Iron Man 3 Review

So months after Iron Man 3 came out in theaters, which I saw in IMAX 3D, we finally get the release of the summer blockbuster on DVD and Blu Ray several days ago. My hype for Iron Man 3 grew immensely after I saw the Avengers, I mean the first Iron Man movie introduced the origin of the metal-head to non-comic book readers and made him from a B-List character, to one of Marvel’s poster boys. Iron Man 2 was on the other end of the spectrum, where it just had too many stories to tell to hype up the Avengers, and even though it wasn’t as great as the first one, it was still entertaining to a certain extent. Now we’ve got the third entry in the franchise, and usually in the comic book superhero genre, the third movie is always the worst out of the 3. So is Iron Man 3 as good as the first, or does it fail just as bad, or even worse than the second film? So the story of the movie takes place about 6 months after the events of the Avengers, with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) who is suffering from PTSD after driving a nuke into a portal to deep space, and stopping the alien invasion. To cope with knowing that there are species of life outside of Earth, he builds over 40 Iron Man armors for just about every contingency he could think of. I felt like this was a great way to show how a great superhero/genius like Tony Stark copes with a situation of feeling tiny. For a guy who’s always been on the top of fame, wealth, and all the ladies, he’s really cracked down to secluding himself in his mansion, and being obsessed with creating more and more suits. As the movie goes on, we see the villain of our story, the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), a Middle Eastern terrorist who is obsessed with Chinese culture, and to bring America to its knees. The thing I love about the Mandarin is that he’s not exactly plotting his evil deeds in the actual movie, instead he likes to record himself doing mass acts of terror on video, and hacking into TV networks to show his misdeeds, mainly to bring fear to the American people. And without giving any spoilers, this “fear” plays into a bigger part later in the movie. So essentially after he can take no more, Tony Stark decides to give the Mandarin his home address in hopes to fight him head on, but is instead ambushed by helicopters full of guns and missiles which were disguised as news choppers, forcing him to suit up in the prototype of his latest Iron Man armor, which doesn’t go too well for him, although he does escape alive, and crash lands somewhere in the middle of the state of Tennessee. Throughout the movie Tony has to overcome the challenges of the whole nation, including his girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), believing he is dead, his best friend James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) taking on the mantle of the rebranded Iron Patriot, fighting against Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and his super-soldier serum knock off Extremis, and finding out the real mystery behind the Mandarin’s antics. So the movie does definitely delivers in the sense that the story is solid without giving too much mention to the Avengers, it gives Tony Stark a new arch for his character to go in, and creates a controversial twist over a certain character. Iron Man 3 however doesn’t do a lot of explaining for things from the comics, like the Extremis serum, which left a lot of unanswered questions in people’s minds. But other than that Iron Man 3 is a really fun movie which has a great balance of being dark, while at the same time being comical. There were some things that left a lot of people sore after watching the movie, but it’s what made me enjoy the movie even more, and with that being said, I’m giving Iron Man 3 an 8.5/10.

Favorite Movie of 2013

Favorite advertisement from my favorite movie of 2013.

Sonic Generations Review

So being a teenager who likes to be involved in a lot of things, one of things I really like to be involved in is video games, and although my generation has been known for being obsessed with first person shooters, while I am the complete opposite of that stereotype. And speaking of generations, the game I decided to review is Sonic Generations, a game that was made 2 years ago to honor the Hedgehog’s 20th anniversary.

Although I didn’t exactly grow up playing Sonic in the 90’s like most Sonic fans, but I did still feel like the franchise was something special. Sure Sonic has had some pretty great games, while others have been pretty half-baked. Heck, at one point the franchise was even at the brink of completely crashing in 2006, but that’s another story for another time. But Sonic did rise back up for me and brought back ex-fans with the release of Sonic Colors in 2010. And with that game’s success, Sega knew that they brought back their original audience, and that’s when they revealed Sonic Generations, the Sonic title that combines both the Modern style of gameplay, as well as the Classic style from the 90’s Genesis games. So is Sonic Generations the anniversary game that I hoped for, or does it wind up in the trash with all the other crap Sonic Games? Let’s find out.

So I’m going to start off with the story, and man did it let me down. The story starts off with a flash from the past, literally, as we see Classic Sonic running through the overused Green Hill Zone. Out of nowhere, a giant purple blob, known as the Time Eater, attacks the Classic Sonic and out of nowhere it takes us to Modern Sonic’s time, where we see his friends throwing him a surprise birthday party. Enjoying his party, the Time Eater shows up in the Modern era, and kidnaps all of Sonic’s friends, and banishing Sonic into a time limbo. In this limbo, Sonic meets up with his past, classic counterpart, where they find whited out levels from the Genesis, Dreamcast, and Modern Eras. The task at hand is to complete each level and at least one mission to progress to the bosses and future levels. Sonic’s friends are also frozen in the same state as the levels, and freeing them is just as simple as completing both classic and modern variations of the level, which really brings no challenge to the game at all. However, my biggest problem with the story is how hollow it is, I mean both versions of Sonic and his friends getting sent to limbo by an unknown time blob and it is just that. I mean there’s a twist at the end of the game revealing the real villain behind it all, but I was actually expecting that twist when I heard about this monster way back when the game was announced, so that really ruined the fun of that.  

But with sucky stories aside, how does the game really play? Well, let me start with Classic Sonic who is back in momentum-based 2D platforming, and essentially he plays identical to the original games on the Sega Genesis, so if you’ve played that game, there’s really no need to talk more about his gameplay. However there is one added feature, and that now when you spin dash, you can just press the X Button, rather than holding down, then pressing X, which really saves the time of charging the spin dash, which you can do as well. Then we have the gameplay of the current Modern Sonic. His gameplay style is similar to that of the 2 previous games, where you are essentially running, boosting to go faster, fighting enemies, avoiding obstacles, and platforming in 3D. As unique and fun as both gameplays are, I would really have to go towards the Modern Sonic gameplay, not because it’s the more recent Sonic gameplay, but because the level design feels like there different ways to beat the level.

I could go on and on about this game, but this is all I wanna talk about for now since I want to make a full review of the game sometime later, but to close off, Sonic Generations takes the old and new things that made his games great, and packaged them in a way for all fans to enjoy. I give Sonic Generations a 9/10.

Movie Trailer

Here's a movie trailer I made in freshman year for my old English class.