Juno is a movie about a girl who gets pregnant and instead of getting an abortion she decides to have the baby and find parents for it. This movie’s premise is very simple and thusly can be described easily in one run on sentence. The movie itself is also very simple and could be spoiled easily in one paragraph. However this does not make it boring. You may want to watch this move simply for one liners and smart mouthed remarks. Juno is funny, and smart and it doesn’t feel too manufactured either.

This is an indy film so it gets some leeway in the effects department, though it has a very nice stop-motion/animated opening. The pregnancy is well done enough that I didn’t think too hard about the fake belly on Juno. Mostly thanks to the acting.

For the most part the acting is really good. Especially Juno and her friend ___, they really make the movie fun. The adults too on Juno’s side are superb. The adopting family is not so good in comparison but I think that may have been intentional.

Overall this movie is worth ….

This is the greatest game ever (for the NDS). Thats it. If I were trapped on a desert island with a NDS and an infinite battery this would be the game I’d have to bring. If I were in heaven and the only game to play was Tetris DS. Then I’d have to say, “Oh, I’d suspected so…”. Those bastards are on a budget…

Tetris DS is the same old Tetris with all the new Tetris moves like infinite block spinning or fun sparkles when you quick drop a piece. Also there is good music, not just the Dun dundun DUNNN dun dun DUNNN dun dun DUNNN of yore. Now you can play to the fantastic tunes of Mario, Metroid, Zelda and others.

The controls are perfect. I’m not sure how they could get better from old Tetris but they did. You press left the piece goes left, you press “A” the piece spins. “B” the other way… There’s a neat feature added from Tetris company cannon/continuity, a sort of "piece storage", you can press “R” trigger while playing and then save a piece for latter instead of putting it down. It’s like they added a tint of strategy to the original game! HOLY SHIT! I never would have guessed that to be possible, but then again I am very dumb. Not only does this make the game fun, but it can save your freaking ass. Now I am never caught without the damn long piece!

There are other Tetris things in the package, Puzzles, a weird Metroid spinning Tetris game, an odd piece sliding game that uses the touch screen, a mission mode, and a tug of war mode, or more of a push of war. All these versions of Tetris are fun, loads of fun, however they are not even close to the ball numbing, finger hurting, super fun, of Classic Tetris Marathon Mode on ENDLESS! Seriously this game is incredible. It’s the only game you’ll need to play on your NDS ever again.

There is a Wi-Fi mode too, so you can play online with random fucks or just put in a freeking friend code and play with a friend… waaaait a god damn minute! FRIEND CODES SUCK!!! THIS GAME LOOSES POINTS FOR THAT! Also Marathon mode has an end when you break 200 pieces that unlocks endless mode, this should not be the case. My Tetris affair should last forever the first time!

haha.

Seriously best game for the DS, minor flaws exist but you might not notice them.

This is a rather old game to be talking about at this point. However, I’ve played it and you want stop me from ranting about it.

I’ve never played any of the other Elder Scrolls games and don’t care much to do any research into the matter besides maybe a small link.

This game takes place in some magical world called Creidal or something like that. A place where there is a person for every house, a ham on every table and a necromancer for every cave. Seriously they are like fucking mice. Anyway, from the get go your sent out on a mission to save the world from some bad guys who can apparently teleport in wherever they like as fast as they like. Also they kill the king who is Captain Picard for some reason.

The main mission is an interesting point to mention, because I have not played it yet. I’ve played this game for 3 weeks straight and I have not even started on the mission to finish the game. Seriously, thats fucked up. Primarily because I’m having fun, the bazillion things to do besides the main quest are fun! Really fun! I was really apprehensive about a game with twenty billion things to do, but they are all fairly fun to really fun to do. The prime reason is because there are no mission parameters that “get in the way” of what your told to do. You can sneak through that entire cave of bandits, go in fireballing everything in site or even (rarely) talk yourself out of situations. The missions vary and the caves and dungeons while all cast from the same template are usually all different. So you really are exploring each one separately. There are some secondary missions you can do like becoming king of the thieves guild, the dark brotherhood or the mages guild. Each one has an extensive task range and verity. For example, I was tasked by the thieves guild to steal at least 50 gold worth of stuff. So, I did a mission for a duchess and retrieved an ancient artifact for her. I was paid for my trouble, then I then snuck into the castle that night and stole the pendant and fenced it for the gold I needed to advance in rank in the guild. This was an extremely awesome moment for me as a gamer. I was able to steal the thing I helped retrieve. Though I was saddened that the duchess did not mention to me the next day, “Oh no my pendant is gone!!”. That would have completed the circle awesome interactivity and definitely got the game a higher score.

The graphics are decent and for the most part are genuinely good, there are polygonal distance pop ups every now and again, but the game does fairly well at keeping that low. The character creation is easily the most comprehensive and detailed I’ve ever seen in a game. however 90% of the characters you make will be butt ugly or some facsimile there of. Whether or not that matters is totally up to you as you will only be seeing the face whenever you look in your inventory and information screens. The game gives loads of choice for your characters so it is a major plus for the game.

The game is glitchy you can get stuck in places be unable to finish some oddball quests and the game even freezes when loading. So as with writing reviews and any other document save early and save often. You get as many saves as you want so go crazy. Though saving with a glitch happening in a quest will probably make the glitch persist eternally. The quirks are annoying but considering the scope of the game they did an excellent job.

The controls are a bit weird at first, especially the B button bringing you to the inventory screen. The controls being a bit oddly laid out will probably make accidentally steal something a few times when in a shop not realizing it and go to jail. It’s annoying but it happens. You get used to them eventually but the cost of entry is high. Finally the third person view is also not very good. It lacks the ability to aim properly and your character looks like it has a stick up it’s butt.

Most of my enjoyment of the game has generally derived from robbing everyone in all the towns blind and completing the very numerous missions for all sorts of weirdos. The game is good but far from perfect, it delivers a sense of freedom far beyond any I’ve ever seen in a game. This game is easily as good as Mass Effect even with the graphic’s not being so good. The replay value however is far better.

Adequately Amazing

Super Mario Galaxy is good. It’s really really good. It is, dare I say, fantastic. “But Cort!” I hear you ask, “Why is Mario’s latest princess run so good?” Well, lets make it plain and simple. Gravity. It is the oddest (best) use of gravity I’ve ever seen in a platforming game ever. This game lets you jump off a planetoid and swing around it into the orbit of another heavenly body and land like an olympic gymnast. A gymnast who’s an overweight plumber with a mustache but very much like a gymnast none the less.

Running and jumping are the core bits of gameplay here, but it’s enhanced by varying gravity and mind twisting level designs. The controls of this game are great, not perfect but great. Moving around is simple and responsive and pulling off cool moves with our portly plumber is a lot easier and mildly more fun than masturbating so I played this game more than I did that in the past few days. The only time I had difficulty with the controls was when wandering around upside-down at weird angles on planets and odd shaped rocks. Though, I’d assume masturbating like that would also be a bit disorienting so the game gets a slight reprieve from criticism, at that angle I mean. The controls are not perfect in other areas, pointing the wiimote at the screen to collect the ever-present star-bits is fun but when the game losses the cursor it can sometimes be annoying getting reoriented.

The controls also give way to mentioning co-op play. I haven’t heard much praise for this feature, but it truly is cool they added a large level of involvement for a second player in a single player game. The second player can collect star-bits but also hold enemies and really affect gameplay. Having a second player to hold back the torrents of enemies makes the game a whole ton easier. Also if each player hits "A" at the same time it causes mario to to a crazy high split kick move.

The difficulty was a surprising factor. I’ve been very used to Mario games being absolutely easy. The more I played of Galaxy however, I found that it is rather unforgiving in it’s level design. It was surprised I actually had to try and keep myself from dying, a lot! This more and more galvanized my inner child’s spirit bringing me back to the feeling of playing the ball-bustingly hard Super Mario (original). It was a good difficulty level and very rarely did my death in game occur because something I might blame on a controller or an annoying brother. The game gives you more1-up shrooms than you’ll ever need so getting a game over is never a problem, but I actually used some of them, which was refreshing in a very odd way.

Graphically Galaxy it is not the sexiest game I’ve ever seen. However with the Wii you really can’t expect much more graphically than an original Xbox. So to say this is the best looking game ever on the Wii is correct, so I will. Super Mario Galaxy is the best looking game on the Wii. Its has the most vibrant and coherant wonderfull art style that I’ve ever known on the Wii. Rivaled maybe only by Metroid Prime Corruption.

There is a lot of playability in the game if you want to collect all 120 stars but nothing in the way of re-playability. Though gravity jumping does provide quite a bit of random fun.

This game is really good probably the best Wii game available in this time period.

Mario Galaxy Gets a

8/10

I’ve spent a lot of time playing Mass Effect and I’ve come to the realization that it is not awesome. It’s just a good game. A bunch of good ideas and a ton of annoying crap.

The main story is very good. It’s interesting, there’s a lot of interesting characters and the world is well developed and extremely detailed. Its annoying I cant say too much without spoiling the interesting story because it will make the negatives stand out more than they might actually.

Graphically the game looks very good. However it looses a lot of points for absolutely shitty texture loading. I experienced in manny situations where characters, objects and even scenery will remain faceless seamless blobs until their textures load up. Sometimes it took up to 15 seconds before the textures would pop in. This is unforgivable, someone on staff should be shot for such a terrible flaw getting into the game. It ruins the player emersion into the game more than the horrendous number loading times.

The loading times really start to scratch at the door when your working on side missions. The side missions in Mass Effect start out fun, but you are quickly bombarded with loading screens and elevator rides (fake loading screens) that will make you feel very very sad for future folk. The side missions also quickly get repetitive by the 3rd or 4th one. They are all exactly the same. They quickly feel like a pitiful distracting force to keep you from realizing the game is so short.

Not that short is bad. Mass Effect’s main mission is a tight story and it truly is fun. However the main mission gets muddled by the repetitive side missions if you decide to do them. Not all the side missions suck, there are a few interesting ones in the cookie cutter lab, cave and moon base designs you can explore. If you can call it exploring…

This game has a very innovative dialogue system, it gives you a few short answers to dialogue being spit at you and you can choose the response quickly and easily but your character responds with the gist of what you selected not the exact thing it is. However a lot of the responses are all the same after you select a response, and manny times you feel stuck answering three flavors of “Yes” when you’d rather shoot the person your talking to in the face. When the game demoed at E3 said that it would offer the character the ability to interrupt conversation when you select a response allowing for a greater level of bad-assitude during play. This feature has been striped entirely much to my lament. The interruption feature was one of the biggest things I was looking forward to in the game.

Other small bits to note are that Mass Effect’s 3rd person action shooter RPG self is very intuitive. The leveling system makes a lot of sense. The inventory system does not. It is dumb. You feel that when dealing with it there has to be a better way to manage all the crap the game gives you to put on your characters. Buttons are another issue that gets to me. Its as if the programers can’t decide what buttons should do what. Sometimes X is select in one place where A is everywhere else, exiting a derelict ship is nothing like exiting any other structure in the game requiring it’s own interface. It becomes extremely annoying that something so minor can constantly make me more and more frustrated at the game.

I recommend it as a rental nothing you’d want to own or need to rush out and buy.

All in all this game gets a

6.5/10

Technically a thumbs up.