Before I begin this week’s blog, I hope you all had a safe Memorial Day, and took a moment to remember those who passed on while serving the United States.
Why hello Pixlbit! I like to think I had a theme four-day weekend (Yes I claimed Friday as part of the weekend along with Monday). There was really only one reason to wake up early for Friday…Fast and Furious 6. Oh yes, I really enjoy this series, and I’m not afraid to own up to it. I love how everything is really over the top, and underneath all that craziness there is the family theme, and above all else that’s most important. Did I mention how crazy and everything is over the top?
Little background. I saw the first film at Downtown Disney in Anaheim, and well at first I thought it was dumb. Bunch of dudes who REALLY love their cartoonish cars (I wasn’t a big fan of street racing) but when the DVD was first released I bought it. During the weekends I would watch it because I had just bought my first DVD player. I started to like it, and I would buy the other films when it went on sale. Of course all of this went hand in hand with me really enjoying Racing Games.
Oh those worlds combined when I think it was Midnight Club 3 where you can customize the hell out of the cars and I made cars from Fast and the Furious, 2Fast 2Furious, and F&F Tokyo Drift. Oh wait it gets better. After watching tons of Fast 5 (thanks HBO) the Fast and Furious Universe invaded my Lego Universe
When Fast and Furious 6 was announced it was on, and I made it a point to see this in the theater
That’s the first showing at the local no frills theater and my Neon Green socks! I told my friend that I would Cosplay this movie as a guy wouldn’t look like he fits in with the Street Racing Crowd, and a bunch of people at the theater dressed the same way. It was me, a bunch of Seniors, a couple of families, and a group of teens who by the way were surprisingly quiet until the right times to get loud. To the dad who kept texting throughout the film, yeah, bright ass screen in a dark room tends to stick out. Just an FYI. Anyways I present to you my Spoiler Free Review of Fast and Furious 6:
I liked her character since Fast & Furious, and she was one of the only interesting characters in that film.
*Did I mention I really don’t care for films 2-4? I think of them as the Star Wars Prequels.
A big reason to get excited about this film is because of American Gladiator Crush aka Gina Carano
Didn’t care for new Gladiators, but loved Crush. Also I started watching Women’s MMA because of her, and for you video game folks check out Command & Conquer
As for the movie, it seems like the franchise moved away from it’s colorful cars, into more storyline. This time Dom and Company team up with Hobbs because of a new storyline that involves Letty who we thought died in a previous film (this can all be seen in the trailers). It’s basically non stop Fast and Furious type action throughout the film. Ludacris and Tyrese’s back and forth keep the seriousness down, and it seems like the acting has stepped up. There isn’t as many one liners (I do miss “I Live My Life A Quarter Mile At A Time”) but there are a bunch of really cool cars and other vehicles.
Fast 6 continues with the recent trend of having a scene at the very end that leaves the audience wanting to see the next installment. Marvel is good at this because they know we really need to use the bathroom after down a gallon of Coke, but at least this film has it right after the movie ends. So if you see this film STAY FOR THE END!
Overall Fast 6 is good for what it is: a summer blockbuster that keeps you entertained for two hours, and this isn’t a bad thing. There are a lot of films where you sit and think (no matter how many serious films you make George Clooney, we aren’t going to forget your version of Batman). This is a really fun summer flick, and I have to say I enjoyed it more than Iron Man 3.With Fast 7 to start filming in August next summer is going to have more of Dom and Company fighting bad guys…a quarter mile at a time.
In keeping with the theme I’ve been playing a lot of the movie tie-in games.
Tablet:
I’ve been making some progress but in this game there is a lot of racing the same sections over and over again to earn enough cash to upgrade your car, and then race the higher difficulty races. It gets annoying especially since you lose a bar of fuel during each race and you have to wait 15 minutes for your car to be refueled.
I finally noticed that if you customize your car, you earn bonus in game cash, so this is what I came up with.
So far what I’ve seen in the story mode, it has nothing to do with the movie, so there isn’t any spoilers. I’m currently trying to build up a car fast enough to take on Roman’s car in this drag race. The one positive is the Daily Races. These races are an easy way to make a bunch of cash, but after you run the three races, you have to wait until the next day to earn easy money.
I'm currently waiting for my next upgrade so I can do some racing.
PS3:
Well I’ve started level 9 and I think I’m one away from the end of the Story Mode, which makes me think I can give some impressions about what I played
You would think with being able to draw 6 films with tons of action, you could come up with a worthwhile game. Heck drawing from a pool of that much action you could make a decent Burnout Paradise clone, or something close to Midnight Club, but this game tries to do too much, and fails at the execution. I can’t say I’m surprised, but with a franchise like this, it’s hard to not make a good game.
- Mods: After earning enough XP, you unlock certain mods that help you in the game. Is it really hard to let you customize your mods at the end of each level? You have to quit the game, start the game and then pick your mods. Instead of going through all of this and leaving the game, it would be a lot more fun if I was able to load up shooting specific mods or racing mods before the level starts.
- Racing: This should be the meat and potatoes of this game. The developers should have said this is 99.999% of the gameplay. When I played some of the race levels it was racing on ice. Tap the emergency break = slide into a wall, tap the regular brakes = slide into a wall. Cars running into you is terrible. I can live with replaying races a couple of times to win, but everything else is a pain.
- Shooting: This is really not needed. Having one character hang out of a car while shooting is terrible, and what’s worse is that after a certain point I started to get a little motion sickness so I kept to driving…on ice.
- Not utilizing the Fast and Furious Universe: Street Racing in Los Angeles/Miami/Mexico, and the game developers decide Russia is a good place to have a Jeep Race? Really? I was excited to see safe dragging was in the game but after that, there is a steep drop in excitement.
- The Audio Volume: During the cut-scenes the characters are talking in a really low volume, and when it comes time to in game sounds, it’s normal.
Going into this game I knew it was going to be terrible because it’s a movie tie-in but damn this is just bad. I can overlook the generic voice acting, bad music, and applaud not using the current film’s storyline, but everything else is just so bad. There have been a bunch of bad movie tie-in games, along with a handful of fun ones, but this game is really really bad. I got sucked into the game because of the name, and I’ll probably finish the storyline just to be able to try the Challenges Mode. Hopefully those are better, but I’m expecting the worst. I give Fast and Furious Showdown a D-.
NON FAST AND FURIOUS STUFF
Saw that Lego showed off it’s scale model of the X-Wing fighter in NY. What I really liked was Yoda wearing an I Heart NY shirt…if Yoda was in charge of the text. As for the X-Wing, it was made of 5 million bricks. That’s insane.
Speaking of Lego, while walking around Target (my Lego pick up stories always start like this) the clearance section was nice to me again
I liked the concept of this set, but wasn’t willing to spend $100 on it. Target was blowing them out for $50, which is still a bit high, but I caved.
The next day I bought these sets to add to the Gold Mine set
Thank goodness there was a Buy 1 Get 1 50% off so these were less than $20 bucks.
The finished set along with my Dump Truck I bought after Christmas on Clearance.
The Mine Workers.
Some new music
Finally found some vinyl of interest at Goodwill. I haven’t gone in a while, and I think the Hipsters are hitting this section hard. Also someone donated a tone of Laser Disc movies. Remember how awesome the screen looked with Laser Disc, and halfway through the movie, you had to flip the giant disc?
And after watching The Voice last night I bought two songs, and apparently voted
Either of those two should win.
It was a good weekend for my Aztecs
San Antonio Spur and Aztec Kawhi Leonard is going to the NBA Finals, right after being invited to the USA National Team Pool. The image above was created by SDSU’s Student Section “TheShow”
And in Mountain West Conference Tournament Baseball, the underdog Aztecs coached by Tony Gwynn beat New Mexico twice to win the conference and earn a bid into Regionals
With that win, SDSU joins 10 other schools that sent their football, basketball, and baseball teams to the post season. SDSU is the only FBS school in that group that isn’t from a BCS Conference so it’s a bigger feat considering the kind of money the other schools pull in. #WeAreAztecs
That should do it for this week. I need to get back to finishing up two presentations. I'm doing a Q&A at a couple of schools about going to college and what it's like to be a Graphic Designer.
Well that’s all for now, more later!
-Chris
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