Goat MMO Simulator

Zach Goodier

This simple add-on to the original very simple game allows players to role play as various goat classes in a fantasy world.  Your heroic goat embarks on quests, fights bears, harvesters, and other creatures of the world, to become the greatest goat in all the land.  What follows is more of the hilarity and ridiculousness that defined the original Goat Simulator.

For those interested in a little magic...

The world itself feels much bigger, and less like the cage you had in the original.  There are several small villages to explore (or destroy) at your leisure.  As well as a multitude of quests to keep you busy while you explore.  The quests themselves feel rather simple or silly, but they have the same charm that you’ve come to love with this game as a whole.

You can be a microwave, too.

You can select different classes, matching many of the standard classes seen in medieval fantasy, like tanks, and each comes with outfits and such.  They also come with unique skills that fit each class, and you can level up to unlock new stuff to enjoy.  I haven’t played with all the classes, but they all make me laugh, whether I picked the “Tank” goat with the big armor, or the “wizard” goat with magician outfit, they all result in laughter as you watch your goat flail around, grabbing items and people with its tongue, and being launched from catapults.

The world is surprisingly well-made.

Overall, this is a new and improved take on the original Goat Simulator.  They realized the things that made us enjoy the original, and expanded on it.  They give it the trappings of a real MMO, but they don’t take it seriously.  This game isn’t about picking up high level armor or ultra-rare weapons, it’s just about goofing around and enjoying yourself.  This is a cheap game with that more than pays for itself with light-hearted laughs and more of the ridiculousness that made us fall in love with the game in the first place.  However, this isn’t a very deep game, the mechanics are very simple, like the original, and once the humor of the goats themselves wears off, there isn’t much else to this game, so this gag game is much of what you’d expect, a solid laugh for a few hours, but once it all starts to age, there isn’t much left to enjoy.

Good:

-Plenty to laugh at and enjoy as you pick your classes and explore the world.

-More great ragdoll physics.

-Great world development, that only gets better with Steam Workshop support.

Bad:

-Shallow, with little fun once the initial laughs and excitement wear thin.

Scully Rating: 8 out of 10

Fury

By: Robert Murphy

There are very few things in this world that can be universally hated by everyone and anyone when brought up or thought about and Nazis are probably somewhere near the top of that list. For the second time we see Brad Pitt (playing Sgt. Don Collier) take on this enemy, this time playing a World War 2 tank operator nicknamed "Wardaddy," he and his crew have fought hard and are one of the fortune few American tank regiments to survive countless battles across Europe and Africa. This is no small feat either as American tanks had a tough time standing up against their German counterparts and not to mention when you see a tank you tend to focus all your efforts to destroy it. What hasn't changed for Pitt this time around though is the killing Nazi business that he so relished and in one of the bloodiest conflicts the world's ever known, we see that business is still booming.

The first scenes of Fury, we meet Wardaddy and his crew trying to go unnoticed after a shitstorm that's left everyone in their regiment dead on the battlefield around them but like countless times before "Fury" still keeps rolling forward. However, one thing has unfortunately changed as one of the team is now sitting beside all of them with parts of his skull splattered over his seat. This unfortunate turn of events leads to the introduction of a new team member, straight laced and shaven Pvt. Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) that was picked right of the writer's pool and put before battle ridden Sgt. Collier and his team. Perhaps the best advice that Collier gives to Ellison is to not get too familiar or close with his team, a cold remark at first glance but after seeing what they all go through, you can understand. The men who have served under Collier all this time are a bit of a mixed bag that you wouldn't expect to go together but do well on screen, Gordo (Michael Pena) is a Mexican-American, Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) is a foul mush mouthed man from somewhere in the American South and Bible (surprising to see Shia LaBeouf) serves as the groups conscious. Bible is perhaps my favorite among the group other than Wardaddy, the two have a relationship that is one of the best touches to the movie outside of the action and though Bible is more inclined to resit scripture, he does let the curse words fly when the situation calls for it. 

Outside of the tank, we see all the gruesomeness that this conflict brought forth as you see heads explode from shell fire, limbs get cut off by machine gun fire and bodies burn to a crisp and men scream in agony till they finally collapse. The chaos of battle is all too real and well depicted throughout the story, it's something that I haven't seen captured so well since Band of Brothers. For the rest of the crew though this is all business as usual, war turned the squeamishness of killing and taking a life a far more easier thing to do than it is for Ellison and once he sees his first death he almost can't believe what is happening around him. There's definitely a blurred line that comes out of conflict and the question of whether or not what is being done is ethically right but when Collier tries to teach Ellison that he needs to kill or be killed, the line starts to disappear for him. In fact, by the end of the movie you almost wouldn't have expected Ellison to be someone whose never seen action a day in his life. Collier almost becomes like a teacher and is a fatherly figure to Ellison and most of the crew for that matter, Bible is just about the closest to Collier's level but the rest need a bit of smacking around and he knows it. But even Collier has his moments where he knows that this conflict has effected him in a big way, the whole movie does a terrific job of showing the struggle they all go through and at one scene in particular the dysfunction reaches a severely critical point. The scene where Collier and Ellison discover to German woman in a recently captured town paints the picture of a dysfunctional family moment that goes from calm and peaceful into a nightmare very quickly. 

For the most part Fury does a great job of portraying a realistic war adaptation, that is until the ending of the movie where the team is the last ones standing after a tank skirmish kills their team members and they are stranded by a mine taking out their movements. This leads us to the big finale where the men decide to stay and fight off an advancing SS battalion so they don't flank the Allied forces. The SS are a hot button for Collier as they are separate from the regular German soldiers, they made children fight after killing their parents and hung people for disobeying them. The fight is seems far too ridiculous for these five men to survive as long as they do against the five hundred soldiers armed to the teeth with weaponry that could easily take out an immobilized tank. There's also the long winded speech preformed by the leader of the SS battalion during the fight where his men are getting slaughtered. It's not that the fight is too ridiculous or crazy but it shouldn't have gone so well for Collier and his crew for as long as it did. 

Overall though Fury is a great griping and gritty war movie that takes a good look at what this conflict was like. Shia LaBeouf's Bible and Brad Pitt's Wardaddy were excellent characters and share amazing on screen chemistry that I did not expect to see. The movie does not shy away from telling you how things are going to be in terms of it's characters and all that is going on around them. Jon Bernthal's character probably says it best in apologizing to Ellison as he states that they're not good men, he might be because he hasn't gone through what they have but that might be a good thing. 

Good:

- A truly griping war story

- Great performances by all of the cast members

- Pitt and LaBeouf have fantastic on screen chemistry

Bad:

- The ending is a little over the top and shouldn't have gone the way it did for so long

- A few lull moments in the story that I did not understand

Scully Rating: 8.0 out of 10 

Cowboy Bebop Opening

Classic opening to a classic anime.  "Tank" has a prominent Jazz influence behind it that does a great job of getting your toes tapping.  The music is accompanied by some video that mainly serves as teaser for the rest of the show.  One issue that could be noted is that the opening does very little to hint at the actual content in the series.

Anime: Cowboy Bebop

Song: "Tank"

Artist: Yoko Kanno

Scully Rating: 9.5 out of 10