Getaway Movie ReviewOctober 1, 2013 by

This a very old review of the movie Getaway. It's never made print for my college's paper neither online regardless of it being done and finalized. Enjoy and please critique.

Do you want to feel confused? How about a young character with a coincidental expert hacking skills with all pieces of hardware and software with just the explanation of “education”? Or police officers that were trained to crash their cars effortlessly and do not have a clue what procedures are? Or even the director being completely okay with Selena Gomez who can’t decide whether she’s scared or excited with cars and bullets flying left and right?

Don’t bother with answering any of those question because I’m sure you don’t want anything described.

Gateway stars Ethan Hawke (The Purge, Training Day) as Brent Magna who has come home to his home ransacked and and his wife missing. After a phone call from mysterious voice blackmails him to robbed an armored sports car specially equipped with cameras, the movie starts to escalate, so does the ridiculousness

Brent is to follow his instruction or it’s curtains for his wife. This includes ramming cars, outrunning cops and destroying park events. This is fine and I even thought is was a neat concept regardless of it being an unoriginal. But all that positivity gets dashed out the window soon afterwards.

Enter Selena Gomez (Hotel Transylvania, Spring Breakers). A nameless young woman robbing Brent at gunpoint. Now that his identify is compromised, the voice tells Brent to drive off and kill Selena. Brent won’t do it and the voice lets him keep the girl to help.

This is my first problem.

Selena’s character says that the car that Brent took is hers and that a police officer, which turned out to be some random henchmen, told her where Brent was with the car. Okay, sounds like a part of an evil plan. But did they know she had a gun of her own? No. Did they know Brent wasn’t gonna kill her? Maybe. Did they realized that she had hacker skills? No, they probably should have checked for that detail, whatever.

No, not whatever. Selena’s character as it turns out seems very baked in, from the weak dialogue to the bipolar reactions to danger. The deeper the movie goes into not explaining her backstory in any meaningful way, the more I feel the original script writers Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell had Ethan Hawke in the solo badass driver-esque movie but the publisher didn’t find it to stand out enough. So pop in Selena Gomez and let’s rank in the fans that probably are not the demographic for an action driving movie, awesome.

To be fair, it is not just her.

No matter how much Brent and nameless girl causes thousands in property damage, destroy a power plant blacking out an entire section of a city or ram cops off the road like a Grand Theft Auto game. The police never thought to use roadblocks in effective ways or send out helicopters. There is one point where the police have Brent and the girl cornered yet the cops decided to let them go, why? Because the accomplice Selena Gomez, that was caught on camera mere hours ago causing miles of the city to blackout, is now suddenly a hostage. Oh no, let them go instead of creating a stalemate to find an opportunity to arrest them both.

Later in the movie, it is even discovered that the voice instructing Brent to cause chaos is doing so to cause the police to block all roads except one leading in and out of the city for citizens, creating an escape route

If I was the police chief, I would order the following, “Nobody is leaving the city until Brent Magna is caught. Is our budget that bad!? I should be home by now.”

Getaway is a movie that doesn’t think anything through. Nothing is explained. Why did the mysterious man chose Brent Magna? He is a race driver and he has “done things that he is not proud of” is that enough to make someone take your wife and use you for a master plan? No.

The need for Selena’s character is unexplained as well. Sure, she’s smart and helps Brent out a lot and she has more electronic devices than a Google employee but that’s all she was used as, a tool without anything that binds her enough to the story. It even takes her until Brent’s wife is harmed on video to realized why Brent is doing these suicidal tasks. Not the fifty times he said they have his wife. It’s like Finegan and Maxwell had to write her in the day Gomez was casted.

The most irritating thing about the movie is it had promise. There were sequences where the storytelling could have been decent at best and Ethan Hawke was actual good choice for his part but the writing was predictable and there were just car crashes after car crashes.

And there was a scene where the camera was strictly a first person view of the car chasing the strange man. It was tense, cars nearly hit them multiple times and the sounds were nicely empty as you just watched as the two weaved through streets.

Thinking something exciting and insane was going to happen, the moment was killed when the action went back to the typical fast moving action movie cuts. Wow, thanks.

The ending is frustrating.

Without spoiling anything, the mysterious man reasoning for putting Brent through everything all make you wish you walked out of the theater two hours ago.

At least now you know you can.


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Opinion: We are not yet ready for a digital future.September 27, 2013 by

A cut story of mine from my school's newspaper, The Rampage.

It was always said that video games will go all-digital, cutting out game specific stores and used game sales.

But technology is growing at a pace that might leave society behind. Instead of appreciating the advances in convenience, digital formats and streaming content, we all see it as another reason to continue staring at a screen and paying no attention to others around us.

I’m not one to say that our devices are going to leave us brain dead and disconnected from each other but we’re not far from it either. Leaving everything to digital-only means can have its problems too, whether they be from a technical standpoint or figuring out who really owns your content.

Applying this dilemma specifically to games, the industry is finding difficulties fully embracing its place in the digital realm.

In a perfect world, they can cut middlemen, save on manufacturing costs and get the profits to the developer’s pockets. The only problem is the loss of community for gamers.

With game stores gone, there will not be a place for like-minded people to converse about their favorite titles and hobbies. We will only be reduced to our friends and whoever we discover is a gamer from school or work. It’s a problem with this “personalized” experience of advancing technologies and social networks. We’re being disconnected.

Another potential problem of an only-virtual world is the need for hard drive space. Sure, larger sizes of 500 GB come cheap but when games in this coming generation are likely to be around 30 or more GB each, piling on your favorite songs and films is going to fill it fast.

So what do we look to?

Right now, we have sites like Netflix, YouTube and Pandora that stream content when you want it. That’s great for their purposes because music and videos are not streaming data by the hundreds of megabytes. It’s not a good alternative for games.

OnLive and Gaikai were the leading companies pushing for streaming games over a browser or Internet device.

The problem was it never worked that well. The games ran slowly and didn’t respond to quick button presses, something you don’t want to have with games that require steady and accurate actions. Fixes and better servers can help but what if you’re the one with bad Internet? Or if the Internet goes out altogether? What about turning on your device to learn Gaikai is down for maintenance? Well, you’re stuck not able to play anything.

And just because your games are tied to your account, is that content really yours? The website The Guardian reported on a story of a woman being locked out of her purchased Kindle books by mistake following Digital Right Management policies.

If you ask me, being wrongly locked out of my purchases is not a good way to spend a weekend.

When technology is in a place where it allows the gamers to control their collection and we are mature enough to hold up our social community, I can see the inevitable digital future finding its place.

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My new podcast!June 14, 2013 by

Hello everyone.

My friend Troy and I started a podcast called Nerdcast Spectacular.

I hope you gals and guys give it a listen. Our first episode is an E3 special so if you like to hear complete strangers' opinions, then this might be your show! :D

And email us at with questions and suggestions for the show.

And if you're talented, we'd appreciate an album art or intro/outro songs as we would like some. :)

Thanks - Victor.



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E3 Fun!June 10, 2013 by

Hey friends,

Two things: my friend Troy and I are writing for a website The Blackbird Journal. On there, we are covering E3.

Yes, IGN is gonna do a fantastic job covering the show because of their awesome live show and the fact that they are professional. In fact, that's where we're getting our info. :) But it is mine and Troy's dream to work for IGN so any and all support will be appreciated. We will be covering the press conferences, unveiled games and even a neat podcast of our own on Wednesday or Thursday. So click on this link and check back for some awesome friendly E3 coverage =D

Also check our pre-E3 articles on our expectations. Here's my friend Troy's and mine!

Now the fun part. I've been typing up all sorts of serious commentaries for E3 and now I'm gonna ask a silly question. :D

Forget logic, money, marketing, timing or if it's even possible. What is the one thing you want the most from E3 2013?

Me, I think I'll say Square Enix's big surprise is that Final Fantasy VII remake we've all wanted.

Build from the ground up to be a completely new game with the music and tracks all recorded from scratch and true FF7 fans writing the complete flawless story. By that, I mean that the little details from the other FF7 games are changed for technology and story reasons. So for this game, every little thing should be be canon for the Final Fantasy VII universe!

SO. What do you wish would happen from this year's E3? comment below and have fun. Later, IGN.

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Don't blame the video gameMay 16, 2013 by

See my article on The Rampage Online

Violence seen in video games is becoming a staple of the medium. One glimpse into the culture witnesses fighting, shooting and action genres saturated with assault, blood, gore and dismemberment effects. Those against games see this and can understandably draw conclusions connected to past tragic events.

EA's "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2" marketing campaign had a negatively reaction as the commercial seemed to target children and teens.

Regardless of the violence seen, it is nothing compared to what happens in the real world. Nothing in games has the power to manipulate and create violence among people.

Game titles that use violent images do so for various reasons. Some use them as a form of light entertainment but most have purpose, a story told with worlds of realities built by creative writers. Some imagining bleak worlds, characters are pushed to the edge of their insanity or unavoidable wars.

The upcoming title “The Last of Us” tells of a ruthless post-apocalyptic United States years after a fungal virus kills millions. Main character Joel, who has seen both worlds, has lost friends and family, and this has hardened him into a “violent thug, a brutal killer, and a torturer.”

Supporting character Ellie was born into this world and has only witnessed steel walls and violent martial law of quarantine zones. Outside are the infected that are ready to tear you apart and survivors only wanting to live to see the next day.

The Last of Us shows a devastated world where every human does what is necessary to survive.

Games that include these dreaded details are crafted as thoughtfully as books would be, and never encourage anything other than attention to the story.

When it comes to children, many researches conclude that aggression in children do increase. But it’s all without context. Scientists debating on websites like the results of their studies just shows children processing violence have varying aggression.

The same can be said about late adolescents.

Nothing ever mentions murderous intent, like those planned events such as the Virginia Tech shooting or Sandy Hook. Tragedies such as these are started by those who from childhood had disturbed emotions or troubled past. While games were their hobbies, they are not the sole reason behind their plans.

Expecting people to be desensitized from gaming violence is really the biggest stretched claim I've heard. As a proud invested gamer, if I ever heard the horrid cracking sound of gunfire, I would shutter and cry. When the shootings stopped, you can bet I would not stand up and promise vengeance like in the video games. Reactions like that do not happen.

The one option everyone is always forgetting is that gaming is a choice. The amount of hours invested in games are a person’s decision, as is the violence consumed. As parents, that decision also fall on your hands. Children not behaving normally or playing too much falls on your actions. Labels, descriptions and websites all tell of the game title’s contents. If you don’t feel right about what’s seen or read, please return the game. You don’t have to play or let your children play that game.

Taking aggressive actions against an item you do not like is some weird form of entitlement; entitlement to have something that was made for many, be changed or destroyed for yourself. That’s the type of reaction against video games that needs to disappear.

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