Zelda Retrospective: Part III - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - Day 1

Initial Thoughts on Zelda II:
1. When did Zelda turn into an RPG/Platformer?
2. When did they decide to ban recovery hearts?
3. Man, Link likes hookers.
4. F*** you, Horsehead!
5. "I am Error." Huh? Do you mean that your name is Error or that you are in error? People, you need to speak more clearly.
6. When did the Crusades hit Hyrule?
7. "I found a mirror under the table"? Did Link just talk?!
8. All these old wizard dudes sure like to live with young girls.


Enemies I've quickly learned to hate in Zelda II:
1. Iron Knuckles.
2. Fox-Headed Dudes who throw boomerangs.
3. Bearded little demon toads.
4. Flying/walking/fire-breathing bone fish that live under a bridge.

Yes, I started playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link today. Some of you warned me as to the difficulty of that game. You were quite correct. It's atrocious. How did those developers sleep at night when they released the game in 1988? I mean, did they know how many people who would probably be driven insane. The fact that it took me about eight tries just to beat the first boss, Horsehead, doesn't bode well. I have a feeling this one's going to take me longer than two days.
It hit me immediately how vast a departure this game is from its predecessor and from its successors. Between an experience point-fueled upgrade system to a semi-random encounter system, this game is very reminiscent of a traditional role-playing game. On the other hand, there's a large emphasis on jumping and hacking in a side-scrolling platformer environment.
This game either didn't know what it wanted to be or wanted to be many things at once.

Well, let's see how this goes.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part II - Legend of Zelda - Day 2

You know what they say: "Once a cheater, always a cheater."

Well, for me, it held true. After thirty-nine deaths and about eight to ten hours of game play, I beat Ganon today and completed the main quest of Legend of Zelda. And, oh boy, I definitely had to rely on that IGN walk through to get me through it.
I booted up the game (I was playing using the Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition disc for GameCube) at around 11AM this morning, after finding out that I wasn't going to be recording with the band. I started from the good ol' starting position, collected some rupees to buy a potion, grabbed some recovery hearts from some downed enemies to fill my life gauge back up, and then went back to dungeon six, the bane of my Zelda-playing experience of yesterday. This time, going in fully prepared, I went in and kicked that dungeon's ass in no time flat.
I was doing well in the seventh dungeon too, until accidently pressed X in the start menu. On the Collector's Edition disc, X is equivalent to Select on the old NES controller, so that took me to the continue/save/quit screen. I hit continue, but I didn't realize that selecting it would take me back to the start of the dungeon and removed all but three hearts from my nearly full set of heart containers. Rage ensued.
What kind of design choice is that, seriously? I mean, how many people who have played this game since it came out in 1987 have accidently done that? How many veins have popped from necks from the fury that issues forth from occurences such as this? I sat and pondered this a moment, then resumed my gameplay.
It turns out, dungeon seven was quite the maze and it took me a long time to finally find my way to the boss. But I quickly dispatched him and moved onto eight. I'm guessing I went through eight all right, because I'm already having trouble remembering even playing through it, other than being frustrated with the large number of Blue Darknuts, who are hard to kill, and that was only a couple of hours ago.

I made my way to dungeon nine, the home of the pig-man himself - Ganon. Well, okay, I relied on the walkthrough for this one. When I realized how immense the dungeon was, I decided that, rather than waste hours trying to get through it, I'd make my way toward Ganon that way. I got all the way there with little problem. I saw where it took four blind hits while Ganon was invisible followed by a silver arrow hit. Well, as I hit Ganon the third time, I died.
So, I went out to find rupees for a potion and then ninety more to replace the magic shield I'd lost to a Like-Like. That in itself probably took half an hour. Killing hordes of ghosts in the graveyard helped quite a bit. I made my way back to Ganon, wiped him out and then hit the end. And then I hit the most story-intensive part of the game: a whole two lines of dialogue!

So, what does playing through this game tell me? For one, I can tell you know that, thanks to technological advancements, the series quickly became far more story driven. The lack of dialogue means less opportunities for hints, making the game that much harder. I never owned an NES, and I'd heard from many people that all the good old games were really hard. This game confirmed that notion in my head even moreso than my attempts to play other NES games. I suppose, back then, video games were more of a niche, so the audiences wanted more of a challenge. Now that gaming is more broad, games needed to be eased up for the sake of the layman's sanity. Also, this game allowed for a lot more imagination. It's far less linear than the Zelda games that succeeded it. Granted, you might need a certain item in one dungeon to access something in another, but you could potentially do these out of order because the game doesn't direct you from one to the next. The only hint that you should be playing them in any particular order is that a "Level-#" shows up at the top of your screen when you're in a dungeon.

I'm not brave enough to try to second quest. Plus I would like to continue on to the next game in the series. So, that's game number one down. Six to go. Tomorrow I'll be hitting up Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in Part III of the Zelda Retrospective. This is another one I've never played through, and many call it the worst of the Zelda games. I'll be sure to let you know if I agree.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part II - Legend of Zelda - Day 1

Okay, so I've been cheating... I've been cheating a lot.

But damn! This game is hard! How did any one ever figure the damn thing out back in 1987? Perhaps I'm too used to my cushy, three-dimensional, story-driven Zelda games where there are hints as to what you're supposed to be doing next? You start the game with nothing in a field with no prologue, no hints, nothing. Luckily, the cave with the old dude who gives you a sword is in plain site. From there, though, it gets hazy. I very quickly decided to rely on IGN's walkthrough of the game since I didn't want to spend hours and hours dying over and over again just trying to figure out where to go. For the sake of this series, I decided to not use the walkthrough while in dungeons unless I get absolutely stuck. Since the walkthrough greatly enhanced the rate at which I played through the game today, I've made it all the way to the sixth dungeon. I have thirteen heart containers, the magical sword, a magical shield, the white tunic and the blue ring. Even with these upgrades, I still find the game quite difficult. To illustrate that fact, I'll point out that I've died a total of thirty times in my play through, sixteen of which have been in the sixth dungeon.
This game is nearly incomprehensible. To play it without any sort of guide would require hours of trial and error. Hours which I'd much rather spend being able to make dinner (teriyaki stir fry tonight, my own recipe) while watching stuff on Hulu (the pilot to Firefly). This game is simply merciless, offering almost no hints other than an occasional old man in a cave. There are lots of old men in caves in Hyrule at this time. And a lot of shopkeepers in caves. Apparently people can't remember how to build houses. And it could be the same old man and the same house keeper and they're just following you around and hiding in different caves throughout Hyrule. That's just creepy. (Yes, I do know that it's an old game and they could only allow so many character designs.)
Back to the sixth dungeon though. That thing is a bane on my gaming existence. I just keep dying. I ought to go get a potion, but that requires 68 rupees. And unlike in other Zelda games, that amount of cash is hard to come by. I would never have gotten the Blue Ring if IGN hadn't pointed out a few secret stashes of rupees. Plus, by the time I got the potion and got back to the dungeon, I'd need to use it. The Wizzrobes are just plain kicking my ass. I got all the way to Gohma once, but I only had one heart left. Plus, whenever I die, I start out with only three hearts and the enemies in the dungeon aren't exactly being liberal with the dispensing of recovery hearts. One time in between two of my sixteen deaths in that dungeon, an enemy dropped a fairy and I thought it was a miracle. I still died later.
To you true Zelda veterans, you who have taken the time to actually play this game honestly without any help, I ask: How the hell did you do it?

- Nate

P.S. - I'll be at the band's drummer's house helping him to lay down the drum tracks for the songs I've written. I might be putting off Day 2 of the original LoZ to Thursday.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Review

Can someone please put a leash on Michael Bay? Seriously, would that be at all possible?
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is simply a mess, created from the indulgences of a giant man-child of a director. While he may have done a pretty good job with the original Transformers, a movie that I had very low expectations for but ended up loving, this film is a lumbering behemoth of a movie that can't decide where to go. It's long, it moves slowly and it can't decide where to put its focus. It's like a giant zombie with ADD, only a movie.
Weighing in at around two hours and forty-five minutes, Revenge of the Fallen starts out strong with a nifty bit of narration and shots of aborigines circa 17,000BC finding Transformers on their land and then a great action sequence with the NEST unit, a team of elite soldiers who have been paired with the Autobots for the purpose of hunting down Decepticons. The NEST team is led by Major Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen). From there, we see that Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is getting ready to go to college and that his parents Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White) along with girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) are having trouble dealing with this fact. Different loud things happen and adventure (eventually) begins. The key plot point of the movie is that the Transformers have been coming to Earth for a long time, but that fact was lost to history amongst humans and Transformers both. The titular character, The Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd, who I actually had the pleasure of meeting a couple of weeks ago), seeks an ancient machine that was built on Earth that would sap the energy out of the Sun, thereby destroying it and all life on Earth. Of course, things are far more complicated than that, which is one of the big problems with the film. Writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Ehren Kruger simply try to balance too much into the story. In fact, the film is so complicated that later on, characters will actually say lines to no one in particular that explain why they're doing something. I even had trouble remembering what characters were doing what and why, and I'm generally very good at following complex plots. I was especially confused with the motivations and actions of a general that was apparently higher up in NEST's command. I simply could not figure out what the guy was up to for a large portion of the movie.
Also, there are way too many characters, many of whom could have been weeded out or given less screen time, like the far-too-many comic-relief characters. Sam's roommate, Leo Spitz (Ramon Rodriguez) is almost entirely useless to the plot save for being the one that finds former Sector 7 agent Simmons (John Tuturro), otherwise all he is there for is to whine a whole lot. While Sam's parents were a lot of fun in the first film, in this they are given more screen time than they really need and the comedy is extremely forced. A gag involving Sam's mother eating some "green" brownies goes on far too long. They are later kidnapped by the Decepticons in an effort to create some dramatic tension for Sam in the film's climax, but an intervention by Bumblebee removes all effectiveness from the scene. Even worse are the Twins, a couple of Autobots named Skids and Mudflap. As established in the first film, the Transformers learned English (and gained their various accents and attitudes) by analyzing the Internet. Skids and Mudflap apparently chose African-Americans, and the characters' idiocy and appearance (one of them has gold and silver "teeth," reminiscent of a grill) are borderline offensive. Not to mention, they do absolutely nothing important for the story - they're just there to be dumb and funny.
This is a film that could have easily dropped forty minutes from its run time, but Michael Bay's predictable indulgences left it dragging. I checked my watch about forty-five minutes into the movie, thinking it had gone on much longer. Any time I check my watch in a movie, that's a sure sign that the pacing is slow and I find myself feeling uninterested in the film.
The action sequences are fun to watch, but in sequences involving larger numbers of 'bots, it's hard to keep track of who's who. That was one of the things about the cartoon, the Transformers all looked so distinctly different that it was easy to tell them apart. In these movies, the attempt at hyper-realistic transformations leaves the robot forms looking largely identical.
There was some nice fan-service in there, like Frank Welker returning as Soundwave. I can't complain about Hugo Weaving's Megatron, but I do miss Frank Welker being the one to talk back at Optimus. Starscream also showed some of his true colors, maneuvering to take the lead of the Decepticons, which was great. I still feel like the Transformers themselves are under-characterized. Over all, they have very little personality. Some more scenes that are just Transformers talking to other Transformers would be nice, because we'd get a sense of who the Transformers are.
And, of course, all of Bay's hallmarks are there. The kiss at sunset? Check. A whole crap-load of stuff blowing up? Check (but that's a good thing for a Transformers movie). The movie being way too long (I'm looking at you, Pearl Harbor)? Check. The glorification/exploitation of the female body? Check (but, hey, we're talking Megan Fox here and that's never bad). Throw in a large dose of "ugh"-inducing testicalular-based humor and a mostly funny little Decepticon that Mikaela keeps in a box, and there you have it.

In the end this movie basically just ends up being kind of "Meh." Apparently, Michael Bay doesn't want to do another Transformers movie as soon as Paramount/Dreamworks want to release another one. I would love to see what a different (see: better) director could do with the franchise. Here's hoping they make a good selection.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part I - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest

Okay, so this is going to be the first in a series of blogs that overlook the Zelda franchise. I just recently finished playing through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest and it gave me inspiration. This is an announcement that I will embark upon a journey through the various console Zelda games, namely The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. This will be a long on-going series of commentaries that will review the games as games themselves, analyze how the franchise and games in general have evolved over time and maybe to have a little bit of fun at the games' expense. I expect this series to take a long time because we're talking about a lot of long games, and since I'm trying to get a job and will be going back to school in a little less than two months. Also, I'm leaving out the Zelda titles that were released on Nintendo's handhelds, because that would just take even more time. But perhaps later on? Anyway, on to Master Quest.
Back in 2003, as an incentive for pre-ordering The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the GameCube, Nintendo offered up a free bonus disc. This disc contained two versions of the same game. The first was the standard version of Ocarina of Time, the game that kicked off my love of the Zelda franchise and ignited the burning desire to own a Nintendo 64 that consumed my ten-year-old heart. The second was what made me want this particular disc so badly: Ocarina of Time Master Quest. Back in the late 1990's, Nintendo was working on the 64 Disc Drive (64DD), a disc-based add on for the Nintendo 64. Master Quest was known in Japan as Ura Zelda, but it was never released since the 64DD was sold at very underwhelming numbers. Essentially, Master Quest was meant to be in the same vein as the second adventure in the original Legend of Zelda, in which you could go through harder dungeons by naming your character "ZELDA" after completing the main quest.
Master Quest isn't really a different game from Ocarina of Time. The story, dialogue, cutscenes, items and everything are the exact same as the regular Ocarina of Time. When you get into the dungeons, however, all bets are off. Though the maps are identical, with the rooms layed out in all the same positions, the puzzles, enemies and progression through the rooms is drastically changed. This version is meant for Ocarina of Time veterans, because you have to be very familiar with the original game to stand a chance of getting through some of the game's more merciless puzzles and also because there are several sidequests from the original that now become mandatory if you hope to get through a dungeon. Items like Din's Fire and the Fire Arrow and the Scarecrow's Song are now essential if you hope to solve certain puzzles. Harder still are the many extremely well hidden switches that I often spent large amounts of time trying to track down or missed completely and had to look up on a walkthrough to understand what I needed to do to move on. It's interesting to note that now, there are less enemies overall within the dungeons, but there are a larger number of harder enemies that take multiple hits like Lizolfos, Dinolfos, Stalfos, ReDead and Iron Knuckles. Also, because of the progression changes, you might find yourself completely bypassing certain rooms or unable to get into them until you've gotten an item from later in the game. This, of course, tends to mean that there are Gold Skulltulas in those rooms. While the Gold Skulltulas outside the dungeons remain in the same places that they are in the original quest, they are in drastically different places in Master Quest and are often much harder to find.
The various changes make a huge change to the overall difficulty of the game - everything is now much harder.
The switch to GameCube also allowed for a few minor upgrades to graphics. The game runs at about 24 frames per second (according to some articles I read on IGN), as opposed to modern games which run in at least 30 frames per second but tend to aim for 60 frames per second. This means that movements on screen might look a little rugged and choppy, especially if you're used to the high definition games that are on the market today. But you'll get used to it after a little gameplay and, really, the game is still great to look at for something that essentially came out eleven years ago. Plus, the GameCube disc can run in progressive scan, so if you have a 'Cube or a Wii set up on an HDTV with the right cables, you can get a slightly better picture out of it.
The gameplay of Ocarina of Time was revolutionary back in 1998, with its Z-targetting system, such a huge game world, and an unheard of camera system that could move into a 1st person free-look. This all worked fantastically on the N64, but on GameCube, it misses a few points. For one, I had the problem of forgetting that this particular Zelda came before the free floating camera that could be manipulated to any position via the C-Stick, as it can in The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. When I first started the file, I kept finding myself trying to manipulate the camera only to bring out an item, since items have been mapped to the C-stick and also to the X, Y and Z buttons. I found myself always using the buttons rather than the stick for my items because it is a much more intuitive and responsive way to do it.
The mapping of C-Button functions from the N64 controller to the GameCube controller's C-stick is most problematic in the use of the ocarina within the game. Because there is no button assigned the the C-Up button from the N64, the ocarina's C-Up note must be played via the stick. This makes many of the songs that use that note much more difficult to play. If a song didn't use C-Up at all, I would always use the X, Y, Z and A buttons just for the sake of convenience. This would be a minor gripe, but considering the prolific use of the ocarina throughout the game, it's tedious. It also makes the ocarina mini-games with the Skullchildren in the Lost Woods and with the Frogs in Zora's River much more difficult.
I hadn't played Master Quest since I first received and played through the disc in 2003, so I've come back into it with fresh eyes. The game still holds up remarkably well and is still very challenging. It's not for Zelda newbies, but veterans who haven't played it should take a look. The game disc is pretty hard to find these days, I'd recommend checking around local or online stores that sell used games. Luckily, the Wii is backwards compatible, so, so long as you have a GameCube controller and memory card, you can play the disc on a Wii if you still don't have a GameCube.

Oh, also, I discovered while playing this that Ganondorf has Obama ears. I'm serious.


Tommorrow's post will be on the first day of play of Legend of Zelda for NES (I'll be playing it on the Collector's Edition GameCube disc). I've actually never played all the way through the NES Zelda games, so this should be interesting.

Star Trek - A Second Opinion

First off, I'm sorry for the lack of updates. The last week and a half has seen me moving into a new apartment and aiding the family while my grandmother was in the hospital (she's out and she's okay, by the way), and I just got Internet service in my new apartment tonight.

So, now on to our subject matter. On Monday, just after a too-thick-to-drink chocolate shake from the Warren's diner, Megan, Julie and I went to see Star Trek again. For me and Julie, it was a second viewing, for Megan it was a third (which is just ridiculous since she'd never even seen a Trek movie before I gave her a crash course in the franchise over the last few months, yet she's seen the movie more than I have).
In any case, I walked out of the film with a more tempered opinion of it than the one I put up in my initial review.
Frankly, I was still on a contact high of brand new Trek after the disappointment of Star Trek: Nemesis in 2003 and the cancellation of Enterprise (which was just starting to get really good) in 2005. The movie was certainly quite good, but I definitely overlooked some of its flaws because I was still giddy from having just seen it.
So how does it hold up now? Aside from some science-geek and cinemaphile nitpicks and a highly-underdeveloped villain, quite well. It's still fast-paced and incredibly fun, it still has some superb special effects and it still has some great acting. Where it falls flat are the characterization of Eric Bana's Nero and some glaring logic problems (that, admittedly, most movie viewers would not cue on to).
Nero simply didn't get enough screen time nor enough to do. I probably did not catch on to this initially due to the fact that I read IDW's comic Star Trek: Countdown, which featured a story by the film's writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. This comic gives the details of what happened in the 24th century that made Nero as insane and vengeful as he is in the film. When I first saw Star Trek, I didn't question anything about Nero because I knew why he was the way he was. However, this time I noticed that all that's really said is that Romulus, Nero's home planet, was destroyed by a supernova (a science nitpick I'll get to in a bit) and he wanted to make the whole galaxy suffer for not helping to save his planet. Nero simply isn't developed enough. I think the writers aimed to make him more of a tragic villain, yet other than an image of Nero's wife who died in the calamity, we're never given any real reason to connect with Nero. There is nothing shown to make the audience connect with him in some way, to feel any sort of sympathy. Had we seen Nero as a man so torn by grief that he's fallen into insanity, he would have been a high effective villain - and Trek movies have a tendency for great villains, like Kahn, Chang and the Borg Queen. However, all we see is an insane, flamboyant, tattooed Romulan who we know very little about and who simply seems to want to watch the galaxy burn.
Another thing that irked me this time was not glaring but flaring (pun intended). For the most part, I love JJ Abram's cinematographic style in the film - with it's documentary style camera movements and angles. What I didn't like was the fact that every other second, there is a lens flare. Most were small and subjected to the sides of the screen, but on occasion there would be one that would totally white out the picture and it started to get on my nerves. The little ones I could deal with, but the big ones that interrupted my field of vision started to annoy me. I even found a humorous edit of the trailer for the Original Series episode "Space Seed" with the lens flares added in, so I apparently wasn't the only one who noticed. It's not really a problem with the film itself, but it started to bug me. It's something I can learn to ignore, however.
The science-geek in me had some problems with the science of the movie, namely supernovae and black holes. Generally, Trek has been really good about keeping to actual science (for the most part), so it was a bit of a disappointment to see problems like that. Apparently, Romulus was destroyed by a supernova that hit with little warning (an event depicted in Countdown, which likewise gave me the same thought). However, even a supernova of a nearby star to Romulus would have taken years to reach the planet, unless it was the Romulan star itself, because supernovae move at less than the speed of light - so there would have been plenty of warning and, thus, Nero would have no reason to be so angry. Also, a black hole is created at one point in the film, and the subsequent destruction shows that everything that is destroyed by it is simply sucked in. However, the debris would have formed a visible accretion disk that would orbit the black hole. That's a minor quibble and doesn't present much of a logic problem for the story as the supernova one does, but oh well, that's just me griping cause I've taken an astronomy class and actually learned something.
All in all though, I won't contradict everything I said in the first review, because those opinions still held true. I loved the acting and the story. I loved the action set pieces and I was still just as blown away by the incredible special effects. It's not as perfect as I initially made it out to be, but it's still a great movie in all respects.

One more gripe about it: I never want to watch it in anything but High Definition, because the film is simply gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, I don't have an HDTV or a Blu-Ray player. So when this movie hits home video, I'm out of luck. Anybody have any high paying jobs to offer me?

- Nate

Terminator Salvation - Review

Warning: There are some spoilers in this review, but if you've seen the trailers, then you should already know this stuff.
I'll be straight with you. It was very difficult for me to just take in Terminator Salvation as a movie in its own respect. I constantly found myself comparing it to the previous Terminator films, especially the first and second, as well as the excellent (but unjustly cancelled) TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
The film essentially follows two interwoven plotlines, one involving John Connor (Christian Bale) and the more prominent one involving Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Both characters start at different places, with the opening of the film set in 2003, where Marcus agrees to donate his body to science after his impending execution. Cut to 2018, where John Connor is fighting the machines and we soon see Marcus alive and well. The film proceeds to tell these two characters' stories, focusing more on Marcus than John Connor. This decision is slightly contrary to what a Terminator fan like me might expect, since John Connor is supposed to be so important to the resistance against the machines yet he is only playing a supporting role here to Marcus in their eventually shared quest to protect Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin).
One problem that immediately struck me was how much the trailers gave away about the plot. Several trailers reveal that Marcus is at least partially cybernetic, and since the reveal of this is a good hour into the movie, it fell very flat and didn't have the impact it could have. Any time Marcus got thrown around before they finally revealed him, I found myself wondering if they'd finally show him to be a machine.
Another problem is that much of the performances just feel wooden. In the first couple of scenes, I was concerned Bale would be doing his Batman-growl through the entire film, but that luckily didn't happen. Worthington seemed to just shout a whole lot, but he did seem to manage to give the character some substance. Common's and Bryce Dallas Howard's roles turned out to be largely forgettable. Moon Bloodgood proved to be a strong point, but it was Yelchin that I felt stole the show. He brought a sense of humanity to the character that I felt was missing from the rest.
In the context of the franchise, Salvation lacks the strong characterization that pervades other entries in the franchise, especially the second film. The film simply felt hollow, with none of the other characters aside from Reese and his small mute sidekick, Star, really connecting with me. At the very least, John and Marcus both managed to capture my attention in the last forty-five minutes or so, but the failure of getting both protagonists to connect with the audience shows a strong failing in the film. And perhaps it's because this film is set entirely in the future that this film can't be as humanizing as the first two. It's simply an entirely different type of story. Another problem within the context of the franchise is that John seems to be terribly open about the fact that Kyle Reese is (or will be) his father. We know that in 2027, Reese goes back in time to protect Sarah Connor, but this movie is set in 2019, years before anyone but John know about the existence of a time machine. And yet, there he is exclaiming in front of everyone that Kyle Reese is his father, and no one, not even the people who don't know John, question him on how that's possible. I feel, as a fan, that it was a critical error on the part of the writers to not make John's need to keep his heritage a secret.
There were some nice nods to continuity, such as the recorded diaries from his mother (voiced by Linda Hamilton) that John listens to throughout as well as the initial appearance of the T-800, which sported a decent if sometimes obvious CGI rendering of Arnold Schwarzenegger's face circa the first movie. A few lines are lifted directly from the other movies as sort of in-jokes for the audience and a couple of locales are at least reminiscent of locations in the first two movies.
One strong point in the film was that there were some really great action set pieces. I was especially impressed by a desert highway chase involving Marcus and Kyle aboard an old tow truck with two motorcycle-like Terminators pursuing them and by a chase sequence involving Marcus and John through the resistance base camp. If only for the glitz factor alone, Salvation is fun to watch.
Overall, Terminator Salvation is an enjoyable film to watch and certainly doesn't feel as campy or forced as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It lacks a certain substance found in the first two films (especially the director's cut of the second), but it definitely shows potential for future sequels - which are definitely coming. The film would have benefited from a more singular focus in its plot and strong use of characterization. I almost feel like those missing elements might have been cut on the editing room floor. I'd be very curious to see an extended cut of the film. In all, if you're looking for a fun post-apocalyptic free-for-all, I'd certainly go see it.