"I am the bobbzman, they are the bobbzmen, I am the walrus..."

bobbzman @ 2009-12-05T18:20:00

2009-12-06T01:20:02Z

So... I haven't had to set up home internet since the days of dial-up connections, and have no clue what to look for. Does anyone have recommendations for a low-cost highspeed internet service (less than $30 a month) that doesn't require also buying some type of phone or cable TV package? Is DSL a good option, or is something else the new standard?

Game Reviews Round 11

2009-11-21T19:17:00Z

Titles Covered: New Super Mario Brothers Wii, Ghostbusters, Mario and Sonic at the Winter Games, Silent Hill 3, Escape from Monkey Island, Castlevania Lament of Innocence, Final Fantasy X-2, Scribblenauts.

Wii

New Super Mario Brothers Wii(****½)
Before the Wii had launched, there was another game called "New Super Mario Brothers" on the DS. The DS version was like a techno remix of the entire series, incorporating elements from all previous Mario games, 3D ones included. It's a good game, but I didn't find it as exciting as the old Mario games, largely due to the DS version's low difficulty, lame powerups, and lack of major innovation.
On the other hand, the Wii counterpart to "New Super Mario Brothers" fixes all three of those problems. The difficulty is much more in line with what I look for in a side-scroller, and you can store extra power-ups and gain useful new toys like the propeller cap and the penguin suit. The overall experience is more or less a souped-up version of Super Mario Brothers 3 with new levels, and it succeeds at this very well. As one of my friends put it: "It's like they took the best parts of all the Mario games and put them together." There are some weaknesses, though. Throughout the game you build up your arsenal of power-ups by going to Toad houses and playing a mini-game. It's the same mini-game every time, and it's dumb. Also, the music is kind of disappointing. It's OK, but not great. The graphics, likewise, are good enough, but they're not as cool as the visuals in recent 2D platformers such as Warioland or Klonoa.
The innovation of NSMBW comes when you add more players, and this is when things get crazy. If you're a good player, adding friends to the mix probably makes the game harder. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a different cooperative experience than something like Contra or Double Dragon, where team-mates always help you. You can really mess each other up, and outside of the story campaign, you are encouraged to. You'll bounce on heads, steal power-ups, knock sliding blocks of ice into each other, and cause all kinds of mayhem. I can't remember the last time I've seen a 4-player game that incited some much screaming, and I mean that in a very, very good way. The idea here is that you don't really play 4-player to beat the game; you do it to have fun with your friends. This might explain the lack of online play... I imagine that if playing anonymously with strangers, I'd just end up cursing the stupidity of my allies, rather than laughing along with them. Some people probably would have appreciated the option to go online, however.
I inevitably have to compare the game to Mario Galaxy, and obviously they're very different. Mario Galaxy is an epic adventure that takes itself as seriously as any Mario game ever could. NWMBW is the exact opposite: it's the nuttiest, most anarchic of all the Mario games. It's good enough as a single-player game, but with a few friends... wow!

Ghostbusters: The Video Game(***)
I'd like to note that "Ghostbusters: The Video Game" is not a very good name. There have already been other Ghostbuster games, so a title like "THE video game" is both a lie and not specific enough.
Like last year's "The Force Unleashed", the Wii version of "Ghostbusters" is very different from the same-titled game on other platforms. In both cases, someone drew up a story and a design for the game and then handed the blueprints off to two different teams working on separate incarnations of the same idea. Ghostbusters The Video Game was said to be written as a movie sequel, but it's more like an expanded remake of the first movie. The plot is VERY similar, and it goes out of its way to replicate many of the movie's most memorable scenes. The writing and acting is quite good, seeing a return of the entire original cast except Rick Moranis and Sigourney Weaver. The jokes are cornier than the humor in the movies, but I enjoyed them a lot. I also have to applaud another thing: You know how in games with voice clips, the clips tend to replay over and over again until they're not funny anymore? Ghostbusters doesn't do that. I was a little disappointed with the graphics. The developers for the Wii and PS2 versions decided to go for a cartoony look, which is fine, but the result lacks detail and polish. Also, for nostalgia purposes, it would have made more sense for a cartoony version to look like The Real Ghostbusters. Heck, they could even do it cel-shaded. Maybe they couldn't get the legal rights...
I've focused a lot on the presentation elements because I think the main point was to create an interactive version of the movie. Playing the game is fun, but it's not particularly challenging or strategic. You move from one entertaining set piece to the next blasting ghosts and solving the occasional simplistic puzzle. You have the basic proton pack, a shotgun-like blaster, the slime-launcher from Ghostbusters II, and alternate fire modes for all weapons. Everything works, and the use of motion controls is good. For some reason, throwing the trap with the nunchuck feels particularly satisfying. However, the game never made me feel particularly skillful for winning, which is why I feel it's more of an interactive movie than a true game. It did successfully capture the feeling of stepping into the Ghostbuster movies, mediocre graphics notwithstanding, and I strongly have to applaud them for that. Even the pacing of the early levels is fairly movie-like, as there will be a lot of build-up where you wander around with the PKE meter while scary music plays, and then... BLAM! Action scene! Ghostbusters is not a great game, but if you like the movies, it's worth a rental.

Mario and Sonic at the Winter Games(****)
Critics be damned, I really liked the original Mario and Sonic Olympics. It's one of the most popular party games in my house. What makes it click is that the game does a good job of mixing actual physical energy and coordination into the competition. The Winter Games requires much less energy, but more coordination, with events based more on timing and aiming than sheer endurance. I liked the endurance-style events more, but these new events are fun too. Skiing and sledding feel very natural, but one of my early favorites was figure skating. I expected figure skating to be the dumb novelty event like gymnastics was in the first game (and some of my friends feel that it is), but I thought it was a decent rhythm game. I wish there had been pairs skating and a lot more music tracks. There's also the welcome addition of 4-player cooperative team events like bobsledding, curling, hockey, and even a weird Ice Capades variant on figure skating. I would have tried the balance board, but I don't own one and I'm don't have enough interest in Wii Fit to spend the cash.
Sega really went all out on this game. The presentation aspects are phenomenal. The opening cut-scene is exciting, the music is inspiring, there's an in-game Olympic village where you can get sportswear for the Mii characters, and even neat little features like making the weather in the game match the weather in Vancouver right now. It felt like the actual Olympics, rather than a collection of sports from the Olympics. All the venues are identified as places in Vancouver, the mascots are fairly visible, and there's a "festival" mode which has you play through the entire Olympics day by day starting with the opening ceremonies. Awesome stuff.
On the other hand, my biggest disappointment is the removal of the "Circuit" Mode from the original, which allowed you to play a set of events MarioKart style and determine the winner by cumulative score. This has been replaced with "Party Mode", which adds various gimmicks and randomness to the mix, similar to the Mario Party games. I preferred the simplicity and purity of the original circuits. Also, some of the events are kind of dull, which tends to happen with large mini-game collections. Ski jumping, for instance, did not translate well into a video game controlled via Wiimote. Dream Ski Jumping is interesting, though.

PS2

Silent Hill 3 (****)
Much improved from Silent Hill 2! The camera is steady, the combat makes a lot more sense, and it actually starts off in a scary level with monsters chasing you. The format and concept of the game is similar to its predecessor, but a variety of minor improvements and fixes make the experience a LOT more enjoyable. There are more weapons, you can deftly dodge and block attacks, and the enemies are a bit more ferocious and deliberate in their attack patterns.
I criticized Silent Hill 2 for not establishing the setting very well, so it may sound weird that I applaud Silent Hill 3 for jumping straight in without establishing the setting at all. The nightmarish monster-filled world of the game is so wildly absurd that it makes more sense to me that one would appear there without explanation. In essence, Heather in Silent Hill 3 falls down the Rabbit Hole, whereas James in Silent Hill 2 took a freeway off-ramp. Also, Heather's attitude when facing monsters is understandably survivalist, ranging from "get me out of here now!" to "I will freaking kill you all!" The actual exposition for the plot comes about 3 hours into the game, when the characters drive to the actual town of Silent Hill. This is where things get weird and questions like "wait, how does nobody notice X?" crop up again. Overall, the plot is hokey videogame stuff, but it's presented well and I found Heather to be a genuinely sympathetic character.
There are some dull stretches in the game. The second level starts in a subway station, and this part is pretty boring and confusing. The same could be said (again) about trekking through the streets of Silent Hill in the second half of the game, although these parts are pretty short. Some puzzles require you to find things that are small and hard to spot, which can be annoying. Also, the interface would be smoother if it had a compass and mini-map.
Having been underwhelmed by Silent Hill 2, I was pleasantly surprised by how good Silent Hill 3 is It's consistently scary, engaging, and plays quite well. Bravo, Konami. Now finish up that remake of the first game!.

Escape from Monkey Island(*½)
I recall someone telling me that he played through Sam and Max Hit the Road entirely with a strategy guide in hand, which I sympathize with. Even as an adventure game creator myself, I've never fully understood the logic in old school LucasArts games such as Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, and Escape from Monkey Island. The problem? The puzzles aren't puzzles; they're jokes. They're designed first and foremost to be funny, and they are. But things that are funny are often absurd and illogical, which does not lend itself to good puzzle design. Sometimes this can work. Monkey Island's "insult dueling" works because it takes the "funny puzzle" idea to its most literal conclusion, asking you to pick the correct punchlines. That makes sense. Another good part involves time travel in a mysterious bog. But a lot of the puzzles make very little sense. There's a reason I turned to Myst when seeking inspiration for Geek Quest, and not these games.
With the new Tales of Monkey Island series coming out, I hoped that Escape from Monkey Island would be a decent exposure to the series. Unfortunately, it just reminded me why I never really liked these games to begin with. The controls, story, and voice-acting are all decent, but the puzzle design is pretty awful. At least Sam and Max was genuinely hilarious and Day of the Tentacle was subversively clever. This... I just can't recommend. Someone will have to tell me if the older games are substantially better and worth booting up the old SCUMM emulator for.

Castlevania: Lament of Innocence(**½)
I think I meant to rent a different Castlevania game, but there are so many, it's nearly impossible to keep them straight. Most of the Castlevania games have been 2D sidescrollers, but the PS2 Castlevanias are 3D brawlers, similar to Lord of the Rings or Devil May Cry. The controls are pretty simple: you have two attack strengths, a few combos, and a bunch of magic and sub-weapon attacks. The sub-weapons are interesting in that you can combine them with special orbs to create all sorts of different attacks, and pick out the ones you like best. You also have a magic meter for using special "relics", but as far as I call tell, you need a strategy guide to actually find any of these relics (except for 2 obvious ones that are pretty lame). The combat works well, but it doesn't respond quite as fast as I'd like, and thus I found myself taking blows even though I had clearly hit the "block" button on time. While attacks are harder to avoid than they should be, the game isn't hard. Part of this is simply due to the fact that potions are in ample supply, though I usually didn't need them except in the boss fights.
My biggest problem with the game is its bland level design and artwork. Dracula's castle looks completely boring. The scary and weird locales from the previous games have mostly been replaced by generic layouts and textures. Also, the rooms and hallways are copied and pasted endlessly, following the "Halo" philosophy of level design.
Lament of Innocence is a decent 3D action game, and it's aged better than Castlevania 64, the first 3D game in the series. Some of the boss fights are great, but the game isn't very memorable. Actually, the part I will probably remember the longest is the music for the last level, which is an amazing piano piece.

Final Fantasy X-2 (***)
I really enjoyed Final Fantasy X for its art direction, story, and battle system. Final Fantasy X-2 looked silly, but it was cheap, and I was more interested in it than Final Fantasy XI, because I don't play MMOs.
I think I know how FFX-2 got created. One day, a group of lonely male programmers started drawing pictures of Yuna and Rikku in slutty clothes. Suddenly, the boss walked in and started yelling at them for drawing girly pictures when they were supposed to be working. One clever programmer quickly concocted a lie, and told the boss that they were making concept art for the new Final Fantasy game. This kept them from getting fired, but then they had to come up with a game ridiculous enough for their "concept art", starring Yuna, Rikku, and what appears to be a weird-looking drag queen.
They succeeded on the gameplay front. FFX-2 brings back the "job" system from FF3 and FF5, where characters can train themselves in different fighter classes and acquire a diverse array of skills. This ties into "dress-spheres" and "garment grids", which are used to make the girls change outfits mid-battle (and also boost their stats, if you do it right). Curiously, this does not change the outfits they wear outside of battle. From a gameplay perspective, the system works really, really well. The battles are challenging from the get-go, and the structure of the game has very little filler, providing a simple system for selecting missions and side-quests. There are layers of strategy that depend on both your battle choices and your longer range character choices, and I was pleased with that. I was a disappointed with the limited equipment system, though.
However, FFX-2 does not deliver on narrative. The story is badly written, the music is awful, and the dialogue is worse. Whereas the original FFX immediately introduced plot tension in the form of a world-destroying monster, FFX-2 has no visible threat. Instead, Yuna and her allies are motivated to find "spheres", because they are "sphere hunters". That may sound lame, and guess what? It is! The spheres are basically the Final Fantasy equivalent of VHS tapes, each having a different 30-second grainy home video on it. Finding these "treasures" has got to be the stupidest job in the world. The plot revolves around different factions bickering over these oh-so-exciting spheres, with rumors that this ties into a doomsday device that no one wants to use anyway. The plot eventually moves on from there, but I had stopped caring.
I recommend FFX-2 for its gameplay, but don't expect much else. The art is all recycled from FFX, the sound is bad, and the story is pointless. The cheesecake fan service might have gone over better with me 10 years ago, but now, seeing a virtual 17-year-old walking around mostly naked is just uncomfortable. Speaking of which, is Square allergic to main characters over the age of 20 nowadays?

DS

Scribblenauts(****½)
Sometimes, the most intriguing game ideas are the ones that seem like they shouldn't work. Case in point: Scribblenauts. I watched an interview with the developers on Nintendo Week (a super-cheesy but kinda funny show) and was baffled. Wait, I can summon anything? Then what's to stop me from summoning a teleporter to send me to the end goal? Or a genie to grant all my wishes? Or, heck, why not just summon the objective of the game? I can't remember the last time I encountered a game concept that conjured so much curiosity. As it turns out, you can summon all the things I mentioned above, but it's like wishing on a Monkey's Paw. The teleporter sent me to the moon. The genie was able to grant wishes, but the main character wished for something stupid. And the starite I got wasn't THE starite needed to complete the level. Therein lies the challenge of Scribblenauts: trying to come up with a creative list of demands that are guaranteed to work. This is pretty fascinating, and the game indeed does have a LOT of stuff. It tends to mess up multi-word phrases, but it does a surprisingly good job considering the infinite possibilities. In an early level I had to get a cat to come down from a roof, which of course invokes obvious, boring ideas like summoning a ladder. But you can also fly up to the roof on the back of the Sphinx, summon a fireman to retrieve the cat, or set the house on fire and force the cat to jump down. All of these solutions work. The best part is not beating each level, but getting the advanced achievement of beating it 3 different creative ways without repeating a word (synonyms are sometimes necessary). This turns the game into a combination of Taboo and The Incredible Machine, with levels that alternate between being a weird platformer, and others that are straight-up word games.
The problems of this game have been so beat to death by every reviewer that I feel redundant. Yes, the movement controls suck and the physics are wonky. To my surprise, this was an unusual instance in which Zero Punctuation was not total hyperbole. I won't go into detail, but I did find it interesting that the game gives you near omnipotence along with the inability to control the main character in any sensible way. While I don't appreciate the sloppy controls, I have to wonder if that's what they were going for. In any case, it actually did little to dampen the experience for me, especially in the puzzle levels, where you don't really have to move much at all.
I didn't think Scribblenauts would work because it gives you everything, which means you can break the game. But that's the entire point. Video games are usually about following the rules, but Scribblenauts is based on creative cheating, and every player does it a little different. Beat a level 3 different ways, then look up a solution on gamefaqs, and it's almost guaranteed to be another 3 entirely different ways.

Memo to self...

2009-11-17T02:16:13Z

When going to Target (the Walmart-esque store), first ensure you are not wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants.

Even More Netflix Reviews

2009-11-13T03:50:47Z

Five from my quest to complete the AFI Top 100 Films list (speaking of which, are you still going with this, bennj?) and five others:
Swing Time, Tootsie, Night at the Opera, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, Alice in Wonderland (1999 version), Equilibrium, Battle for Terra, Taken, and Battlestar Galactica Season 4.

AFI Top 100 Films

#90 Swing Time (***** for the dance numbers, *½ for everything else)
Let me recap the exposition in this movie: A dancer who is already late to his wedding is made slightly later by a bunch of guys who convince him that his pants aren't right. To make amends, he has to come up with $25K. Why? Is that the amount he cost the bride's family by missing the wedding (which would be an awfully expensive wedding in 1936)? Nope, it's just a random amount of money that came up in conversation as a figure of speech. The dancer goes to New York and gives his lucky quarter away to a random lady, asks for it back, steals it back (actually, his ugly chibi friend steals it back), then follows her to work to return it. This naturally leads to a string of musical numbers and dance routines. Holy Plot Contrivances, Batman!
I know: a movie with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that's mostly about the dancing? Shocking! And speaking of the dance scenes, they're astoundingly awesome. I don't think they could possibly be improved. But there are only 4 dance numbers in the entire movie, which is fewer than what you see in an average episode of Glee. The vocal portions of the songs leave much to be desired, and the story sucks. The plot could just as well be about aliens from Planet Swingatron saving the universe in a dance-off, and it would make more sense. Actually, that sounds pretty cool.
If MTV had existed in 1936, Astaire and Rogers might have stuck to music videos and never worried about inconvenient things like plot or dialogue. Ultimately, I give this movie the same recommendation I give 2001 The Space Odyssey: fast-forward to the good parts, and skip the rest.

#69 Tootsie (***)
Men dressed as women seems to be a classic comic gag, which raises the question: why is it never the other way around? Basic synopsis for Tootsie: Dustin Hoffman is an actor no one wants to work with, so he creates a new persona as a woman and gets a role on a soap opera. This happens pretty suddenly, as if the answer to "I need a new identity to get a job" is always "Of course! Cross dressing!" But hey, it worked in "Mrs. Doubtfire"... Unlike Robin Williams' Doubtfire character, Hoffman is not wholly convincing as a woman. You get the idea and can accept that everyone in the movie is fooled by his disguise, but he looks and sounds one step off from a Monty Python man-as-woman. However, Tootsie is not entirely silly in its approach. There are relatively few gags, and most of the humor is dry and flows from the dialogue rather than erupting after a punchline.
What I found most interesting, however, is watching what the role does to Hoffman's character as a man. Method acting is very psychological, and there's a sense in which one absorbs the roles that they play. There's a documentary called Confessions of a Super Hero in which a Superman impersonator seems to think that he really is Superman. He knows that he can't fly, and he knows that he's an actor, but you can tell that deep down, the Man of Steel is ingrained into him. Tootsie displays a similar effect, as Hoffman becomes the "Dorthy" character even when he's playing the male counterpart.
Tootsie didn't knock my socks off, and I greatly prefer the screwball comedy and family focus of Mrs. Doubtfire, but it's worth watching.

#85 A Night at the Opera (***½)
I think I realized while watching this movie that the only Marx Brother I really love is Groucho. His quick-witted insult comedy is unmatched. I don't think I've seen another actor who can deal out funny lines so quickly that you're almost afraid to laugh for fear of missing his next joke. Harpo has his moments of brilliance, but his character is so blatantly irrational that I feel like I don't expect much from him. Meanwhile, Chico is decent, and I honestly can't remember who Zeppo was in Duck Soup. Speaking of which, Night at the Opera is definitely not as good as Duck Soup. Duck Soup was funny all the way through. Night at the Opera is much more uneven. Most of the movie is good, and contains bits such as the infamous "crowded stateroom" scene, and the finale which involves the brothers sabotaging an opera by switching out the musical score, dressing up as extras, and then swinging around the backstage area, causing backdrops to constantly fall and raise. But other routines are awfully tedious and repetitive. There's a part involving an actor's contract which is basically the same line over and over again, and the lead-up to the stateroom scene involves a gag that repeats so inexplicably that I actually thought that there was a mistake in the editing.
Overall though, definitely worth checking out, but watch Duck Soup first if you haven't already.

#96 Do the Right Thing (***½)
I've actually never seen any Spike Lee films before this one. He's Hollywood's most famous "angry black man," and while I understand why he does what he does, I never felt motivated to see any of his movies. Do the Right Thing does not have an entirely cohesive plot. It revolves around a pizzeria run by the only Italian-Americans on the block, and follows various characters as they deal with different racial issues. As a whole, I'm not sure how I feel about the movie. It is definitely well-written, and I enjoyed a lot of the dialogues and comedic moments. However, the dramatic scenes are just a mess of incomprehensible shouting, which may be realistic, but also fundamentally alienating. The climax relies on certain characters being completely irrational (granted, one is mentally disabled, but the others are not), which feels like a cheap contrivance. I'm also disturbed by the tribalistic undertones of the movie, further underscored by Spike Lee's statement that "only white people" have a problem with the main character's actions at the end of the movie.
I can still recommend the movie, however, because it's interesting. It stuck with me for a while after I watched it, and I think that says something. The film handles a lot of characters and a lot of different views. For me, I mostly liked Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator/disk jockey, and a wise old drunk called "Da Mayor." "Always do the right thing," he says. If only the rest of the characters listened to him.

#92. Goodfellas (***)
Goodfellas is either too long or needs more focus. Ultimately, if anyone asks me what the movie was about, all I can really say is "gangsters." There's sort of a plot, but it's buried beneath a lot of scenes with gangsters swearing at each other. Frankly, I don't find gangsters swearing at each other to be inherently interesting.
There are other parts of the movie I did find interesting, particularly the relationship between Ray Liotta's gangster and his wife. At first I felt bad for her, like she was a helpless victim, but she ends up being completely complicit in his activities. Pointing guns at each other and adultery is part of their relationship, and I'm not sure who the crazy one is. The narrative structure is interesting because it pretty much takes you through the main character's entire life, giving some perspective to what story there is. It's also kind of neat to watch Robert deNiro get older.
For some reason, the only Scorsese crime film that's really impressed me is Casino, which is rarely praised as much as his other movies. Casino was a movie with focus, a sympathetic main character, and a setting I could associate as being on planet Earth. Goodfellas is more like watching people from some alternate dimension, but I think that's entirely the point.

Others

Alice in Wonderland 1999 (*½)
There have been a lot of "Alice" adaptations, and one I've been aware of but never seen is the 1999 made-for-TV version, with Napoleon Dynamite's girlfriend as Alice, and a slew of big name stars as everything else. Seriously, isn't it odd that the TV version has the most star-studded cast?
The new angle of this version is that Alice is supposed to sing for her parents' party guests, and she's overcome with stage fright. Her adventures in Wonderland are supposed to counsel her to have courage. Frankly, this came off as shallow and ham-fisted compared to the more subtle lessons of other film versions, such as the 1951 Disney version, in which Alice learns how horrifying a world run by childish whims would be, or the 1985 live-action version, in which Alice learns to grow up and interact civilly with the adults.
But the real problem with the movie is that it just isn't much fun. It lacks the anarchic energy that Wonderland should have. Every scene goes on too long, meandering pointlessly through various soliloquies and painful cameos (Woopie Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat? What the hell?). The story feels like it's going through the motions. All the famous Wonderland characters appear, but they don't feel compelling in any way... even the ones that aren't completely miscast. Blarg.

Equilibrium(***)
Apparently this movie came out in 2002, but I had never heard of it until recently, when multiple sources told me it is "like the Matrix, but better." Equilibrium is definitely like the Matrix, at least in terms of style. Christian Bale looks like Neo's twin, and the action scenes are very similar. Is it better? Well, I'm of the opinion that The Matrix really wasn't that great, and the sequels, while enjoyable, ultimately revealed the franchise as a pretentious mess of hollow platitudes and pointless characters. Equilibrium isn't that great either, but it is a lot of fun.
The basic plot is an adaptation of 1984. Evil big brother government has taken over, and is using emotion-limiting drugs to subdue the populace. Refusing to take the drugs is a capital crime. To enforce the laws, the government trains "clerics" with Neo-like powers. There is not a good explanation for how people could acquire such amazing powers. The story kept my attention, and was excellent for the first half of the movie. But towards the second half things change gears, and ultimately the entire discussion of human civilization and the cost of emotion will be settled by whoever displays the most bad-ass combat abilities. It's not quite clear to me if the film had a relevant message. If the plot was intended to be an original set-up for a sci-fi action film, then it succeeded. If it was intended as a Brave New World-esque commentary, than I'm not sure who or what it's responding to. In a sense I'm reminded of Pleasantville, with its trite "emotions=good" straw man argument.
But enough of the negative, because I did enjoy the movie. I don't know if it's better than The Matrix, but it's about as enjoyable and only half as pretentious. It also did a much better job of making me REALLY loathe the bad guys, which made it more satisfying when Bale kicks their butts.

Battle for Terra(***)
You know what I'm sick and tired of? Invincible aliens: aliens with force fields or impenetrable armor that can be only subverted by a bizarre weakness. It was a novel idea when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds 100 years ago. Now, it's just a cop-out, an excuse for not coming up with a way that aliens and humans would actually fight. And so, the trailer for Battle for Terra caught my attention. Real alien battles? With the humans as the villainous technologically-superior invading force? Now, THIS I have to see!
The idea here is that humans are interested in planet Terra, which is currently inhabited by a race of sentient tadpoles that are buoyant in their own atmosphere. The human race is running out of options (Earth is gone), and need a solution quickly. The resulting story is greatly uneven. Let's start with the animation: The film starts on the planet Terra, and it looks beautiful. The world is well-realized, and the aliens are expressive, distinct, and richly textured. Then we move to the Ark, a ship housing the refugee humans, and the film suddenly looks like crap. The humans look like carbon-copy figurines, and the environment doesn't look like a place where people live. Meanwhile, the plot is novel at times, but then becomes annoyingly cliche. The idea of making an alien invasion movie in reverse is novel (I guess Starship Troopers also did it, but without creating a shred of sympathy for the aliens), but the reasoning behind the invasion pretty stupid and cliche. I loved Battle for Terra in parts. I loved the idea, I loved the design of the alien world, and I loved some of the characters. But the script needed a lot more work, and the film's message can't find it's bearings. To be fair, I've yet to see an animated feature that tackles environmentalism without becoming so ridiculous that it lost relevance (Remember Captain Planet?). But I will definitely give them credit for one thing: they finally made an alien movie where neither side is invincible!
One final note: some people have noted a similarity between Battle for Terra and the plot of James Cameron's upcoming "Avatar." Am I the only one feeling major "Phantom Menace" vibes about this movie?

Taken(**½)
Apparently Liam Neeson is a superhero. He has the brutality of Clint Eastwood, the invincibility of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the martial arts skills of Jackie Chan. Taken is pretty much a retread of "Commando": a retired ex-super-soldier must kill a billion bad guys to save his daughter. No matter how many bad guys surround him, he will always kill them all. Surprisingly, the aging Liam Neeson makes it look almost believable, launching attacks with ruthless efficiency. The bad guys are traffickers with a seemingly large supply of kidnapped girls. I guess we assume that Liam saved all the other girls too, but the movie kind of skips over that and also quickly forgets about the death of one of the major characters.
Taken is a guilty pleasure movie. The bad guys are bad, the hero kicks their butts, and it's satisfying enough. I didn't learn anything from Taken and it didn't make me think (it's best if you don't...), but it was a satisfactory way to spend 90 minutes.

Battlestar Galactica, Season 4 (****)
The first half of season 4 was consistently good but never great. It kept the plot moving and was interesting, but it largely played the same notes as before, and the emotional and psychological drama felt worn out. That said, the only part I really objected to was the Cult of Baltar (aka "The Baltar Slut Brigade"), which has got to be the stupidest thing the series has done. What next: he becomes a circus clown because a bunch of "crazy" people inexplicably think that he should be one?
The second half was much better, and seemed to have more going on. The mutiny subplot was interesting, partly because Zarek has a pretty damn good point: behind all the leader worship that the BSG universe seems to adore, Adama and Roslin are basically tyrants, and at this point, they're without a clue. I think I was really sick of Roslin in particular. Her entire administration has been supported by the ideals of Divine Right of Kings crossed with "my boyfriend has a Battlestar so neener neener!" I don't think any of this hurts the show, but it perhaps adds more moral ambiguity than the writers intended.
The finale is not without its cop-outs (*cough*Starbuck*cough*), but all in all I thought it was pretty freaking fantastic. The final battle was amazing and the ending has some nice fake-outs.
My verdict on the whole series is that the story should have been trimmed down to 3 or maybe even 2 seasons, but despite having to wade through a lot of filler, it was worth it.

Public Service Announcement

2009-10-17T22:45:04Z

Dear people who like to take their families to UA football games:

Parking at and around the university is free on weekends. The "Event Parking" is actually the only place you have to pay, and a lot of it isn't even close to the stadium. Why are you all parking there?

Sincerely,
Someone who's been beating the system for 6 years

bobbzman @ 2009-10-16T00:28:00

2009-10-15T07:31:37Z

OMG, Super Mario is dead!

(Well, one of the faces of the Super Mario Trinity, in any case. Let's hope nothing happens to Charles Martinet or Bob Hoskins)

My stupendous Flash project, continued...

2009-10-11T07:02:24Z

No, it's not Geek Quest 4.

Amidst other projects like trying to get through grad school, I finally finished the second episode of my music-RPG series. This one required a metric buttload of coding since I basically had to make all the RPG systems like managing equipment and completing dungeon crawls. Anyway, if you'd like to check it out:

Part I (originally posted several months ago):
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~abobbs/hero.html

Part II:
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~abobbs/hero2.html

If you complete Part I, you can load your character sheet into Part II. Otherwise, you will be given preset stats.

Basic Controls:
On the map: Cursor keys to move and select dialogue options. Enter to interact with something, talk to someone, or advance dialogue. Tab to bring up your character sheet.
Shops/Character Sheet: Use mouse to make selections
In battle: Cursor keys to make selections and hit beats, Enter to confirm, Mouse to hit ranged targets.

I'm not sure how to balance the difficulty, so I mostly need feedback on that aspect. At minimum, even if you have nothing else to say, please let me know how difficult you find it to hit each type of beat marker: (1) The yellow "quick attack" marker, (2) the red "strong attack" sequences, (3) the "range attack" mouse buttons, and (4) the arrowed "defense markers". Defense markers are supposed to be quite hard to hit, whereas quick attacks are supposed to be easy, and the rest should be somewhere in between. The combat engine is coded to be pretty robust and flexible, so I can easily change just about anything.

Mini Strategy Guide:
-There are 2 "shops" in the game. One is the shack next to the archery range, which sells weapons and armor. The other is the temple in the far-left side of the castle. Talk to the king to get gold for your services, and you can go shopping for potions, armor, and weapons.
-The game is designed to let you develop the character based on your own strengths and weaknesses. If you have trouble hitting the red attack beats, stick to swords and boost your skill points to lessen the penalty for missing beats. If you have trouble hitting the defense beats, take "Hard to Kill", then "Tough Skin" so you can absorb more blows. If you have favor with the king, take "Haggler" so you can buy more stuff with all the gold he gives you. If you kick ass at the rhythm game, consider switching to axes, taking "Melee Master", and giving Myrina your best sword.
-Character and Reputation Points are not very important at this stage of the game. The only effect you might encounter is that the temple will refuse to do business with you if you rob the guest rooms in the castle.
-Equipment must be selected from the drop-down menus in the character sheet screens.
-You have two main options for this episode: either you can go on a dungeon crawl, or you can stay behind and participate in a brief battle-planning mini-game. Taking the episode as a standalone experience, there's very little reason not to take the dungeon crawl option. Years from now when I finish all the episodes and string them together into one gigantic game, it will make much more sense to have these sorts of different paths.
-A few things about combat:
The "phase" indicator in the upper right indicates which character you are making decisions for, and which one you are acting for in the rythm game. There is no pause between turns in the rhythm game, so you have to stay on your toes.
Each encounter has a pre-set distance that the enemies start at. Later enemies have ranged attacks, but in this episode, this is basically an opportunity to pick them off before they get close. Scorpions go down in one hit. They also attack as a group, so defending against several of them is a dangerous predicament, but they're easy to eliminate quickly.
Wargs are the first enemy that has multiple attack types. The claw attack does less damage, but is harder to dodge. The bite attack only requires hitting the first beat marker, but does more damage.
Poison does not continue to sap your health once a battle is over. I always found it unbelievably annoying to wind up with permanently poisoned characters on a dungeon map. Fallen characters are brought back up to 1 HP after a battle. Like most RPGs, poison can be cured in-battle by having the poisoned character use antidote. Revives, when used, bring back the other character, set them at 50 HP, and remove effects of poison. Second Wind does the same thing, and it will be used automatically the first time you go down.
The Manticore presents an alternate way to fight: one character goes in close and the other provides fire support. If you've leveled up Myrina's bow skill and equipped her with the Scythian Bow, this is probably the way to go. If the Trainer falls during this fight, there is a chance that Myrina deserts you and you get Game Over. This is highly unlikely if you have lots of Myrina points and/or the Arrow of Light. If the Trainer withdraws, Myrina will withdraw as well.
The "withdraw" command applies to each character separately. If anyone is low on health, you can send them away, but can not bring them back into that same battle. Mostly, you want to do this with Myrina, as you get bonus points for keeping her unharmed. Withdrawn or fallen characters will not get any XP. If both characters withdraw, you'll be taken back to an earlier spot on the map. Enemies regain all their HP when you fight them again.

Known issues/limitations:
-Like the Final Fantasy games, only the main character appears when you're running around the map, even if other characters are with you. I'm not going to write a "follow" script. It's way too much work.
-Hit detection in Flash is inherently wonky, so you'll find minor peculiarities while walking around the maps. At times, you may need a foot of clearance from the wall, and other times you can push a few pixels into it.
-When you bring up the equipment screen on your character sheet, the pictures of your equipment may flash because the game takes a split-second to figure out which picture it's supposed to show. For similar reasons, enemies flash when you enter combat.
-For stupid reasons, my system only allows one character to level up at a time. If two characters reach their XP thresholds at the same time, only one will level up, but the other will level up at the end of the next event.

Game Reviews Round 10

2009-09-27T19:13:24Z

Titles Covered: Klonoa, The Conduit, Madworld, DK Jungle Beat (Wii Version), TMNT Smash-up. Strong Bad's Game (Episode 2), Contra Rebirth, Majora's Mask, and Silent Hill 2

Wii
Klonoa(***):
Klonoa is a side-scroller that understands the 3rd dimension. You move in 2D, but the world is drawn in 3D and your path will arc and turn about the 3D plane. The graphics look fantastic. I don't mean "realistic", I mean fantastic: sharp, well-modeled, and nicely colored. The gameplay is also pretty good. It's a platformer, but adds the innovation that you are constantly picking up enemies and throwing them to solve puzzles. This usually involves hitting a target (sometimes out of the 2D plane) or throwing them down to give yourself momentum for a second jump. In general the gameplay is satisfying if unexceptional. It's over pretty quickly, however. Klonoa only has 12 levels and then a final boss fight; at most, that's 4 hours of gameplay for a play-through.
And then... there's the story. I can't tell you anything about the story because the cutscenes were so annoying that I started skipping them pretty early into the game. The dialogue is incredibly irritating and high-pitched. I now appreciate how Mario games were always so good at being kid-friendly without losing appeal.
That aside, the game's worth a look. It's a good entry in the sidescroller genre, and while it only has enough staying power to be a rental, it's a highly enjoyable rental.

The Conduit (**½):
Gaming journalism hyped up The Conduit as the savior of "hard core" gaming on the Wii. Why? Because it was guaranteed to be challenging, lengthy, and artistically ambitious? Of course not. The Conduit is "hard core" because it's a first-person-shooter that plays online and has voice chat. Internet, must you always prove me right? But, whatever. Is it a good game, or not?
It's decent. The Conduit is a standard shooter for the most part, but there are some nice things about it. As with the Half-life series, you fight a mix of humans and aliens. This may sound purely stylistic, but it also provides a nice mix of gameplay styles. At times you take cover and engage in firefights, and in others you plow through swarms of monsters trying to destroy all the respawn hives. And sometimes you do both. The weapons are also a mix of old and new; you get the ever-reliable shotgun along with weird futuristic/alien weapons, which are pretty cool and remind me a bit of Perfect Dark. The other unique feature is a tool called the "All-Seeing Eye", which reveals invisible things, but it's not particularly interesting. The level design is very repetitive. It's certainly better than Halo, but if that sounds like great praise, you need to go back and play Halo. The controls are good, and the game has a clever way of letting you fine-tune pretty much every parameter, even your running speed. The only serious problem I found with the default set-up is that the melee attack is assigned to a swing of the remote. If I have to be pointing at the center of the screen, I don't want to also have to swing the remote. Save yourself some trouble and use the control options to swap "spin" and "melee". It makes a lot more sense.
I'm going to stop reviewing the online multiplayer modes in games. It's not my thing, never has been, and probably never will be. I'll just say that there is an online mode, but there is no local multiplayer at all, which is too bad. For the entertaining (if short) single-player campaign, The Conduit gets a passing grade.

Madworld(****)
Madworld is one of the most violent games I've ever seen. It's also an instance where the violence is incredibly funny. Perhaps some of you remember Steven King's dystopian satire "The Running Man", or the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie loosely based on it. Madworld is the same idea, except with much more emphasis on the dark humor of the situation. The story is that terrorists have taken over a city, apparantly for the sole purpose of putting on a game show called "Death Watch". On the show, you pulverize tons of punks in various ridiculous ways, all while sports commentators give a play-by-play of the action. The two commentators are comedians Greg Proops of "Who's Line is it Anyway?" and John Dimaggio of "Futurama", and they often made me laugh out loud.
The controls are very intuitive. You have a jump button, an action button, and a chainsaw button. Simple. Swing the remote the way you want to swing/throw your weapons, and you're all set. You're expected to make your kills interesting, which creates a balance between what is effective for clearing out guys and what's effective for getting points. The chainsaw is typically the weapon of choice for giving yourself some space, but you'll want to use the environment to get points. At first, the enemies are such wimps that all you do is practice setting up combos, but it becomes more of a real action game as you go on. Arguably, the game should have started on "hard" mode, but that's my bias as someone who craves challenge. The graphics are very stylized; everything is in black-and-white except the blood, and it's all drawn in a comic-book style. Aesthetically, I didn't think the style was all that great, but it does contribute to the surreality of the game. Despite all pretensions, Madworld is a title that reminds you that you're playing a video game. It would be pretty horrifying if it didn't.
There are a few problems. The in-game text is tiny and hard to read. I also would have liked a better sense of progression in the levels, rather than the open-ended skate-park design. Finally, as much as I love the commentators, they can repeat themselves excessively if you end up doing having to do the same move several times in a row. Would it have been that hard to have the game stop playing clips for a while once it's run out of new ones? The game is not very long, but it lends itself to replay. Overall, I'd put it in the same category as No More Heroes, a game with similar ambitions. It's not perfect, and can get awfully repetitive at times, but it's well-executed and unique enough to be more than worth your time.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Wii Version (***)
The Wii is backwards compatible for GameCube games, but publishers have seen fit to rerelease their Gamecube titles as "Wii" games anyway. Aside from marketing purposes, the main point of this is to use the Wii controllers as opposed to GameCube controllers. In this case, the game is replacing bongo controllers, which I never owned. The result is that the Wii version has more traditional controls than the GameCube original. "Jungle Beat" is now a traditional platformer supplemented by waggle and tilt controls. It may sound like a quick cash-in, but they did a really good job with the conversion. It looks and feels like it was designed from the ground up as a Wii platformer, and some of the boss-fights are similar to Wii Boxing.
With the new controls, Jungle Beat is a lot like the Donkey Kong Country games from the mid-90's. This comparison probably doesn't do it any favors, because those games are hard to surpass. Diddy's Kong Quest is one of the best platformers ever made, and Jungle Beat is not. It lacks the challenging design and epic feel of the DKC series, instead focusing on high scores and "banana combos". This is alright, but I'd rather have more of a survival challenge. There are definitely moments when Jungle Beat is running on all cylinders and becomes downright awesome, but most of the levels don't reach such heights.
Jungle Beat is definitely a very charming game. It looks cute and is fun to play, but at the end of the day, I didn't feel it was a keeper.

TMNT Smash-Up(**)
Ninja Turtles have gone through many incarnations, the most famous being the 1987 TV series and its many video game spinoffs. Apparently, TMNT creator Peter Laird never really liked the TV show, and has prevented any of its original elements from ever being used again. Thus, the franchise is trying to keep itself alive amidst a flood of other 80's nostalgia pieces, but unable to use its most popular characters. This is an incredibly stupid position for a franchise to be in, especially when you're trying to make a Super Smash Brothers clone with a set of characters to compete with Nintendo's roster. Of the entire colorful rogues gallery that TMNT has seen over its many years, the only recognizable ones you'll see here are Shredder and Karai, and if you've never heard of Karai, you're not alone.
So with a restricted character roster, does TMNT Smash-Up still succeed as a great fighting game? Not really. The game mechanics are functional, and there are an impressive array of modes, but the core fighting lacks pizazz and variety. All the characters have pretty much the same moves, with minor variations, and a few feel completely identical (April and Karai, for instance). None of the moves are particularly cool; you tap buttons and swing weapons, and that's about it. This aspect is remarkably disappointing. You do have items in the form of "ninja powers", which are decent, but they are hindered by the fact that you can only use them with two feet planted firmly on the ground. So what does the game offer that's good? Well, the level designs are pretty cool, and I like that they have a lot of hazards and transitions. The graphics are also pretty sharp, although Shredder looks wholly unintimidating. Also, perhaps the one improvement the game makes on Smash Bros. is that the dodge moves are easier to pull off.
Other than that, I can't offer any grand praise. The gameplay actually works OK, but it's not particularly thrilling. TMNT Smash-up is a missed opportunity. The game could have delved into all the different versions of the turtles to give us a wide array of items, characters, assists, and fighting styles. They had a metric ton of material to work with, but instead made a mediocre adaptation of a once legendary franchise.

Wiiware/Virtual Console
Strong Bad's Game, Episode 2: Strongbadia the Free (***½)
I played this quite some time ago, but forgot to write a review. In general, Episode 2 of Strong Bad's game has similar merits to Episode 1: excellent voice acting and writing supplemented by adequate game design. "Strongbadia the Free" follows a fairly similar pattern as "Homestar Ruiner", offering a main quest, a choose-you-own-adventure Teen Girl Squad comic, and a minigame that serves as parody of the Atari 2600. The difference is that in "Strongbadia the Free", everything is done just a bit better. The Teen Girl Squad segment is more creative, the Atari parody is funnier, and the main quest makes more sense. There is an actual narrative this time, which gives the game a stronger sense of purpose besides just finding things that are funny.

Contra ReBirth (***)
Following the decline of the sidescroller genre in the mid 90's, Wiiware and other low-cost game services like XBL Arcade have given it new life. Contra ReBirth is what it sounds like: it's a brand new side-scrolling Contra game. The gameplay and style remind me a lot of Contra III: The Alien Wars, almost as if this were the lost SNES sequel. Explosions, mini-bosses, and crazy situations flood the screen. This might be the wildest Contra game yet. At the point where you get involved in a car chase involving robotic llamas, I started to question the sanity of the game designers. Aside from the crazy scenarios, the gameplay is classic Contra, complete with perfect controls and 2-player cooperative mode. I am, however, dissappointed by the weapon selection; there are only 3 gun upgrades, no other power ups, and I miss the flamethrower. Difficulty is hard for me to judge. The game is very busy, and very, very hard, but you can keep "continuing" and replaying levels until you beat them. There's also a plot supported by still images, and it's bad, but intentionally so. You can skip the cutscenes.
I didn't like Contra ReBirth as much as Contra III or the original Contra, both of which had more levels, powerups, and gameplay styles. However, I can't argue with what Konami has done here by creating something new and nostalgic at the same time. It's not as exciting as novel Wiiware games like World of Goo or Lost Winds, but it's a cool little throwback.

Majora's Mask(***½)
I decided to buy this on the virtual console because it's the only Zelda game I've never completed. When this game came out, I tried to finish it on a 3-day rental over Christmas break. I might have succeeded, except that my mom got upset at me for playing video games for hours on end, so I ended up quitting about a third of the way through. Ironically, in the game-world of Majora's Mask, Link has a 3-day time limit to save the world, which equates to about 3 hours of play-time, 6 if you use the slow-time spell. You can reset the clock, but this resets any in-progress sidequests or dungeons.
A ton of character models and gameplay moments are recycled from Ocarina of Time. But aside from that, the game finds a lot of new ideas, mainly focused on powers and transformations you get by using different masks. The ability to transform into different creatures is neat; it's the one stand-out feature of Majora's Mask that I wish had been carried on as a permanent mainstay in the Zelda universe. All 3 transformations make sense and give you a variety of powers and limitations. The dungeons are designed around the ability to transform Link into these different creatures, and these levels stand out from the clichés of the series. The town quests, on the other hand, are a mixed bag. Town quests are a HUGE part of Majora's Mask, and while some are pretty clever, they're not exciting, and can occasionally be entirely tedious and arbitrary. A lot of sidequests are impossible unless you do them at exactly the right time. You get a scheduler to help you with this, but seriously, why should a video game revolve around a day planner? What next? Mario skipping his battle with Bowser because it's not allowed by his life insurance policy?
Overall, Majora's Mask is a good game, and I certainly won't complain about the value I got for $10. The main dungeons are all masterfully designed, and while I didn't appreciate the endless sidequests, I do respect the sheer depth of the game. However, it's still a problematic title, and probably the worst of the 3D Zelda games. It lacks the freshness of Ocarina of Time, the epic scale of Twilight Princess, or the poignant creativity of Wind Waker. At times, Majora's mask is excellent, but the overall adventure and story simply don't flow well, and a lot of its grand ideas almost work, but slightly miss the target.

PS2
Silent Hill 2(***)
Games need to learn how to hit the ground running. I say this because the beginning of Silent Hill 2 is terribly boring. You wander through fog-filled streets for what feels like an eternity and aren't allowed to interact with anything. This is a game design sin. I understand that stuff you see in a game is occasionally scenery, but if I see a door that isn't boarded up, I should be able to try and open it. The town of Silent Hill is a tech demo for fog effects.
The indoor stages of the game, on the other hand, are more enjoyable. You get some puzzles, some key-finding, and claustrophobic spaces that render slow-moving monsters relevant. And fortunately, the game suddenly decides it's a good idea for things like doors and shiny objects to be interactive. The indoor levels are somewhat repetitive, but they largely succeed, and they make great use of sparse lighting and a very useful map system. However, the combat is no good, even by standards of the genre. The combat system is simultaneously stiff and erratic, and enemies can't seem to decide if they're dead or not.
Silent Hill can be a very scary game, although it took a long time for it to suck me into the atmosphere. I found the setting somewhat jarring and confusing. The game wants so badly to be taken seriously, but the premise only makes sense if you take it as a total abstraction. Silent Hill 2 tries to be The Shining, a psychological horror novel with very similar themes, but forgets to explain how such a place could fit into the real world, why the main character doesn't just leave and get help, and who he is besides some guy with a dead wife. As such, I found it hard to understand the game's universe. Eventually it grew on me, more from my own play experience than anything else, and there are a few parts in the second half that are genuinely terrifying. The story is not bad, but it's not good literature either. It does have some good ideas and some great moments, but ultimately it's pretty one-note and underdeveloped.
Although it took a while for me to get into it, I did like the game, even if it wasn't nearly as good as I had been led to believe (Seriously, REmake is a much better game). I would have played Silent Hill 1 first, but copies of it cost slightly more than I'm willing to spend for a blind-buy of an old game, and Gamefly doesn't rent PS1 titles. But look, a Wiimake! Sure, I'll give it a try...

More Netflix Reviews

2009-09-22T08:14:26Z

Stuff covered: City Lights, On the Waterfront, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Gone with the Wind, North by Northwest, Grave of the Fireflies, Dances with Wolves, Gran Torino, and Battlestar Galactica Season 3.

Top 100 AFI Films

#11, City Lights(**½)-
Unlike Buster Keaton's The General, which I reviewed last time, City Lights is more in line with what I expected a silent movie to be. It's wall-to-wall slapstick, which can best be summarized as "Charlie Chaplan stumbles around and crashes into things" and "Charlie Chaplan reaches out and grabs the wrong thing-a-ma-bob". This is all well and good, but it gets monotonous after a while. I felt there needed to be something more, perhaps some funny dialogue that would use the slapstick as a punchline. Obviously, we don't get any of that. I did really love parts of the movie, however. Some of the scenes are genuinely memorable, such as a police chase in the dark, the buildup to the famous boxing fight, and a drunken car ride.
The romance between The Tramp and The Flower Girl is surprisingly sweet and poignant. Actually, the Flower Girl is a pretty charming character by herself, and manages to achieve some sense of subtlety (gasp!) with her role. I have to wonder if the movie would be better had it been about her, with The Tramp in a supporting role. On an introspective note, I've found that I tend to enjoy the romantic subplots of older movies much more so than in more modern movies. Especially in the last few years, it seems that romantic comedies are burdened by sappy dialogue, unlikeable characters, and an excess of sex. I blame Wedding Crashers (an abysmal movie, IMO) for this trend.
Overall, City Lights is good for what it is, but it's not as good as The General and it gets tiring after a while. Also. continuing my thesis that silent films are like video games, City Lights opens by having a kazoo playing the musical accompaniment to provide "voices" for people. I swear I've seen something like this before.

#19, On the Waterfront(****½)
In preparation for directing The Crucible, I read playwright Arthur Miller's autobiography, "Timebends", which has some incredible stories about the House Un-American Activities Committee. At one point, Miller was pitching a screenplay about longshoreman, union corruption, and the mafia. The studio was ecstatic about the script, but censors nixed the project, insisting that the film was unAmerican and could only be allowed if all the villains turned out to be Soviet infiltrators. Miller rejected this asinine plot twist and left Hollywood.
The story as I knew it ended there; I either didn't know or forgot what happened next. Then, while watching the opening credits for On the Waterfront, I noticed two names: Elia Kazan and Lee Cobb. Kazan was Arthur Miller's producer, and actor Lee Cobb played Willie Loman in the original production of Death of a Salesman. Could it be? Yes, as Wikipedia confirmed for me, On the Waterfront is actually a re-branded version of a banned screenplay, credited to a different writer who reworked the story to contain heroic and populist themes.
You might think that this would make On the Waterfront a watered-down movie (forgive the pun), but it's not. It lacks the moral complexity of Arthur Miller's theater work, but it does not lack heart and drama. It's a powerful movie, a simple story of a man who lacks the courage to do the right thing, and the few who can make him see the light. It also has great acting and soliloquies that sent shivers down my spine.
There are a few problems. Leonard Bernstein's score is overplayed, at times upstaging the actual film. There are also some bits that seem silly, such as when an assassin trys to run down Marlon Brando, misses, and then just keeps going, like the drilling machine from Labyrinth. But these are nitpicks. We may never know what On the Waterfront would have been if not for 1950's censors, but somehow it still managed to be an incredible movie.

#29, Double Indemnity(***½)
Interesting film noir loosely based on the true story of Ruth Synder, a woman who had her husband murdered for insurance money. The crime was poorly executed, and Mrs. Snyder was sent to the electric chair in 1928. Double Indemnity tells an alternate version of the story from the point of view of an insurance salesman who falls in love with a femme fatale. She regales him with stories of how her husband neglects her, and he decides that he can use his inside knowledge of the insurance business to concoct the perfect plan for murder and insurance fraud. Without giving much away, the plan he comes up with is actually not very good at all. As such, I predicted exactly how it would unravel before it even started. This could be considered a weakness in the story, but then again, who ever said criminals were smart?
The smart one is actually Barton Keyes, a claims adjuster who apparently does better detective work than the LAPD. He is probably the most interesting character in the film, followed by the hapless stepdaughter, who gives a frightening monologue that reveals just how insanely evil the film's villain is. The two lead characters, by contrast, are mostly there to move the plot along. They get the job done, but don't accomplish much else. Curiously, I also found the hair and make-up jobs on the femme fatale to be highly unattractive. The only part where she looked hot was in her first appearance, when she had just come out of the shower and didn't have anything fancy done to her face or hair.
Double Indemnity lacks the psychological depth of Sunset Blvd, Bill Wilder's other famous film noir, but it's an entertaining and interesting picture in its own right. The camera-work and lighting is excellent, and the story is capable enough, if just a bit silly.

#21, Chinatown (**)
How often can you show people a movie and say, "This was directed by a wanted fugitive"? Yep, French director Roman Polanski, who also directed The Pianist a few years ago, is still wanted in the US for a 1977 statutory rape charge.
As for the movie itself, all I have to say is "meh". It's wholly unremarkable in every aspect. The plot, the style, the filming... all "meh". I didn't really understand Jack Nicholson's motivation. He starts out as a hired gun, then pursues the case beyond his contract for no particular reason other than to advance the plot. The plot itself is OK, but it unveils itself in a slow, methodical manner that doesn't allow for much excitement or drama, and still manages to leave a lot of loose ends hanging. The final plot twist might have been brilliant in a movie with better pacing, but here it merely solicited a reaction of "Oh, that's interesting." Finally, the movie has the look of a typical 70's movie: stylistically bland. I decided at one point that the 1970's was the worst decade for film, Star Wars notwithstanding, and my quest through the AFI list has supported this. I didn't hate Chinatown, but it really isn't anything special. I assume the film was a much bigger deal when the Jack Nicholson persona was new.

#6, Gone with the Wind(*****)
Pop Quiz: What is the highest grossing movie of all time? Titanic? Wrong answer! Sure, Titanic made the most without inflation adjustments, but in today's dollars, Gone with the Wind's worldwide total is about 3 billion! For whatever reason, Netflix doesn't have history's highest grossing movie (is it out of print?) and no one I knew had it in their collection. After checking a few times, I eventually managed to get a copy from the UA library. Was it worth the trouble?
In a word: yes! Let's start with the art design. Gone With the Wind won Best Art Direction in 1939, and it might as well have won again for every single year it was re-released. The backgrounds, sets, costumes, lighting, and camerawork are absolutely phenomenal. It's artistically brilliant and technically impressive. Often in old movies you see the seams, the places where you wish that modern technology could have made it look more believable, but not here. There's a chase scene through a burning city that looks like it was filmed no earlier than the 80's.
As with The General, it felt a little weird to see a movie that took the side of the Old South, a society my progressive Western education always maligned as an evil place. The film criticizes the South for going to war, but it does not damn Southern values... not even slavery. It's a portrayal of fairytale land that turns into a war torn landscape, and then is rebuilt as cold-hearted modern reality. Romanticized? Yes. This is not a good history lesson. But as fiction, it's a compelling, nearly overwhelming story that covers a lot of ground, one of those movies that is so big it's almost ridiculous. The acting is another highpoint. Clark Gable is wholly charismatic as Rhett Butler, and Vivian Leigh pulls off the charmer/seductress act better than almost any actress I've ever seen.
I'd say Gone with the Wind is a very long movie, but I feel it's more like two movies advertised as one. I often watch long movies in 2 sittings anyway, but this was a case where the two halves (separated by an intermission) were neatly split into two complete stories, as if "Gone with the Wind I" and "Gone with the Wind II" simply came in the same box set. Bottom line: unlike with Lawrence of Arabia, I didn't feel like I was taking breaks out of boredom.

#55, North By Northwest (****)
I'm always impressed with Alfred Hitchcock. The man made classics for half a century, defining the modern age of cinema. I've seen many of his movies, but there are always many more notable ones I haven't seen because his body of work is hugely enormous.
Unlike most Hitchcock movies, North by Northwest is a film that spends most of its time in overdrive mode. It starts very quickly and ends abruptly once the last bad guy is taken care of. It's The 39 Steps mixed with James Bond. Cary Grant is Bond, Eva Marie Saint is the Bond Girl, James Mason is the Evil Genius (played with the sliminess he showed in Lolita) and pre-Mission-Impossible Martin Landau is OddJob. From Russia with Love even stole a scene from North by Northwest. It's a very, very cool movie. In nearly every scene, there's either a chase, an intriguing plot twist, or the hero doing something clever. It's almost over the top, particularly the iconic crop-dusting scene, which is exciting though lacking believability. The low point of the movie for me was the female lead. She's ultimately not much more than a modestly-dressed Bond Girl, but the film acts as if her romance with Cary Grant is supposed to mean something, and I found her romantic scenes boring. Aside from that, I have to say this is one of the most enjoyable Hitchcock movies I've ever seen, and probably a good gateway film for people who find his other stuff too slow.

Other Stuff

Grave of the Fireflies (***½)
I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of anime, but this film was recommended to me enough times that I decided to check it out. It immediately reminded me of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, another WWII movie with a somewhat similar premise. War hits home, kids are separated from parents, and then they struggle to survive. Despite not being terribly long, Grave of the Fireflies is kind of a slow movie. Even the firebombs in the air raid scenes seem to fall slowly. Meanwhile, the dialogue is sparse and there are a lot of scenes that exist without any grander role in the plot. At first I wasn't impressed with all this, but somehow it manages to come together in the end. Perhaps the best way to explain this movie is that it's a journey. You know the destination from the outset, and the individual stops aren't that impressive, but the entire thing is something to look back on. Grave of the Fireflies is a really good movie, but it took almost its entire running time to convince me of this. And yes, it did make me cry, but just a little bit.

Dances with Wolves(****)
I doubt she remembers me, but I actually knew one of the stars of this movie, Anne Costner, in high school. Anyway...
When I reviewed The Searchers, I commented on how the Commanche were treated like Imperial Stormtroopers. Dances with Wolves comes from a different era, a time when political correctness was becoming trendy, and yet it still manages to do the exact same thing. This time, it's the Pawneee tribe and the white people (minus Kevin Costner and President Roslin) who are cartoonishly villainous. The film's one-sided view on US expansion results in a lost opportunity. I was looking forward to a scene where Costner would act as a representative of the Sioux, and give a dramatic speech to his people. But no, he's too emo to talk, and the white soldiers are too evil to listen.
Aside from that and a completely unnecessary sex scene, I actually enjoyed the movie quite a bit. It's long, but it keeps things moving. The production design works well with the setting, letting you feel the vast power of the untamed frontier. I always liked stories of mountain men, so I actually liked the scenes with Costner alone on the plains with his wolf friend, despite the lack of dialogue. The main plot, of course, has to do with Costner making friends with the Sioux nation. Issues of PC-pandering aside, this is actually very interesting. This is where the film uses its slow pacing to good effect, allowing the friendships to grow with a slow pace that makes them feel all the more real.
I recall when Dances With Wolves won Best Picture, and I think this was the first time I had heard of the Academy Awards. However, I misunderstood the meaning of "Best Picture", thinking it was a prize for technical photographic quality.

Gran Torino (****½)
"Get off my lawn!" I love the Clint Eastwood persona, but have been a little annoyed at his recent Oscar-baiting. With Gran Torino, however, I honestly felt that he hit this one out of the park. In this movie, Clint is an angry old man, who pulls guns on kids, growls at his teenage granddaughter for exposing her midriff, and is full of racist language. Yet, he seems to have some deep-rooted wisdom, especially in contrast to the punk gangsta kids who tramp on his lawn. There's a great moment where Clint holds them at gunpoint with the same M1 garand he used in the Korean War. When the kids try to talk about how tough they are, they look completely ridiculous. The mean old man has a point: our generation is full of selfish pretenders.
Predictably, Clint becomes less mean as the movie goes on, but the story is very genuine. There are no sudden epiphanies or dramatic character shifts, just a believable friendship between two people who need each other's help. I can't think of any major complaints about the movie. Good story, good writing, and great movie all around.

Battlestar Galactica, Season 3(***)
This is a very uneven season, with some episodes that are excellent ("Rapture") and some that are terrible ("Unfinished Business"). Individual episode quality aside, I took issue with some of the character arcs as well, especially with the fact that they made Starbuck into such a drama queen. Seriously, this show is dramatic enough without an extra helping of relationship wanking. I also disagree with the decision to show so much of the Cylons in their own environment. All the scenes of the "skinjobs" arguing aboard the Basestar took away from the mystery and menace that made the Cylons so compelling. Instead, they seemed like another clan of humans with a smaller cast. I understand that humanizing the cylons is sort of the point, but this had already been accomplished with the "Sharon" subplot.
What was good about the series before is still good, though, and most the episodes are enjoyable, even if many of them refused to move the plot along. The mystery of the final five cylons was paced well, and it was everything I could do to keep myself from looking it up on wikipedia. The final episodes were wonderful, and I'm guessing that things are about to get really weird.

Video Game Review: Evil Genius

2009-09-08T23:16:37Z

Usually, I compile a series of short console game reviews, mostly rentals, and do them altogether. I felt this one deserved a lot more discussion space, both for its good and bad qualities, and because I think most people have never heard of it. And really, any game where you play an evil genius deserves my attention.

Evil Genius is a computer simulation game in the same genre as Sim City and Theme Park. The premise is that you are a supervillain trying to take over the world. You start with a bunch of gold, a henchman, and a bunch of jump-suit-wearing anonymous minions. Then, you construct a secret underground lair and start plotting world domination. I love this idea.

The base-building system is interesting. Everything has to be constructed by your basic hardhat minions, so there's a real-time construction process that runs parallel to the planning interface. The construction interface is perfect, allowing you to easily lay out and change building plans. Most of the rooms are fairly innocuous habitation areas intended to help you maintain your private army: bunks, mess hall, break room, infirmary, etc. Others are more evil-genius things: science labs, control rooms, detention blocks, arms caches, body bag storage, rocket launch tubes, etc. I have no complaints about the base building system.

World domination mode is much more abstract. You have a map of the world, and place your minions and henchmen on it like game-board pieces. You don't get to see anything else or know exactly what kind of operation they are running. You're just told that they are in that country working hard for you. There are various missions that are more specific, which often involve stealing valuable artifacts (including the Ark of the Covenant). Occasionally, good-guy agents will pop up on the world map and capture your men. This element felt like a bit of a crap-shoot to me. Soldier minions do help provide some protection, but otherwise, there's not much you can do. Overall, world domination mode could use a lot more pizazz, but it works as a game mechanic.

You have no direct control over individual minions at all, either through the interface or the evil genius character himself. Instead, you give standing orders like "build room here", "send people to this country", or "train X number of scientists", and these will get accomplished if you have appropriate minions who are not already occupied. It would have been really nice to have the option to order people around more directly when you need something done right away, but for the most part the system works well, and it's nice to see minions take care of things without you having to babysit them. "Henchmen" are the exact opposite, in that you must give them direct orders to make them useful. These are similar to the powerful Bond villains like Oddjob, Jaws, Necros, or Mayday. One of my favorites is an Arnold Schwarzenegger parody who is amazing at warding off groups of enemy agents, but causes so much destruction that he wrecks your own base if you let him inside. Ironically, the Evil Genius character doesn't do much at all aside from stand around and ensure minion loyalty.

I have to complain about the system for character stats. If minions are not feeling well, they will refuse to work. You have so many stats on each person, it's like playing The Sims with a family of a hundred people. I can't control minions directly, nor is is feasible for me to keep track of everyone, so why does the game have all these individual stats? Why not just have more generalized "base morale", with ratings in different catagories that tell how well you're taking care of everyone? The minion control interface also tends to fall apart once the shit hits the fan and you start getting messed up by the good guys. This lack of control also applies to the science system, which is particularly subject to randomness.

The last component of the game is base defense, where you have to defend your base against intruders like James Bond. This sounds awesome, but I actually thought it was the weakest aspect of the game. First of all, you have civilian intruders who do nothing but run around getting in the way. Why are they even in the game? They're not a threat; they're just annoying. The game encourages you to build a hotel on your secret island to keep civilians occupied, but the hotel is hideously expensive, and wouldn't a chain link fence be better for this purpose? Meanwhile, agents and weapons inspectors waltz right into your base constantly. This would be like Sim City if a small tornado popped up every 2 minutes. You're supposed to fill the base with deathtraps that deal with intruders. These are amusing, but they don't seem to work very well. The placement of traps and trigger mechanisms gets cluttered, and is subject to a bunch of arbitrary limitations. Ultimately, the trap system feels more like The Incredible Machine than an element of a strategy game.

Like other "Sim" games, Evil Genius is remarkably addicting, but also kind of tedious. It's easy to get to the point where you're waiting for money to slowly trickle in, or for the one minion you need to finish drinking coffee before he will do his job. Despite everything, however, the game does stick with you, which speaks well for the games attraction.

The presentation values are decent for this type of game. Strategy games are about cramming a lot of information on the screen, and Evil Genius does the job. The one place that has exceptional music and graphics is the title menu, which has stylish background animations and thrilling music. I would have liked some of that flavor in world domination mode. Not a huge deal, but it's weird that every time you push "Esc", the music gets much more awesome.

Overall, Evil Genius is one of the most fascinatingly and frustrating games I've seen. It has many, many incredibly novel ideas and a lot of content, but also suffers from uneven gameplay and challenges that can simply be irritating. Honestly, I hope they make a sequel some day, and iron out the rough bits. In particular, if they rework the base defense and research systems, and vamped up world domination mode a bit, we'd have the greatest simulation game since Civilization II.

Question for board-gamers

2009-08-13T20:49:14Z

Are the expansions to Carcassonne worth getting?

Backstory: I've started a weekly gaming group at my church that's been going on for about a year, and mostly revolves around Settlers and Seafarers (and their 6-player expansions), with the occasional game of Risk thrown in. We've decided to expand our repertoire and I wanted to include Carcassone. I then discovered this, which is vaguely tempting for just how much stuff it has, but it's a lot of money and I actually don't know much about the expansions that are included. At minimum I wanted to get whichever expansion lets you have up to six players, but I don't know about the rest.

Writing Projects

2009-08-10T19:26:53Z

In case you don't know, I like to write stuff. Essays, novels, plays, screenplays, whatever. I don't typically worry about being published/produced when I write, although it would be nice if it ever happened again. It's a hobby.

After completing Hamster of the Opera, I tried to find a literary agent, since I had been told this was the only chance of getting anything published. After 2 years of pitching the script, I finally gave up, and had a very negative impression of the entire experience. The problem wasn't that my script was rejected. I actually only got 1 rejection (based on a 1-page summary I wrote) and one pocket-veto, where the agency read my summary, asked for the entire script, and never got back to me. That's fine. I accept that anything titled "Hamster of the Opera" by an unknown author is going to be a tough (if impossible) sell. What irked me was that most of the rest of the 30+ agencies I tried to work with simply said, "Sorry, we only work with people who are already famous and have published a lot". I'm sure there's something useful the agent does, but it's not discovering new talent. South Park once did an entire episode on how talent agents are leeches who prey on people who don't need their help, and this rang true with my own experience.

There were some exceptions to this among the lesser agencies that seemed to have no references or connections. Instead of turning me away, they demanded hundreds of dollars upfront. Fortunately, I had been warned about this: it's a scam. At best, you're paying someone hundreds of dollars to take your work and stick it in the mail, perhaps with a cover-letter from their unknown agency. More likely, they just take your money and do nothing. I concluded that if I would be better off drafting my own cover-letter from a made-up agency. It would probably have the same effect, and be much cheaper.

I've recently thought about trying this again. I've accumulated a large number of projects. Many of them are at least somewhat finished, if unpolished. I still don't have any credentials or connections, so I don't know how I would pursue this idea or if it's worthwhile. But anyway, to refresh my memory, I compiled a list of all my large-scale writing projects and assessed their viability (considering mostly just the concept, not actual logistics of getting anything published or the fact that I'm not a professional writer).

Anyway, here's my list of projects. Projects without links are ones I'm not ready to share yet.

1. Hamster of the Opera
Summary- In a parody of "Phantom of the Opera", a genetically-engineered hamster controls thralls by forcing them to sing the Harvey the Wonder Hamster theme song. The hamster and his servants take over an opera house and plot to take over the world.
Status- Complete, along with original musical score. However, I'd like to do another full revision to remove some of the stupid parts, along with the late-90's teenage slang all the characters use.
Viability- Possibly the best thing this script has going for it is that it was actually produced on stage, and I have the tapes to prove it. It's a silly, weird play, but bizarre musicals seem to be all the rage lately ("Avenue Q", "Spamalot", etc.). I think my best bet is to pitch it as a school play (for highschool or mid-high) or a community production piece.

2. Zort! Return of the Hamster
Summary- Semi-sequel to "Hamster of the Opera" and a loose parody of "Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat", in which Harvey Hamster and his followers battle a rival group of delusional megalomaniacs bent on world domination.
Status- Complete, but without an original musical score.
Viability-I feel "Zort" is actually a more interesting play that "Hamster of the Opera", but it's also much less accessible. Not only is it a sequel (sort of), but a lot of the humor is a geeky deconstruction of theater itself, which might not be understood by everyone.

3. Final Fantasy: Circle of Time
Summary-Reimagining of the original Final Fantasy NES title, written as a screenplay: Four warriors are called to fulfill a vague prophecy that declares them the future saviors of the world.
Status-2nd Draft Complete
Viability- Zilch. It's fan-fiction.

4. Verpor
Summary- I wrote this in a few weeks for National Novel Writing Month. The story starts with a young girl who befriends an invisible man, a ghost from an alternate reality. It then progresses into a weird government-conspiracy/underground-war story.
Status- Rough Draft Complete. Needs a LOT of work.
Viability- Decent, but only if I have time and energy to do a complete re-write. It's an interesting sci-fi piece, but it's structured poorly. This is what happens when you try to write a 150+ page piece in slightly over a month.

5. Springrod
Summary- A 5-act play parodying Shakespeare's greatest works. Basically, a motley crew of Shakespearean stock characters run around the forest falling in love with each other and plotting to kill each other.
Status-Complete.
Viability- Pretty Good. The concept is appealing to literary-types and makes sense outside of Alex-world.

6. Future Discovered
Summary- A highschool teacher suddenly finds himself with no knowledge of the last 10 years, and suspects that this is more than simple memory loss, especially when he meets a mysterious man who claims to be in the business of fixing "glitches" in the fabric of time.
Status- Rough Draft Complete
Viability- Decent, although it covers similar ground as several recent movies, including "17 Again", "13 going on 30", and "The Time Traveler's Wife".

7. Metroid
Summary- Reimagining of Nintendo's "Metroid" game series, providing a biographical and psychological portrait of Samus Aran from her childhood up until her victory over Mother Bran.
Status- Rough Draft 90% complete.
Viability- See above notes on fanfiction.

8. The Last Christmas
Summary- I conceived this as a serious teen drama version of Santa Claus movies: a coming-of-age student questions the story of Jesus, and then is offered a chance to ask God one question.
Status- Rough Draft complete
Viability- As much as I like this one, I don't think it has an audience. It's a pro-Christian script with a heart-breaking ending that discusses both the good and the bad points of modern Christianity with total candor.

9. Burn-outs
Summary- This one is actually written as a TV series. An ensemble cast of highly gifted 20-somethings struggle to find purpose and motivation in a harsh post-college world that has religated them to menial jobs. This is a highly fictionalized version of the stories of myself and different people I met since graduating college (In the same sense, "Hamster of the Opera" is a highly fictionalized recreation of a summer camp experience. So don't take it literally. It's just supposed to be a funny/interesting story.).
Status- Currently in progress: Series outline and character arc summaries complete. Detailed summaries for the first 19 episodes complete. "Pilot" episode complete. 1st Drafts of 2 more episodes.
Viability- Pretty Good. I think this is especially relevant for my generation, and it has the most non-geek appeal.

More Netflix Reviews

2009-08-05T06:35:56Z

Films/Shows covered:
W, Raging Bull, Slumdog Millionaire, Popeye, The General, All About Eve, Taxi Driver, LA Story, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sunset Blvd, The Searchers, M*A*S*H (the movie), and Battlestar Galactica Season 2.

I've sort of started on a project parallel to bennj, trying to finish the AFI Top 100 Films List, so a lot of these fall under that banner.

W.(**½):
My initial reaction upon hearing about this movie was that making a Presidential biopic while the President is still in office is a fundamentally flawed idea. It is only long after a President's term is over that his legacy and impact can be truly understood. And unfortunately, I think this problem hampers W. as a movie. It runs through the motions, portrays the characters with uncanny realism, but ultimately has little to say beyond "W is a simple guy who likes baseball and suffers from Daddy issues." Take this in contrast to Oliver Stone's "Nixon", a film I thought had amazing depth and drama. "Nixon" had the benefit of historical perspective, being able to focus on the things that really mattered in the long run, and being able to identify what place the late President has in our current identity as Americans. "W." can't do this because it's a story that's still being written, and so the movie concludes with really no ending at all. Without this destination, the "plot" bounces around haphazardly, skipping past parts that would seem to be important for a biopic. W is seen preparing for a speech, but never giving it. He announces his intention to run for President, but is never seen campaigning. Laura Bush is given a lot of screen time and spunk, but rarely gets to say anything important.
Overall, though, the movie's OK. The acting is spot-on, some of the dialogues in W's inner sanctum are really interesting, and it is cool to see Bush portrayed as an actual person, rather than a political talking point. But W will not go down as the definitive movie on George W. Bush Jr. That movie probably won't get made for at least 10 years.

Raging Bull(**½):
This is kind of a weird movie. The acting is great, the writing is sharp, and the camera work captures everything with a brutal grittiness. That said, I just couldn't get into it. My principle problem is that I had zero empathy for the protagonist. He's a total asshole in pretty much every single scene he has. I assume Raging Bull is supposed to be a tragedy, but by definition a tragedy is about the fall of a good person. Jake Lamotta just seems rotten to the core from square one, and we're never told where his anger problems come from. Really the only character I liked was Joe Pesci as Lamotta's brother and manager. So the movie's well made, but in the end it's essentially 2 hours of watching a guy abuse women, start arguments for no reason, tell bad jokes, and beat up people in a boxing ring. Frankly, I'm not sure I got anything out of watching that.

Slumdog Millionaire(***):
So, I got around to seeing last years Best Picture winner. As everyone probably knows, it's about an Indian "slumdog" explaining how he was able to win big money on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" despite his uneducated background. The answer is actually kinda disappointing: He basically guesses on three questions, asks the audience on one, and the rest seemed to be mundane, easy questions. Yes, the questions tie into his childhood, but aside from the final one, it never does so in a way that is surprising or clever. From start to finish, it feels contrived, like someone wanted to make a lighter version of "City of God" and needed a framing device. But that complaint aside, the movie's actually good. The acting and directing is decent and the flashbacks have a nice sense of drama. One thing it does better than "City of God" is that it maintains an atmosphere of hope, rather than letting me as a viewer simply give up on all the characters. Overall, the film doesn't ring true and I'm don't feel "Slumdog" is a great movie, but it definitely is a good one.

Popeye(**):
What do you get when you combine a cheesy 1920's comic strip, a wacky comedian, and a pretentious director? A really, really, weird movie. For those unfamiliar with this film: it's a live-action version of the cartoon sailor, with goofy Robin Williams as Popeye and cutie beanpole Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. I was mostly looking forward to seeing Robin Williams as Popeye, but was disappointed in this regard. Williams doesn't really play Popeye so much as he does a Popeye impression for 2 hours. There's a difference. The star of the show is actually Miss Duvall, who plays an absolutely absurd character with rather stunning believability, and makes it very funny. The movie capitalizes on its cartoon setting to put together a lot of sight gags and silly "cartoon" effects. For example, Popeye will "wind up" his fist, and then punch someone and send them flying across a room. These parts are pretty funny. The worst parts of the movie, however, are the songs. I love musicals, but with the exception of "He Needs Me" and the main theme song, the musical numbers in Popeye range from merely bad to stunningly awful.

The General(***):
I know very little about silent movies. Most of my past exposure to the silent era comes from museums. Unlike black-and-white film, which persisted as a viable alternative to color for decades, and is still occasionally used today, silent films quickly became a relic. Sound is such a big part of what defines a movie that silent films seem to be a different medium entirely. So why did I track down "The General"? Because it's on the AFI Top 100 list, which I'm trying to complete. So, here goes...
Silent movies are neither entirely silent nor completely devoid of dialogue, but "The General" has very little plot or conversation in it. Instead it's mostly physical comedy and action, although done in a more serious style than I expected. I imagined that a comedy relying entirely on sight gags would be filled with people slipping on banana peels and getting hit by cream pies, but that never happens. Indeed, "The General" is almost more of a quirky adventure movie than it is a comedy. Another thing that surprised me was the overall feel of the movie. The music in the version I saw seems to be synthesized, and while it's decent and actually connects really well to the action, it tends to loop and repeat itself a lot. So here I am, watching a primarily action-based story with very little plot, dialogue you have to read, and synthesized music that repeats a lot. In other words, it was like watching a video game. A movie from eighty-two years ago ends up being more video-game-like than anything I've seen from the modern era. Now that's just weird.
Anyway, is the movie good? It's pretty entertaining. It's not terribly funny, but it did make me laugh a few times and it maintained my interest throughout. It's not the kind of experience that will liven up your Saturday evenings, but for an exposure to an era of film most of us find completely alien, it's not a bad way to spend 75 minutes.

All About Eve(****):
My word. The writing in this movie is amazing. Every interchange is so witty and striking that it's hard to believe. Geez, I wish I could write like this...
The plot of All About Eve is perhaps less interesting. Basically, the titular "Eve" is an ambitious actress who rises to fame by stalking an older actress named Margo, becoming Margo's assistant, and building connections with the theater insiders. Along the way, she pretends to be a humble war-widow who never dreamed of stardom. Oh, and Marilyn Monroe appears for the purpose of looking pretty and saying dumb things. Eve is often considered a villain, but I found myself liking her more than Margo. Partly because I don't believe in entitlement (why does Margo deserve the part if Eve can prove she's a better fit?) and partly because I admire people who are clever. Margo is just as much a manipulator as Eve, only she uses aggressiveness instead of cleverness. I think this is a common theme in many movies: heroes are forceful, villains are smart.
The most charismatic character, however, is Addison deWitt, a cynical British theater critic who narrates the movie, a role that landed actor George Sanders (whom I quickly recognized as the voice of Shere Kahn) an Oscar. Every moment of his screen time is really a joy to watch and listen to. Everything he says is so rich in texture that you believe he really is the genius he thinks he is. And now it occurs to me: the critic is the narrator, the director trys to keep everyone together, and the actresses create personal drama. That's interesting.

Taxi Driver(***½):
One of many crime films by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert Deniro, Taxi Driver is an odd movie. Basic plot synopsis: a taxi driver goes crazy and wants to kill people, but can't decide who to kill. What I liked about it was the nuanced psychological portrayal of Deniro's insominac anti-hero. He is crazy, no doubt, possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress of the Vietnam War, but we can't be sure about that. There are no flashbacks or discussions of his military service. He has a pitiable and occasionally charming quality to him as he pursues a campaign worker he likes, writes in his diary, and trains himself to do... something. The first half of the film built his neurosis up perfectly. The second half of the film I'm less crazy about. Jodie Foster gives a great performance as a child prostitute, but she enters the scene too late. She has very little time to do anything before Deniro takes things into his own hands, leading to an extremely weird climax. Overall, I thought Taxi Driver is a movie with a lot of build-up and not enough payoff, but the buildup is excellent and incredibly tense all by itself. I did take something away from it, which is more than I can say for Raging Bull.

L.A. Story(***):
Probably the best way to explain LA Story is that it's the West Coast version of a Woody Allen movie. It has a goofy, cynical older man who goes through 3 different women in the course of a slightly esoteric satire of the city the movie is set in. I liked it better than most Woody Allen movies, however, because I find Woody Allen himself to be annoying. Steve Martin, on the other hand, is a much more likable goof, and he derives a lot of laughs playing opposite a magical freeway sign and a very bouncy Carrie Bradshaw. The actual plot of L.A. Story didn't do anything for me: I really didn't care if Martin ended up with ANY of the girls, but that's par for the course for me. If you actually like love stories, you might have a different reaction. But the laughs are there and they keep coming, especially in the first half, so for that I enjoyed the movie.

The Man Who Knew Too Much(***):
Good-but-not-great spy thriller from Alfred Hitchcock featuring a very anguished Doris Day. The movie's pretty interesting, but the plot is kind of a let-down. It starts off well, setting the stage for a mystery, but in the end there's not much to it. Compared to Hitchcocks "The 39 Steps", a movie with a somewhat similar premise, "The Man Who Knew Too Much" seems very simplistic. The best scene, however, is the climax, which takes place during an orchestra concert. In an interesting artistic choice, Hitchcock has you as the audience listen to the entire musical piece, and has you watch the orchestra play for several minutes. When the main characters start running around, the orchestra does not disappear, but instead it keeps playing, as the dialogue and sound effects are completely muted. That's really an interesting effect to watch.

Sunset Blvd (*****):
I've long known that the famous quote "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" comes from Sunset Blvd, but I hadn't actually seen the movie until now. Not knowing anything about the actual plot, I would imagine the quote being said by a Marilyn Monroe type, likely in a flirty voice. Little did I suspect that it's actually used in the context of a scene similar to Anthony Perkin's final moments in "Pyscho". Sunset Blvd is a lot of things: film noir, psychological drama, and a poignant parable on life. It chronicles the mental breakdown of washed-up actress Norma Desmond, as told by a writer who slowly turns into her co-dependent boyfriend. There's not a whole lot that happens beyond that, but the strength of the subplots, but spoken and unspoken, allow the drama to intensify. Cecil DeMille, playing himself, only appears briefly in the movie, but you understand a lot about him, and can immediately contrast his graceful aging with Norma Desmond's unhealthy focus on the past.
Speaking of Mr. DeMille, he actually did make the transition from silent to talkie pictures in real life. And Gloria Swanson, who plays Norma Desmond, actually was an aging silent films actress who had worked with Mr. DeMille in her prime. All the photos and films of Norma Desmond during her career are from the real film career of Mrs. Swanson. And when Norma Desmond invites other washed-up silent stars to play bridge with her, the crowd consists of actual washed-up silent film stars, including Buster Keaton. Sunset Blvd is scarily close to reality.
Really, the movie's pretty astounding. The acting, writing, and cinematography are amazing and the story is beautifully disturbing without actually becoming depressing.

The Searchers(****):
I generally feel that classic films shouldn't be remade, but here's one that would be interesting to redo. "The Searchers" is great, but it's rooted so firmly in standards of the 1950's that if the same story were made today, it'd be a completely different film. It'd be darker, edgier, and more violent. Quite honestly, I'd like to see this hypothetical remake. The story of "The Searchers" is dark, but the style is not. The music is constantly upbeat, and the characters rarely seem to be in any real danger. It's a cheery, highly enjoyable adventure with some interesting subplots. I've read that racism is a big theme of the movie, although it's hard to tell where the filmmakers were going with this. The movie is not racially sensitive. The Native Americans are played off like the storm-troopers from Star Wars: evil, dispensable, and terrible shots. So when the movie backs off and makes us feel bad for them, it's a little weird. The racial issues provide some interesting subtext, but it's never quite clear exactly what it amounts to. Again, a potential area to expand on in the remake.
The filming is phenomenal. One of the best scenes takes place in the beginning, when a homestead is about to be attacked. There's little dialogue explaining what's happening, but the sense of imminent doom is unforgettable. In addition, the landscapes are beautiful and fully capture the different environments. One thing that is NOT captured so well, however, is the passing of time. Early on, there's a stretch of time that is supposed to represent about a year, and I assumed it was only days or weeks. Save for a few lines of dialogue and one major plot-point, it feels like the entire film takes place over a year or less.
Overall, I liked The Searchers for its fun spirit, excellent cinematography, and interesting story. I didn't quite find it "powerful", but it came really close.

MASH(*)
I have to admit I never really got into the MASH TV series. I don't mind it, but it just never hooked me. I also haven't had good experiences with Robert Altman, who also directed Popeye (see above), Cookie's Fortune (boring), and Gosford Park (ludicrously boring). So what were the chances that I would like MASH, number 54 on the Top 100 AFI list?
Not good, apparently. This movie was so painful to watch that after 45 minutes I started working on something else instead of giving the film my full attention. The problems with this film are crippling. The worst is the structure of the audio design and dialogue. In at least half the scenes, the characters just kind of mumble and ramble, and you can't even tell who's talking. The film has no sense of acknowledging that it's supposed to have an audience; I felt like I was sitting at a dinner table with a bunch of people I didn't know who were ignoring me and talking about things only they understood. The editing just contributes to this problem, as scenes come and go without a real sense of narrative. Then, you've got sexist jackasses for main characters and hospital scenes that are simply nauseating. Finally, the tone of the movie is all over the place. At times it turned into Catch-22 and at others I swore I was watching Adam Sandler's "The Waterboy". What exactly is the appeal of this movie? The only part I liked was the unseen PA announcer, who has the only genuinely clever lines in the movie.
I reserve 1-star ratings for movies that go beyond being inadequate and actually manage to piss me off with their poor quality. MASH is such a movie. It's mean-spirited, joyless, and poorly constructed.

Battlestar Galactica, Season 2.0(*****)
The DVD set of BSG Season 2 is divided into two sets, and the two halves of the season are very, very different. The first part wraps up many of the major loose ends from Season 1, using multiple settings to weave interlocking stories very effectively. In general, I was thrilled with the plot-lines revolving around the search for Athena's tomb, the resistance on Caprica, and the fracturing of the fleet. The ongoing character arc of Sharon Valerii, who is quickly shaping up to be the show's most interesting character, was emotionally touching and methodically paced. Really the only complaint I can make about the Season 2.0 is that the rift between Commander Adama and President Roslin seems to heal much too quickly. But just when that conflict is solved, we're treated to a new anti-hero in the form of Admiral Cain, which ends the half-season on a great cliff-hanger. Bravo!

Battlestar Galactica, Season 2.5(***)
What happened here? While not bad, the second half of season 2 definitely takes a huge hit in quality and story structure. The conflict between Cain and Adama is conveniently solved, and then there's a series of episodes which I call the "troublemaker of the week" stretch. Basically, a new character appears out of nowhere to start trouble without posing any credible threat. First it's a peace faction leader, then a black market dealer, then a cylon raider, then a terrorist, and then an angry commander. One or two of these episodes would have been fine, but with 5 of them, it felt like the series had completely stalled. Things picked up with the brilliant and psychological episode "Downloaded" and the lengthy season finale, but then there's the matter of the last twenty minutes of the season. I seriously thought until the end that it was all going to turn out to be a dream sequence: such a surreal, sudden shift in an otherwise carefully-plotted show just didn't make sense. The ending is not so much of a cliff-hanger as it is an "Oh really?" plot development that made me wonder where the writers were going with all this.

Robots in Disguise!

2009-07-19T15:47:41Z

Wow. Just wow. I had not originally planned to see Transformers 2, but I have to say, I'm really impressed. They may have succeeded in making the most hilariously stupid movie ever. Let me try and recap the plot:

The movie starts out with a flashback of primitive man fighting giant robots. Then the camera quickly cuts to present day before we start to wonder what the point of this is. In present day, Optimus Prime has joined forces with GI Joe to wage war against the Decepticons, all under a veil of secrecy. They go on an exciting chase that destroys downtown Shanghai, and the Chinese government claims it was all a gas leak. Brilliant! Because everyone knows that gas leaks cause people to hallucinate seeing giant robots.

Then we meet a new character, known as Bureaucratic Asshole. I forget his name, but it doesn't really matter. As soon as he walks on screen, you know who he is. You know he will insult everyone, be an annoying prick, question the value of the hero's mission, use his power to impede the good guys, and then be disposed of in some humiliating fashion. I'm not sure why the screenwriters actually bothered writing any lines for Bureaucratic Asshole. He's such a predictable, overblown cliché that we already know what he would say in any given situation. The movie could have saved time and just shown a picture of him scowling once in a while, and it would be the same as actually having scenes with him. Bureaucratic Asshole works for Obama. Ooh, how up-to-date! There's also an arbitrary reference to swine flu, conveniently heard when we can't see the mouth of the character supposedly saying it. I'm surprised they didn't insert an audio clip of someone shouting "I can't believe Michael Jackson died!" every time a character has his back turned to the camera.

In all seriousness, the movie was actually doing pretty well up to this point. I imagined that they could continue having the Autobots trek around the world, accompanied by the likable soldier characters, fighting Decepticons and unraveling a Da Vinci Code-like mystery until they figure out how to stop an evil plot to destroy the world! After all, the movie is called "Transformers", shouldn't it be about the Transformers?

No. Of course not. It should be about unlikeable horny college kids instead. How silly of me to suggest that the cool-looking robots should be main characters! So we are introduced to Unlikeable Horny College Kid #1, played by Shia Lebouf. At least, I think that's his name. I seem to recall he was in the first Transformers movie. I can't be sure, I was mostly distracted by the cool robots. Shia is going to college, so Dad helps him pack and Mom cries over a pair of toddler-sized tennis shoes while whimpering the words "Baby Booties". Shia doesn't have the courage to tell her that tennis shoes and baby booties are not the same thing. Or maybe she was saying "Baby Boobies" and the shoes just happened to be sitting there. I swear Mom got lobotomized sometime before the movie started.

Then, Shia calls up his girlfriend Megan Fox, who announces that not only is she breaking up with him, but that she won't even say goodbye to him. Ouch, that's cold! Shia whines that they can't break up, saying "I just gave you a $5 webcam and the leftover wax from the candle that was burning while we had sex!" Ooooooh! Hear that, boys and girls? Shia and Megan got it on, and it's SO important that we know this! Speaking of which, the movie has a lot of awkwardly blunt sexual references, but as with Bureaucratic Asshole, I don't understand why the writers bothered actually writing these lines. They could have just used old Monty Python footage of Eric Idle saying "Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Say-No-More!" It would have had the same meaning, except with a lot more subtlety and class. Anyway, after having just broken up with Shia, Megan Fox then proceeds to change clothes on his front yard, pose for a Hallmark Card, and then kiss him while the camera spins around them about forty-seven-thousand times. Wow, what a great character she is! I really hope this charming couple can be relevant to the plot!

Oh, I forgot to mention that while this is going on, Shia discovers a piece of the Allspark, which causes him to see weird symbols. It also causes all his household appliances to turn into miniature Decepticons. This is actually really cool, especially when they start tearing apart the house, causing Mom to run around screaming about how the squidmen are coming for dinner and she needs to get her hair done.

We then cut to Shia meeting his college roommate, who is a likable, ordinary guy who studies literature, plays in the band, and has no interest in giant robots. "Really?" you ask. Of course not. He's another "wacky" unlikeable horny college doofus, who covers his dorm-room with pictures of all the women he's currently stalking. And guess what his job is, just guess! That's right, he's the webmaster for a site that attempts to spread awareness about giant robots! OMG!

Meanwhile, Mom buys a bag of marijuana because she thinks it will stop Global Warming. Dad tries to take it away from her, but she screams, "No! I will save the environment all by myself!" and consumes the weed while making "OM NOM NOM" noises. She then starts recruiting girls to sleep with her son (bragging about the fact that he nailed Megan Fox... Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Say-No-More!), and then she runs around campus tackling people. I wish I was making this up. I really do.

Meanwhile, the Decepticons do cool stuff and resurrect Megatron with a fragment of the Allspark. Not the one that Shia encountered in the beginning- that one has ceased to be relevant to the plot- they get some other fragment that was hidden in a glass case with a "Do Not Touch" sign. The Military is unable to do a thing about this, and the Autobots are too busy getting custom paint jobs. The Autobots have also expanded their ranks to include some motorcycles and a "wacky" duo of ghetto-speaking twins who compete furiously with each other to be the movie's most hated character. In case you haven't guessed, they have some serious competition.

Meanwhile, Shia starts re-enacting scenes from "A Beautiful Mind" by drawing weird symbols everywhere he goes. This attracts the attention of an important character named College Slut Girl. She suggests they hang out and do stuff. "Do stuff? Like what?" Shia asks. "Oh, I don't know," College Slut Girl responds coyly, "Perhaps we could go back to your room, kick out your roommate, lock the door, strip naked, lie on your bed, and then see what comes to mind." Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Say-No-More!

At this point it has been firmly established that all women in Michael Bay Land are either whores or clinically insane. But wait! College Slut Girl is not a girl at all! She's a robot; a franchise exchange student from the Terminator movies! That explains the giant Decepticon-like bots in Terminator Salvation! Brilliant, I say, brilliant!

After a chase scene, Megatron decides to win favor from the audience by torturing Shia along with his irrelevant girlfriend and even more irrelevant roommate. Unfortunately, Optimus Prime decides to let the unlikeable horny college kids live, and fights Megatron along with some other Decepticon that looks just like Megatron. This is probably the best scene in the movie, and it ends with Optimus Prime dying. No way! That's NEVER happened before, certainly not in any previous Transformer movie!

Believe it or not, the movie was still holding together at this point, but then the plot starts flying in every direction. The Decepticons decide to re-enact disaster movie scenes by sinking a random aircraft carrier. Bureaucratic Asshole shuts down GI Joe. The Autobots sit on their butts waiting until the next battle scene. A new villain called "The Fallen" appears on Jay Leno to announce he is running for California Governor. Mom tries to speak to French mimes, but is interrupted when she gets a personal phone call from Megatron. Ah ha! It all makes sense now! If she gets calls from Megatron, Shia's "Mom" is obviously a malfunctioning Transformer. See? Michael Bay doesn't think women are dumb, he just thinks they're all robots in disguise.

Shia's roommate provides some small justification for his presence in the movie by introducing Shia to John Turturro, or whatever his name is. I think he was in the first movie, but again, I was distracted by all the cool robots. John is an ex-government agent who leads Shia to figure out what the weird symbols he's been seeing are. They interpret the symbols by showing them to Megan Fox's pet robot (Oh yeah, forgot to mention THAT subplot. Don't ask). John and the roommate drop their pants, taser a bunch of security guards, and meet up with an old renegade Decepticon in an Air and Space Museum. Then Megan Fox's pet robot starts humping her leg for several minutes. Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Say-No-More!

At this point, John Turturro yells at the old Decepticon to give the movie some plot. I'm not kidding. He actually asks for a plot. A character in the movie criticizes the movie for not having any plot-logic. At this point the writers must thought they were remaking "Airplane!"

There's not much to say about the rest of the movie. Bureaucratic Asshole is thrown out of a plane and lands in a donkey farm. A bunch of similar-looking robots fight for about an hour. Irrelevant roommate is still around for some reason, and no one can figure out why. Mom gets taken hostage and screams about how the tuna salad is going to go bad. Megan Fox runs away from explosions in slow motion while seeming more bouncy than Pamela Anderson on Baywatch. Shia dies, then lives again when he remembers that he's dating Angelina Jolie Jr. John Turturro calls in a rail-gun strike despite the fact that he's a civilian, using the ingenious line "You can worry about whether I have clearance, or you can save a gazillion lives!" I should try that next time I feel like calling in an air strike. And yes, he actually uses the word "gazillion."

Oh, and the gigantic vaccum-bot in the trailer has two gigantic wrecking balls hanging from its crotch. Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Say-No-More!

Game Reviews Round 9

2009-07-12T07:35:36Z

Games Covered:
Excite-bots, Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles, Mercury Meltdown Revolution, Castlevania Judgment, Deadly Creatures, Okami, Punch-out (virtual console, not the new one), World of Goo, Kindom Hearts Re-Chain of Memories, Guitar Hero Aerosmith, and We Love Katamari

Wii

Excite-Bots(***):
Hopefully you all remember "Excite-Bike" from the 80's and "Excite-Truck" from the Wii launch. Now, there's Excite-Bots, which takes the idea into much sillier territory. Superficially, Excite-bots is a racing game, but it can barely be called that. The courses are actually pretty easy to race on compared to those found in Excite Truck, especially with the improved control you can get from the Wii Wheel. So instead of focusing on high-octane speed and challenging courses, it takes the "trick" system of Excite Truck (where most of your victory points come from stunts) and adds silly things like swinging on bars, throwing darts, scoring soccer goals, and knocking over bowlling pins. These aren't minigames, these are part of the race. Then, if this wasn't weird enough, there's a poker mode, where you race while collecting cards trying to put together as many high-scoring poker hands as possible, which requires you to think really fast.
Excite-Bots is appealing as a novelty, but I found it didn't quite captivate me like Excite Truck did. It feels like such a mish-mash of different ideas that you're never sure what you're playing. In Excite Truck, the different parts meshed because the high-scoring stunts generally resulted in a faster and more intense race. Here they result in your vehicle extending a robot arm and launching cream pies. Don't get me wrong, that's hillarious, but it doesn't quite fit.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles(****):
I played a few levels of this back at the E4All convention and thought it was reasonably snazy. Basically, it's "Resident Evil: Fan Service", providing an action-packed recap of Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3, including a cliff-notes version of the plot. I happen to be a pretty big fan of Resident Evil, so I was pleased by this. I do find it odd that they picked those three games, given that Resident Evil 0 and 3 are not considered the high points of the series, but I guess they were going for plot/character continuity. The game is a basic rail-shooter; you're autoguided through different levels and get to blast monsters. Generally, there's not much to add to this formula, but Umbrella Chronicles distinguishes itself in a number of ways: (1) You can control the camera using the nunchuck attachment, which gives you something to do with your left hand. (2) Instead of just having one gun and a few powerups, you can build up an arsenal containing many types of guns, knives, grenades, and healing sprays. (3) The environment reacts impressively well to your shots. (4) The pace of the game is very methodical. Whereas the rail-shooter genre is notorious for constantly shoving enemies in your face, "Umbrella Chronicles" is not afraid to occasionally let things slow down, and escalate gradually. All told, I can't think of many criticisms for Umbrella Chronicles, aside from the idiotic tutorial pop-ups when you first try to play it ("Really? I'm supposed to shoot the zombies? Gee, thanks for telling me!). True, this is a hard genre to completely screw up, but Umbrella Chronicles deserves applause for being an impressively meaty, challenging, and well-designed shooter. If you get one rail-shooter for the Wii, this is the one to buy.
Now I'm just waiting until I can play Resident Evil 5. Which will happen first: Capcom ports RE5 to the Wii or PS2, or PS3's drop a lot in price?

Mercury Meltdown Revolution (**½):
I've actually had this one sitting on my shelf for over a year, and I've picked it up now and then. As of this writing I've beaten about half the total levels. I think that's a testament both to the game's length, insane difficulty, and the fact that it hasn't called me to play it nearly as often as the other games in my collection. Which is strange because MMR is not bad, and in fact nothing is really bad about it. My first impressions were actually really good. It's an interesting game, with interesting, well-designed challenges. It's the "oh yeah, that game!" in my collection, the one I dig out when I'm not sure what to play and want to take on a few more levels. It's usually enjoyable to play, but for some reason, once I put it down it just doesn't stick with me.

Castlevania Judgment(**):
If there's a genre I don't really understand, it's fighting games. The combos, cancels, and complicated moves completely elude me, and thus I've never really become an accolyte of the genre, despite my love for Smash Brothers and Soul Calibur. Castlevania Judgement does not break this pattern. It's an OK game, but I'm not sure who it's really designed for. Hard-core fighting game enthusiasts will probably laugh at the small move list each character has, and people like me who don't understand fighting games will find it inaccessible, wondering why attacks don't always connect and how the computer does everything so fast. Which is too bad because I feel that with more polished game mechanics, this could have become the next Soul Calibur. The style is pretty cool, the characters have an interesting repertoire of moves, the different game modes are exhaustive, and the levels have a lot of neat obstacles to mix things up. Making Castlevania into a motion-controlled fighting game wasn't a bad idea; it's just not executed well enough. Oh, and did I mention the completely overpowered super-move that takes off half your opponent's life in one shot?
Overall, Judgment is worth a rental only if you're curious. It's a neat novelty to see the more famous Castlevania characters in a fighting game, and it's fun to just turn the difficulty down to "easy" and play around with all the weird moves you have, but that's about it.

Deadly Creatures(***):
This is another semi-obscure Wii game that I was really curious about. Deadly Creatures has a fairly unusual premise: you play has a spider and a scorpion, and fight bugs as you venture through the Sonoran Desert. One thing the game does really well is take you into a bug's perspective. You don't feel small, everything else just looks really big. Cacti are now mountains, humans are collosi, and lizards are a formidible menace. The atmosphere works, and it's engaging and occasionally kinda scary. If creepy crawly things make you nervous, this game may genuinely frighten you. As far as gameplay goes, it's decent but unexceptional. It's a basic brawler: you can dodge, block, do various combos, and launch special attacks using a balanced combination of button presses and motion controls. The fighting works alright, but it does get old after a while. The design of the game provides some decent levels to explore, just don't bother asking for plot logic. It's never clear that either protagonist really has any motivation other than to escape the mysterious invisible walls that block their progress until they kill everything.
Deadly Creatures is a short game, so I'd recommend it as a rental. Again, the gameplay is nothing to write home about, but the atmosphere and premise are one-of-a-kind and definitely deserve a look. And near the end it has the world's most epic battle between a snake and a spider.

Okami(****):
Okami impressed me at E3 2005 and again at E3 2006, with its interesting art-style and paintbrush game mechanic. Yet when I finally got around to picking up the Wii version, I found it hard to get into. The games starts off REALLY slow, with long cutscenes, too many "tutorial" sequences and a side-kick who never shuts up.
Once you get past that and into the parts where the game opens up, however, it's pretty awesome. Okami is a game full of big ideas. It transports you to a unique world, making you feel like you walked into a painting. The artwork and music are perfect, and the stylized form ties in perfectly with the gameplay. While much of the gameplay is patterned after Legend of Zelda, Okami distinguishes itself by replacing the tools from the Zelda series with a paintbrush that allows you to redraw the world around you. The game is also good about giving you lots of stuff to do. You get a good selection of weapons and items, various collections to complete, and a robust character leveling system that again seemlessly binds the gameplay and story. I also have to laud the combat system, which is nearly flawless.
Unfortunately, many of Okami's most brilliantly artistic features are also its most frustrating. The interface, for starters, is initially incomprehensible. It's a hodge-podge of paintings and Japanese symbols. When you defeat enemies, instead of getting a numeric score, or a letter grade, you get a peach-blossom tree. Also, at times the game seems to want you to stare at the art too much. The cutscenes are too numerous and too long, and some are completely unneeded. The Celestial paintbrush can also be very unreliable. Now, I generally scoff at complaints about the Wii's controls, assuming that the critic is a traditional gamer who completely sucks at using the Wiimote (*cough*Yahtzee*cough*). But Okami's detection of the Wiimote brush strokes can be genuinely unintuitive. Eventually you kind of figure out what it's looking for in each move, but it's very annoying trying to reach that point, and this hampered my enjoyment a lot.
Overall, I would compare Okami to Psychonauts: It's not perfect, and its imperfections may drive you nuts at times. But when it's running on all cylinders, it's a magical experience. If you can make it past the tedious opening chapters, Okami is a great game. But damn I hate the talktative fairy side-kick they give you!

Virtual Console/Wiiware
Punch-Out! (formerly "Mike Tyson's Punchout") (*****):
I have fond memories of playing Punch-Out in 2nd grade. Only I didn't play it on an NES or in an arcade... I played it in real life. No, I didn't get into fights, but my classmates turned Punch-Out into a recess activity. There was no actual hitting, but instead we relied on using copious amounts of imagination and pantomime. Yeah, my childhood was like an episode of Muppet Babies. I'm not sure if I'd ever played the NES Punch-Out, although I would recognize many of the characters. Over 20 years later, I found myself with 500 spare Wii points and flipped through the list of NES virtual console games. Most of the popular ones I've already played, but then there was Punch-Out, with "Mr. Dream" in place of Mike Tyson. Apparently Tyson's deal with Nintendo expired, he lost his championship title, and they didn't want to pay him more money. And then he went to jail...
Punch-out is a game based on skill and knowledge. To get anywhere in the game, I had to get the feel for the different punches, the way opponents block, and the tricks for taking them all down. It's sort of a combination arcade-action-puzzler as you sometimes reach an opponent who seems unbeatable until you figure him out and then devise a plan to make him vulernable. And then the twitch-based fighting gameplay takes over, which gets insanely difficult by the time you get to the last circuit. What's awesome is that you will feel yourself getting gradually better, both at the game and against each fighter. When you beat a fighter for the first time, you've really mastered them. What's weird about Punch-Out is that, for a 20+ year old game, there's surprisingly little I can compare it to. I guess there was a sequel on the SNES and now a remake on the Wii (both of which I now need to get), but aside from that, was there ever a game quite like Punch-Out?

World of Goo(****½):
Now here is an impressive Wiiware title! Attractive Tim-Burton-esque visuals, great music, and a flawless physics engine all compliment the surprisingly clever design of World of Goo's puzzles. How does it work? Basically, you get to be an engineer, building various bizzare contraptions out of goo balls in order to reach the goal at the end of each stage. But you also need to get as many goo balls as you can across the finish line, which provides an incentive to conserve your building material. This all takes place in real time, so you can not simply design something and plop it down; your creations must be stable as you are building them. The level design is really impressive, except perhaps for the 4th world, which is more weird than it is clever. Heck, the entire game is impressive, and it was reportedly designed by only 2 people. OK, so there are 4 people listed in the credits, but still... that's a pretty small team. World of Goo is a $15 game that blows most $60 games out of the water. It's a remarkable title: innovative, compelling, and intelligent.

PS2
Kindgom Hearts, Chain of Memories, Ps2 Remake(*½)
Chain of Memories was originally designed as a GameBoy game, but recently it was remade on the PS2 for people who want to get the interquel story, but don't play portable systems. As far as design goes, it's basically a rehash of the original Kingdom Hearts, with the plot explanation that you are revisiting your experiences in the first game while exploring some castle that saps your memories away. Or something like that. For its credit, Chain of Memories starts off better than the other Kingdom Hearts games. After the opening cutscenes and tutorial, you go to an actual level with bad guys to fight, instead of a lame introductory stage. Unfortunately, that's about all it has on Kingdom Hearts I and II. I understand it was originally a gameboy game, so I'm not going to complain about the inferior production values, but I do take issue with the fundamentally flawed gameplay. The main KH games were hack-and-slash gameplay with RPG character development. You also had spells, summons, and items, but these were harder to use. You could hot-key a few of them, which helped a lot, but all others had to be activated by fumbling through the attack menu while you're in the middle of a fight. "Chain of Memories" changes up the gameplay by adding a card battle system. All attacks, summons, spells, and items are accessed by playing from a deck of cards. You can combine cards to increase their power, neutralize the enemy's card by simultaneously playing a higher one, and build custom decks. Sounds good, right? Well, maybe it would be, except that the battle continues in real-time just as before, and you're expected to be dodging enemy attacks, jumping around, and setting up your own attacks while fumbling through your deck trying to find the cards you need. In essence, they took the biggest problem with the original combat system, the fact that it was occasionally hard to access needed spells and summons, and applied it to every move in the game. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!
I really wanted to like this game. I loved the original Kingdom Hearts, and enjoyed the sequel despite some major issues with the design and story. But here, the parts I liked best were when I had enough attack cards queued up that I could just fight normally. And then I wondered why I wasn't playing a game where I could just do that all the time.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith(***½)
I'll admit it: I'm a Guitar Hero nut, constantly in search of more songs to conquer. I've conquered the original on Expert, and Guitar Hero II and III on Hard. I'm not a huge fan of Aerosmith, but I like the style of Rock and Roll they represent, so I picked up this spin-off at a great bargain. On a side-note, I hear that Harmonix is coming out with Beatles Rock Band. Now there's a band I like! But wait... no PS2 version?! Curse you, Harmonix! I am NOT buying another guitar controller, got it? And fix those stupid hard-to-see rectangle notes in Rock Band!
Anyway, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is pretty much what you'd expect. It's Guitar Hero III with a bunch of songs by Aerosmith as well as "opening acts" which feature songs from other similar bands. Nothing revolutionary, but the songs are good and the guitar rythyms are consistently interesting, which is more than I can say for "Guitar Hero Rocks the 80's". When you're playing the Aerosmith songs in career mode (as opposed to the opening acts), your band is replaced with character models of the Aerosmith guys, and they have a lot of funny animations specific to each song. The guys look kind of creepy, but that's not much different from real life. They also preform in real-life venues like the Super Bowl or the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame (which is worth visiting, if you're ever in Cleveland). The final new feature of the game is that it trys to tell the story of the band, and features video interviews with them, but I didn't get much out of this. I would have prefered animated cutscenes with a coherent narrator.

We Love Katamari(***½)
I've played some Katamari Damacy, but not much, and decided that I should sit down and have a more serious go at it. Really, though, there's not much to say. You roll a big ball around with dual-stick controls, make the ball larger by sticking progessively bigger and bigger things on it, and try to do this as fast and as efficiently as possible. The style is quirky and the dialogue walks the line between ingenously postmodern and total nonsense. Now, this title is actually "Katamari Damacy 2", but if it sounds like I just described the original, then there's probably not much difference between them, aside from some objective-based missions that mix things up. The Katamari is a good gameplay concept, but perhaps not a very robust one that can be applied to many different experiences and scenarios in a way that is profoundly different. In a way this reminds me of Elebits: a unique and enjoyable gameplay concept without much room for expansion. But with its insane concept and delightful music, Katamari is a sublimely fun experience, especially once you create a ball so big that people start running in terror. Mwa ha ha ha!

80's Nostalgia

2009-06-27T06:30:29Z

You've probably all heard by now that Michael Jackson passed away. It's perhaps a bit cliché to start saying nice things about someone right after their death, but I really liked his music videos as a kid. My dad and I used to watch them and I loved the bizarre settings, special effects, and crazy dance moves.

So in case you've forgotten (or never knew) just how outstandingly cool "Wacko Jacko" used to be, here's some nostalgia from my childhood:

First the classic: Bad means "good"! Yes, it did... back in the 80's

Second, from the most often referenced Jackson album: That weird horror short film with dancing zombies. It's kinda long and Michael doesn't sing until 5 minutes in, but if you haven't seen the whole video before, it's definitely worth a look.

Third, with the best dance moves: Michael Jackson as a 1930's gangster. This was part of his feature film "Moonwalker", which itself was disappointing.

Fourth, with epic scale and effects bordering on insanity: The one with that kid from "Home Alone".

Finally, my personal favorite. What do you get when you combine the creator of Star Wars, the director of The Godfather, and the King of Pop? This awesome 3D music video. You'll just have to imagine what the 3D was like.

bobbzman @ 2009-06-24T22:55:00

2009-06-25T05:58:30Z

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/24/oscars.expansion.nominees/index.html

Cnn's Headline: "Number of best picture nominees doubling"

Actual Headline: "The Academy finally admits that nominating Oscar bait no one cares about doesn't help the ratings."

In which I put together another movie about my missionary adventures...

2009-06-15T07:05:36Z

"A Mission to the Mayan World, Part 2"
Run Time: 10 minutes
Summary: Following our successful trip to "El Naranjal" in 2007, the Northminster mission team ventures out to the Yucatan once again in 2009, this time visiting the village "Huechen Balam" ("Well of the Jaguar" in Mayan). In contrast to the serious, matter-of-fact tone of my last video, I made this one a bit more comical, partly since it seemed redundant to explain pouring concrete again.

Original File (big download...):
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~abobbs/MissionTripFinalCut.wmv

Facebook Video:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=724403856802&saved#/video/video.php?v=724403856802

Notes:
-The opening minute is from a sketch we did for all the services at our home church. Basically the idea is that there are 4 different people auditioning to go on the trip with different motivations. One believes she has been chosen by God, one is depressed by stories of third world suffering, one believes he is so smart that he can fix everything (I play this character), and one doesn't know why he's going, but figures he should anyway.

-It was insanely hot that week. Hence my choice of music for the work montage.

-We had not expected to be laying walls, so it was kind of a learning experience. Fortunately, we had professional supervision and eventually got it down.

-Our tour of the Mayan ruins was so hilariously incoherent that I got my roommate to recreate it for everyone watching the video. I think we got an inexperienced guide...

-I tried to get more footage of our 2 fun days, since I had none in the last video. The music is from this Homestar Runner cartoon.. Just in case anyone's wondering, the activities were paid for out of our own pockets.

-While looking for inspiring role-call music, I found the complete World of Goo soundtrack. Seriously, check it out. And then get the game if you haven't already.

E3 reactions

2009-06-05T06:17:24Z

To be clear, I am not at E3 right now. I got several emails reminding me to sign up, but declined because the dates ran straight into my trip to the Yucatan. At best I could have made it by the second day, and I would have been completely exhausted. So it didn't seem worth it.

But since I feel like it, I'll be one of those uninformed bloggers I despise and write a brief digest on things I haven't actually seen but have heard about from other people.

Microsoft:
The lineup of games is predictable and probably has some good stuff, but it's not for me. We've got a genre I don't play (Forza Motorsport), a franchise I never liked (Halo), a sequel to a game I never cared about (Crackdown 2), and 2 more for franchises I initially liked but quickly got tired of (Call of Duty and Splinter Cell). Yawns all around.

But wait a minute! What have we here? Some high-tech camera that can accurately translate 3D body motions, with voice recognition, facial expression analysis, and super-cool AI. No way! It's got to be smoke and mirrors! And... maybe it is. My jury is out on this one until I get some honest feedback on how well the thing actually works, and some information on how much it might cost. For the record, if it works, I'm really, really excited. I had pretty much decided before that I was never going to get a 360 (mostly due to reliability issues and a bad experience I had trying to get Microsoft to fix a friend's broken system) but if this actually becomes more than an attention-grabbing gimic, I might change my mind.

Nintendo

Mostly they announced stuff we already knew about. Wii Sports 2 is coming out, which I might or might not get. I don't have a constant crowd for party games, but we'll see. Good Wii party games are always a hit with a mixed group of friends and family, but I don't play them otherwise. They showed more some rail shooters (Dead Space Extraction and Resident Evil Darkside), which I like, but am a little tired of. These games both look pretty scary, however, so that aspect grabs my attention. And there's a cyberpunk Halo wannabe (The Conduit). I'll at least give it a rental when it comes out, but my feeling so far is that it's going to be "OK".

The new peripheral this year is apparently a "vitality sensor", which measures your heart beat or something. I guess it must be a component for Wii Fit and its library of exercise software. Otherwise, I'm just scratching my head. The other big peripheral is that Wii motion plus thing, which we already knew about. Is it a significant upgrade to the Wiimote? I don't know. We'll have to see how Wii Sports 2 and Red Steel 2 turn out.

Three big surprises came from Nintendo's big franchises. Mario Galaxy 2 is coming. Now, I'm always looking for something NEW, not just another iteration of the same concept, but Mario Galaxy was so fantastic that I'd buy a sequel without a second thought, and the trailer displayed some cool level ideas. Another, more original Mario game is a side-scrolling multiplayer game where you compete against other people to grab coins and stuff. "New Super Mario Brothers" on the DS did something like this and it wasn't terribly expansive, but it was still a lot of fun. I'm not completely sold yet, but it definitely has potential and James Rolfe (The "Angry Video Game Nerd") had some nice things to say about it. And then, last but not least, there's a more action oriented Metroid game from the makers of Ninja Gaiden. I was hoping they would do this to the Zelda series since Link is more about close-range combat and all, but... this looks pretty dang cool. And really, the Metroid series has a pretty stunning track record.

Sony

Hey look, Sony is getting in on this motion-based control stuff too! Again! Unlike Project Natal, though, I'm not sure what it does that the Wii doesn't.

As far as games, there are the usual sequels to things I haven't played (Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 2, etc.), plus not one, but two Final Fantasy games coming out simultaneously. Wait a minute, didn't I first see FFXIII three years ago? This had better be one heck of a game. Then there's this awe-inspiring piece of work from the makers of ICO and Shadows of the Collosus, and the highly anticipated conclusion to the God of War series. And I'm sure God of War 3 will deliver what it promises: great graphics, huge, visceral action and an atrociously bad adaptation of the greek legends.

And if any one of you actually made it to E3 this year, I look forward to hearing your much more informed opinions.

Terminator Salvation

2009-06-04T16:22:38Z

It's... OK. Certainly not as good as I might have hoped for, nor as bad as I feared. And all told, it's probably appreciated best on its own, and not compared to any of the first 3 Terminator movies. I say this for two reasons: 1) It's not as good, and 2) it connects pretty poorly to the other movies. The future war looks nothing at all like how it appeared in T1, T2, T3, the Universal Studios show, or the TV series. The dark grey-blue ash is replaced with brown desert landscapes, the evil machines look like Transformers, and the improvised guerilla resistance looks more like a regular army, complete with standard 20th-century weapons. Actually, the entire movie looks like Transformers. John Connor is nothing like he's supposed to be. The entire franchise rests on Connor being so important that the fate of the war rests on him. We're told in the original movie that he organized the resistance and taught people to fight back. And in Terminator Salvation, he's not the leader! He's an officer with really no special qualities at all, aside from making some fire-side chat radio broadcasts. We're told that people view him as a messiah character, but why? At best the guy comes off as an above-average soldier. And Kate Brewster-Connor fares even worse. She's entirely pointless, serving little more than as a nod to T3.

The action scenes are great at times, but I think more time was needed in the editing room to get them just right. They're actually choreographed and filmed really well, but there's a lot going on and it doesn't seem to flow smoothly. In one moment, someone will be in the front of the vehicle, then he'll be in the back, then there will be 2 terminators, and then 3, or maybe it's just 1 that you saw multiple times... A little more work could have made the action bits phenomenal, but as is, they're full of holes. The plot has some similar problems, as we jump between scenes without always getting the connections. In one particularly confusing moment, John Connor releases a bunch of people and yells at them to "Get to the transports!" Wait... What transports?

All that said, the movie actually isn't bad. It's a fun little romp, and while the Connors pretty much suck, I really liked how they handled young Kyle Reese. He's a compelling and sympathetic hero who connects well to the Michael Bien version of the character. The new character Marcus Wright is also kinda interesting, and he has a scene near the end with Helena Bonham Carter which is actually pretty chilling. Young Ahnold makes a cameo via CGI and a body double, and it makes a lot of sense and creates an effective "Oh... Snap!" moment.

Overall though, and I say this as a HUGE Terminator fan, wait for DVD.

Game Reviews Round Whatever

2009-05-15T04:48:27Z

Titles covered:
Call of Duty: World at War, House of the Dead Overkill, de Blob, Dead Rising Chop til You Drop, Warioware Smooth Moves, Tenchu Shadow Assassins, Mario Kart Wii, Sonic Unleashed, and Jak 3.

Wii

Call of Duty: World at War (**½):
Yes, I know, I'd sworn off this series, but my roommate wanted to check it out. It's pretty much the same as earlier Call of Duty games. Heck, the Russian campagin is straight out of CoD1; you fight the same battles and everything. The one unique bit is when you fight the Japanese, not because the core gameplay is any different, but the scripted events and enemy behaviours are made to represent some of the more infamous tactics used by Imperial Japan during this era. Overall, the game's OK but the energy just isn't there anymore. I originally loved "Call of Duty: Big Red One" on the GameCube because it was a focused single-player experience with a solid war-movie feel. But my affection for the series seems to drop with each installment. Even the dramatic scripted events and detailed graphics of 2007's "Modern Warfare" couldn't make me overlook the core gameplay, which I found somewhat tiresome and repetitive.
I do, however, have some nice things to say about the online mode (gasp!). The Wii, for all its interesting internet features, has never been strong with managing head-to-head online play. But in the case of "World at War", I have to say that the online mode actually works. The game found other players extremely quickly, ran without any lag, and overall seemed reasonably fair and balanced. It's missing a "Capture the Flag" mode (and maybe some others, I'm not sure), but the overall fidelity of the experience was exactly on par with what I've seen out of XBox Live, except that it saves you from the trouble of listening to idiots on voice chat. So if online deathmatch is really your thing, maybe check this game out. Otherwise... whatever.

House of the Dead Overkill (***½):
Another Wii rail-shooter, and along with Umbrella Chonicles, this one may actually be worth buying. HotD:Overkill is classic light-gun gameplay, stylized as a parody/homage to exploitation films, similar to the movie "Grindhouse". For the gameplay portions, I greatly enjoyed the over-the-top cheezy style and funny profanity-laden voice acting. In the cutscenes, however, the joke wore thin very quickly. It's funny when the characters vocalize the player's reaction by cursing at onscreen enemies during gameplay, but in a cutscene, it's annoying and tedious. Fortunately, you can skip the cutscenes on replay.
The levels have a pretty good variety, although I didn't think they were as good or as challenging as the ones in House of the Dead 2, which may be the pinacle of the series as far as design goes. Where "Overkill" definitely improves, however, is in sheer content, with bigger levels, a host of powerups and upgradeable guns, and a better scoring system, which encourages replay. Sega seems to be improving on the value front as well: A single play-through of Ghost Squad clocks in at 20 minutes. House of the Dead Return was probably just over an hour, but Overkill ate up over 3 hours before I saw the end-credits, at which point I unlocked the longer, harder "director's cut" versions of all the levels (some are pretty much the same but with more enemies and civilians; some are impressively meaty and include a lot of interesting new areas). So overall, definitely worth checking out.

de Blob (****):
I'm going to quote myself from a year and a half ago: "They did have one interesting game where you're a blob of paint bouncing around coloring things. That has potential to be a Katamari Damacy-esque experience." de Blob signifies one of the main reasons I like the Wii: you get some really original off-the-wall games. Here you're a giant blob, similar to the one from that Steve McQueen movie , and you roll yourself around while throwing the Wii remote to fling yourself over gaps and onto walls and such. It's a silly game that defies conventional game-logic in a sense: you can play levels that have very few obstacles or enemies and it's still way more fun than it has any right to be. In particular, the combination of graphical effects and music sync perfectly with the gameplay and turn the game into a playable psychadelic music video, in a sense accomplishing what I think Rez was trying to do. As you color more stuff, the music gets more lively, the city looks prettier, and the citizens throw off their monochrome oppressors start partying in the streets. The revolution will be televised... in color! The level design accomplishes what they were going for, and provides a sense of escalation as you start out completely unopposed and eventually proceed to all-out war. The only bad thing I can say is that the missions could use more variety. It's hard to explain this game... you just have to try it for yourself, and I definitely suggest that you all do so.

Dead Rising: Chop til you Drop(**)
This title has been perceived less as a game and more as a talking point in the eternal XBox360 versus Wii debate, since the original Dead Rising came out on the XBox360 almost 3 years ago. Consensus seems to be that the original was better, but I only played it for about 15 minutes back at E3 2006, so I'm not going to compare the two versions. I think the more relevent question is not which version is better, but whether "Dead Rising Chop til you Drop" is any good. My answer, in a word: "meh".The story is based on the movie "Dawn of the Dead": zombies are out in force and you're trapped in a shopping mall. Fortunately, in addition to an array of traditional fire-arms, you can also wield almost anything you find in the mall, from chainsaws to golf clubs to large umbrellas. Improvised combat while evading legions of zombies is a very cool premise, but unfortunately I feel that it's a great idea without a great game to contain it. Dead Rising's fatal flaw is that it's extremely repetitive. The game area is simply not very big, so to compensate, they make you traverse the same levels over and over and over again, constantly plowing through continuous swarms of zombies. The only time you do anything else is during the boss fights, when you fight unzombified humans who have apparently gone crazy. These are a change of pace, but they're awkwardly contrived and just not very interesting. Overall Dead Rising is decent mindless fun, and it's great to constantly discover new weapons, but the game lacks any real sense of adventure or progression. You literally spend the entire time running in circles, and if not for the "shortcuts" that warp you around the mall, I would have lost paitience much earlier than I eventually did. If Capcom had replicated the kind of creativity, level design, enemy variation, and atmosphere they accomplished with their zombie-filled masterpiece, Resident Evil 4, they'd have a great game with some very original gameplay mechanics. But Dead Rising isn't that game; it's Dynasty Warriors with zombies and baseball bats.
Is Dead Rising better on the XBox360? I don't know. But the problem here isn't that the game needs more zombies. If anything, it needs fewer zombies and more thought put into it.

Warioware Smooth Moves(**½):
Warioware is one of the strangest game franchises ever. For the uninitiated, it's a rapid-fire collection of 5-second challenges("microgames") which by themselves are stupid but put together create an interesting experience. In essence, Warioware is a meta-game, focusing not so much on the microgames themselves, but on the challenge of predicting and recognizing them. Warioware was born on the GameBoy Advance, and I thought it was an ideal portable game- a great little timekiller that you could pick up and play anytime. On home consoles, however, I feel it suffers from the same problem as Big Brain Academy: what works while you're waiting for the bus doesn't neccesarily work as a solo evening activity. Warioware Smooth Moves as a singleplayer game will last you a day or two and as a serious multiplayer game it doesn't quite hold up. Ultimately, it's a goofy party game intended to be played when everyone's in a silly mood (or has had a few beers).
The actual gameplay perfectly embodies both the spirit of the Wario franchise and the ideals of the Wii console itself. Each microgame is not only a test of a game mechanic, but also your ability to shift the Wiimote into different positions. Many of the motions required to beat each microgame make no sense until you assume the correct position and think about what actions you can make from there. Of course, you can also cheat, and will probably quickly figure out that many positions are essentially the same thing, just with a different grip or a silly stance. The microgames themselves are pretty good, in that they are intuitive, make use of the different grips, and are stylistically outrageous. This may be the only franchise that can get away with nosepicking as a legitimate game mechanic.
Two areas of dissapointment are the graphics and themes. Wario games have always stuck to simplistic visuals, but even so, the jerky Flash-style animations leave something to be desired, especially compared to the beautiful hand-drawn look of "Warioland: Shake It!". Also, I couldn't figure out what the theme of each set was supposed to be. In the GameBoy original, each character embodied a different genre, like "logic" or "sports" or "retro". Here, the only one with a clear theme is returning favorite "9-Volt". Everyone else seems to have been dealt a random deck, which is a problem when you're replaying levels and trying to remember which ones you especially liked. And for a game this short, replay is important.
If you have people over a lot, especially children and the young-at-heart, Warioware Smooth Moves is a fantastic group activity that will give everyone some laughs. But otherwise, it's a franchise that I believe belongs in the portable realm.

Tenchu: Shadow Assassins(***):
I try to understand new games on their own terms, but when it comes to the "stealth" genre, I always end up having to compare titles unfavorably to Thief The Dark Project. Hitman is Thief with inferior controls and imbalanced game mechanics. Splinter Cell is Thief with an alienating plot and eye-straining, dark graphics. Star Craft Ghost is Thief except it never actually came out. And so, when I say that Tenchu is Thief with ninjas and more linear levels, that's perhaps a complement: nothing is fundamentally wrong with the game.
Actually, Tenchu works in part because it's simple. You jump between different hiding places until you get close enough to each guard such that you can take them by surprise. Then you check that the coast is clear and move ahead. When you are spotted, you can either win a sword-fighting minigame (which is really hard) or go back to the beginning of the segment. There isn't much in the way of evading pursuers or exploring; just show off your ninja skills and then move on. For the game's credit, it does a fine job of making the controls and levels sensible, and the kill opportunities are pretty intuitive and exhaustive. At one point I tried to nail a guard by climbing up a stack of crates and then jumping on top of him and guess what? It works. You can also spring out of bushes, jump out of containers, pull guys off ledges with a fishing line, or grab them from around a tight corner. Tenchu does not derive its challenge by being obtuse. And it does specifically capture the idea of being a ninja, instead of something else (and includes the idea of other ninjas trying to sneak up on you). I did still have a few problems with the game, mainly with the frustrating boss fights, repeated levels, and the downer plot. Overall, "Tenchu" didn't really impress me, but what it does, it mostly does well.

Mario Kart Wii(****):
Now, don't get me wrong, I love Mariokart (at least the racing mode) but its appearance on each console has started to feel a bit obligatory. Mario Kart Wii is very good, but not surprising. It's pretty much what you expect: Mario Kart with some new tracks, a new control method, an online mode, and a few new features. I actually really like the Wii Wheel. A steering wheel controller is an old trick, but a light-weight free-floating wheel is a bit different than what I've played before, and it's pretty neat. And as for gameplay tweaks, some welcome changes were brought in as well. Drifting and getting mini-turbos is no longer annoying, having 50% more racers means more chaos, and the motorcycles are a neat addition, if for no other reason than that they look cool. The online mode, which started on the DS, has been fixed. Mario Kart DS, for all its other great qualities (I'd say it's by far the best MK to play single player), had an online mode that was simply unfair, rewarding people who abused the mini-turbos or left matches they were losing. Mario Kart Wii throws the finger to those blasted "snakers" (people who cheat by triggering drift turbos on straight track), and I stand firmly behind Nintendo on that choice. It still has a steep learning curve for playing online, but at least noobs can still compete. One complaint about the game is that I wish there were more courses, and especially more new courses. Mariokart Wii has enough, but for such a big, best-selling franchise, I'd expect Nintendo to make a game that's bursting at the seams with content. Other than that, I'm really not sure what to say here. It's Mariokart; all its good and bad qualities are pretty much defined by its name. And yes, the computer still cheats when you're winning.

Sonic Unleashed(*½):
I've long been a defender of the 3D Sonic games. Sure, they're not the greatest games ever, but they're pretty good games. I'd also argue that the 16-bit era of Sonic wasn't exactly a golden age, as once they got to Sonic 3 it was pretty much same-old, same-old.The last Sonic game I played on the Wii was Sonic and the Secret Rings, a title I really liked once I got past the (literally) slow beginning. Sonic Unleashed is.. uneven. On one hand you have the day stages, which are basically glorified race tracks. These are the most fast-paced levels in Sonic history, which is both good and bad. It's good because it's fun and exciting to go fast. It's bad because it doesn't allow for any sort of interesting platforming challenges. Then you have the night stages, where Sonic mutates into a powerful beast (a "Were-Hog") that does a lot of brawling and platforming ripped straight out of other action games like "Prince of Persia" and "God of War". The night levels range from passable to horrible. The platforming is kinda frustrating and the brawling is just a chore. You wave your arms around until the bad guys disappear, and that's it. It's possibly the least interesting 3D action gameplay ever. Was there no room in the game for moderate-paced platforming with high-speed segments, like the original Sonic had?
Frankly, this was a step back from Sonic and the Secret Rings, which had the sense to pick one good gameplay mechanic and develop it. Now we're back to the problems of the early Sonic Adventure games, which would alternate between fun levels and boring levels. Except now it's usually at least 3-4 boring levels for every fun level, plus segments where you have to click around a pointless "town" area. On top of it all, Sonic has a side-kick who is absolutely insufferable. Not only are the cutscenes he appears in unskippable, but he pops up throughout each level with idiotic tips like "you should jump over this pit." Really?! Sonic Unleashed would have been another pretty good game if they'd stripped it down to the racing segments and the boss fights. It still wouldn't have been fantastic, but at least all the parts would have clicked.

PS2

Jak 3(***½):
There were actually a lot more PS2 games I wanted to check out, but they're all "low availability" on Gamefly, so all I have this time is the conclusion to the "Jak" trilogy. The original Jak was a good clone of Mario 64. The second Jak was a bad clone of Grand Theft Auto mixed with awesome jumping puzzles. And the third is not sure what it is. Jak 3 is a game that throws every type of gameplay imaginable at you. This isn't a bad idea, but it does make the game unfocused. I never felt that I had any chance to get particularly good at the game, just that I managed to pass each segment and move on. Fortunately, almost all of Jak 3's parts work. Haven City is back, but it's less crowded and you spend less time running around it. The only part I found frustrating was the dune buggy segments, because the physics engine for this part is stunningly bad. Your car will flip when running over the tiniest obstruction, skid for no reason at all, and when you try to ram other vehicles, they tend rub against each other like two balloons. I don't think I've seen vehicles with such bad handling since Earthworm Jim rode an upside-down pig. Other than that, Jak 3 is quite good. It's not a "must-play" by any means, but it's a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

Return of the Netflix Reviews!

2009-05-10T08:21:12Z

Movies: Cube, An American Carol, The Sting, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Kingdom, Citizen Kane, The Time Machine, The Tale of Despereaux, You Can't Take it With You, BloodRayne
TV: Clone Wars, Sarah Connor Chronicles, BSG

Movies
Cube(*½):
Cube frustrates me because it's almost an excellent movie, but ultimately is unsatisfying and pointless. The premise involves a bunch of people who wake up in a maze made up of a series of interlocking cube-shaped rooms. Some of the cubes have deadly booby traps, so based on the room numbers, everyone has to figure out which rooms are trapped and which way leads to the exit. The characters have personalities made to grind each other's gears, as if they didn't have enough trouble staying sane while inside a weird cube maze, so the set-up for a psychological thriller is flawless. But while the movie has the right idea, it flubs the details. The character arcs are too sudden, moving in weird ways without any direction, and as such everyone except the teenage girl comes off as capricious, useless, and just plain unlikeable. The movie as a whole is tense and occasionally exciting, but whatever point or thesis it was going for gets lost in the shuffle of shouting and "Saw"-like deathtraps. Despite this, the movie was going on three stars until the ending, at which point I wanted to strangle the director. An ending doesn't need to be happy, nor does it need to explain everything, but it needs resolution, and Cube misses the mark here so badly it boggles the mind. The writers had a great premise in mind, but they made poor plot choices (pretty much throughout, but especially at the end) and created a story that's at best nihilistic and at worst meaningless shock value.

An American Carol(**½):
Actually, I didn't rent this one. My roommate did. And maybe I'm just crazy, but I thought this unabashedly conservative movie was surprisingly decent. It's basically a reinvention of "A Christmas Carol", but instead of having a miser who is grumpy around Christmas, it has a far-left filmmaker (who is not Michael Moore, really, he's not) trying to ban the 4th of July. Now, as a satire or commentary, it's almost as bad as the webcomic/blog "I Drew This": a one-sided festival of strawmen and self-pity. But as a comedy, you can tell it came from the same man who brought us "Airplane!", "Top Secret" and "The Naked Gun." Sight gags and slapstick are in order here. In a flashback, young Michael Moore (sorry, "Michael Malone") is dumped by his girlfriend for a young soldier, as she "likes men in uniform". The camera then shows her other suitors, which include representatives from every branch of service, a firefighter, an astronaut, and a man in an Easter Bunny costume. This movie has a lot of political statements to go with the random silliness, and it WILL offend just about everyone, but in a South Park kind of way, it works better than it should. The movie still isn't great, and it drags in the second half due to a series of unconnected sketches that the writers tried to squeeze in (*cough*zombie ACLU lawyers*cough*), but it's still lightyears ahead of what passes for slapstick comedy and parody these days. After years of laughing at liberal political humor (like the Daily Show), it was actually refreshing to see the other side take a crack at it.

The Sting (***½):
The Sting is basically a caper movie, providing the groundwork for films like the fairly entertaining Ocean's 11 remake (and the sequels that I never bothered with) and the far less entertaining "Bandits". The acting is great, the story is interesting, and the style is charming. The Sting is a retro film, with title cards, music, and a filming style that make it look like it could have been made 25 years before it actually came out. Yet for all its positive qualities, the movie didn't quite sweep me away. It's extremely well-made, but lacking in emotional resonance.

Kramer versus Kramer(****):
After seeing "The Sting", I realized I only had one Best Picture winner from the 1970's left to see, and this was it. I actually had no idea what it was about before watching it on Netflix; from the title I would have guessed it was about a guy with split personalities... It's a drama about a divorced couple fighting a bitter custody battle. Not the most original premise, but the acting and writing lift it to interesting heights. Dustin Hoffman gives an astounding performance as a single dad trying to balance too much, and Meryl Streep plays a genuinely sympathetic antagonist, being given every chance to tell her side of the story. One final note: this movie is rated PG, but has more explicit nudity than a lot of R-rated flicks.

The Kingdom (***):
In this movie, the first 10 minutes and the last 20 are amazing. The rest of the minutes... are just OK. The Kingdom straddles the line between being a political thriller and a "Die Hard" action adventure. The premise focused on the double-edged sword of US-Saudi relations, but the resolution depends on the heroes being able to shoot or blow up dozens of terrorists in an exciting (if highly unrealistic) gunfight. Unfortunately, as the movie goes along, it doesn't really explore the political subplot with any depth. It's there, and it provides tension between the American good guys and the Saudi good guys, but that's about it. Oh, and kids, don't use car doors for cover during a firefight. Mythbusters showed that the bullets just go right through.

Citizen Kane (*****):
Now, I'm not one to fall in step with the stuffy legions of critics and Academy members. I'll readily admit that I disliked many Best Picture winners, and that my DVD collection includes Transformers and Jingle All the Way. Citizen Kane is named the Best Movie Ever by the American Film Institute, a claim I was fully willing to disbelieve. I feared it would be boring, and for about the first 15 minutes, it kind of is. But once Citizen Kane hits its stride... wow. Just wow. "Kane" is an absurdly good movie. Best Movie Ever? Well, let's not get carried away here.
At this point I assume that everyone knows what Rosebud is. If you don't, I'll tell you: it's a MacGuffin. It provides some discussion material for after the movie, but the movie could have ended without ever telling you what it was. The film is a depiction of a man so wealthy that he finds he actually has nothing. He has nothing to work for, no limits to his resources, so he seems to play life as if it's some sort of boardgame, manipulating people like toy soldiers and then trying to buy their love. But ultimately, he's just another citizen.
What really drives the film, beyond its devastatingly tragic plot, is how it's filmed. Even in the relatively slow 1st act, I was impressed with how well Orson Welles had filmed everything, capturing details in corners and reflections to put entire stories into single frames. And with slick editing, he achieves a surreal compression of time, explaining an entire life with relatively little dialogue. In one great scene, Kane and his wife sit down for breakfast, each aging years by the minute, as their conversation seems to run in circles. You immediately understand how frustrating it must have been for Mrs. Kane to spend 20 years with a man who could never have enough. I was skeptical going into Citizen Kane, but I have to admit, this really is one of the best movies ever made.

The Time Machine(****):
It helps to understand that this move is almost 50 years old, and that the book was written long before that. I say this because the traveler goes into different "futures", some of which were known to the film-makers, and some of which are known to us but NOT to the filmmakers. On its surface, "The Time Machine" is a fun adventure yarn about a man who goes to the future and has to help people beat those damn dirty apes. But underneath it has some thought-provoking commentary on human progress, as the traveler witnesses both the horror of a futurist warring society, as well as the horror of a passive leisurely society that never deigns to fight (or do anything else, for that matter). Are we ultimately better off with wars, weapons, and an economy that guarantees haves and have-nots? We very well might be, at least to a point. The subtle sophistication of this message, and its dismantling of utopian dreams, is really what sets the original Time Machine above the 2002 remake. Although I actually thought the much-derided remake was alright.

The Tale of Despereaux(**):
Sigh... Why did such good animators have to be wasted on such a flawed story? "Despereaux" is a movie that doesn't know what it's about, or even who it's about. It takes 20 minutes for the main character to appear, following an excessively long introduction that teaches us that stereotypes against rats are wrong. But then, suddenly the rats ARE evil, the story is about a maid who wants to become a princess, and somewhere back there is a subplot about magical soup that makes it rain and a side-character composed of animated vegetables (who is never explained once). I liked the courageous mouse being protector to a lonely princess, but all the supporting elements of the plot are weak and confused, and the writing is simply not very good. The animation, on the other hand, is excellent, making effective use of background details to create a convincing fairytale world. Seriously, I wish the Shrek movies looked more like this. The characters are drawn in a very effective style, and the use of light and color is superb. But the script? ARGH!

You Can't Take it With You (**):
I don't know if it's fair for me to comment on this one. Some of you may recall that I directed the stage version of "You Can't Take it With You" some years ago, and I know the entire thing pretty much by heart. I had never seen the movie version until now, and it's different, to say the least. It's like the screenwriters read a brief synopsis of the play and then wrote their own script from scratch. The movie might or might not be good on its own, but the changes just drove me nuts. Not just the fact that it was fundamentally changed, but that everything I liked about the play was changed. Alice is now a ditz, Ed is an annoying football jock, and Kolenkov is a stern man who isn't the slightest bit funny. Really only Essie, Depinna, and Tony survive the translation, but they're not enough to carry the story by themselves. Furthermore, while the play is succinct, punchy, and comedic, the movie is slow and drawn-out, trading laughs for social critique delivered with the subtlety of a sledge hammer. The entire humor element is missing, as many of the jokes have been either defused or surgically removed. If I didn't know what YCTIWY was SUPPOSED to be, would I have liked this movie? Maybe. The acting is good and the writing's not bad. Some of the original elements made me smile, such as a scene where some random kid with an accordian teaches Tony and Alice to dance. But overall, this movie just frustrated me.

BloodRayne(*):
I've long heard about infamous German director Uwe Boll, who has funded various videogame adaptations by providing a tax shelter for his investors. Critics widely agree that his movies suck terribly, but I'd never seen one. Well, since Netflix has unlimited "instant plays", I figured going that route would be like seeing the movie for free, and if it proved unwatchable I could just shut it off and not lose anything. For my Uwe Boll experience I chose BloodRayne, since it seemed like a recognizable adaptation of the video game, which I have played (though I thought it was an average game at best).
BloodRayne most certainly is an incredibly bad movie. The acting in particular is astoundingly awful. Even skilled actors like Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen are completely unbelievable, wearing goofy wigs and reading their lines with no enthusiasm or interest at all. Kingsley has a speech he gives his minions which is so bad it's almost hillarious; he sounds so bored and uninterested he might as well be saying "Blah blah blah... kill the good guys... and stuff..." Cripes, the guy's got an Oscar for Best Actor, and he's reduced to this?! The dialogue is mostly dull, and the plot is full of "What! Why?" moments. In one scene, Bloodrayne searches a monastary (belonging to the good guys) and finds a crypt guarded by a zombie friar. What! Why is there a zombie friar? What! Why did one of the main characters turn betrayer apparently due to a plot event that clearly happens outside her scope of knowledge, and what is she even trying to do? What! Why is Meatloaf even in this movie, and who is he? What! Why did some vampiress suddenly start kissing Bloodrayne? Then there's the (fairly graphic) sex scene, which comes out of nowhere and then vanishes as if it never happened. The action scenes are unreasonably gory, but not in a stylized way like Kill Bill or even (sigh...) 300, and just in case you missed them, the movie concludes with a long, slow motion replay of all the goriest moments for no apparent reason.
On the other hand, as awful as it is, Bloodrayne is actually kind of entertaining. It's a viceral movie, with a lot of fighting and scantily clad women, and I guess it sort of works in that sense. As video game movies go, it's probably marginally better than Mortal Kombat Annihilation, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, or Doom, though definitely not up to the caliber of the original Mortal Kombat, the two Final Fantasy movies, Resident Evil, or even Tomb Raider (I haven't seen the sequels to Tomb Raider or Resident Evil). Not that any of these movies are particularly great. Some day I have hope that a videogame movie will be handled by decent writers.

TV

The Clone Wars, Volume 1(***):
I should probably clarify what this is, since there are several different things I could be refering to. First there was "Attack of the Clones", the second episode of the prequel trilogy (and my favorite movie of 2002), which you've probably all seen. Following that, there was a cel-animated cartoon series called "Clone Wars" by animator Genndy Tartakovsky. The first season of "Clone Wars" in 2003 was merely a collection of 5-minute shorts that were broadcast as filler segments on the Cartoon Network. It was basically a bunch of fight scenes, but it was fun and creative. In 2005, Tartakovsky released a second season of longer, story-oriented "Clone Wars" cartoons, covering the events leading up to "Revenge of the Sith". This second season is pretty awesome. Then, in 2008, there was "The Clone Wars", a movie about Anakin taking on an apprentice, and unfortunately it was pretty bad. Seriously, I thought it was bad, and I like everything Star Wars. Of course, the movie was basically a lead-in to a CGI TV series with the same name, and that's what I recently watched. Still with me?
Anyway, "The Clone Wars" is actually significantly better than the movie that preceded it. The animation is more attractive, Anakin's apprentice is less annoying, and the show as a whole is more fun. It's ultimately a kid's show, complete with the "lesson of the day" and comically inept villains, but it's a good kid's show. That said, as another episode in the Star Wars saga, I question how much The Clone Wars really adds. This ground has already been covered so often that the very title of the TV show is easily confused for something else. Overall, I'd say the show is worth checking out for its action scenes and the depth it brings to the minor characters of the Star Wars universe. But it still feels like a lost opportunity, when there are less over-exposed areas of Star Wars lore to develop. Like, why not "The Thrawn Chronicles"?
And by the way, why on earth are they releasing this series one disk at a time?

Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles(***½)
The original Terminator movie is one of my all-time favorites, and T2 was a breakthrough for action and special effects movies. T3 lacked innovation and had a frustrating final act, but it was a fine summer action film in its own right that maintained the style and tone of its legendary predecesors. "The Sarah Conner Chronicles" is different. It ties in deeply to the plot of T1 and T2, with some connections only die-hard fans will spot, but as far as the style, writing, and characterizations go, it's something else altogether. Which isn't a problem, although you have to accept a lot of character discontinuities in speech, behaviour, and general appearance (although the only one who really bothered me was Dr. Silberman). It also ignores T3 entirely, something I'm not happy with but can understand as neccesary to the premise.
Anyway... The show starts out as a predictable retread of T2, but it gets better. It takes the concepts of the Terminator movies, but explores interesting plot possibilities that the movies never had time for. The idea that time travel keeps creating alternate realities (an idea alluded to in T3 but not fully discussed) is a big theme, as are possibilities such as time traveling engineers using their futuristic knowledge to short-circuit technological development, and the human resistance trying to destroy the birth of Skynet just as Skynet was trying to destroy the birth of John Connor. Of particular interest is the reprogrammed female terminator "Cameron". Ahnold largely played a straight father figure to John in T2, but Cameron adeptly straddles the line between sinister bodyguard, surrogate twin sister, and potential sex toy.
The show definitely has its dumb spots, though. Cameron's character seems to have been completely redesigned after the pilot, they inexplicably retcon the timeline for T2 (making it even more broken than it already was), and a subplot about a destroyed Terminator magically reassembling himself is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever seen. The guy gets blown to smithereens, somehow reactivates his head (without power?) and then pilots his body back apparently without being able to see it or anything around it. Seriously?! Who is this guy, the Iron Giant?
Overall, though, I was pretty impressed by the first season. The story structure is interesting (you MUST watch the episodes in order starting with the pilot, though), and the writing is very strong for a TV show. However, I do wish the series moved along a bit faster, as it seemed pedantic at times. Now the only question is: will Terminator Salvation actually be good? The trailers certainly haven't done much for me.

BSG, Miniseries and season 1(*****)-
Phenomenal. This had an AMAZING pilot. Right from the opening scene- in which Cylons casually appear when we know they've been missing for 40 years- I was intrigued. It set up the story perfectly, giving every character a purpose, every plot-thread some importance, and every scene a bit of excitement. The story was incredibly dark and dramatic, and found a nice balance between popcorn fun and serious sci-fi. I was skeptical going in, having been underwhelmed by every sci-fi show you guys seem to like, but the high quality and maturity of the plot, writing, and acting made me an instant convert.

28

2009-04-06T18:00:29Z

I think I can now refer to myself as "pushing 30."

Stock market rambling

2009-04-03T00:55:22Z

Reverse-splits are the ultimate April Fools day joke.

"OMG! I'm rich!"
"..."
"Oh wait, never mind."

For those in the know...

2009-04-02T02:56:26Z

I'm short on good ideas this year so I'm not doing one.