attacks look really good with purple energy all around. As for the soundtrack, it’s also really good. The themes are all really fast paced and increase the intensity of the levels. I’d definitely like to see the tunes return in a sequel.

Unfortunately, there is no replay value here. Once you beat the game, you cannot replay the levels to get the extra power ups. Your only option is to replay the game and that would purely be just to have fun. It’s a game that you complete and then put back on the shelf. The playthrough is good though so this isn’t a bad thing, but I always like to have some replay value. It gives the game an extra boost if you ask me.

While the game is good, there are clearly some negatives since I’m only giving it a 7. As I mentioned, the story isn’t great. It’s not bad and showed signs of promise like whenever the two friends would appear. It just suffered from some slow parts where nothing would really happen during some levels. The gameplay could also be a little repetitious since you would have to keep shifting forms to deal with various enemies. It wasn’t a big deal though and I still enjoyed the gameplay. These are just elements that hold it from being an 8. I did enjoy the puzzle system for the time stop attacks though and I’d definitely keep that for the sequel.

Overall, Alter Echo is a solid game and one that I would definitely recommend. It’s fairly short and won’t last you too long, but the gameplay is on point. The soundtrack is solid and the plot isn’t bad either. It’s the kind of game that nobody has heard of so it’ll also earn you some brownie points with other gamers when you mention that you’ve played such an obscure game. It had some issues like the levels being repetitious along with the gameplay to an extent, but that’s where the short length actually came in handy. Hopefully we get more space games soon, but I doubt that’ll be a problem. Space games are always going to be seen as cool.

Overall 7/10