*Artists impression of the complaints line for Street Brawl

There’s been a fair few decent games coming out on XBLA recently, mostly as part of Microsoft’s Summer/Winter of Arcade (check your local seasons for details!).  But I was looking over the trailers for the upcoming arcade title The Warriors: Street Brawl, and I can’t help but feel less than inspired.

It looks bland, unexciting and visually lacklustre, which is a highly unfortunate thing considering the awesome nature of the source material.  The Warriors is one of my favourite cult films, and while it does revolve around brawling gangs, you’ve kind of missed the fun of the movie if that’s all you condense it down to.  Rockstar has already managed to make a great video game adaptation of The Warriors, and it worked because the dev team were obviously fans of the movie.  But from what I can see in Street Brawl‘s trailers, we’re looking at a Double Dragon clone, reskinned to hopefully cash in on the people who enjoyed either the film or Rockstar’s adaptation.

To give you an example of why I don’t think this game is going to do the movie justice, I’ll ask you one question: What the fuck are The Warriors doing fighting with The Lizzies?  While the movie certainly portrays The Lizzies as a gang not to be messed with, their main weapon was seduction and a surprise pistol, and they certainly weren’t about to toe-to-toe fist fight with another gang.  But apparently that doesn’t make enough sense for the creators of Street Brawl, who just see another well known gang from the movie that they have to incorporate.

The game doesn’t have a set release date yet, other than “this summer”, so presumably it’s going to be released soon (especially if they’ve just started pimping out trailers after a long gap).  I think this is going to be one of those “stay ye well clear” titles.

I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, but for right now: No, I can’t dig this.  Microsoft should just go right ahead and re-release Rockstar’s The Warriors on 360 Originals, and we’ll all be happy.

Yup, it's a subtle film

I had the pleasure of watching Inglourious Basterds as part of the recent Melbourne International Film Festival.  We bought our tickets early (before they sold out), and even then there had to be a second screening opened to deal with the high demand.  Sure, we were stuck down in the cinema’s second row from the front by the time we cleared the line, but the movie proved itself well worth the potential trips to the chiropractor.

Inglourious Basterd‘s is the latest film from making-cult-mainstream director Quentin Tarantino.  And when it gets right down to it, could you think of any other director that could get away with making a movie about a Jewish company in World War 2, behind enemy lines, scalping Nazi troops?

The list would certainly be short, that’s for sure.

However, despite the rather controversial concept, the actual exploits of the Basterd company don’t make up the majority of the film.  The plot, while making sure we know the squad’s intentions and methods, focuses more on the events that happen around them.  The movie is presented in a series of chapters, much like those in Kill Bill, only this time they’re in sequential order.  The first chapter is an introduction to the brilliantly acted Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) who roots out and kills the family of another of the films main characters, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent).  Landa has the opportunity to kill Shosanna while she flees, but chooses not to.

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