I just watched the War Games sequel that has just gone straight to DVD. Ive mixed feelings about this one. They almost won me over with a cheap shot - bringing back Dr. Stephen Faulken and Joshua - the bastards almost got me raving wow about this movie. In truth it's a far fetched, unbelievable pile of nonesense. For the first 40 minutes I was midly entertained but found myself constantly thinking 'BULLSHIT!' at every lame 'hack' that the main character Will Farmer pulled out the bag. A lot of the 'hacks' were well known, ageing hacks (if you can call them that) such as making a wireless signal booster out of a Pringles can (known as a cantenna) - this was big news - 7 years ago! Also the story centres around a machine called R.I.P.L.E.Y who is the latest incarnation of Joshua. RIPLEY has a set of games that are available on the internet designed to entice terrorists to play... why the fuck would terrorists be attracted to a games website??? The story falls down here big time as it assumes that only people capable of terrorist acts would stumble upon the site. Anyone who beats the game is then subject to an onslaught from RIPLEY who has access to every CCTV camera in the world and can lip read what you are saying by looking at reflections in windows etc. Then takes action from what she learns. Like I said - BULLSHIT!

Later in the movie an old man comes on the scene and whilst the two main characters are on the run from the government department who own RIPLEY he introduces himself as Dr Stephen Faulken. This is where I suddenly got interested but they had to go and ruin it - Faulken turns out to know all about Will Farmers dad who had unknown to Will been involved in hunting terrorists and killed by one of their chemical weapons. Bit of a huge co-incidence that considering Will only got involved in all of this after his mate told him about the website where he could play all these games. Too far fetched. Felt like it was made up on the spot.

Also toward the end we get to see Joshua, or WOPR which is now covered in dust and running a local power grid for a remote town, run by Faulken and a drunk russian. Many jokes are made as to how WOPR is a pile of shit that couldnt stop traffic let alone RIPLEY but sure enough with a couple of key strokes a magic 'backdoor' is opened and theyre in, playing RIPLEY at her own game. For a second when WOPR is first shown I was converted but yes within a split second I was back to... BULLSHIT!

They eventually defeat RIPLEY using a DDoS attack. Now if Amazon have the technology to ward off DDoS attacks these days then Im damn well sure the US government would not fall prey to this. Hackers moved on from DDoS attacks a few years ago now so all this is old hat. The film feels like it was written by someone who just read some local newspaper article on hackers and thought WOW Im going to write War Games 2 without realising the world had moved on since then.

To top it all off Joshua now makes jokes... the only joke I got was this movie. I so want to like this movie but apart from the initial rush of seeing a dust covered Joshua and the introduction of Faulken I realised Id been duped. I guess I should have known better really. Hehe.