Week in Review: Quake Wave, Resident Evil 6, Movies, etc

Welcome back to another week in review over here at my wonderful website of stuff!

This week I finally convinced myself to do it.  What is that you ask?  I finally put in a preorder for the fantastic looking Fan Toys’ (not to be confused with Fans Project) Quake Wave, which if you can’t guess is a third party, Masterpiece-style Shockwave.  This looks to be the third and final run of the figure, so I finally caved because I didn’t want to miss out.  There are only a few places selling Quake Wave, and I would assume because it is so blatant of a Shockwave mold that retailers with Hasbro or Takara-TOMY connections don’t want to be involved with it.  I grabbed mine off of a site called Captured Prey.  It came to a little over $160 shipped and I did have to pay up front, they say the expected ship date is around June or July.  I believe they are closing out preorders soon as well, they mentioned it on Twitter earlier this week.

It’s a hefty price for a third party Transformer, but I’ve heard nothing but praise from people who have him.  Check out the pictures below if you haven’t seen this yet.  Quake Wave looks to be a really sharp toy and will sit proudly next to MP Soundwave.

 

Video Games – Segmenting Muliplayer DLC: When Resident Evil 6 came out on consoles I heard a lot of bad things about it.  This saddened me so I never picked it up even though I am a HUGE Resident Evil fan.  When the game was announced to be ported to the PC at a discounted price I then decided to jump in.  One of the perks of preordering the game was that I got a “season pass” of all the DLC, which of course turned out to be all multiplayer modes.  If you didn’t preorder the game these modes cost about $5 each.

Just a word of warning if you do decide to purchase Resident Evil 6 on PC: Don’t buy ANY of the DLC!

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I think this picture best illustrates what you will find if you attempt to connect to any type of multiplayer mode in the game.  There is literally no one playing any of them.  The first day it was out I found one person hosting a “Mercenaries” lobby, but they apparently went idle so I gave up and went solo.  Luckily Mercenaries comes free with the game and has a solo mode.

resident_evil_6_left_4_dead_2.0_cinema_640.0Capcom has some pretty awful DLC schemes, but I think charging people for a multiplayer mode is one of the worst.  First of all it’s a Resident Evil game and people aren’t tearing down the walls to play Resident Evil Deathmatch.  So by making multiplayer modes paid DLC you are effectively cutting the audience that would play these modes by 75%.  Once those people realize after the first purchase that they aren’t going to find games they won’t come back for more so you can probably cut that 25% in half or more.

Don’t you think a more effective plan would be to have all multiplayer modes available to the people that bought the game, and then use the DLC scheme to give them new costumes or characters?  You can’t tell me selling a Barry or Wesker character slot for multiplayer modes wouldn’t be a hit.  Halo or Call of Duty could get away with charging for a multiplayer mode, Resident Evil doesn’t have that built in community to keep it together.  It’s a dumb move and a blemish on an otherwise pretty fantastic game and PC port.  Skip the DLC and just play Mercenaries or do the campaign if you wish … Resident Evil 6 is a blast.  Plus on Steam you get the Left 4 Dead 2 cast to play in the new Mercenaries: No Mercy mode.

On the topic of Resident Evil, Hot Toys has come quite a long way since this.  To go from that to this in a few years is pretty impressive.  Of course I couldn’t afford Hot Toys’ action figures when they were in the $100 – $150 range.  They are now in the $200 – $300 range mocking my inability to buy them.

tom-cruise-oblivion-640x342Movies – Oblivion: I had no intention of seeing this one at all.  I’m not really a Tom Cruise fan and the trailers didn’t do much to sell me on it either.  Yet all it took was one of my friends telling me it was “Portal” the movie.  I didn’t have any expectation going into the film, but Portal similarities had me intrigued.  It’s also worth mentioning that it really wasn’t a Portal movie, but instead a whole collection sci-fi and video game ideas mashed into one.

The movie seemed to take ideas from Portal, Mass Effect, The Matrix, Moon, and various other films.  I don’t think it did any of these homages overly well, but it was a competent movie and I enjoyed it all the way through.  If you are looking for something that is on the sci-fi side, and isn’t a sequel to something it may be worth checking out.  It won’t blow you away, but its not a bad movie to sit down and watch.

I also saw Iron Man 3 this week.  However being that not too many people in the US have seen it yet I won’t get into spoilers, instead I will offer a few of my thoughts.  I enjoyed the first Iron Man movie, didn’t see the second, and hated Avengers.  This movie had an interesting plot that I think they just went too far with.  There is a pretty major revelation about 3/4 of the way through the movie that I can only imagine will annoy some people.  On the other hard I think it is one of the more creative and respectable turns a Marvel movie has done ever.  The only problem is I think the movie should end shortly after.

It doesn’t.

albert_wesker_uroboros_by_lena14081990-d5skc6eI’ve talked a lot about Resident Evil already, but basically the end of Iron Man turns into the plot of a Resident Evil game.  The similarities to Wesker in Resident Evil 5 are pretty easy to spot.  If you are a fan of the video game series I think you will pick up on it when you see the movie as well.

It takes a lot to impress me because I am really tired of the comic book hero movies, but Iron Man is definitely one of the better series.  For a third film in the franchise, Iron Man 3 is able to keep itself on the rails whereas most other movies fall off.

Misc – What I’m Checking Out:

Masters of the Universe Day was today!  Check out my link round-up, a bunch of us bloggy people were doing things.

I was actually amazed when I saw Battlegrip’s reviews at how deep Gentle Giant’s jumbo vintage Star Wars figures were into the line.  It’s pretty impressive and Phil over there takes great pictures, definitely something to check out.

I tried my luck with the latest series of Lego Mini Figures, I did not get Mr. Gold.  I still find paying $3+ for these ridiculous, yet every series I’ll buy a couple.

TF Source has a nice blog post on Binaltech/Alternators.

I haven’t checked much else out this week, got a few reviews done for the site.  But been pretty busy otherwise.  Have a great week!


6 thoughts on “Week in Review: Quake Wave, Resident Evil 6, Movies, etc”

    1. I seriously doubt it for a couple reasons. First there is no real mainstream hype for the movie, and second I don’t think Tom Cruise signs over his likeness for anything.

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