You’re probably wondering where the heck this one came from. It’s way out in left field, I know. The sequel has already replaced it in everyone’s minds, so why even bring it up now?

Well, Sony made me do it!

Okay, no, not really. But in Sony’s attempts to win annoyed Playstation 3 owners back after totally betraying their trust by not properly handling security and by remaining quiet when they should have been open about their hack, they offered a “Welcome Back” package of two free PS3 game downloads. From a short and very uninspired list of old games and cheap downloads.

Hence why suddenly I’m playing inFamous, as it was one of the games I didn’t already own.

Which, itself, might surprise some people. Let me explain.

Years ago I downloaded the inFamous demo. And frankly, while the idea behind the game was pretty interesting, the actual game itself just felt very … unfinished. It was chaotic and unrefined and just plain not much of a joy to play. Back then, in my mind, the horrible playability of the demo affirmed to me that inFamous was certainly not worth the money to buy.

Years later, free download, what the heck. For free, I can give it a shot.

Well, at least the real deal was somewhat improved from the demo. It’s still Fractured Fairy Tales time, and plays like asterisk. But at least it’s kind of interesting enough that I haven’t just quit in spite of its many flaws.

I think my biggest contention is that it was obviously designed to be played a certain way. In so many certain ways.

To start with, the camera controls… I’d really love to invert the x-axis. And, indeed, there IS an option to invert the x-axis. But doing so doesn’t just invert the camera control. It also inverts the targeting reticule control, which I don’t want inverted. There’s no way to fix that, and from the start makes the game nearly unplayable to me. No matter how I change the settings, something is always inverted from how I want to control it. In the end I decided that the greater of the two evils was having an inverted targeting reticule, so I chose to leave things un-inverted, as the developers obviously intended the game to be played. It sucks. It makes for some rather twitchy moments as my camera is still often twitching in the wrong direction first, but slowly, I’m retraining my brain from how other video games have obviously trained it to perceive.

Here’s where the certain way it was meant to be played comes into screw-you-part-two. inFamous was obviously designed to be played as a gun-and-run game. Not the other way around. What do I mean? Okay, say you’re Spider Man. You jump into a group of thugs, punching and kicking and such. Someone runs away from you. You spray him with a web and then kick his asterisk. You don’t chase him willy-nilly all around the city. You don’t have to. Because you have a ranged approach, even IF you prefer to drop in for the up-close-and-personal melee approach most of the time. Only in inFamous, even though you have a lot of nifty melee potential, it doesn’t blend with the ranged combat at all.

One would think that with the ability to power-drop off of a building into a group of thugs, and amped-up melee attacks and shocking vorpal blades sprouting from your arms, that the intent might be there for a strong melee player. Nope. Throwing lightning bolts may be restorative, somehow, but punching someone in the face, all right up in their bio-electric field, isn’t. But it’s hairier than that. And here I don’t fault the AI itself. It’s right that everyone scatters in different directions to shoot you with their guns when you drop in on them like that for some punching and kicking. Only a fool brings a knife to a gun fight, and they have the guns. So of course the bad guts put some distance between themselves and you the first chance they get and run around all headless-chicken-like to hide behind cars and stuff to use everything that they can for cover. That makes sense. Well … mostly. Why don’t any of them have knives? Why do they all have guns? I guess on the streets guns and ammo must be dirt cheap…

But okay. I get the AI is working smartly for what they have, and it’s just bad programming that they all have guns. That makes sense at least… mostly. Only, here comes the problem, so you’re punching and kicking and blading them up after your big drop, and they all start running away. Hey! Come back! So you chase them down, thinking, “Gee, if only I had some ranged attack like throwing lightning bolts…” Because even though you do … you don’t! Switching from melee to ranged combat is nigh on impossible in the heat of the moment. The two systems are extremely dissimilar. Directionality and proximity in melee becomes move the circle in the center of the screen around to target something when you switch to ranged combat. It makes it near impossible to do something as simple as zap the dude running off to the left in the back, because the guy running off to the left, that you were punching at a second ago perfectly well, is not even remotely in the center of the screen where the targeting reticule pops up to aim your shots. And by the time you swing it around to target him … he’s found cover. So it becomes a choice between a game of chase-the-baddie-while-getting-shot, or a game of aim-at-the-baddie-while-getting-shot. If you play chase, you’re a harder target for all of his buddies, but it takes you a lot longer to take him down. If you play the ranged game instead, you take him down quicker, but you get shot a lot more by everyone else. It’s a lose-lose proposition and to borrow a line from Joshua, “The only winning move is not to play.”

A simple target-lock mechanism here would have made a world of difference. You could bad-asterisk your way in and then take them out quickly and easily as they run away. Even if you’d have to be in touch-range to paint a target first, fine. I could live with that! But, alas, no. Leaving the two methods of fighting nearly impossible to combine. And so while you might have all sorts of super-keen melee super powers, so long as your enemies are smart enough to scatter in all directions to hide behind things when you jump them, and then shoot at you over and around their cover, you’d be a fool to jump into melee like that, especially when more and more fights become one-against-many instead of one-on-one.

Basically, what could have been really cool instead relegates melee attacks to “for emergencies only” fighting. If you want to survive, you’ve got to master ranged attacks instead.

Again, meant to be played a certain way … and not the way I wanted to.

But here’s where it gets even more schizophrenic, because while ranged combat is clearly how the game was meant to be played … you’re left with two distinct problems. First, detecting enemies at range is very flawed. Your HUD has a limited scope, less than your line-of-sight. So identifying targets in time, and especially avoiding traps, isn’t always easy.

Worse, enemies don’t seem to have this problem with you. All the time I get into situations where I hear gunshots, but I don’t receive any signs whatsoever of where they’re occurring. You would think if someone starts shooting at you that they at least would turn red on your HUD. But no. All too often you’re left with a mystery of who is shooting where. No Spidey Sense to guide the way, even if you press L3 to activate your… Uh … yeah. Huh? So sometimes you literally just have to sit there and wait to get shot, just to have any idea where the shots are coming from. It’s not a great tactic for any combat, but especially for ranged combat, where hoards of baddies could be closing in while you wait, and wait, and wait. Because, again, the range on your HUD is far shorter than your line of sight.

Speaking of coming up short, here’s the next area where ranged combat suffers. The range of your lightning bolts is less than the range of the bullets baddies shoot at you. Eh? Yeah. I know! Makes you want to just pick up a darned gun already. (Which, by the way, would have been an interesting option. Electrified bullets even?) Plenty of times I’ve sat there on rooftops, at the very corner, as far as I could walk, being shot, and yet not damaging the bad guy shooting me, with my own lightning bolts thrown at him. They just fizzle out right in front of his face. I know he’s laughing at me. Heck, I would be laughing at me too. It’s not a matter of accuracy, but of range. It’s a pretty lousy limitation for a game designed to be played with ranged combat. If only you could simply snipe…

Okay, so apparently, one of your hidden powers is the ability to snipe. I only just learned that while looking up something for the review. When you get this power, I don’t know. Why such an obvious power gets delayed while you pick up useless powers like amped-up melee that you can’t properly use when everyone runs away from you all the time, I don’t know. Again, a lot of lack of refinement here. It’s like no one actually bothered to play the darned game through from beginning to end. Or even beginning to … beginning. I mean I can’t be all that far into it, and already I’m baffled by the lack of clarity.

Speaking of a lack of clarity, so here’s one that has me befuddled. When I first started playing, raging melee seemed like the way to go as a solution to my x-axis inversion dilemma. Invert the camera and just don’t use ranged combat and all would be good. So I started out with the obvious melee and blade upgrades. And at first, that was good. Then I kept running into more groups, and they’d scatter, and I ran into that no-win situation of chase-the-baddie while his buddies shot me. So the next obvious upgrade was to lessen the amount of damage I was taking. Only here, again, lack of clarity. So 10%, 20%, 30% … is that cumulative? Or do we seriously onlt get 30% damage reduction at best? But even if it is cumulative, best case scenario makes it a damage reduction of 60%. Meh! That’s only able to take slightly more than twice as much. That’s the best that someone who can manipulate electricity and electromagnetism can do against bullets? Eh?!?! Lame.  Melt bullets before they even get to you maybe?  (Heck, melt their guns!)  Deflect bullets like they were nothing with a wave of lightning?  They are metal after all.  Lead melts quickly.

Meanwhile baddies get riot shields? And gun turrets to hide behind? WTF?! Why can’t I pick up a riot shield?!

Though, again, in quick research it looks like another hidden power yet to be unlocked is some kind of shield. Well great. But why can I max out my damage reduction without unlocking that no-brainer? Seriously, did anyone even think this game through?

(And do you think that you could Magneto all those bullets hitting your shield and then repel them back like he could in a deadly bullet storm effect? Wouldn’t that have been something?  Even if lead isn’t magnetic, energy could do something…)

Any even then, it still seems like a pretty lousy defensive list of powers. Can I at least don a freaking bullet-proof-vest or something here? They come out in swarms with automatic weapons, grenades, freaking bazookas, and trucks with machine guns, and I’ve got … 30%? 60%? And maybe, eventually, a shield of some kind…

There’s a dead cop wearing a vest over there. And that bad guy dropped his riot shield there. Can I just take a moment in sanity and “power up” my damage reduction here?

Nope.

More confusion comes as you just play the game. I’m powered up by the same device that has left shards of itself all over the city, but I can run right past a shard without it even showing up on my HUD. Even if I press L3 to further power up that Spidey Sense, still no appearance by Mr. Shardy. But that one across the bay over there where it’s guaranteed death to try to walk to right now, that one shows up on my HUD? Eh? Shouldn’t there be some kind of affinity to the darned things? So confusing!

Equally befuddling is when I complete a plot mission, a requirement to go through the game, turning on lights for all the scared city folk no less, and hurting no one in the process, and it gives me a RED evil-karma outcome? Huh?! Why?!

And speaking of a lack of clarity, karma itself is a bi***. Sucking the life out of someone is evil. Okay, I kind of get that. Though considering the dude just started shooting me in the face for simply walking down the street … the evil of it seems a little contrived. Is it “evil” to kill someone in self-defense in general? Do I get bad karma for not taking them down “alive”? Do I get evil karma for stomping on them after taking them down? Killing civilians is wrong, but what about killing the nefarious ones who offer you evil side quests? Shouldn’t killing them be a did-the-world-a-favor moment? Do I get good karma for bothering to take the time to restrain them? Maybe yes? Maybe no? The game doesn’t indicate one way or the other on any of these actions. I would assume that at least bothering to cuff a baddie should reward you for making the effort, but I could easily be wrong. And as for the rest, only god knows apparently, and he ain’t telling!

And back to speaking of side quests, more agitation comes when you’re walking up to talk to someone about a side quest when suddenly bad guys jump out and shoot him/her in the face! WTF?! Well I guess I didn’t need that quest after all then… But seriously, I don’t think there’s any way to get it back. Once they’re gone, their quest is gone too. And you’re just SOL. Gee, if only they had like a brother or sister or mommy or daddy or son or daughter or husband or wife or friend or coworker tenant in the same bugged apartment building or someone in this whole doomed city who knew about / was affected by whatever problem they had too and would seek you out in the event of their demise… But then, that’d have required putting some thought into the quest system I guess.

Further lack of refinement in inFamous comes in the form of … jumping. Okay, so I tend to like when superheroes have trained in parkour. Call me crazy, but they’re super heroes, so they should be doing super things, right? Batman climbs up buildings and he doesn’t even have any special powers. So I like that part of the game … when it works. The converse of that being that you can’t just hold down the drop button to keep dropping. So some guy is shooting at you as you climb up a building. You press the drop button … and drop a whole two feet to grab the next thing down. And again for the next. And again. And again. And … getting shot really hurts! Gee, if only there were a concept as simple as holding the drop button down to NOT GRAB THINGS AS I FALL! Seriously. Heck, call me crazy, but it’d have made even more sense to require you to hold a button to hold on to something in the first place. I mean sometimes you’re just trying to jump over a garbage can and the next thing you know you’re freaking hanging from a ladder when all you wanted to do was vault the object the guy you’re chasing just ran around. But then, oh right, you can’t really play this game as melee-oriented anyway. So that’s not supposed to be a problem because you don’t chase after bad guys in the first place.

And why is it that a guy who can fart lightning and practically fly can’t light up a simple room? Seriously, what the heck is up with that? Some of those sewer missions get pretty crazy to navigate simply for lack of a freaking flashlight … or lightning-based alternative. Mr. Sparky Glowy Hands neads to learn to project. Or just grab a Maglite from one of the downed cops.

Speaking of the sewer quests, another puzzling inconsistency is his inability to control his conductivity around various things. Step in a puddle of water and everyone around is all twitchy and then lifeless on the ground, but you’re unharmed, so it’s all good. Walk over a manhole cover or climb a pipe though and … nothing. So I guess that makes metal less conductive than water? Likewise fall into the sewer and zap, zap, Toasty! Painful but not actually life threatening. Yet fall into the harbor and nature is all like, “Finish him!” Kapow! Dead. Bummer. So I guess in the world of Physics According To inFamous, metal is non-conductive (unless you want it to be and you’re a good guy and a baddie is hiding behind it), puddles are entertainingly conductive (especially if you’re a bad guy), sewage is painfully conductive, and ocean water is hyper-deadly conductive. Kind of makes you wonder why your enemies don’t just fill up some squirt guns from the harbor or crack open a fire hydrant.

But then again poisonous water sprayed into his face didn’t hurt him … unless you count a few psychedelic trips as hurt, which I don’t. Though it was cool. But it also really begged the question, why the heck didn’t he just grab the danged wheel from the side? It’s not like he had to stand directly in front of it to turn it! And certainly standing to the side would have been a smarter choice than taking it in the face … again, or zapping some poor bloke until he turned it for you. Talk about poor problem solving skills…

And by the way, how the heck does this guy use his cell phone if he can’t even walk over a puddle? You’d think the thing would have fried right in his pocket when he zapped the city. But no, the cell phone magically survives? And in spite of all of his electromagnetic zappiness, not once does that cell phone pick up any static either. Darn amazing phone! Where can I buy that model?

Of course then there’s that wonderful world of physics again, asking why electricity isn’t grounding out to the nearest opportunity, ruining all of his lightning bolt shots. Or, conversely, why you can’t get those lightning bolts to in any way home in on a target if they can be controlled from doing things against nature.

Basically, the sad part is, I could rant on and on and on here with all of the inconsistencies and flaws of inFamous until Father Time smacked me upside the head, and there’d still be more to list.

Is the CONCEPT of inFamous any good? Heck, it’s great! I’d love to see more!

Is the IMPLEMENTATION of inFamous any good? Not really. No.

Bottom line, it’s not worth the money. But for free, maybe.

Will I bother with it all the way to the end?  Maybe? Well, not likely.  We’ll see.

Twice through to see both good and evil sides played out? Definitely not likely!

I give inFamous 2 half-baked lightning cookies out of 5.

But for a plethora of simple playability refinements, it could have shot up to 4. But, frankly, the engine used itself is still kind of not-so-spiffy in my opinion, so I doubt even with all of the bugs and problems fixed I could give it a perfect 5. Which is a shame, because the concept really is cool.

I wonder if they’ve even addressed the multitude of playability issues in inFamous 2…

And to end on a smile, while writing this blog, on many occasions I had to correct my fingers when they typed it as inFamouse. Because that’s all we need, a glowing red evil Disney cartoon spitting lightning bolts while giggling maniacally. (No, really, we need this! Someone get on it! inFamouse!)

I have to admit that I still enjoy a good video game from time to time.  One of my favorite genres is, or course, role playing games.  A good computer RPG hearkens back to the olden days when people still had good pencil and paper games to play.

(And no, I don’t consider anything from WotC to be “good”.  I’m talking about TSR, about FASA, Rolemaster and Rifts, etcetera ad infinitum.)

I’m taking about a time when skill was not about how well you handle a joystick, but the stats and proficiencies of your character when you go to roll the dice.  The tabletop RPGs were about roles.  They were about depth of storyline and character.  They were about a gamemaster with enough creativity and flexibility to run a game where a player could literally do anything, so long as it was within the spirit of the game.  Where a player who got into their role didn’t always need a strict adherence to every last rote, rule, and roll.  And a good gamemaster knew that whatever storyline and plot they intended for the characters, it was the ingenuity of the players that would always stretch that plot to its limits, going ways unforeseen and oft times beautiful.

Back in that era, computer RPGs tended to suffer a bit.  Let’s face it, the graphics just couldn’t do the creativity and colorful worlds of our imaginations justice.  And the play control, at the very inception of gaming, was no good by any means for anyone.

And yet now that we have the awesome power of multicored CPUs and monstrous graphics cards ready to render those fantasy worlds in startling clarity, we find that the whole identity of the role playing game has been forgotten.

Let’s look at some of the best for example:  The Elder Scrolls, one of the most amazing series in computer role playing games, set a phenomenal stage for itself with some truly brilliant game development.  By TES II: Daggerfall they were really reaching for the stars.  Character creation could be as simple as answering a few questions, or as complex and detailed as anyone could possibly ask for.  If anything, it was perhaps a little too intricate and varied, according to some.  But to that, nay, I say.  Because the complexity wasn’t a requirement, it was an option.  One can never have too much depth as an option.

But by the time Bethesda got around TES IV: Oblivion, the series had taken an almost opposite turn.  Character creation was incredibly simplified and superficial.  Skills were cut to ridiculous generalities that grouped daggers with claymores and hatchets with sledgehammers, and got rid of several rather important skills entirely because the game developers had simply lost all vision.  You couldn’t even throw a dagger anymore.  Or carry a spear.  Or climb a wall.  Etc.  Indeed, just making the appearance settings for your character’s face took far more time than actually fleshing out who your character actually was and what he or she was capable of.  Which, if anything, was a portend of things to come as then many minigames further eliminated any need for the character’s actual skills, instead replacing them with carefully timed button mashing.  A series once renowned for its complexity and depth, of the role, and of the story, had been reduced to a lame first person shooter with minor RPG elements.  Where once a whole world was open to exploration, with factions that played off of one another and the developers having truly intended for your endeavors during play to affect the local and global balances and economies, and the very outcome of the world was in your hands, the series had been reduced to playing “follow the arrow” through a myopic countryside that couldn’t even fit the descriptions of its own canon.

And now they’re bringing in dragons because a couple people couldn’t understand that by the fourth edition they’d already created a far more interesting fantasy world.  No, because the game developers just lacked that much integrity to stand firm to an ideal for the world that they were supposed to believe in.

Bah!

This is the utter lifeless spineless crap that role playing games have been reduced to.  No one stands up for the storyline any longer.  No one creates a flexible world in which you control destiny instead of just following it.  And certainly no one cares about the development of the character as being just as integral, if not more so, than that of the player.  What ever happened to the role? They’re not writing role playing games anymore.  They’re just playing games.

And to a certain extent, I get it.  Why pigeonhole your market group into that of people who might actually want to think a time or two, or even to solve the occasional puzzle that involves more than “go get the Blue Key to open the Blue Door and then the Red Key to open the Red Door” when you can make your game so broad to market that even five-year-olds want it?  Why make something interesting when you can make something generic?

Never mind what people are screaming for.  Or what you built your series on.  Who cares about integrity when you can sell out, right?  Who wants to be the best at something amazing when you can just be rich?

So I get it.

I just don’t agree with it.  Obviously.

Because if you do it right, you can have integrity and get rich doing it.

So here is my challenge for 2011, rethink what it means to produce a role playing game.  Try putting the role back into the game.  Stop thinking about RPGs as guys on horses with swords and start thinking about them as complex and intricate worlds governed by the actions and the choices of the characters.  You don’t have to go back to turn-based combat systems to make a world come to life.  But you do have to care more about the roles that characters play than you do about play control, graphics, and physics.

I want to see someone truly think about making a real RPG again.  Obviously, Rome wasn’t built in a day.  And let’s face it, you’ve all lost your way … and then some.  I’ll gladly give you time to find a compass and a map, to find dice and pen and paper, to try gaming without a computer for a change so that you know what a role playing game really is.  I don’t challenge you to release a good RPG in 2011.  But I do challenge you to start one.

And no, the next big MMORPG doesn’t count.  Because single-player games have been neglected and abused long enough, this challenge has to take the MMO out of MMORPG.  Yes, that’s right.  It just leaves you with the R, with the P, and with the G.

I am a paying customer.  I am the voice of a market demographic.  This is what we want, and if you build it, we will pay for it.  We’re tired of  being insulted.  Why don’t you try impressing us instead?

You can do it.  I know you can!

And if you really need help and guidance, you know where to find me.

I was recently caught off guard by a video game commercial for Halo Reach.  It claimed to be the most anticipated game of 2010!  Really?  So Bioshock 2 wasn’t more anticipated?  And I suppose no one has even heard of Starcraft 2?  Yeah.  Un-huh.  Suuuuuure.

The most anticipated game of 2010: Halo Reach? Or StarCraft II?

Don’t we have some kind of regulatory agency that requires some kind of truth in advertising or something?  Like, I don’t know, maybe the Federal Trade Commission…

The DMCA or Digital Millennium Copyright Act was a very broad stroke copyright law enacted in 1998.  It extended the reach of copyrights whilst simultaneously granting far broader power to the copyright holder, most specifically in making it illegal to circumvent “encryption” of copyrighted materials.  No matter how poor the encryption was.  And no matter how many legal rights under the US “Fair Use” laws were trampled.

Since then, the DMCA has become a veritable pendulum swung over everyone’s head, preventing a great many formerly legal uses of copyrighted material.  Agencies like the RIAA, MPAA, etc. were all too happy to jump upon the new powers against usage of any and all copyrighted works in any way they disagreed with, regardless of what the law used to allow and rights people had before the DMCA.

To say that it was a law that undermined people’s trust in government, as well as in law itself. by handing over an abusive amount of power to corporate America whilst trampling the rights of the individual is a grievous understatement.

So it comes as both no surprise and great surprise then that some amends are finally being made.

The Librarian of Congress has released exemptions to the DMCA that finally begin redressing the loss of legal rights under US Fair Use law.  The following exemptions now apply to the DMCA:

1. DVDs can now have their encryption circumvented so that short portions of motion pictures can be used for educational uses, for documentaries, and for noncommercial videos.
2. Jailbreaking your cell phone for the purposes of running legal software otherwise blocked or banned.
3. Unlocking your cell phone so that you can use any network carrier instead of the one your model of phone was locked into using.
4. Video games can be hacked for the purposes of testing, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities.
5. Computer software protected by dongles can be cracked if the dongle malfunctions or is obsolete, such as if the company producing the software/dongle is no longer selling dongles.  (Or even in business for that matter.)
6. The encryption of electronic books can be circumvented if the encryption in all existing editions of the ebook prevent text-to-speech and likewise technologies that impinge upon the rights of disabled people.

It’s certainly not the restoration of all lost rights that the DMCA trod upon, but it is definitely a good beginning.  Most of my concerns are the narrowness of scope of the written law of these exceptions.  Namely details like the specific use of the acronym “DVD”.  Besides the fact that Blu-Ray Disks are now quite common, making DVDs antiquated, we’re also in the Electronic Age, where many movies aren’t even on any type of a compact disk at all, but are still encrypted.  So you can crack a DVD to copy a segment of it for your documentary, but you cannot do the same with a movie downloaded from NetFlix for example, because of the narrowness of the wording of this exception.

Likewise “video games” can be legally cracked now for security purposes, but no other encrypted or otherwise protected computer software can.  Again, the legal wording sets a very narrow scope.

And while outdated software using dongles from a company that no longer exists might be nice to finally be allowed to circumvent, what about similar protections in software that requires some form of network authorization that “phones home” to a server that no longer exists?  Think Steam and what would happen if those servers went dead.  Same concept, just newer technology, but because of the limitations set in the written word…

You get the point.  It’s a very good start, but, sadly, very based in the last millennium, not this one.

And then there are all of those other rights, like backing up for protection in case of damage to the original media, which aren’t even remotely addressed in these exceptions.  Transference to a different type of media when the physical format becomes outdated the same as those old dongles.  (Does anyone even have a working floppy drive anymore?)  Will we ever see those kinds of rights restored?  Circumventing encryption is sometimes a necessity in using our legally granted rights, but not according to the DMCA.

And then there’s that elephant in the room:  What is the point of legally protecting a form of encryption when the means of breaking that encryption is common knowledge?  If I encoded my blog in Pig Latin, should I really have any expectations of protection?

And then there’s the obvious question of the value of the DMCA at all: When aren’t the simple laws against misuse of copyright enough to legally protect a copyright?  Stealing is still stealing, regardless of whether you broke through a door to do it or not.

Perhaps one day these are all issues that will be addressed.  But at least, today, the Librarian Of Congress is finally putting to bed some of the gross abuses of the broad powers granted in the DMCA.

I recently caught Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li on HBO.  I’ll admit, it’s not a very timely review.  But then when are any of my movie reviews ever timely?

The thing is, you’re probably not likely to see many good reviews of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.  There are a few reasons for that.  For starters, and while I’m not exactly a Street Fighter expert, it seems to me that of what little I do know, there are a few details wrong there.  That’s bound to piss off Street Fighter fans, which is whom I’d have to assume the movie is aimed at.  So that can’t be good.  But it gets worse, mostly in the form of Gen, who just plain looks nothing like Gen in the games.  For that matter, all of the actors chosen struggle to look like their video game arcade counterparts.  And through nearly the whole movie Chun-Li is hardly ever made up to look like Chun-Li … an odd choice to make indeed.  As was the choice to not exactly overwhelm the screen with her signature moves in the combat sequences.

And then there’s the acting that’s only so-so.  The plot that’s not exactly stunning, though not entirely bad.  There’s also the general abhorrence for including things that might have gotten the kiddie’s blood pumping, like gratuitous sex and blood.  (Though it must be said, this is Street Fighter, not Mortal Kombat, so what can one really expect?)

I think the biggest failing in the minds of Street Fighter fans however will be the complete lack of cartoonish computer animations amidst the myriad of fight scenes.  The movie simply doesn’t look like Street Fighter.  For the most part it has a rather mundane feel to it.  You know, like that thing called reality that we so often try to avoid.

And yet, personally, I think that’s really the one place where Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li shines.  Much like the new Batman movies that take a grittier reality-based approach to our beloved superhero, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li has that same gritty almost-real feeling to it.  And that’s something I very much enjoy.  Oh, certainly I can respect a director’s choice to make comic-book heroes and villains look like a comic-book on the big screen.  It’s the obvious direction to go and to not ever do it would be to disrespect the roots of where things came from in the first place.  But, that having been done, there’s something more … human … about making things a little less ridiculous.

So while for the most part Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was a fairly mundane watch, quite possibly not worth it to a true Street Fighter fan (And honestly, who else would ever bother watching a Street Fighter-based movie?) I think there’s a direction in the minds that make things move that I would like to stand up and applaud, even if this particular example is otherwise less than shining.  We don’t have to live in a cartoon world any longer.  Let’s see just how real we can be.

But otherwise, yes, I do have to give Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li an unimpressive two lightning kicks out of five.