The Wii U is P.U.

Throughout the day Sunday, I kept hearing reviews of the Wii U and decided to go on the hunt. Two hours and several stores later, I found one at a dark and eerily dead Sears. They informed me had I gotten there any earlier, I wouldn’t have gotten it. Apparently they screwed up an order and the shipment didn’t arrive until shortly before I got there. So, lucky me, I bought the deluxe model for $479 including tax.

What puzzled me was the lack of an Ethernet port. The exclusion was fine for Wii, as it wasn’t really geared for online games, but wasn’t the Wii U supposed to appeal more to “hardcore” gamers? If so, they’re already doing a bad job of it. I’ve got a router that’s literally two feet away from my TV—it’s a shame I simply can’t plug in. So far, most of my games only offer local multiplayer; the “online features” are social networking options that nobody will ever use.

My next complaint is about something that’s understandable in the modern age of gaming, but it still sucks: the day-one patch that takes an hour to download. If you bought one of these for your kids on Christmas, you probably won’t get to play it until noon. You don’t have to update if you only plan on playing disc games, but you do if you want to do literally anything else. On top of that, every game I’ve tried so far requires an individual update, which can take ten to thirty minutes a piece.

I’m also underwhelmed by the graphics. No, graphics aren’t everything, but I’m sick of people pretending graphics are nothing, too. This lower standard in graphical quality is to be expected from Nintendo, but I didn’t expect the graphics to be this bad. Hair looks PS2 era—sometimes worse—and when you play Assassin’s Creed 3, you’re going to be disappointed by the limited draw distances and the way shadows take on a distracting strobe effect. It’s hard to believe this is a next-gen system just by looking at it, though I expect the games will improve as developers get more experience with the system.

As usual, Nintendo shouldn’t be your first choice for FPS games and action titles. If that’s all you’re into, wait for Microsoft and Sony to release their next consoles (better yet: just beef up your home computer). But if you’re looking for something different, the Wii U might be for you. Although the system feels more like a toy than a gaming unit, it’s a fun throwback for those of us who grew up playing games with friends on the same TV.

The gamepad looks big, stupid, and uncomfortable, but the second you pick it up, you’ll wonder how they crammed so many electronics into such a lightweight device. It fits in your hands nicely and the touchscreen works like a charm, despite the lack of multi-touch controls. It’s just as cool and innovative as the Wiimote was in 2006. It’s especially surprising it didn’t make the package cost more than six hundred bucks.

Even so, I returned the system to Sears. I’ll buy it again in a few years, but right now, it isn’t worth the price for anyone but the most loyal of Nintendo fans. Even a few of them will have buyer’s remorse until the library is significantly bigger.

Smooth launch day for Black Ops 2

I thought I was done with Call of Duty. As launch day reviews came tumbling in this morning, I found myself excited about the newest installment. In particular, it was footage of the zombie mode additions that got my attention. So I purchased it and downloaded it while I was at work.

It’s good. It’s different. Everything I dislike about COD games has been addressed… well, almost everything. There are a few too many button prompts and quick-time events in the campaign, but there’s plenty of honest action, too. Amazingly enough, it runs better on my system on the day of launch than MW2 and 3 do after months of patches. I’ve yet to encounter any memorable bugs in the three hours I’ve played it. (Knock on wood, right?)

The sound is crisp, but Treyarch’s default mix sounds a little janky on my speakers; your mileage may vary so experiment with settings. Joining games has been a breeze and although I lagged a couple of times, it’s been pretty smooth for the most part. I like the customization. I like the futuristic weapons and tactical gear. Against all odds, I like Call of Duty again, if only briefly.

Looper is Sooper

The year is 2044. It’s thirty years before the invention of time travel. A voiceover tells us that as soon as time travel is invented, it’s outlawed. Naturally, that won’t stop the most powerful crime syndicates from using it. So where’s Timecop when you need him?

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper. Loopers are hitmen, but not the type who whack you in Scorsese movies. No, loopers simply wait in a field for a target to appear from the future. When the target arrives, hooded and bound, the looper shoots him. The only benefit of doing it this way is the body won’t be found in the future, when cops have access to higher tech forensic methods.

Before disposing of the body, the looper can find their payment strapped beneath the target’s clothes. The payment usually comes in the form of silver bars, which can be traded for their own timeline’s currency. Every looper knows full well that, one day, they’ll find gold bars strapped to a body instead of silver. The day that happens, the looper has just retired himself, which is so common it’s called “completing the loop.” When we see that Joe lives very well in a future where most live in squalor, we can see the attraction of the job despite its deadly retirement plan. He even admits that people in his line of work aren’t exactly forward-thinkers.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know that when Joe’s future self is sent back, young Joe fails to retire him. His future self is played by Bruce Willis, which is far less distracting than having Gordon-Levitt play dual roles—one in old-age makeup. You’re probably expecting a cat-and-mouse game to ensue. It’s actually more like a cat-mouse-dog-and-tiger game in which timelines tangle like pasta.

Does this sound convoluted to you? It’s a movie about time travel—of course it’s convoluted. Whereas so many of these movies try to make an unbelievable premise believable with endless technobabble, Looper leans into the problems of time travel with little explanation, which gives it room to do something fresh in the genre. Its interpretation of the rules leads to one of the most chilling death scenes ever filmed. The scene in question is truly the stuff of nightmares, but if you want to poke holes in it, you’re watching the wrong movie.

The X-Men Rises? (First Class review)

X-Men: First Class opens in a concentration camp. The boy who will one day become Magneto is separated from his parents by Nazis, which causes his mutant powers to unlock. Stricken with grief, he discovers he can bend metal with his mind. And you’re right: we have seen this exact scene before.

Around the same time, young Charles Xavier has learned he can read minds. He demonstrates the ability when he discovers a young and homeless Mystique rummaging in his kitchen. I don’t remember Professor X ever recognizing the shapeshifter in the films set after this one, but just go with it. You’ll have bigger challenges with this film, believe me.

Fast forward a few years later and an adult Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is searching for Dr. Schmidt (Kevin Bacon), who cruelly studied his powers of magnetism and murdered his mother. We learn that adult Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and adult Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) have been hiding their mutant powers ever since they met. Mystique is forced to appear in her human form whenever they’re in public; she thinks men are unlikely to find her attractive in her natural blue form (um… sure).

Schmidt has escaped to America under the guise of Sebastian Shaw. During a stakeout, CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) learns Shaw is a mutant who plans to incite nuclear war. See, mutants were born of radiation so they will survive the nuclear winter (never mind the blasts). Most humans, on the other hand, will not. When you’ve got mutants as dangerous as Shaw, you can see why the government wants to track them all, but I digress. Again, there will be harder pills to swallow.

Charles and Mystique are recruited by the CIA to go after Shaw. Charles convinces Magneto to join him. They’re going to need a team, of course, so they scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel. See, for much of the original run of Uncanny X-Men, there was a problem: it was kind of a mediocre comic. It wasn’t until Giant-Size X-Men when the team got interesting. Which begs the question: Why bother making a film about the X-Men team no one, including Marvel itself, gave a shit about?

Look, all superhero movies are at least kind of goofy, but First Class takes the cake. Even the recognizable X-men are portrayed by younger actors with roughly half the gravitas of the old ones. Most of their powers are dull and useless. Worse, Magneto seems to exist in his own movie most of the time, a more serious movie, a darker movie, and a better movie. I would have much rather seen Magneto: Origins than this uneven mess.

Tonal shifts aside, it’s a well made movie made by an accomplished director whose first three movies I admired tremendously. It just isn’t exciting subject matter, unfortunately, and I hope he gets a chance to return to the less-Hollywood fare where he originally made a name.