Friday Review: Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure

I typically wait until I’ve either beaten a game or played it for a good long time before I decide to review it, but here’s a first impression review of this travesty of a game. I’ve found very few reviews for it online, so this will be one of the first. Trust me, this is one game to avoid if you can. I got it for Christmas and it just hasn’t been doing it for me. I’ve only played it for around 45 minutes, and that was way too long, so bare with me.

I thought it was going to be something like Endless Ocean, in which most of it would be learning about the sea, except that this would be learning how the ocean was in prehistoric times. It’s actually about you, a sea monster, trying to escape from “these waters”, which already isn’t very specific. It goes downhill from there.

The artwork is probably the best thing this game has going for it. The Discovery Channel has always been good at rendering ancient creatures into 3D, and this time it’s no different. Looking at these creatures reminds me of why the ocean is so darned scary.

There is an art gallery in the game, but it’s hardly impressive. I would have thought the developers would have taken this opportunity to really showcase their stuff, but it’s pretty mediocre. I was quite disappointed.

During the opening sequence (before the menu pops up), the animation is smooth and fluid. It looks a lot like the quality you get from their TV specials, but once the game begins, it’s jerky, rigid, and all around very unappealing. Particularly when you switch the camera to view the creature from the front (called “monster cam” for some reason). The movements are just ugly, and I typically don’t like to use that word, but in this game it’s warranted!

Let’s put it this way: I’ve seen fishing games with better animation than this! It’s unfortunate that you can tell the pride and joy of the developers was not put into this game. It was a quick job that was pushed onto shelves as early as possible to promote their movie.

As far as sound effects go, I really can’t think of any at the top of my head. They pretty much skipped over this, but I do recall that the monster takes a deep breath when you bring it to the surface. Other than that, I really can’t think of anything.

Things are pretty quiet music-wise until you start to fight with something. When that happens some big, epic score starts to play. Don’t hold your breath; it’s not Shadow of the Colossus, but it’s not terrible. The music keeps the battles somewhat afloat.

Do we have to go into gameplay? You run around finding fossils, eating stuff, and fighting with other monsters, and none of this I executed very well. Oh, and you find little glowing things that warp you, contain fossils, etc. You also have to get some oxygen every once in a while.

doesn’t sound fun, does it? Here’s where it gets worse. The controls for this game are awful! I’m not kidding; it’s hard to do anything. Here’s a quick rundown of it all.

Firstly, you unlock more than one monster that you can play as, and each monster is supposed to have a crappy special ability that doesn’t do a whole lot other than make each creature sound unique. These monsters look impressive, but they all basically do the same thing.

To nourish these guys, you have to eat little creatures. This is very aggravating for the first portion of the game because the first monster can’t really do anything. It’s very difficult to find anything you can actually eat (trust me, I spent twenty minutes trying to kill those stupid turtles), and most monsters you encounter will kill you very quickly.

Actually doing these tasks is a royal pain. The controls are very jerky and half the time they don’t work the way you want them to. You basically swim up to a creature and wait for the cursor to change into a “bite” mark, which doesn’t look much like a bite to me. Then, you just hit the B button and the creature attacks. Most of the time it misses. If said monster attacks you back (and their attacks are pretty accurate compared to yours), you have to move the control stick to jerk out of the way. No, swimming out of the way doesn’t work, and the camera is so bad in this game that it’s hard to tell where you’re thrashing to and where the monster is. My butt was royally kicked and rather than see that as a challenge to go back, it just killed any motivation I had left for completing the game.

Let’s move on to that crappy camera. It’s okay for just swimming around, and you actually move about much like you do in Endless Ocean. However, one of the buttons makes your creatures do a 180 degree turn, leaving your half wondering exactly what just happened the first time you accidentally use it. The camera isn’t very flattering when it comes to using those special dodging/fighting moves.

Not to mention, there’s also a thing called the “monster cam”, which I thought meant that the camera would shift to the monster’s point of view, thus eliminating several of the games most annoying quirks. Instead, this simply swings the camera around the front of the monster so we can look at it’s jerky head and neck movements and wonder why this game was even made if they really weren’t going to put effort into it.

I should have known something was wrong when the instruction book offered a mere two pages of game explanation, but alas! my logic failed me!

Do I recommend it? No! This review was put together about as hastily as this game was, but I think I covered pretty much every aspect as to why you shouldn't buy this game. Watch the show, but don't play the game.

Maddie Blaustein Has Passed Away

Originally found on Pokémon Nightmare:


It is a sad time for lovers of the original voice actors for the Pokémon series this week; Maddie Blaustein, who voiced Meowth from episode 32 to episode 421, has died. In it from the start, Maddie was one of the most beloved voice actors of the Pokémon series and will be sorely missed. Our hearts go out to her friends and family during this time of loss. The cause of her death, which occured during her sleep last Friday, is not known at this time. Maddie was 48 years old.

For more information regarding her death, click here.

I feel extremely sad right now. I hate dubs, hate 4Kids, but find myself very sad. She always did a spectacular Meowth (I liked all of the Team Rocket voice actors, actually), and a plethora of other voices as well. This is just my small tribute to her. I can't really put this on my Japanese Blog because it's dub, but I might change my mind in the future.

Be sure to check out her wikipedia page, because I'm really bad at expressing this stuff, and I've already posted it on plenty of forums.

In honor of her undying memory, please listen to this and laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFGLJkJVp4Q

Here's another video as a tribute to her:

RIP Maddie. I know you've blasted off to Heaven now!

Ron Paul on the Auto Bailouts

I don't even have to explain this guy, he's just amazing. Ron Paul has been predicting our economic ups and downs for a long time, and he's also great at foreign policy, too. Thomas Paine once wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls." Those words ring true today as we face a nation that now fears its freedoms instead of celebrates them. We give up our civil liberties willing for the sake of security, which is exactly what Benjamin Franklin warned us against.

Moreover, we have now embraced a man who waves a sign that reads "Change" while promoting fascist and unconstitutional laws. What happened to freedom? And why is it that the man who knows what he's talking about gets laughed at.

For those of you who may not know who Ron Paul is, please check out the links on the left-hand side of the blog and watch this video.

Live-Action Avatar Movie - I Figured it Would Suck

As always, you can get the original article here, so you can see this travesty for yourself. Now, I'm always critical whenever animation goes the live-action route, and with good reason. Just look at some of the epic failures of the past: He-Man, Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, and the list goes on. Also, don't forget the new Dragonball movie.

Naturally, when I first heard that Avatar was going live-action, I figured it would be a flop. Nickelodeon is kind of known for its habbit of disowning anything that extends beyond their target group of kids aged 6-12. For some strange reason, people seemed to be thinking that they'd get an awesome PG-13 Avatar film instead of what Shyamalan seems to be doing.

First of all, the cast. There's been a lot of people who are genuinely angry over the fact that so far all of the actors have been white. Now, I'll move on to that in the future, but I have to say that their insistence of an all-Asian cast is a bit of a stretch. Not all of the characters look Asian, although the bulk of them should probably be, like Toph!

To start off, I'm going to actually defend Jesse McCartney. I thought I'd never ever do that, but I've heard that he's actually not a bad actor when he isn't swooning preteen girls. Perhaps he's trying to break out of his type-casting problem by playing Zuko. Now, I don't want him to play Zuko. I'd rather have all unknowns for the various roles, but if he's really good, I won't complain.

My biggest complaint with McCartney would be that if he lands the role, it will probably be because the casting director realized that the Zuko character has a very large following of freakish fangirls (no offense to you girls, you're awfully entertaining in the forums), and casting McCartney would pretty much be screaming, "Hey pre-adolescent girls, we've made sure this year's hottest young actor is playing the character you all love!" That's not a very good reason to cast someone, but I could be wrong.

Now, this is when I start to bash the apparently racist casting decisions. Check it out!

Now look at these actors and tell me they even slightly resemble the character. They don't have to be perfect, but at least they should look kind of like Eskimos. Really, this is a travesty, a crime against humanity, and every other bad thing they could have done. At least Justin Chatwin tries to look like Goku in the new Dragonball Evolution movie, but these people don't even slightly resemble their respective characters!

I'm afraid that it might all go downhill from here. Well, it started going downhill the minute it was decided to do a live-action film, but you get the point. Avatar is an insanely detailed show; you can tell that a lot of time and research went into making it, and I don't just mean from a martial arts standpoint. They not only used Chinese calligraphy but they also get even the mannerisms right, from specific hand guestures to bows. It's those little details that help bring each culture to life, not just the different scenery, although that's also incredibly detailed.

Avatar feels more like a peice of history, much like Lord of the Rings, but this film looks more like a teen flick out to make some bucks.

The actual show is also swimming with political undertones and deals with things that other shows either ignore completely or force down your throat in a very preachy sort of way. Avatar manages to deal with death, suffering, hope, honor, compassion, vengeance, and obligations without doing any of that.

On a more positive note, since it seems that even I was mistaken in that I thought they'd actually put some effort into casting this film, this presents an amazing window of opportunity for me. Maybe I can play a character, since race and other appearances make no difference, apparently. I don't know who I want to play (maybe Jeong-Jeong), but it apparently makes no difference that I'm 22 years old and only 4'10". See y'all on the big screen!