*WARNING: At least one definite Inglourious Basterds spoiler and I get a bit rambly towards the end*
 
I often find the mark of a great movie is that after watching it, I feel changed. Films like The Matrix, Battle Royale and Fight Club all had a big effect on me when I first saw them roughly a scary decade ago. While not exactly the deepest movies of all time, after watching them, they make me consider my place in the world, how it effects me and vice versa. With Inglourious Basterds, this is the first time a bad movie has ever had an effect on me like this.
 
When I came out of the cinema on Friday, besides being angry that I lost a coin toss and ended up watching a Tarantino film instead of (500) Days of Summer, I realised I was now sympathetic to the Nazis. Now, I want you to know that I know Inglourious Basterds is a fantasy movie and pretty much nothing in that film actually occured in real life but it still made me question the way in which we view the Nazis as history's stock villains.
 
Take the film's big bad guy and final boss, SS Colonel Hans Landa: He's incredibly intelligent, charming, dashing and as a detective is probably the best since (or is this before?) Columbo. In his position in the Third Reich as The Jew Hunter, he excelled at his job, as perfectly demonstrated in Chapter One but later on in the movie, he shows that he has no interest in the Nazi party and is willing to let the higher ups die if it means he ends the war, saves millions of lives and deservedly takes the credit. While watching the film, I was rooting for Landa. I wanted him to win. To me, he was the hero. A Nazi hero.
 
And then you have the Nation's Pride, Frederick Zoller. A Nazi sniper who iced so many Yankees that his position as Private means he must have definitely prestiged at least once and now, the star of what would have been a huge hit in the alternate 1944. Pinned down and facing insurmountable odds, he did what any good soldier fighting for his country would do and stood his ground. When we see him in the film, Zoller is definitely a war hero, beloved by his fellow soldiers and adored in his homeland. Then he meets the lovely Shosanna and tried to win her heart. Not by being the macho motherfucker he had every right to be but by being a pretty cool guy who knew his movie trivia. While this seemed like an obvious showhorn of Tarantino's movie knowledge into the picture, it made Zoller seem like a down to Earth kind of guy and it's only when he has Goebbels attention does he turn into the macho motherfucker, but even then, he just seemed a bit bewildered by his newfound fame. Towards the end of the film, he gets killed by Shosanna but not before firing back and laying some Reichsmackdown of his own. It seems I was the only one in the cinema who seemed happy about this with the couple next to me looking kind of bewildered why I was so pleased. To me, Zoller was a really nice guy. A really nice Nazi.
 
Compare those two to the film's intended heroes: The Basterds. Most notably Lt. Aldo Raine: A retarded huckleberry who was presumably sent on a suicide mission because he was foolish enough to get clocked smuggling moonshine through Hicksville, TN. Why are we meant to root for this guy? As a disturbing trend in popular culture, because he's stupid and talks in a funny voice, we're meant to like him. Then we have 'The Bear Jew' played so badly by Eli Roth that now I can confirm he belongs on neither side of the camera. During the finale, he takes such delight in gunning down the relatively innocent and already trapped, burning and suffocating German officials that when you combine this with his love of smacking already captured Nazi soldiers in the head until there's nothing but bits that he manages to be the biggest villain in a movie that also stars Adolf Hitler.
 
When I compare those two Nazis to the two Americans, Landa and Zoller are people i'd much rather be fighting with than the suicidally stupid pair of Basterds and yet we're meant to hate them simply because they wear that sharp Nazi uniform. It just strikes me as pathetic that we're meant to hate the Nazi characters for just being Nazis and root for the Jews because they're Jews. I studied the Nazis at GCSE, AS and A2 levels in high school so while i'm not amazingly well versed in what they did during WWII, I have a very good idea and events like Kristallnacht all the way up to The Final Solution are deplorable and, for lack of a better word, evil but trying to brand every Nazi as being deplorable and evil is the kind of jingoism that modern society is fighting against on a daily basis.
 
I think it's even more weird that the reverse is allowed to happen. Because the Jews were the victims here that we're meant to sympathise with them by default and assume that they are all good and that in the movie, their revenge mission isn't evil. The movie's producer, Lawrence Bender, described the movie as a 'fucking Jewish wet dream' which, to further blur the lines between fiction and reality, seems far more evil in its intent than the Nazis original stand point when you consider that they were trying to restore Germany back to its position as a major European power after being withered by The Great Depression, WWI and the resulting Treaty of Versaille. If The Basterds really were heroes, would they not focus on saving Jewish lives rather than taking pleasure in killin' Nazis?
 
After all this writing, I think i've come to the decision that Inglourious Basterds is definitely a bad film, Tarantino is a bad film director but deep within this bloated mess is something great and it might not even be something Tarantino expected to create but his movie points out the audience as hypocrites. Hypocrites who relish the death of soldiers with mothers, fathers, wives and children all because they were on the losing side.
 
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.

Having played Resident Evil for over a decade now, or at least sat back and watched my uncle played the first game on the PSone, and finding that Resident Evil 4 was one of the best games on the GameCube, 5 looked like it was going to be amazing. After all, it had actually had Wesker which, considering the times when Wesker actually appears in the games and with Jill supposedly being dead, something big had to happen in this installment. Not to mention that it had to build off the successful gameplay changes of RE4.

How wrong I was.

First, i'd like to say that not everything is bad about RE5. Everything looks great, most notably the characters who i'd say are comparable to MGS4's fantastically emotive characters. Also, from the moment he first appears to the bit where he gets syringed in the final fight, Albert Wesker is one of the most perfect character in any video game universe ever. A hulking combination of super powers and smugness, Wesker is not only infinitely hateable but completely formidable. For anyone who hasn't played CVX, this is the same guy who had a ton of steel girders dropped on his head and shook it off like it was nothing more than a slap in the face. As baddies go, Wesker is one of the best out there. Or, was.

The thing which annoyed me the most about RE5 is that as a (potentially) closing chapter to this part of the Resident Evil franchise, it felt as if it was being written and controlled by someone who had no real idea about the characters or the storyline so far. The equivalent of Jonathan Mostow taking over from James Cameron in Terminator 3. The final scene demonstrates this complete lack of character development perfectly. You've got Wesker, the big bad since 1996, dying in a volcano and who is it who kills him? Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar. Chris killing him makes sense, after all he was one of the intended victims of the Arklay Mountains outbreak but Sheva's involvement is insulting. She doesn't even know who Wesker is till halfway through the game. To make matters worse, Jill fucking Valentine, you know, the other main character from the first game as well as a main franchise player, is sitting right next to them in the helicopter willing to just let the man who she chased for years then was captured and experiment on by, be killed by someone else. Is there no desire for revenge in her heart? Not to bog this down too much with comparisons to other media, but it's the equivalent of Agent Smith being killed by some civilian at the end of Matrix Revolutions while Neo sits back and watches. And that complaint is without even going into detail on how pathetic that end is for Wesker. Getting hit by two rockets in the middle of a volcano seems incredibly impersonal considering the homoerotic rivalry between him and Chris.

I know after writing that, someone will bounce into the thread and give me the old 'It's just a video game. Have fun, dickhead' arguement, but coming right off MGS4 which tied up everyone's story so that every MGS game felt like it was part of one big, if messy, contrived and convoluted, story and actually rewarded me as a fan for sticking with it for years, I expected better from Resident Evil 5. Instead, what I got was a piss poor Resident Evil 4 remake made by people who loved MGS4 so much, that they couldn't tell the rhyme or reason behind the plot points, just that they needed to be copied:

• A bleach blonde haired ninja in an advanced bodysuit which allows the user to do gravity defying kung-fu. I'm talking about Raiden, right? Nope: Jill Valentine.
• Killing one of the bosses by sticking him with a needle full of a toxin that overpowers his system making him easily defeatable. I'm talking about Vamp, right? Nope: Albert Wesker.
• Opening in a desert town with a monologue about how the world is currently in peril. I'm talking about MGS4's Middle Eastern battlefield opeing, right? Nope: RE5's African war torn village Kijuju opening.
• Ending on a tanker in the middle of the sea full of the bad guy's troops before having a protracted fist fight with the bad guy himself. I'm talking about MGS4's final chapter, right? Nope: RE5's final chapter.

That may only be 4 plot points, but they're all so similar and so major that you can't help but note their point of origin. This is before you even consider the other multitude of other rip offs in there ranging from a complete recycling of some Resident Evil 4 set pieces and the Gears of War influenced reviving a downed player all the way to Ozwell E. Spencer being taken directly from Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi and Albert Wesker acting and looking like he belongs in The Matrix. Absolutely nothing in RE5 is original or even given its own original flavouring. It's just a mish-mash of other games and movies masquerading as a single cohesive unit. And, to be fair to it, it's not like the series has been particularly self-inspired so far so it just shows how unashamed RE5 is in its desire to plagiarise.

Getting back to stealing from Gears of War, it's no secret that since that game got popular, everything has featured cover mechanics and co-op so picking on Resident Evil 5 for taking them might seem like a cheap shot but at the same time, I can't think of another game which does them so badly and needlessly. Up to this point, Resident Evil has also been a solo affair working on the obvious human instincts of loneliness and isolation being two major factors in being scared. The implementation of Sheva in the game completely unbalances the tone that the series has used for years and feels completely unecessary. Granted, there was a second person with Leon in RE4 when you saved Ashley Graham but she had no idea how to use a gun and couldn't help you in anyway so it was down to you to keep her alive.

This is where I feel a lot of designers forget the disconnect between what's happening on screen and how i'm supposed to feel about it. The idea that having two people increases tension only works under the assumption that both people are completely overwhelmed by the enemy and that at least one of them is going to be scared. If you have two people taking everything on without breaking a sweat, then you've always got a confidence boost to keep you going. Just because Sheva keeps getting into trouble, it doesn't mean i'm afraid because all I have to do is fire a shot in her direction and she'll break out from the enemy's grab and then thank me for it, making me, as a player, feel like a badass. This does the complete opposite of making me feel scared and belongs more in a game like Gears, BotS or Army of Two where the ethos is that you're a team of motherfuckers laying the smackdown rather than two ill equipped BSAA agents surviving a zombie horde in a foreign country.

I think the worst part of that, however, is that I might be wrong in what I expected from RE5. Like, MGS4 before it which shirked the stealth in favour of more action, RE5 seems to just forget it's part of a horror franchise and do its best to give you a more action packed ride though again, while MGS4 knew its lineage and still gave you plenty of options to slink through the enemy lines, RE5 never gives you any scares thus losing its one definable trait in the middle of an over saturated action game market. The whole thing just feels dull, plays like a relic and most tragically of all, is regarded as a AAA game. The idea that a game as middling as this can be put out as a cornerstone of a franchise is tragic and really goes a long way to explain why videogames are still treated like a joke and the people who play them get little respect because as an industry, we have incredibly low standards.

So, i'm enjoying Persona 3: FES but this is also the first JRPG i've played since Pokemon FireRed so i'm playing like a stone cold rookie, much like the Jeff in the Endurance Run. As such, I think i've come across a problem: Sleeping Table. For those uninitiated with this BAMF, the Sleeping Table has no weaknesses, is impervious to fire and slash damage and its attacks are Megidola, Maragidyne and some combo where you get scared then OHK'd.

At this point, most of my party are between lvl 37 and 46 with me being the highest at 46, Yuka being at 42 for Mediarama, Koro at 37 then whoever else I try to tackle the boss with being somewhere in between. The only person who is way below is Junpei who I stopped using at lvl 17 when Akihiko joins the fold. Also, from my position, I have 14 days before the next full moon.

My dilemma is this: From what I can tell, to have even the slightest chance against this thing, i'm going to have to power grind and try to get my posse up to scratch before the 14 day limit, but even then, I don't really know if i'll be able to defeat it and move on in time. Not to mention how boring the idea of grinding through Tartarus is. However, at this point, i've put in 40+/- hours on the game and I really don't want to give up and do all that again but on Easy mode.

So, does anyone have any sureshot tips to beat this mother or am I fucked? Up till now nothing else has really posed a problem but this guy is not olny destroying me, but completely sucking out my interest in what has so far been a fantastic game.

I just took my driving theory test and I got 40/50 on the questions and 50/75 on the hazards meaning all in all, I was 3 questions under a pass and a solid 5 into the black on the hazards. This is so disheartening. I know i'm not too far under a pass meaning I should be able to get it on my next go, but I feel incredibly stupid seeing how everyone I know did this first time. But hey, whatever.

How did you do on your first theory test?

OK, GiantBomb, this is a shout out to all of you who wear contact lenses because I need help. I wear glasses. I like glasses. I like my glasses. They help me see, they let me read, they keep my hair out of my eyes and they make me look adorable. However, one thing they do not do is portect my eyes from the harmful rays of sunlight I have to absorb when I leave the house once every few weeks to collect my unemployment and that is something I could do with now Spring has sprung and Summer is just around the corner.

Now, my hypocrisy only goes so far and seeing as I used to bully a guy who had reactions lenses, I'm not going to get a pair of them. It just wouldn't be right. And any kind of prescription sunglasses I have seen in the opticians of Liverpool City Centre have been kind of lame. I'm after some big fancy T-800 or Tyler Durden style sunglasses that are bad-fucking-ass but, there is a catch: I can't fucking see. I put them on and I turn into Zubat.

I consulted a few people on what I should do about this and the resounding response was to get contact lenses thus leaving me free to wear whatever kind of frames I please but, again, there is a catch: I am terrified of conact lenses. The idea of putting a tiny sheet of plastic on my fucking eyeball sounds scary. Anything touching my eye is scary but this is even worse as i'd have to take it out of my eye again at the end of the day.

So, I ask you guys for some kind of moral support. Do you use contacts? How easy are they to use? Were you ever afraid of them? If applicable, how did you get over that? And so on and so forth. I just need some information. The kind of thing I was meant to be told while I was at my opticians only instead they decided to try and shill me the most expensive type of lens insurance they could. And I bought it.