This past week I was busy watching fireworks, drinking, and playing WoW. But I did get to spend some time with Fatal Inertia EX, and I saw the film Hancock. So at least I did something (kinda) productive. Here are two quick reviews:



Fatal Inertia EX is a pretty standard arcade racer. You race vehicles dubbed "racecraft" on futuristic tracks and use some pretty entertaining weapons on the other pilots. The game's design is straight forward: you can do a quick race or compete in a career mode to unlock new racecrafts. There's a practice mode as well, and the package wouldn't be complete without online modes too. You can also race split screen and LAN with a friend.

The controls are good (although I hate using face buttons to accelerate in racing games)and although the graphics are not PS3-caliber, they are serviceable. The true star of the game is the weapons. Physics-based weapons are a blast to use, like magnets or a chord that pulls other racers back. Fatal Inertia also gives the player a good sense of speed; something I have felt lacking in recent racing titles.

Its not the best racer on the PS3, but with a $30 price tag on the PSN Store, it makes for a fun diversion. But I doubt this will pull racing fans off of Grid or GT5: Prologue.



On the fourth I did catch Hancock before I went down to the fireworks. I wasn't sure what to expect from Willie's latest; I looked like an interesting premise, but early reviews said that it was awful. So I figured that there was no way to know unless I saw it myself.

The trailers for the film tell you a little of the story: Will Smith is Hancock, a drunken superhero who lives in the real world where collateral damage is relevant, and someone with superpowers can't just go around doing whatever they want. Hancock drinks while he flies, isn't mindful of his surroundings, and acts on impulse. And he's a huge jerk. But when Ray (Jason Bateman), a public-relations spokesperson, tries to improve Hancock's image in a city that hates his guts, Willie decides to improve himself and become a real superhero.

Hancock is a film where the trailer tells you almost none of the story. The twists and turns this story takes are crazy, and to explain them all here would give away too much. However, this is not a great film. It starts out fun, but the story starts to drift into really stupid territory and it never resurfaces until the end. The twists are crazy, but not logical, and the emotional scenes are lost due to the overall silliness of the story. The film also serves as a missed opportunity to really spoof superhero conventions that many of us have grown accustomed to in films these days.

There are some neat scenes (but are filled to the brim with CGI), and Smith is rather fun to watch as a drunken, socially-deprived hothead. The ending of the film establishes a comic book world that would be very interesting to see more of, but I guess we'll have to wait until the sequel.

Fatal Inertia EX
My Score: 7/10

Hancock
My Score: 5/10