Battle Rap Wednesdays: JC vs. Caustic

Both JC and Caustic put in some work on this, but JC got it.  Apparently Caustic had some problems in the weeks leading up to this battle, leading to him writing most of his shit the night before.  Now you always hear that when a guy you expect to bodybag loses like this, but I'll give the guy the benefit of the doubt.   Plus its not like he did terribly in this anyway--that Boston line was waaaaay too soon but it was REALLY good.

That said, I'm still getting tired of the excuse.  I hate that multiple battle leagues basically mean you can schedule as many battles as you want, which means despite that people usually know about most of their battles months in advance, usually they only write a week or two before the battle.  This is why you get so many battles where you get hyped for it and the battler you're hyped for is on Twitter RTing all these "Yo that's gonna be a classicccccc!!!" tweets from their fans or whatever, and then the battle comes out and people are like, "That was it?"   Battlers: Shit happens.  Don't just wait until two weeks before a battle and then be surprised when shit comes up.  Just because you CAN write your shit the night before, doesn't mean you should.  And all of you ain't got Caustic's skill anyway.

Speaking of two weeks...how is it that Math Hoffa has been battling every two weeks for the past three months and STILL nobody's killed him aside from Hitman Holla (from what I heard).  Is it because he's battling scrubs or has he stepped his game up?  I usually think dude is basura but since his stock hasn't dropped yet (evidence is that he's still able to do this) it's gotta be one or the other.

Freeverse Fridays: Loaded Lux

Loaded Lux is a wizard with words, so you just enjoy that video for a moment and then we'll get into something else after you've watched.

Done?  Okay.  So having watched this I realized that if Summer Madness 3 does have Loaded Lux vs. Hollow Da Don, I'm pretty sure I know the winner.   It's Hollow.  And not because he's a better rapper.  This just proved to me that a prepared Loaded Lux CAN'T actually lose to anybody out there right now.

But Loaded can't beat Hollow, and its because of this: Hollow Da Don is funny.  Like, don't get me wrong Loaded has some jokes but in the end when it comes down to bars vs. jokes, jokes will win out every time.   Lux will be there with this complicated wordplay with hard-hitting bars that are honestly way too good for the battle game, and Hollow will be there with "leave blood on the wall and the cabinets homey/it'll look like four bad-ass kids was eating ravioli" every bar and he'll take it.  2-1 or 3-0. 

Don't get me wrong--nobody else is capable of doing it.  Hollow's got a good flow and great jokes and very few people in the game are as funny as he is and can break rappers down like he can.  He's literally one of the best in the game.  (Hollow vs. Surf is a bodybag for Hollow.  And if they fuck up and put him up against anybody else for SM3 that's a wrap too.)  Plus he's been out of the game for like two years and has had plenty of time to write--and three rounds like what he did against Big T R3 will KO anybody.

That said, its Hollow's battle to lose.  If he tries to go bar for bar that shit ain't gonna work and it'll be a bodybag in the other direction.  But crowds in general love jokes more than anything else (jokes >> bars >> aggression), and I don't see why not: You come to a battle to get entertained, and what's more entertaining than some good laughs.  They'll be way easier to digest than lines like: "I could be your floor exit/On your front door checking the vortexes You had enclosed in your data code/They had it closed, but daddy's home". 

If it seems like I'm dickriding or I'm a stan or whatever....?  Get over yourself.  Do you know how many shitty sports schemes I watch rappers build?  Or how many bad "E.R." lines I've sat through in the past year?   To be honest, I don't care who wins just so long as they both put on their best show so I can forget all the terrible battles I've seen and don't even bother to link to this site. 

Mr. X-Factor...

Ahahahaha...

So remember when I did a BRW on Goodz vs. X-Factor?   So yeah, apparently somebody else thought pretty similarly regarding that battle.

Dude was hot about that $150!  I just wanna let ya'll know I don't take this as super serious as ya'll think.  This is just something I like to watch because lyrical ability amuses me.

Song of the Week - De La Soul - Me, Myself and I

Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

Tell me mirror, what is wrong

Can it be my De La clothes?

Or is it just my De La Song?

Love these guys, and this song is a classic.  Enjoy the nostalgia trip.

Music Video of the Week - Mariah Carey ft. Miguel - #Beautiful

Miguel on fire right now between his own music and the co-features This video is a little awkward to watch to me, but the song's good enough so that I don't care.  Also, am I the only person who thinks this feels more like a Miguel song than a Mariah one?

Also, as a bonus because it was good and legendary Wu-Tang member ODB was on it, one of Mariah Carey's classic jams:

Injustice: Gods Among Us

So reviews aren't really this site's thing, but I do feel like when I hype shit I should at least come back and talk about it and maybe give a few thoughts on the finished product.  If there's anything you've picked up from this blog's existence, it should be that Sage Is A DC Fan.  A huge DC Fan at that, so obviously I was super-excited about this game from the moment it was announced last May.  So excited I paid off my pre-order in January and showed up for the midnight release my local GameStop had.  Now we're nearly a month into the game's existence, and I've put at least 15-20 hours into the story mode, playing the ladders and with my friends.  And I've been trying to three-star all these fucking S.T.A.R. Labs missions.   So, having experienced a goodly portion of the game, what do I think? 

Well, let's start off with the Story Mode first.  If you're one of the people who actually bothered to poke holes in this, you're weird.  Yes, it's big and dumb.  It's a FIGHTING GAME STORYLINE.  It literally exists to explain why all the characters in the game are beating each other up.  I wasn't expecting Grant Morrison.  Or Alan Moore.  Hell, I wasn't even expecting Geoff Johns (who I find a good writer, but not exactly known for the most thought-provoking comics ever).  I expected something that would reasonably explain why Superman was making people's faces explode, and I got that.  It was an enjoyable cinematic experience that I enjoyed from start to finish.

Are there plot holes? Yes. Could you have done this with the Crime Syndicate of America?  Yes, but not without creating a sub-par game since there's no way they fight all that much like the Justice League.  You'd essentially be looking at a Shazam/Black Adam type of deal, where characters with the same powers fight completely different, and they just didn't have the character slots for that. 

Still could've done with at least another four characters in the main game.

And coincidentally, that brings me to one of the problems I have with the game: The character roster is small as hell.  And it's filled with basically only the most well-known characters in DC.  Like, NRS can pretend like they balanced this all they want, but they totally didn't.  I heard Ed Boon try to call Raven obscure--yes, the same Raven who was on primetime television from 2003 to 2006, and is currently on the comedy series Teen Titans Go.  When THAT'S "obscure", you have a good idea of what's in store.  The only two characters who you wouldn't necessarily recognize just from name alone if you made a habit of watching DC cartoons (which accounts for probably 85% of the people who bought this game), are Ares and Killer Frost.  And Ares is from Greek mythology.  Which leaves you with Killer Frost, a character who has literally no purpose in the story, has an arch-nemesis who is twice as famous but inexplicably absent from the game, and is pretty much only there because there were too many dudes in the game.  I'm all for gender balance actually, but they could've picked any number of characters to fill this role.  

Yep, noooobody knows who this is.

Still, what you have is a roster that would make any casual DC fan happy, even if the (comparatively) tiny hardcore base is left wanting, so I'd say their choices were largely a success.  Plus there's at least another four characters coming over the summer, so there's that.  Unfortunately one of their choices is Lobo (and another is Batgirl), but still the extra characters are appreciated.  And there's also the extra costumes that will be coming out alongside said characters, which brings me to the other problem I have with this game: the frankly stupid amount of exclusive bullshit, and overall lack of unlockables. 

Because this game was sorely lacking in Batman characters...

Now, at this point I know a shit ton of people who would read this would start ignoring me as an unsatisfiable fan.  But think about it.  What can you really unlock?  Music, the costumes from the other Earth, and more ladders.  To me, the music is fairly generic, the ladders are something that really just should have been available to you, and the alternate costumes aren't the skins most people really want.  Aside from the sweet GL and GA costumes, most of them are kinda terrible to begin with, but they also don't really have any sense of nostalgia you would normally get from a costume unlock.

Did you REALLY want this?

This wouldn't upset me as much if the game didn't have a TON of other costumes...that you have to spend MORE money to get.  Want the Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman New 52 costumes?  Should've been willing to shell out an additional $40 for the Collector's Edition, chump.  Want the Red Son stuff?  Better pre-order at GameStop, sucker.  All the cool recognizable costumes like New 52 GL, classic Bane and Batman Beyond?  Gotta play the iOS game to get them, AND unless you want to spend three weeks doing it, better be ready to drop another $25.  

Want this skin? Too bad, iPhone users only!

Honestly, none of that would piss me off in the slightest if there was legitimate hidden content like a non-game related alt. costumes for every character, an extra character or two and maybe an unlockable stage.  But none of that stuff's there, and what we're left with is a game attempting to milk you for every fucking dime you have.  I was one of the people who really wanted everyone to buy it on release and not wait for any kind of "Komplete Edition"...but knowing that version of MK9 came out less than a year later for about $20 less but with all the extra costumes and DLC, I can't in good conscience tell anyone to buy this game anymore.  You'd be better off waiting for some sort of GOTY version without all this fuckery.    

If the aforementioned Collector's Edition allowed you to sidestep all this crap and let you spend $100 (maybe even $120) to get all the costumes and the Flashpoint Four all at once, that would be another way for NRS to be let off the hook.  But this isn't an option.  It's all spread across pre-orders, season passes and crap involving electronic devices you may not even have.  (The Injustice mobile game isn't even available on Android, so if you don't have an Apple good luck.) 

 

 

I don't even HAVE an iPhone...

If you ignore all the extra shit, Injustice is a solid game.  I don't care what anyone says, the fighting isn't stiff--characters do what you want, when you want and at a pretty rapid pace (at least for me, the non-fighting game fan), and the game is fun to play, which is the highest praise you can give any game.  You could spend tons of hours beating the story mode and the Classic Mode (which has different endings depending on the character) alone, to say nothing of all the other ladders and S.T.A.R. Labs.  And to top it off, the story mode is a solid single-player experience, well worth the four or five hours it would take you to beat it.  I just hate that the game is dragged down in all this modern day, "the cover price isn't the REAL price" bullshit.  Unless you're a DC purist, buy the GOTY edition next year when none of that is a problem.