Power Rangers Jungle Fury

Super Sentai Equivalent: Juken Sentai Gekiranger (Beast-Fist Team Fierce Spirit Ranger)

Long ago, the Beast War occurred on Earth. Mighty transforming robots known as Maximals battled against the evil Predacons to harvest the planet's energon... okay, yes, I'm getting tired of this gag too. It has a passing similarity to something else, let's move on.

Long ago, the Beast War was fought among the animal spirits, between those who followed Dai Shi in his belief that humans had no place on Earth, and the Order of the Claw, also known as Pai Zhuq (pronounced "pie shwa"). The Pai Zhuq masters prevailed and sealed Dai Shi away inside a magic box. There he remained for 10,000 years, until some jerk named Jarrod came along and donked it all up. Freaking Jarrod, am I right?

Anyway, with Dai Shi free and the Pai Zhuq master Mao slain in the battle, the three remaining students will travel to... some city the name of which we never learn. There, at Jungle Karma Pizza, they will find the last Pai Zhuq master, kind-of-a-dick New Age slacker bro R.J. With his help and their totally lame sunglasses, they will become... Jungle Fury Power Rangers!

In terms of story, Jungle Fury starts off pretty strong, actually. The heroes are likeable (even R.J., in spite of his being kind-of-a-dick) and with good personality. The villains have a level of complexity approaching In Space and Lost Galaxy. The show was able to teach the occasional moral lesson without coming across as (too) contrived or condescending. The writing was tight and focused. It was going somewhere.

...and then the Writers' Guild Strike of 2007 to 2008 happened, and all of that went away. The story fell dead in the water. It became stagnant and mired in plot holes and out-of-character moments. They even attempted to introduce a new character during this time, the Rhino Ranger, and he ended up being a black hole of plot almost on tier with S.P.D.'s Omega Ranger... almost.

Fortunately, at least, the strike did end in time for the last few episodes to not totally suck.

The series also managed to have some pretty cool ideas, like the animal spirits being means to an end that were neither good nor evil and could be used by both the heroes and villains. I also felt that this series formed an interesting counterpoint to Wild Force, with Wild Force's Orgs representing industry and pollution, while the Dai Shi and his minions represent uncontrolled nature. I would have loved to see a crossover between the two series exploring this, but that doesn't happen. Actually, Jungle Fury is the first series of Power Rangers since the Zordon era to not have any crossover elements with any other series. Even Mystic Force had a guest appearance from S.P.D.'s Piggy!

They also took some more risks with the source material, creating their own Rangers for the first time since Lightspeed Rescue. It is slightly undercut by the fact that they - by their own admission - only did it to have some more toys to sell, and the three Spirit Rangers have very little to do in the show... but it's still pretty cool.

In all, Jungle Fury is a good series that might have even been great if not for the writers' strike. I honestly feel like I owe Bruce Kalish an apology. Nothing I said about Kalish or the shows he executive produced is necessarily untrue, but I just don't feel like it's fair to put it all on him. Disney gave him an absolute mess and told him to fix it, then gave him basically zero resources with which to do so, and in spite of that he still managed to turn out two passable series (S.P.D. and Operation Overdrive), one good series (Jungle Fury), and one of my top 5 favorite series to date (Mystic Force).

At the time of my writing this, my reviews for the Kalish series actually still haven't gone up (at the moment the latest review I have up is for Lightspeed Rescue) but I'm not going to rewrite them. Like I said, nothing I said in them is really untrue, and also I feel it's important to write about them as I thought of them at the time.


GOOD

PROS:	CONS:
+ A solid start and finish. Really, very good writing and characters for at least half the series	- The Writers' Guild Strike screwed up everything in between.
+ Had some really cool ideas.	- Having cool ideas means nothing if you don't explore them.

Video Game Review: Slayer Shock

Originally posted on November 13th, 2016

Let me start by saying that I do really like developers Minor Key Games. At the time of this writing I've got 44 hours in their first game, Eldritch, a "Call of Cthulhu by way of Minecraft" type first person rogue-lite. So you could say I'm a fan and none of this is meant as an insult against them.

Slayer Shock is an interesting game and does have potential. You play as the Slayer, an implied Buffy expy who hangs out in a coffee shop with a gang of friends and occasionally goes out to hunt undead monsters. The game is very Buffy, even to the extent of dividing itself up into seasons and episodes - every mission is an episode, find and defeat the boss vamp, that's the end of the season. Move on to the next season and the next boss.

It isn't a bad premise and like I said it does have potential. The problem right now is the gameplay. Again, the idea isn't bad. It's basically the same combat and movement mechanics from Eldritch, but turned up a notch. There are RPG elements at play; you can't just expect 1-2 shot kills all the time like you could in Eldritch, instead enemies actually have HP and damage stats of their own.

And that's kind of the issue here. Slayer Shock is a hard game, and unfortunately it's not all for legitimate reasons. Despite what the game's Steam store page says stealth really isn't optional. Enemies tend to travel in large packs, they often take many hits to kill and they strike fast so evading isn't as easy as it was in Eldritch. If you're playing on anything above Easy difficulty open combat becomes suicidal, so you'll really need to rely on stealth to get by.

The problem is, the stealth doesn't work very well. You move so slow that trying to sneak up behind enemies while they're moving away from you is next to impossible, there is no grace period when you're spotted, and even with the perk that lets you deal additional damage on a backstab you're STILL looking at a protracted battle against most enemies.

Worse, enemies like to spawn in on top of you. I've seen enemies pop up two inches in front of my face as I was walking, and unlike Eldritch where you could stop spawns by not looting enemies, here there is NO WAY to stop new enemies from re-appearing constantly.

Basically, Slayer Shock is a good premise, executed poorly. The developers are still working on the game as of this writing, so hopefully they'll fix the stealth mechanics and the respawn problem. If they do then expect this review to be updated but for right now I can't really recommend this game in good faith.


BAD

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Annotation From The Future:
It seems that Minor Key Games has, sadly, given up on Slayer Shock so sadly none of these issues will ever be fixed or addressed. I know it's their game but still. It had potential and its sad to see that potential squandered. As they say, a work of art is never finished, it is only given up on, and Minor Key Games... they gave up.

Power Rangers Operation Overdrive

Super Sentai Equivalent: GoGo Sentai Boukenger (Rumbling Team Adventure Ranger)

Many years ago, Last Sunday A.D. The elemental brothers Moltor and Flurious wrought havoc on the universe searching for the magical crown of the gods, the Corona Aurora. They were defeated and imprisoned by the mystical Sentinel Knight. In order to prevent the crown from being fought over any longer, Sentinel Knight took the crown jewels and scattered them across the Earth. In the present day, adventurer Andrew Hartford discovers the crown, accidentally releasing the evil brothers into the world once more. In order to correct his mistake, he'll gather a team of the most talented individuals in the world, to become the Overdrive Power Rangers!

As always, I'll start with what the series did right. The Rangers aren't bad. This is the second series after Lightspeed Rescue where the Rangers are explicitly recruited for their skills and they actually have a certain degree of competence and maturity to them, though they can still be a bit whiny at times too. There's also a pretty interesting plot twist involving the Red Ranger, Mack, which I won't spoil. In all I found them pretty likeable, I enjoyed the interactions between them... not bad.

On the downside, the plot is pretty weak and it's all Disney's fault. According to the crew, the show was pitched as the Power Rangers take on Indiana Jones, with "a new exotic locale in every episode." Disney loved it so much that they gave the show a shoestring budget that made that impossible, and demanded the use of even more stock footage. One has to wonder why Disney even wanted this franchise if this is how they were going to treat it. Haim Saban might be a greedy dick, but at least he kind of cared about what he was doing.

The villains are pretty weak too. They get their small victories, which is important as I mentioned in my review for Mystic Force, and that at least puts them a step above Lightspeed Rescue's villains. They're just... not really interesting. And they come so close too...

For example, let's talk about the aforementioned elemental brothers, Moltor and Flurious. These two actually used to be human, but they turned themselves into monsters in order to gain power. "OMG! Spoilers, man!" Except not really, because in order to be a spoiler it has to be an actual plot point and it isn't. The only reason I even know about this is because of a single throw-away line in the penultimate episode, in which Mack calls Moltor out on sacrificing the "precious gift" of humanity. It means nothing.

Oh yeah, and even though they're brothers, they hate each other! Why? Well, when they were kids, Moltor broke Flurious' favorite toy sled. Haha, that's sure silly, I guess... but wouldn't it be cool if it was replaced by an actual backstory instead?

Oh yeah, and the kalishplosions begin to reach critical mass, to the point of watching things like the villain Flurious shooting the Rangers with ice, and causing them to explode in a giant ball of FIRE. What?

There's a little bit to like here, but not enough to make up for the show's flaws.


MEDIOCRE

PROS:	CONS:
+ Rangers are pretty okay.	- Story is pretty weak and never does much to stand out.
+ Villains get their small victories.	- Ice beams explode into fire because Bruce Kalish is a lunatic.
+ Multiple villain groups creates the potential for some interesting interactions.	- The villains' potential is totally squandered.

Video Game Review: Bubsy Paws on Fire

You may remember a while back I reviewed the entire Bubsy franchise, or at least the older ones. I never looked at the newer stuff because I just couldn't be interested. Well, suffice to say I finally managed to work up enough interest to try this game: Bubsy: Paws on Fire... mostly because it was on sale, and I had enough points saved up on the Nintendo eShop to get it for almost-free.

So, did it redeem the franchise and make me think Bubsy is good again?

Ha ha ha ha ha! Ah...

Let's start with the story... the characters and characterizations are all from that god-awful cartoon pilot that no network was stupid enough to pick up, which means that everyone sucks and is obnoxious as Hell. Fortunately, there's a bare minimum of story here. Unfortunately, you still have to listen to Bubsy and his "friends" making crap puns on every stage.

Moving on before I need to kill someone...

Level design! It's boring and uninspired. The environments and obstacles are all very samey, and there's never anything new or interesting to see. Just play the first level. See those wood platforms and sawblades and TNT boxes and bugs? Okay, now eject the game and sell it back to GameStop because you've seen the entire thing.

To be fair, it's probably for the best that there's nothing interesting to see, because you won't have time to look at it anyway. Oh yeah, Bubsy is also a Running Game now, for some reason. It's almost as if the developers realized that literally everything this damn bobcat touches becomes an utter failure, and they just have no idea what the Hell they want the franchise to be anymore... but obviously that's nonsense.

So, yeah. It's not even really a Bubsy game anymore. It's just frustrating and tedious. The controls are weird. Jumps are awkward to time, and one hit from anything kills you instantly, just like in the old school Bubsy games. The difference is this game doesn't even have the humorous death animations that were literally the one saving grace of the old games. Also, Arnold the Armadillo's bonus levels suffer from a bizarre... I'm not even sure what to call it. Glitch? Oversight? Sadistic prank by Satan himself? Point is, you roll down a tunnel, and if you move too far toward the top, then the game reverses your controls for some ungodly reason. Who the Hell thought that was a good idea?

Okay, okay, I'll admit it. The game is at least competent. It's not a bug-riddled mess. It doesn't crash. They didn't forget to add in any of the levels or graphics... but it's just so BORING. Normally this might earn it a rating of 3 - Mediocre, but... this is Bubsy and Bubsy can go to Hell.

It does feel bizarre to say this, considering I'm one of the few people who actually used to defend Bubsy... but it is absolutely mind-boggling to me why people are so insistent on trying to keep this miserable trash pile of a franchise alive, while so many other much better franchises languish in obscurity, just waiting for someone to come along and revive them. Seriously, just let Bubsy die already.

SHOVEL

PROS:	CONS:
	- Story and characterization straight from the worst cartoon pilot to ever crashland in Crapville.
	- Level design is boring and uninspired.
	- Environments are boring too.
	- Gameplay is frustrating and tedious.
	- Literally causes cancer, leprosy, and gout.
	- Will kill your dog too.
	- And sleep with your wife.
	- Seriously, there is absolutely nothing good about this game.

Video Game Review: Immortals: Fenyx Rising

On a distant island which is home to the gods of Olympus, a young shieldbearer named Fenyx awakes, washed ashore after a horrible shipwreck. They are alive, but not safe. Monsters roam the island, the gods are nowhere to be found, and everyone they know has been turned to stone. Typhon, the father of monsters, has broken free from his imprisonment, and intends to destroy the world to remake it in his own image. It's up to Fenyx to rescue the gods, defeat Typhon, and save Hyrule -- ah, I mean, the Golden Isle!

Okay, yeah, let's get this out of the way. It's Breath of the Wild. Absolutely and totally. That is what this game is. It's Breath of the Wild, as made by Ubisoft. From game mechanics to art direction, there is no area in which this game doesn't completely ape off of Breath of the Wild. That on its own isn't necessarily bad. People still enjoyed Quake and Doom despite them being basically just level packs for Wolfenstein 3D. More relevant to this, most people have been fairly positive about fellow Breath-clone Genshin Impact.

In fact...

Gameplay

I'll start here because I want to say right off that there are two areas where I actually give points to Fenyx Rising over Breath of the Wild. Number one, your weapons don't break. Number two, and this is going to sound weird but bear with me: it's not a Zelda game. Not because I dislike Zelda, I love it, and that was the problem. My one major complaint that I always had about Breath was that it was a Zelda game without dungeons. It had the shrines, yes, but I'm talking about real dungeons. Ocarina of Time style dungeons. You just can't have Zelda without dungeons. I spent all of Breath of the Wild waiting for the dungeons to appear and I was always disappointed that they didn't. Divorcing the game from the Zelda franchise made that more palatable.

All of that being said, Immortals: Fenyx Rising does not put its best foot forward in gameplay.

For one, looting isn't very fun for me in this game. Weapons and armor aren't particularly interesting here. They don't have different stats, only different perks, none of which seem very useful to me. Also, looting to unlock new color variants for weapons and armor, as opposed to actually unlocking new weapons and armor and then getting to dye them myself if I want to like in Breath, feels really lame.

And now for the more serious complaint...

I'll be honest, I only half enjoy physics puzzles as it is. I'm not really a fan of this genre where I can figure out your fairly basic puzzle in a few seconds, but then fail 30 times anyway because Ian Malcolm was wrong. It gets worse when the physics puzzles are full of bugs. Oh yeah, this game is a buggy mess.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I spent almost a half an hour on one puzzle because it was broken. The puzzle itself was pretty obvious. I had to flip a switch, which caused a wooden ball to spawn, which gets blown by some wind jets over to a platform. I have to run and jump to reach the platform and grab the ball before it rolls away into the abyss. But I can't... because the physics engine bugged out and the ball doesn't make it all the way to the platform. It's obvious that it's supposed to, but it doesn't. Except sometimes it does, and I only ended up getting it after a half an hour because I finally got lucky and it actually hit the jet right, allowing me to move on.

That's only one example of many. Sometimes, as in that example, jets wouldn't push stuff as hard as they should. Sometimes physics objects would spawn inside the floor, or not spawn at all. It got to a point where I could never be quite sure if I was failing to figure out a puzzle, or if the game had bugged out again.

Also, it crashes a lot.

The game does actually work at least, not because there's no bugs or that the bugs aren't serious, but because there's at least workarounds for it. Saving and reloading will reset puzzles and fix the physics, and the game's constant autosaves mean that you never lose much when it crashes. Also, the game is generally pretty fun to play when it is working. I mean, it's Breath of the Wild without weapon breakage. Of course it's fun.

Please note, however, that's not me saying it's all fine. "At least there's workarounds" is not something you want me to say about your game. That's like saying at least you gave me a band-aid for the gaping head wound you left me with.

Rating: 3/5 - Fun to play, less fun to loot, full of bugs.

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Presentation

I almost don't even feel fair rating presentation. I'm basically just rating Breath of the Wild here. It's the exact same stylized "3D cartoon" style of artwork. It's nice, but I've seen it before is what I'm saying.

I don't really get why. I mean, aside from the obvious answer of "because BotW did it". Ubisoft has their own style already, and people like it. In fact, according to the developers, they got the idea for this game after a glitch in Assassin's Creed Odyssey turned the sailors into cyclopes and they decided they wanted to see a fantasy-themed Assassin's Creed game... so why not make that? Why not give us your realistic designs except now with grotesque monsters? I know you're ripping off Breath of the Wild and I accept that, but you can at least do one thing of your own, right?

Well, at least it does look pretty. Also, you can select your weapon and armor, and then select their appearance separately, meaning you can play with the perks you want and the look you want too, which is definitely nice. I'm still taking off a point because I don't like the weapon and armor designs, though.

What? You already knew I was an asshole.

Rating: 4/5 - Can't put Fenyx in the Gerudo outfit, 2/10 stars.

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Story:

In this case, there's two things I want to talk about. The first is the writing, which I actually enjoyed. I know this isn't the case for everyone, but Fenyx Rising's sense of humor is actually right up my alley, at least most of the time. I appreciated the witty observations on Greek mythology, and I found the Wise Guy/Straight Man dynamic of Zeus and Prometheus to be pretty fun. There were a few times where it got a bit too over the top, and some jokes that fell flat, but also a lot of times that made me seriously laugh out loud.

Even with that being the case, though, there were also definitely times when I wished that Zeus and Prometheus would just shut the hell up and let me enjoy the game in peace. I actually liked the humor and it still got old for me. If you don't even like the humor to begin with, you will hate this game.

And that said... it's time to climb into the cesspool...

The big problem with the story is that we're obviously supposed to be on the gods' side, but the game never manages to successfully convince me of why I should be. To quote Roger Ebert, "you can't have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense." Typhon's entire raison d'etre is that the gods are trash and bad for mortals and he intends to take their place. While he might not be much better than they are, everything he says about them is right. Even if you don't already know the myths and you're only speaking in the context of the game, it also doesn't shy away from it and in fact plays up the gods' assholery so much that it's impossible to sympathize with them.

And yes, for a slight spoiler you probably saw coming anyway, the gods eventually realize they were jerks and promise to be better by the end of the game... but so what? Look, I believe in second chances as much as the next guy. You need to have second chances, otherwise you might as well just give up and become a serial killer the first time you make a mistake, because you're done anyway. But the Greek gods are not the best choice to use for this allegory. If anything, they make a better allegory for why you should never give anyone any chance ever.

It's one thing to argue for a second chance for a petty criminal or a jerk jock, it's another thing to argue for a second chance for a genocidal psychopath. Just go Kratos on their asses and call it a day. You can't spend your entire game casually joking about the time this character turned into a pig so he could rape a woman, and then murdered her entire family to cover it up, and then expect me to want that character to have a happy ending. In fact, no, you know what? You can't spend your entire game casually joking about rape and murder. What the actual fuck is wrong with you, Ubisoft Quebec?

Rating: 1/5 - #TyphonWasRight

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I'll admit I did have fun playing the game. It's not terrible, but it's got way too many flaws for me to call it really good. The worst part of it is the story, and that's such a big part that I can't just ignore it and focus on the gameplay, not when Zeus and Prometheus are going to chime in every time I even look at a new puzzle. So, overall...

MEDIOCRE

PROS:	CONS:
+ Pretty fun to play, when it works.	- A buggy mess that crashes and glitches out constantly.
+ Fairly witty dialog if you're into this style of humor.	- If you're not into this style of humor, then...
+ No weapon breaking.	- Constant commentary ruins immersion.
	- Trashy story about trashy people being trashy and getting away with it.
	- Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact both already did it better.