I went to see it tonight, and it was surprisingly good. Even with Jamie "Midnight" Foxx and Jennifer "Alias" Garner, it was very enjoyable and topical.

It didn’t go in guns blazing; it built up the tension and set the scene, and then at the very end it erupts into a symphony of ultraviolence. Jamie Foxx has got a great throwing arm, by the way.

Will it be better than Death Proof? Only time will tell.

I was almost going to give this one a miss until my curiousity got the better of me and I downloaded it.

Conan the video game is violent. Despite its simplistic nature, it’s definitely not one for the kiddies. The tagline was "If it bleeds, you can kill it". True to its word, I was hacking off limbs and camel punching pirates in no time at all. At its heart, it’s just a mindless, random hack-n-slash action game. There is no pesky inventory system to deal with - just mash the buttons to get some combos out and you’ll come out on top. You can also build up certain skills by repeating the use of a certain technique, and presumably you’ll be able to level up these techniques to be more powerful or have a greater range of effect.

You can also collect red Runes (ala the red orbs in Onimusha and Devil May Cry) that you can spend to learn new skills.

There was one thing that entered my mind when I played this game - it was loaded with testosterone. Every action that you do through Conan, you feel like you’re a man. A manly man. When Conan meets the Queen for the first time and she asks if he will serve under a woman, he replies, "Service her, aye, and gladly." I was expecting him to walk up, sling her over his shoulder, pick up a keg of beer and retire to his cave.

It also feels like you really are controlling a hunk of muscle. Every blow you land and every move you pull off feels and looks painful. With every slash, the ground turns rusty red with blood.

There’s only one thing that concerns me about this game, and that is its longevity. With Devil May Cry, it was unique enough and varied in pace so that it kept me interested all the way through. In God of War, Kratos had all those moves to perfect and his agility made killing enemies a whole lot easier. This looks to follow the same formula - it remains to be seen if it can live up to the standard backed by a solid name.

I wait to be pleasantly surprised. 

There’s something about Japanese fighter games that get localised here. Something must get lost in the translation, because when I tried the demo, I was trying my hardest not to laugh.

Seriously. There should be nothing funny about a karate master rippling with muscles and taking down opponents with ease, nor should there be anything funny about a pro-wrestler pulling off a submission hold on his opponent.

But somehow, I can’t help but find the parts in between the fighting completely ridiculous. You see the cute teenage girl fighter prance around and exclaim something in varying tones, and then you see the psychotic boxer dude scream in reply, "This wil hurt you more than it will hurt me!" I’m glad you’re on the right track, boyo.

The karate dude isn’t much better. He’ll say something in Japanese along the lines of "(My style of karate) is the BEST" before pushing his palms face down in front of him and breathing out a bass sigh of relief, like he just took a monster dump.

But the guy I really love is the wrestler guy. When he delivered finishing lines like "I am the Ultimate" before he leapt forward and fly-kicked the camera to the ground, I didn’t care whether or not I was laughing at him or with him.

Having said that, the fighting itself was quite good, and caters for button bashers and combo monkeys alike. After my first few rounds of mashing the controller, I slowed it down and tried to pull off certain combos with varying degrees of success. It even took the legwork out of pressing button combinations by assigning the trigger / bumper buttons to predefined key combinations. The animations were pretty standard and the environments weren’t too bad for a fighter game.

As I digress from the hilarity of obvious cultural misalignments, I find myself looking at whether or not my experiences here would warrant me paying for the full version. It probably would have been good as a gag, if only for the amusing dialogue and post-fight scenes.

But I’m not much of a next-gen console fighting fan anyway, so I’ll give this one a miss. I’ll just stick to Neo Geo classics on the emulator.

When I came into work on Saturday, I saw the effects of everyone who had worked the midnight shift for cutover.

It’s pretty scary seeing people who are really tired. Not only do they look like they really need a good lie down, their fuses are much, much shorter. That’s if they are coherant enough to know how to become irritable in the first place.

Anyway, after tying up some loose ends at work there wasn’t much point in me sticking around since they were deploying some patches until later that night, so I went home, slept from about 7pm to midnight, and waited for the phone call telling me to come in to help out.

It never came.

So I stayed up that night until 4am trying to play the Stranglehold demo on PC for a bit of a laugh, and working on some writing (expect some new stuff today). I’ll just say that the demo crashes my computer. Multiple times. An AMD dual core paired with a 7800 GTX and 2gb of RAM was suggested as the bare minimum spec for the game. I was running it on 1024x768 with all the video options off (yep, all two of them…gotta love PC ports).

*sniff*

Anyway, new stuff coming up.