The Fretless Bass reviews: Toy Story 3

I'm going to be honest, when I first heard of Toy Story 3, I thought that it would be a tack-on plot with no expansion, just a screen feeding you the exact same movie again. However, when I did see it, I found that it was actually quite good.

The plot starts with the toys desperate attempt to get Andy to play with them again, and it fails. The Toys are dismayed because Andy is going off to college, and they will be thrown out, donated, or stuck in the attic. Andy decides to take Woody to college and leave the rest of his toys in the attic. But, in a move of brilliant stupidity, Andy puts the attic-bound toys IN A GARBAGE BAG and LEAVES THEM AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS. The toys almost get put into a garbage truck, but escape, and hide in the donation box because they don't believe Woody when he tells them that Andy wanted them to go to the attic. So the toys all end up in a day care, where the movie quickly becomes a dystopian film.

I did like the film, and I have liked all the Toy Story films, and this movie did much better than I expected, and wraps up the plot of all three movies nicely. One thing I liked a lot is how they had Buzz reset to his original factory settings. This problem has come up now in all three movies. (If you don't remember, Buzz was first introduced like that in the first movie, and in the second movie, another Buzz Lightyear toy replaced Buzz and thought he was on a mission and all the other toys that were completely unarmed and frozen with smiles of their faces were somehow out to get him). But this movie did it well, I would have expected them to just have him fall over and hit his head, but they integrated the event into the plot very smoothly.

I have a few bad things to say about it, too. First, You could replace the character of Woody with MacGyver, and no one would stop drooling on their official fan t-shirt to notice. Also, about fifteen percent of the movie was Woody climbing, but seriously, that toy could out climb Ryan Seacrest if there was a photo shoot at the top of the cliff. My final grievance is with the plot, in every single Toy Story movie, the toys somehow get lost and need to find their way back to Andy. If not for the Andy-going-to-college part, You could have swapped Toy Story 3 with Toy Story 2 and no one would notice except stuck up reviewers like yours truly.

All in all, Toy Story 3 is a very good movie and I would recommend it. I give it an 8/10.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Jak and Daxter: the lost frontier

I have had a playstation for a long time, and I must say one of the most consistently excellent titles in the entire gaming world would be Jak and Daxter. The first game was set in a fantacy world where the lifeblood of existence is a form of energy called eco, Jak, the main character despite the title, has the ability to harness eco and use it to fight enemies. So Jak and his best friend, Daxter, go to the forbidden Island and Daxter falles into a pit of dark eco, and comes out as a half-weasel, half-otter, and ottsel. Jak must journey to the far end of the world to find a cure and instead, after an incredible adventure, finds a mysterious machine powered by eco.

In the second game Jak uses the machine and it takes him, Daxter, Samos the green eco sage, and his daughter, Kiera, to the future, they land in Haven City, Jak is captured by the evil barron Praxis, and is tortured with dark eco injections for two years. Daxter finally saves him and they soon discover that Jak turns into a horrible dark eco powered creature whenever he gets to mad. He and Daxter then save the city, and all is well.

In the third and fourth games, Jak and Daxter again save the world or the city. All of these games have been excellent. The Lost Frontier, however, is a knock off piece of crap. The first thing you notice is how the plot is like someone wrote "and then this happened!" in sharpie at the end of the story line. Jak 3 ended nicely, and wrapped up the entire action series nicely with no lose plot lines, and Jak X (the fourth installment) had a tack-on, but still believable plot. In The Lost Frontier, all of a sudden the world is running out of eco and Jak, Daxster, and Kiera need to find more. The one thing that really pissed me off though, was that Jak's personality had changed. In the earlier games, he was an angry guy, now he's twice as talkative and has a new voice actor. The gameplay is mostly the same, except they ditched the lovable mod-gun in favor of some piece of crap called the "Gun staff" Why mess with something if it isn't broken? Along with that in the gameplay area is the movement, in the precursors to this game, the movement felt very free and open, in The Lost Frontier, everything seems choreographed. In short, this game was so bad, that I stopped playing it half an hour in to write an angry review. And now as I write this very sentence, I realize that was dumb. I'm going to publish this anyway, and keep playing the game, if it gets any better, I'll be sure to tell you. Mickey's rating(for now) 4/10.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Robert B. Parker characters

I love Robert B. Parker, I love all of his books that I've read. I've especially liked the Appaloosa series. I have, though, noticed some similarities between some of his characters, mainly in the Spenser and Appaloosa series. First, Hawk and Virgil Cole seem to have the same personality. They are both the really experienced guy that barley ever speaks his mind and never does anything unnecessary. Spenser and Everett Hitch aren't all too similar, but they do seem to be the only people in their respective worlds with a @#$%^&* conscience. Also, I read the same phrase twice in the two series. In Paper doll (a Spenser book) and Brimstone (an Appaloosa book) the phrase "He'd f@#$ a snake if you'd hold it for him" comes up. I like Robert B. Parker's books, and I like his writing, but you'd think that re-using a phrase as memorable as that would be something writers wouldn't do. Also, all the "whores" in both series always have the same personalities, they all don't mind being a "whore", but they'd rather be something else, and they seem to know everything about everything illegal happening within five hundred miles. Also, the plots of Brimstone and Appaloosa are almost the same. Virgil and Everett ride into a town, become the law, keep a whole bunch of saloon owners and drunks that are so dumb they couldn't tell you the right way to sit on a horse from killing each other, save some woman from some kidnappers in the desert, ride back to the town, and solve the problem with one very loud word, "BANG" and move on to the next town with or without the girl that Virgil can't seem to make his mind up about. Now, don't get me wrong, I liked both those series a lot, but I would have fixed the above errors instead of hopping that my entire fanbase only knew me for one particular series and never read the other.

A dark week for TV

The week of May 23rd 2010, was a dark week for TV. I'm writing this to complain about it. First, Lost ended on Sunday, then 24 on Monday, then Flash Forward on Thursday. Lost had announced that season six would be its final, so I had time to cry and take some coping classes, but I didn't find out 24 and Flash Forward were going to end until both shows were most of the way through each of their seasons. The people at Fox made a big deal out of the end of 24. Flash Forward however, didn't, when I heard about it, I called all my friends to see if they found out before i did and neither of them had.

Lost was a show about the survivors of a plane crash on a F@#$ed up Island (I can't tell you any more than that because the plot is so complicated it would make skynet short out). 24 was a show that ran for eight seasons about a federal agent named Jack Bauer saving the world. In the first season, he saved his family (spoiler alert!) mostly, in the second season, he saved the world, then he retired, came out of retirement, retired, came out of retirement, went rouge, came back and retired, then un-retired and went rouge again. Flash Forward was a perfect hybrid of the two, it was about an FBI agent named Mark Benford who is assigned to trace the cause of whatever caused every human on the planet to faint and see the future for two minuets and seventeen seconds. It had the military action of 24, and the having no Idea what the f#$% is going on from Lost. So anyway, all three shows had their series finale in one week, and I was devastated. Lost could have kept going for three hundred years with all the LSD induced plot twists, and Flash Forward had recently made a brilliant move to keep the plot moving until 2016. 24 was the only show I thought had a good reason to end; Jack Bauer had run out of disasters to save the world from. All three shows closed with excellent writing, and I'm willing to bet Lost and 24 will be made into movies when I'm 45.

The Fretless Bass Reviews: Jackson Browne and David Lindley.

Last summer, I saw Jackson Browne in Boston on his Time the Conquerer tour. I liked it a lot, actually, I loved it, I'm a huge Jackson Browne fan, and Time the Conquerer, while not his best album in my opinion, delivered more Jackson as I like him. Now, Jackson and his former guitarist, now solo, David Lindley, have put out an album of live songs recorded from a tour they did in Spain. Now, they're going to tour the U.S.A with acoustic instruments, and I have tickets! I expect this concert to be just as good as the other one I saw, if not better. David Lindley opens for the show, followed by Jackson Browne, then David comes back and they close the show together. I'm really excited, and I'll be sure to review it for you.

The Fretless Bass Reviews: Tom Rush at the Union Coffee House.

I just saw Tom Rush play in Carlisle, and it was really cool. For all of you who don't know, Tom Rush is a folk singer who's heyday was in the 60's and 70's. Some of you may know his song Circle Game. The cool thing is that Rush is a comedian, in between songs he tells hilarious stories. He's also an amazing guitar player, and singer, but he's the only singer I know that could also be called a comedian. If you are into the folk scene, I highly recommend seeing Tom Rush.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Uncharted 2 is the best game I have ever played. The story starts with a good old flash back sequence where in the first ten seconds of the game, the protagonist, Nathan Drake, finds himself hanging off the safety rail of a train car that is coincidentally hanging off a cliff. In the flash backs that follow, you find out that Drake was talked into stealing a priceless artifact that belonged to Marco Polo by an old associate, Harry Flynn. Now, Drake is a fortune hunter, but presumably was a thief before the events of Uncharted: Drake's fortune (the first game). So Drake goes with Flynn, and Something goes horribly wrong (any more would be a spoiler). The most basic plot of the game is that Drake is competing with an army of mercenaries to obtain a priceless treasure. Now for the review. My favorite part of the game (this was a hard thing to decide because I liked all of the game) was the way that combat, climbing/jumping, and puzzle solving, were all evenly dispersed throughout the game and were all still fun. Combat is amazing, the diversity of weapons is nice, everyone can have a favorite gun and/or combination of guns. My favorite weapons to carry are a wes .44 and an M4. The hand to hand combat system is good, they linked all combat to two buttons and made it so you felt like you knew what you were doing, and the combos varied enough to keep you entertained. One big thing I like is how punching is not more powerful than bullets (as in many 3rd person shooters). Climbing/jumping was powerful. Nathan Drake is superhumanly athletic, so he can pull himself over walls, leap from one ledge up to another, and jump across a twenty foot gap. One thing I didn't like though, was how even though Drake is supposed to be superhumanly athletic, he grunts like Venus Williams when he jumps off so much as the curb. Puzzle solving is the weakest out of the three, still fun, but weak. Every puzzle in the game can be solved by opening Drake's journal and it literally shows him the answer. There was one puzzle where the hardest part was remembering each symbol's corresponding color as you turned a page in the book. And now for my favorite part of the gameplay, stealth. I love stealth games, and uncharted 2, while not Batman Arkham Asylum (I'll review that one soon), satisfies. The parts where stealth is possible are really obvious, so you don't die twenty times only to realize you could have taken out six guys before ever even drawing your gun. The cover is nice too. The issues are again the grunting, I once jumped behind a guy and made a grunt that would have woken a dead man, and the guard didn't even blink. I don't know whether to blame this on the sound people or the fact that the AI couldn't tie it's shoelaces with instructions that have size thirty font. Also, the stealth move is almost always the same, a neck break. I'm about to wrap up, so know: the bad things I said about this game are purely stuff you don't even notice until you stop to write a review about it, and this game is flawless in every sense of the word. Mickey's rating 10/10.

Introduction to The Fretless Bass

Hi, everyone, I'm Mickey, and as you can guess, this is my blog, The Fretless Bass. I'm going to do my best to be funny and give good reviews of comics, movies, video games, and music. I think I should start by explaining the title. The Fretless Bass means many things. I play bass guitar, so that is one reason for choosing this name. Also, a fretless bass as an instrument is unguided, you need to play it by ear, like my writing style. I'm also a bass singer, and relatively laid-back when writing, so I am also a fretless bass. I do sincerely hope you enjoy reading my blog, and I also hope I'll enjoy writing it.