#also the monster high equivalent of ken

[astrowell]

If the Barbie movie was anti men what about 7 year old me staging executions for Ken dolls for the crime of not being pretty like Barbie

[monsterwithasweater]

I finally finished my Truthful route playthrough of Digimon Survive. Spoilers(not much tho) and incoherent thoughts under the cut.

Warning: Mostly rambling about affinity

I know the Truthful route is meant to be played last, but I'm way too impatient.

I managed to get Shuuji's affinity high enough to unlock Cherubimon. I was honestly really worried that I wouldn't get them, so I'm honestly very relieved.

I got 100 affinity with Miu, Ryo, and Kaito, in that order. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can tell who my favorites are.

I ALMOST got Aoi's affinity to 100, but I answered something wrong and then she was forever stuck at 98 affinity :'(

Idk why, but I really like the Four Sovereign Monsters as mega levels for the kids partners.

I'm pretty torn between playing the Harmony or Wrathful route next. On one hand, I really like Saki and Aoi and Plutomons design is pretty rad. But on the other hand, I really like Miu and Kaito and Boltboutamons design is also pretty rad. Either way, I'm gonna have to kill off Ryo and Shuuji :(

If we ever get a Survive sequel like 02, I think the Ken equivalent would be the obligatory 'gets killed off in most routes' character.

[thisyearingaming]

1997 - This Year in Gaming

Muggins here was born in ‘97, and can’t really remember much of it, natch. But there were some good things released this year - I’ve played every one of these, and have missed so many more.

Diablo - Windows, January 3rd

We start with dungeon-crawl-em-up and well-loved out of season April Fool’s Joke, Diablo. I’ll be totally honest - I don’t like Diablo that much. It’s absolutely fine, I just can’t get into it. The writing, setting and characters are all very good especially since this year only marks the beginning of games being seen as a bit more adult and intelligent. Check out this gameplay from Hour of Oblivion on YouTube, and marvel at the faux-Scottish accent on Griswold the blacksmith.

Mario Kart 64 - Nintendo 64, February 10th

Compared to its more recent versions, Mario Kart 64 is a veritable bloody relic of the past - solid controls and a quirky style mean it’s still a crowd pleaser to this day, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone right now that would die on the hill of it being their favourite single-player racing experience. It’s also got some of the deepest, impenetrable lore in any medium known to the human race - why exactly is Marty the Thwomp locked up here?

Blast Corps - Nintendo 64, February 28th

February’s position as most boring month of the year is shaken up a bit by having a uniquely designed Rare game slammed into its 28-day long face. Blast Corps is the puzzle-action game where you take control of several vehicles to destroy homes and buildings in order to prevent a nuclear warhead exploding in the coolest incarnation of Cold War politicking ever seen in a video game. Calling Blast Corps a “hidden gem” these days is like calling Celeste a hidden gem - it impresses nobody and makes you look like a dick. 

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter - Nintendo 64, March 4th 

The N64 was home to a surprisingly large number of above-average shooters despite its muddy graphics and small cartridge space - Turok is one of these, a great FPS game where you shoot the SHIT out of dinosaurs. Brett Atwood of Billboard said it was like Doom and Tomb Raider mixed - Doom Raider, if you will. I say it isn’t - there’s no demons, and there’s no polygonal breasts to poke dinosaurs’ eyes out with! 

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Sony PlayStation, March 20th

What is a retrospective? A miserable little pile of opinions. I’ve only recently played through SotN for the very first time on a TOTALLY LEGITIMATE copy with a CRT filter. Bloody good (geddit?) game, that takes the repetition of its predecessors, improves on it in basically every conceivable way, and combines it with special effects and graphics that even 23 years later had me going “ooh, that looks quite good!” Symphony’s music and audio design are wonderfully paired with a deeply enjoyable experience that’ll have you saying “mm, maybe just one more room?”

Tekken 3 - Sony PlayStation, March 20th

Also releasing from the Land of the Rising Sun that day was Tekken 3, which many believe is still one of the best fighters ever made. Tekken 3′s combat is so fast and responsive that it’s better than some games made today. T3 is also the best and easiest way to knock seven shades of absolute shite out of your friends without risking a massive head injury or a trip to the headmaster’s office... where you could also challenge him, but only if he plays as my favourite Not-Guile-or-Ken character in gaming, Paul. 

Sonic Jam - Sega Saturn, June 20th

The moment Sega realised that re-packaging old Mega Drive games would net them serious cash - although unlike later collections, this is a strictly Sonic affair, and has a neat little 3D world to run around in as a sort of hub world. Sonic X-Treme proved that Sonic Team would have to work hard at getting the fastest thing alive into 3D space properly: Jam is the sort of test ground for it too. It features some genuinely good emulation work for 1997, although it’s basically the gaming equivalent of going round to your grandparents at Christmas only for them to give you the exact same gifts you got in 1991, 1992 and 1994 but wrapped in a bow to make you think it’s different. What are you lookin’ at, you little blue devil?

Star Fox 64 - Nintendo 64, June 30th

So there’s this German company, right, called StarVox. Nintendo look at Europe and say “shit, we don’t want another lawsuit... after all, we’ve done three this year!”. So they give us in the PAL region the exciting title of Lylat Wars which as far as I know means absolutely fucking nothing in the context of the game. They’re still called Star Fox in-game too so what was the point? Anyway, fun 3D shooter with graphics that’ll make you do a barrel roll off the sofa and onto the power button to make the brown and green blurs a little easier on the eyes. Hello 2007, I’ve come back to make old references with you!

Carmageddon - Windows, July 30th

The game so scary it was BANNED in the UK! More like the game so fucking shit it was banned. Carmageddon is so deeply boring to play on PC that I can only imagine that Stainless Games made it tasteless by 90s standards simply to ramp up demand - much like another game we’ll be covering soon. 

Herc’s Adventures - Sony PlayStation, July 31st

“And they said Kratos was the best hero? Shish... they got it wrong, sister! Hercules is clearly better... he even has a coconut weapon.” A surprisingly fun overhead action game that most people only know for... well, I’ll just embed it.

Mega Man X4 - Sony Playstation, August 1st

A few years ago I tried playing every Mega Man game there is - I gave up at X3 because I was getting bored. Even still, Mega Man bores me - but at least the level design is good. Stay away from the Windows port. Pictured: me in the background yawning.

GoldenEye 007 - Nintendo 64, August 25th 

The name’s Intro. Overused intro which I also managed to fuck up twice through the deeply editable medium of text. GoldenEye is like the Seinfeld of console shooters - playing it nowadays you’re unlikely to be amazed but holy shit there’s some absolute greatness in this game. Every sound and every piece of music in GoldenEye is permanently seared into my brain - sometimes I’ll just hear Facility or Frigate in my head alongside the door opening sound and the gentle PEW of the PP7. I mean come on, fucking listen to this and tell me Grant Kirkhope isn’t cool as all hell.

LEGO Island - Windows, September 26th

The first open world experience I ever had was LEGO Island. It’s still quite good today, utterly deranged animation from the likes of the Infomaniac and Brickster - a cautionary tale for children that giving pizza to high-profile criminals is disastrous for the human LEGO race. 

Fallout - Windows, October 10th

War never changes, but franchises do. Fallout’s legendary status in the industry is exemplified in how different it feels. Yes, we had the game Wasteland nine years prior, but until September 97 there was nothing quite like Fallout. From the chilling introduction sequence showing the ruins of the United States to the tragic ending, Fallout is an exercise in pure human misery with the brightest spots of hope it can possibly muster thrown in for good measure. What begins as a tedious isometric point-and-click RPG ends as a minigun-wielding power fantasy, before your entire worth is stripped from you at the finish line. You have 500 days to find a water chip before it’s too late, but you’re constantly being fought by terrifying Super Mutants, irradiated animals, and the biggest monster of all - humanity. See what I did there? If anything, humanity in Fallout’s setting would be the greatest unifying force possible against the horror of the outside world. But how is it? It’s dull, it’s sluggish, and it’s really hard to get into even if you’re already a fan - but push through that and it’s worthwhile to see exactly how far the series got before Todd Howard said “eh fuck it” and had the whole thing dipped into an FEV vat.

Grand Theft Auto - Sony PlayStation, October 21st

To put it simply, the first in the GTA series is now nothing but a novelty. It has an irritating camera, wonky controls, poor graphics and deeply repetitive gameplay. But thank fuck it exists, because without it the Rockstar story may have been very different indeed. It’s quintessential cops and robbers gameplay, spanning across Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas in one game, but with maps so far removed from their modern incarnations they may as well be named “Not New York, Possibly Bristol and Orange Town”. People really fucking hated Hare Krishnas in the 20th Century, didn’t they?

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back - Sony PlayStation, October 31

A hard one to talk about, honestly - it’s more Crash and better than the first one. It looks great, and Crash controls so well compared to his first outing. It’ll also keep you playing for 100%, fiendishly addictive and unashamedly difficult. Had a weird cover that moved with your head. 

PaRappa the Rapper - Sony PlayStation, November 17th

Type type type the words into the box! (Type, type, type - uh oh - the box?)

PaRappa is a gorgeously stylised rhythm game about rapping to steal the heart of the girl of your dreams - which involves learning karate, getting your driver’s license, selling bottle caps and frogs, making a cake, desperately trying not to shit yourself, and finally performing live on stage. Every one of its segments is so well-produced that they’d genuinely sell like ghost cookies in this era of shite rap. Notable for producing the greatest Jay-Z backing track ever made.

Sonic R - Sega Saturn, November 18th

Sonic R is absolutely FINE with vibrant textures, interesting levels, neat gimmicks and decent controls. But I’m gonna talk about its fucking AWESOME soundtrack by Richard Jacques and T.J. Davis, an eclectic mix of Europop and New Jack Swing - even thinking about it is bringing tears of absolute joy to my eyes hearing Super Sonic Racing in my head. You’ve got the main theme, Living in the City, Can You Feel the Sunshine, Back in Time, Diamond in the Sky, Work It Out and Number One - all of these are absolute club bangers and genuinely wouldn’t be out of place in a 90s disco. 

Tomb Raider II - Sony PlayStation, November 18th

Lara Croft returns to single-handedly endanger every species on Earth. TR2 is really good, the exploration and puzzle-solving aspects of the first game expanded upon here and the gunplay remaining just as punchy. Lara’s got a fully-functioning ponytail which absolutely boggles the fucking mind - a lot of work went into Lara’s hair for the 2013 reboot, so I can’t imagine the amount of man hours it took to get fluid(ish, come on, it’s the PS1 we’re talking about) hair movements in 1997. 

And really, that’s all I played from 1997. I’ve left out big hitters like Quake II, Gran Turismo and Diddy Kong Racing, but I simply haven’t formed an opinion on them yet. Maybe in a future post. 

Thanks for reading.

[write-stuff-for-life-blog]

Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

NOTE: I actually saw this movie in theaters but since it’s DVD release was yesterday I figured I’d post my review of it here. I might ramble on for several paragraphs in these reviews, especially if I feel strongly about something, so I’ll try and make it a point to post a short rating at the top as well as a more in depth one at the end.

NOTE THE SECOND: I don’t usually care about spoilers in these reviews so read at your own risk.

1 out of 5 stars. Only watch on Netflix if you exhaust all your other options.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is written by Colin Trevorrow (previous writer and director of the last entry in the franchise) and Derek Connolly and was directed by J.A. Bayona. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard reprise their roles as Owen Grady and Claire Dearing respectively and are sent back to Isla Nublar by Jon Hammond’s previously never mentioned before former partner billionaire Ben Lockwood played by a James Cromwell who can barely bother to keep his eyes open throughout the movie. I, in fact, share that same sentiment.

Usually in these reviews I try to touch on all the aspects of said medium: visuals, camera work, writing, directing, acting, etc. But this review is going to focus mainly on the writing and acting because both are so atrocious all the other aspects are inconsequential. 

I didn’t think the first Jurassic World (JW) was as great as it needed to be for a soft reboot / revival of such a beloved franchise but it did have several memorable moments. The leads were charming enough to make you forget that they lacked meaningful character arcs (Claire does have one but the movie doesn’t care about it that much) and the action in the second half of the film was pretty cool (specifically T-Rex and Raptor and Giant Alligator Thing vs. the Indominus Rex). So for the second go around I was hoping that the filmmakers would take the time to really get it right and do the franchise justice. My hopes were far too high.

The only two performances that were worth anything in Fallen Kingdom (FK) were the two returning leads, Pratt and Howard. Howard is a decent enough actress but I’ve never seen a performance from her that I really love and FK continues that trend. Claire does undergo a change from shrewd, cold businesswoman to animal rights activist and that does give some depth to her character but it happens off screen during the three years between JW and FK. It was a little jarring at first but I swallowed it better when the film took a minute to explain her motivations. Pratt was as Pratt as ever as Owen is exactly the same through this movie as he was when we first met him in JW. I fear there’s a real risk for Pratt here as it seems as though he’s becoming another Will Smith or Tom Cruise. He is varying degrees of his usual charming and charismatic self in whatever project he appears in. Owen is just Pratt but outdoorsy to the extreme. Star-Lord is just Pratt with his ego turned up to eleven. Andy from Parks and Rec is just Pratt as a dumb man-child. And I guess that’s fine. Plenty of stars have made careers doing the same but actors actually stretching themselves and challenging themselves to become someone else will always be more impressive.

One thing that annoys me about modern blockbusters are their tendencies to inject new secondary characters into each following installment while completely ignoring the B cast from the previous entry. In the original Jurassic trilogy it did make some sense to do that as each sequel followed the branching lives of Ian Malcolm and Allen Grant who, we can presume, never encounter one another again after the first film. But here there’s little justification for it. JW’s comic relief characters Lowery and Vivian, played by capable comedy actors Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus respectively, are nowhere to be seen in this movie. Instead we have Franklin Webb, a spazzy tech guy played by Justice Smith, and Zia Rodriguez, a ball busting veterinarian played by Daniella Pineda. I don’t have much to say about Pineda, she was decent enough and served her purpose, but Smith … Oh my God. I believe this guy will go down in history as the absolute worst character in any Jurassic movie ever. Yes, he is even worse than every child character in all of the movies combined. He does nothing for the movie other than to scream in a high pitched voice when something scares him. Everything scares him. It’s always played for laughs but the joke falls flat on its face every time. The movie thinks it’s funny for a grown man to shriek in terror and scream out loud the thing that’s scaring him. “Lava!” “T-Rex!” “Social interaction!” All right, I made up that last one but the character is so cliché he might as well have said it. And what’s more there is no reason for this character to be here. The movie wastes a fine opportunity to bring back JW’s Lowery who was also a tech guy. In fact it even makes sense for him to run with Claire in her animal rights activism as he was a huge fanboy for Jurassic Park. He had toy dinosaurs all over his work station, he loves them! And it makes even more sense for him to return to Isla Nublar because he was familiar with the park’s computer systems. Why isn’t he joining Claire? He was courageous and had some genuinely funny interactions with Vivian. He certainly would have been better than Spazzy McScreamy.

Speaking of trends let’s talk about the obligatory child character. Isabella Sermon makes her big screen debut as Maisie Lockwood, Ben Lockwood’s granddaughter. Of all the new additions to the franchise she’s the standout as her performance has a depth and range most child actors would struggle to convey. Now one thing about the Jurassic movies is that their child characters were usually pretty capable in some way or another. Hammond’s granddaughter in JP reboots the computer system. Malcolm’s daughter in Lost World is able to gymnastic a raptor to death (yeah it’s a dumb scene but she saves her dad). The teenager in JP3 survives Isla Sorna alone for eight weeks. And the brothers in JW are able to fix a derelict jeep and rescue themselves. FK started out following this trend of capable children with Maisie … until it abandons the idea so we can have a “monster creeping through a child’s bedroom” scene. This completely undermined her whole character. Up until then the movie had established her as smart and independent and capable as hell. She snuck into the secret lab, spied and hid from the bad guys, busted out of her room which she’d been locked in, and climbed atop buildings all secretly by herself without help from a single grown up. But the minute the new hybrid dinosaur goes after her, which she had seen several times before then, she immediately forgets how capable she is and hides under her bed sheets. This might be the most heinous example of bad writing in this whole movie. Mixed messages? Okay, fine. Forgettable action sequences? Whatever, that’s most of Hollywood anyway. But please, for the love of God, have consistent characters!

Now the villains. Ugh.

BD Wong returns as the dastardly Dr. Henry Wu, the mastermind genius behind the dinosaur cloning process, the I-Rex, and FK’s new hybrid the Indoraptor.  It would seem that in the three years since JW InGen and its parent company Masrani Global have cut Wu loose as he’s now partnered with a new financier Eli Mills played by Rafe Spall, the CEO / director / executor of Ben Lockwood’s … estate? Company? Trust fund? I don’t remember the movie specifying what Mills’ job was, only that he was another white collar villain (because we haven’t seen that before in a Jurassic movie). Toby Jones makes an appearance as Mr. Eversol, an auctioneer for the high rolling criminal underworld, and Ted Levine plays Ken Wheatley, the leader of a disposable mercenary force who has an odd fetish for collecting dinosaur teeth. And that is literally all there is to the villains. Each of them is cartoonishly shallow to the point that Wheatley is a parody of an archetype and all Dr. Wu needs is a mustache to twirl. True, the villains have never been that big of a deal in the Jurassic movies as the dinosaurs have always been the main attractions but not even Vincent D’Onofrio’s Hoskins from JW was this bad and in a movie full of weakly written characters he was the weakest link.

And let’s not forget the dinosaurs. They are there. Not as much as you’d like but they’re around. The big draw for Owen this time around is to save Blue, the only surviving raptor from the pack he raised and trained, from Isla Nublar’s impending volcanic eruption. FK plays this up as though Blue was always the equivalent of a loyal attack dog but it conveniently forgets that JW established her as a dog capable and willing to bite the hand that fed her. The scene from the previous movie in which Owen is in the raptor enclosure is a tense moment because he is under threat from all the raptors, Blue included. In fact when the I-Rex persuades them to go after the humans all the raptors focus in on Owen. There was that one moment when Owen pulls off Blue’s head camera at the end of JW but to rewrite the relationship as though she were a loyal golden retriever, I feel like that was not earned in the slightest. And the main attraction this time is the new hybrid, the Indoraptor, essentially a smaller version of the previous movie’s I-Rex. FK presents this abomination of genetic manipulation as an ultimate monster but it really just looks like rejected concept art of the I-Rex. Also the Indoraptor is only in half of the movie. The I-Rex in JW was a better monster because it was terrorizing the island for almost the whole runtime. Plus the I-Rex has some decent build up and a good reveal. Here, it feels like the movie couldn’t be bothered. “By the way, we made another hybrid dino. Here it is.” I did enjoy the return of more practical animatronics over every dino being CGI but if you saw the last film this one doesn’t have anything special for you in that regard.

Let’s talk about Trevorrow’s writing. It’s awful. Like a pile of hot rancid garbage awful. The biggest problem with JW is that it completely ignores the moral of the original. JP was a cautionary tale that proves whenever man tries to exert his will over nature he will lose and just because we can do something it doesn’t mean we should. It’s classic man vs. nature ending with man being humbled. JW said, “Hey look, we’re going to keep doing that ethically questionable thing most people believe we shouldn’t be doing and wield the power of a god with no regards to any possible consequences,” and gets upset when the monster it created wreaks havoc. But does FK finally learn that lesson and try to take the franchise somewhere new that doesn’t lead the characters into being idiots who keep going back to the island? Do Michael Bay’s Transformers movies understand subtlety?

More than ever this movie has dumb characters making dumb decisions that nobody with a brain can follow. The villains want to capture the dinos and auction them off to billionaire criminals because these crime lords want them for pharmaceutical reasons (but why though?), the ability to hunt one like a big game hunter (because we also haven’t seen that before), or for weaponization. Let’s touch on that last point. The villains justify it by saying animals have been used in combat scenarios for centuries when armies rode to battle on horses and elephants. And the movie might have had a point if either one of those transportation methods hadn’t become outdated before the fifties.

Now just for the sake of argument I’ll list off a few more examples for this movie’s case: K-9 units, bomb detecting dolphins, and pidgins have all historically been used by one military or another at various times. But here’s the common thread among all those examples: none of those animals are predisposed to ripping a man’s head off in a single bite. Why do you think it isn’t common practice for a military to use lions and tigers and bears? And let’s take a closer look at the proliferation of working dogs and horses. Could it be that thousands if not millions of years of closely co-existing with humans have made them predisposed towards not killing us on sight? What’s that called? Oh yeah. Domestication!

Whether we’re talking about fiction or not, training an animal that never co-existed with humans so it can become an attack animal is not a good idea any way you slice it. Any semi-intelligent person can recognize that there are way too many variables to take into account. Oh but what about Blue, I hear you asking. Owen proved that raptors can be trained with Blue. That may be true but one successful instance against a multitude of failures does not prove the concept. Sure the Polish Supply Brigade around WWII kept a bear named Wojtek that would carry their supplies for them but you don’t see cargo bears being implemented throughout the world’s militaries these days. Do you know why? Because they’re freaking bears! They could go in for a playful swipe and nick your carotid by accident you MORONS!

And that leads me to this movie’s message. Apparently FK believes these animals have as much right to life as any other endangered species. That’s the whole reason Claire wants to go back so she can save them. But the film is bookended with Jeff Goldblum reprising his role as Ian Malcolm speaking before a congressional committee on how much that is a bad idea. He argues that nature selected the dinos for extinction millions of years ago and bringing them back was a mistake. The volcano erupting and eradicating the clone dinos on Isla Nublar, he says, is nature’s way of correcting that mistake. So the film opens and closes arguing why protecting these creatures from a second extinction is the worst. And yet we spend most of the runtime doing exactly that.

Seriously?

Malcolm has always been the ultimate voice of reason in these movies and we as an audience are inclined to agree with him given the proof each movie provides for his argument. There are four previous films illustrating why bringing the Earth’s most dangerous predators back to life is a horrible idea. And now that nature wants to correct the mistake you’re going to defy that decision?

The film uses Maisie here to make this case. The dinos are technically clones and we learn that Maisie is a clone as well so now we’re using clone rights to justify saving the dinosaurs. It is a weak argument thrown in at the last moment. Arguing for conservation is good and all but how well are you going to side with that argument when the T-Rex is meandering through a neighborhood gobbling up pedestrians left and right? These animals have lived on an island their entire lives. Aside from T-Rex who visited San Diego in the 90s they have never seen a town. The only human made structures they are familiar with were the derelict park buildings that the movie shows them waltzing through all the time. Even our own real world wild animals don’t understand that they should stay away from human settlements, how well do you think Blue is going to do the first time she’s caught in the headlights? But apparently they have a right to live because they are just as alive as Maisie the clone is so let’s end the movie by releasing all these dangerous animals, most of which are as large as a rhino or elephant, into the American countryside.

Sure, forget about public safety. Forget that dinosaurs had their chance but nature selected them for extinction over sixty million years ago. Forget about all the indigenous plant and wildlife that is now under threat because you just loosed at least eleven different dinos onto the world. Forget about how their nesting habits might destroy the landscape like nutria in Louisiana. What was your motivation again? Conservation? Give me a break.

Honestly this movie makes me glad Trevorrow was fired from Star Wars Episode Nine. This proves that he has no clue what decent writing looks like and has no regard for what the original was trying to say. Just because he was given the opportunity to make these films doesn’t mean he should have.

 1 star out of 5

A forgettable and messy film that slowly meanders through the second and third act with no sense of purpose other than to say, “Ooooh look. It’s a dinosaur!” And it doesn’t even say that well.

[thegloober]

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween

It’s Halloween and two middle school boys stand in front of hundreds of suddenly sentient Gummi Bears. A few moments ago, they were in a bowl for trick-or-treaters. But a magic book from R.L. Stine has brought to life all kinds of ghosts, ghouls, witches, and monsters, from a headless horseman to a ventriloquist’s dummy named Slappy and a house-size purple spider. And now those suddenly alive Gummis are quickly changing from cute to fierce as they gnash their gummy teeth and merge together like a sugary-goo version of the mercury-steel drops of the second Terminator.

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The first “Goosebumps” movie was a lot of fun, with Jack Black playing real-life author R.L. Stine, whose hundreds of spooky-fun books for tweens have sold hundred of millions of copies. This sequel, with only a brief appearance by Black, is blander, with lower-wattage talent on and behind the screen. But the special effects are still top-notch and it is a pleasant little scare-fest for the Halloween season.

“Fear,” Sarah (Madison Iseman) types into her laptop as the movie opens, and she sighs. She is a high school senior working on her application to Columbia University, trying to respond to an essay question about a fear or challenge she has overcome. At this point, it seems her biggest fears are not doing a better job on the essay and not getting into Columbia. Her boyfriend shows up at her window (the first fake-out boo-scare of the film), but Sarah’s harried single mother (Wendi McLendon-Covey) quickly sends him away. She tells Sarah she has to work double shifts at the nursing home, and needs Sarah to babysit her middle school brother Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and his best friend Sam (Caleel Harris), who is staying with them. 

Sonny, who is trying to finish his school project about the abandoned local Nicola Tesla electricity plant, reluctantly agrees to go along with Sam’s plan to cart away junk for free, with the hope of finding treasure they can use or sell. Their first customer sends them to a creepy abandoned house, where they find a hidden chamber with a mysterious locked book. When they open it, Slappy the dummy appears. He comes in very handy when Tommy, the local bully (Peyton Wich of “Stranger Things”) terrorizes the two boys, making Tommy’s pants fall down before he can take more than the book and Sonny’s sweater. 

Slappy also “helps” Sarah by causing her cheating boyfriend to fall off a ladder. But then Slappy decides his new “family” is not giving him what he needs, so he uses the Tesla plant to bring to life dozens of Stine characters and Halloween decorations, just in time for the trick-or-treaters to be out. Sarah, Sonny, and Sam will need to get the book back from Tommy’s house to swallow all of the monsters so they can lock them all up again. 

Ken Jeong is a bright spot as the next-door neighbor with a handy costume collection that will come in handy when Sarah, Sonny, and Sam have to disguise themselves. He is also way into decorating for Halloween, covering his entire house with an enormous purple balloon spider, later brought to gruesome life by Slappy. But McLendon-Covey and Chris Parnell as a monster-fied store manager are under-used and Sarah and the boys and even the bully are so thinly written that they barely register among the colorful ghosts and ghouls.

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This is not a film that spends time on character development or lessons learned. This is just about the boo-scares and special effects (that spider is pretty cool), the kind of silliness kids love (a skeleton dog pees on a fire hydrant), and a few self-aware references (Stine sees an “It”-style red balloon and sniffs that he thought if it first). There is that perennial kid favorite: triumph over a bully, plus a reassuring chance to out grown-up the grown-ups and rescue a mom. It’s not as clever or engaging as the first “Goosebumps,” and nowhere near Halloween classics like “Monster House,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” or “ParaNorman.” But striking the right balance of silly and scary makes it trick or treat-worthy, the cinematic equivalent of a fun-size candy bar.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/goosebumps-2-haunted-halloween/

[thegloober]

Pregnancy Games for Girls: Inside the Weird World of Pregnant Disney Princesses

I am helping a very pregnant Cleopatra give birth. It’s an exhausting and complicated process. First, she needs to be fanned. Then, I’m required to rub an ointment on her bulging belly (clockwise, counterclockwise and finally up and down). After leading her to a palace bathhouse where I light candles, play music, put aromatic herbs in the water, and rub her belly some more, I catch her newborn infant. The child is clean and Cleopatra is blissfully free of pain. There are no viscera. There is no feces. Cleo begins nursing immediately as I watch, proud of my work as a doula, but also confused. The birth is nothing like the ones I witnessed when my kids were born. It’s sanitized for an audience of little girls — an audience that is popularizing a bizarre genre of “pregnancy games” online.

“Cleopatra Gives Birth Into Water” is one of literally hundreds of pregnancy games that run the gamut from “Pregnant Ice Queen Bath Care” to “Pregnant Draculaura Emergency.” Taken as a whole, they offer mediocre gameplay and a very weird message about human procreation. Taken as a whole, they mean something. What do they mean? Well, that’s where it gets complicated.

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I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon my first pregnancy game. But I do remember that it involved dressing a pregnant Elsa from Frozen in a variety of outfits that accentuated her late-term midriff. Why did I do this? I don’t know. I like it when my wife was pregnant. I was bored. I have a subconscious desire to support the animated Norwegian monarchy. These things are all probably true, but truer still is this: I have a tendency to fall down internet rabbit holes. And the pregnancy game rabbit hole is deep.

I discovered the game was part of a vast ecosystem of flash-based games found on gendered and vaguely porn-y sounding websites with names like GirlsPlay.com and GirlGames.com. All the games involved a popular female character — Cinderella, the Little Mermaid, the Miraculous Ladybug — carrying and giving birth to a happy, healthy baby. The games were sweet. Creepy and sweet.

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Let’s be clear: These games were built so that seedy, backwater websites on the edges of the internet can sell ads or user engagement of some stripe at a high volume. Almost none can be played with an active ad-blocker. But that still doesn’t explain why the genre seems to appeal so strongly to its target audience of young girls or what those young girls think they’re learning from all the massaging and soothing.

Nobody wants to see Ariel from the Little Mermaid screaming in agony before pushing a viscera-covered baby fish monster out of the gonads near her anal fin.

The exact steps are subject to change, but the games all take the same basic shape, requiring players to provide some form of medical assistance to a cartoon mom going through labor. Players might provider her with pills or oxygen, take a sonogram or give her an injection. Players might also massage the mom, apply lotion to her belly or take her blood pressure. Whatever the process, the outcome is the same: the birth of a baby whose genitals are tastefully obscured. You know, like real life.

But obviously, while they’re simulations in spirit, none of the pregnancy games are supposed to offer little girls real-life insight. They are saccharine and sanitized. They suggest that after the love story, the inevitable outcome is pregnancy. It just happens. How? Ask your fleshy parents.

There are exceptions, obviously. A game called “Princess Cesarean Pregnancy,” for instance is startling explicit in its depiction of a cesarean surgery. After injecting an anesthetic into the spine of princess “Elisa,” players have to cut and spread several layers of illustrated skin, fat and organs before pulling the baby free. They then have to sew everything back up before being told they have saved the princess and her baby. There is a brief moment of blood on the first incision, and to be fair, there are some kids who would likely enjoy understanding the cesarean process, such as it is. At least “Princess Cesarean Pregnancy” is honest in its depiction. In the vast majority of games, the baby just appears from nowhere, in the princess’s lap.

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Obviously, the lack of realism is probably for the better. Nobody wants to see Ariel from the Little Mermaid screaming in agony before pushing a viscera-covered baby fish monster out of the gonads near her anal fin. And, if they do, there are surely other websites to cater to those needs — none of them kid-friendly. But while pregnancy games aren’t particularly graphic, that doesn’t mean they’re not disturbing. The small parts are innocuous. The whole isn’t.

In many of these games, the characters who are pregnant are Disney princesses, or at the very least Disney princess rip-offs. Is that really so distasteful? It’s really a matter of perspective. As an adult, pregnancy rarely occurs outside the context of sex. A pregnant princess causes an adult mind to conclude that Belle and the Beast got it on. And there is certainly a market for those kinds of thoughts. The internet is full of sites That depict the graphic copulation of Disney characters and their menagerie of not-quite-human sidekicks. And it’s fair to say the pregnancy games share the slapdash, bootleg quality of cartoon porn sites.

But little girls don’t see pregnancy in the same context as adults. They only understand it on a sexless continuum of theoretical procreation. These pregnancy games, for them, are the equivalent to playing house. There’s nothing really shocking about it. Women become mommies because they have babies. It’s that simple.

Except that it’s really not that simple, as any parent who struggled to answer the “where do babies come from” question can attest. The problem, aside from the sexualization of the beloved childhood characters is these games are clearly not made by people who care whether or not a kid might be traumatized opening Elsa’s abdomen to pull a baby free. Like the money grabbing YouTube channels that offer endless disturbing iterations of nursery rhymes the pregnancy game makers see kids as a commodity and have zero vested interest in not showing children weird stuff.

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Pregnancy games exploit a little girl’s curiosity about babies to make having them an aspirational goal.

Sure, kids being treated like a commodity isn’t anything new. Branded games are all over the internet, and kids love playing them. But what sets a pregnancy game apart from some mini-game downloaded in McDonald’s McPlay app is that it feels very clear that there is no regulation in how the games are made or what their value to kids might be. Also, there is no avenue for grievances. There is a sense that the makers know the games are awful but are also quite aware there are no repercussions for what they are doing. Good luck trying to track them down. The genre consists of internet pirates trying to explain birth to 8-year-old Frozen fans. And doing a really bad job.

And what’s more disturbing is that in their carelessness they have inadvertently created a dangerous message for girls. One in which birth and motherhood are portrayed as spotlessly pleasant. These games make it seems like everything related to love is pleasant. They ignore that life is mostly rough edges and that none of it is easy. Love isn’t easy. Pregnancy isn’t easy. Birth is a gore-fest. Of course, kids don’t need this shoved in their face, but they shouldn’t expect things to go smoothly. They’ll only be disappointed.

Consider how different these games are to the message of Barbie. Sure the doll is impossibly built, but at least Barbie excels in the workplace. She has Ken, yes, but their relationship isn’t about having a family, it’s about supporting Barbie’s variety of successful careers from science to professional sports. On the other hand, pregnancy games exploit a little girl’s curiosity about babies to make having them an aspirational goal.

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And all of this is likely happening under the radar of mother’s and fathers. Many parents won’t even know their children are playing these games. And that’s a shame. Because there are important conversations about pregnancy and birth to be had between parent and child.

For many girls, that conversation is being fulfilled by a cartoon Cleopatra and her dark-skinned servant girls. And the lesson being learned is frightening. The fact is that parents better have the conversation with their kids about procreation or a criminal in Taiwan likely will.

The post Pregnancy Games for Girls: Inside the Weird World of Pregnant Disney Princesses was shared from BlogHyped.com.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/pregnancy-games-for-girls-inside-the-weird-world-of-pregnant-disney-princesses/