doombot

Short Movie Review: The Mutant Chronicles

Jason — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:06:19 +0000

I watched this movie today because I was feeling sick. It did not help. It is the worst game-to-movie adaptation I have seen since Mortal Kombat Annihilation. I might have forgiven it if only there had been an ezoghoul, but there was not. I don’t know which is funnier: that I actually finished it, or that the end implies that they actually thought this might get a sequel.

Short Movie Review: The Parent Trap (Lindsay Lohan version)

Jason — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:01:31 +0000

You know, I can’t just leave my complaint with this movie as an offhand joke at the end of a post on Bruce Willis’s Surrogates. This movie is messed up. I assume you know the premise: Two girls meet at summer camp, discover they are long-lost identical twins who were split up when their parents divorced, and decide to switch places as part of a plot to reunite their family. This is not the implausible part yet.

The implausible part is that everyone lives happily ever after. We never really find out what separated the parents in the first place, but it would have had to have been pretty bad, I’d imagine, for them to consider splitting up their children like chattel and then lying to them for the rest of their lives. I mean, that’s pretty messed up. And I’m supposed to buy that they’re all happy to get back together again some day? Golly, I can’t imagine where these kids get that lying, manipulative streak from.

In summary, The Parent Trap is a heartwarming story about how Disney is full of filthy lies.

Short Movie Review: Surrogates

Jason — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:56:04 +0000

Bruce Willis stars in a movie about how nobody leaves the house except in an android body. It’s probably a commentary on something or other, but mostly it reminded me of how people who are horrified that anyone would walk anywhere when they could drive. In terms of my level of enjoyment, it fell somewhere just above sitting around bored, and several steps above the second movie in that day’s double-feature, the Parent Trap remake.

(Not Quite) Short Game Review: Mass Effect 2

Jason — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:59:52 +0000

I’ve enjoyed Mass Effect 2 immensely, but I have to concede that it’s practically a different game from its predecessor, which is one of my favorite of all time. Certain changes seem like simple, direct responses to common gripes, such as including bathrooms on your space ship; others completely throw the baby and the bathwater alike right out the airlock. The much-maligned inventory management system—which included tons of useless items that needed to be deleted regularly—has been scrapped entirely for no real inventory management at all. The somewhat tedious, optional vehicle missions—which included unreasonably unnavigable terrains and battles with guns that took forever to destroy anything—have been replaced by a much less optional, much more tedious “minigame” which essentially amounts to “a metal detector looking for quarters,” which is precisely as dull as it sounds. The somewhat lackluster third-person-shooter mechanics have been replaced with a more intuitive system akin to other shooters, complete with extra damage from head shots and crippling effects from leg shots—but the characters’ sci-fi super powers have been rendered much less effective and interesting to compensate for being so overpowered in the previous game.

All of that said, the interaction between characters is where this series really shines. Mass Effect had a fairly interesting dialog system, allowing you to choose between short statements that would then be acted out and elaborated upon by the protagonist. It allowed for a sense of control by the player but also some room for surprise when lines get delivered in unexpected ways. Mass Effect 2 improves upon this with better facial expressions, better gestures, a greater variety of cinematic camera angles, and generally better dialog writing. While some players have criticized the story for not being as straightforward and epic in scope as the previous game, I think it’s worth comparing to a mid-series season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: There are a few “episodes” here and there about the apocalyptic evil that must be stopped, but mostly you get self-contained stories about dealing with your friends’ and allies’ personal problems so that everyone is comfortable working together when it all hits the fan.

It’s not a perfect game, and playing it has made me realize just how much room for improvement the first game had. Both games are still way ahead of the pack in terms of telling an interesting, interactive action story, though. If you haven’t played Mass Effect, I recommend borrowing a copy, doing only the plot-relevant missions, and carrying the character over into the sequel, which follows up on key choices made in the first game. I complain a bit here, but I think those of us who have been playing way too much of these games sometimes forget just how amazing this whole series is in its ambition and scope.

Short Book Review: The Magicians

Jason — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:53:17 +0000

Lev Grossman’s urban fantasy novel The Magicians starts off reading like a self-aware, toughened-up blend of Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia. It ends up being a character study of a nerdy guy who likely reads as disturbingly familiar to a decent portion of the intended readership, and a metaphor for the existential dilemmas of the intellectual elite. It also contains the line, “Look, who’s the talking Bear here? … Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.” Despite the odd scene of animal sex here and there, I believe this warrants my endorsement.

Short TV Review: Glee

Jason — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:05:28 +0000

People kept recommending Glee to me last year—a sitcom/drama/musical about a high-school glee club, the tension of high school hierarchies, and the faculty advisor’s tangled love life—often with the caveat, “It’s stupid, but it’s still really good.” Well, I just finished the first season, and I’d contend it’s one of the smarter comedies on television.

While it does stumble in places (particulary when it focuses on self-contained episodes over the overarching story), and perhaps never again really achieves the savvy level of savvy satire found in the director’s cut of the pilot, it’s still painful enough to be believable, and ridiculous enough to be funny. It’s also relatively daring as network TV goes, with love triangles hinging not just upon adolescent crushing (though there is plenty of that), but upon issues of marital fidelity and pregnancy. The defensive remarks that it’s “stupid” probably refer to the soap-opera trappings in its storyline, if not the patent absurdity of the way that musical numbers are worked into each episode. Still, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that when it’s stupid, it’s stupid on purpose, and usually effectively so. Plus, you will have an a capella cover of “Don’t Stop Believing” stuck in your head for days, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The Year in Numbers

Dan — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:55:35 +0000

Or, a random assortment of things that I can quantify, though perhaps not 100% accurately.

12 Number of flights taken
411 Number of bylined Macworld articles I wrote
32 Number of books I read
3 Number of books I read that were graphic novels
45 Number of movies I watched
37 Number of new movies I watched
2 Number of Dungeons & Dragons adventures completed as DM
5 Number of Xbox 360 games purchased
4 Number of above games completed (for reasonable definitions of completed)
50,574 Number of words written for NaNoWriMo
84,508 Number of words written in non-NaNoWriMo novel
1,089 Number of photos taken (not including iPhone)
1 Number of spoof movies produced
10 Number of Doomcast episodes released
2:55:17 Length of total Doomcast episodes

Short Movie Review: Avatar

Jason — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 05:21:49 +0000

Every review of this you have read is probably more or less right and more or less the same. I’ll summarize: Dances With Wolves meets Ferngully. Spectacular visuals, but a weak and predictable story, and 3D effects that gave me a serious headache. Also, about a half hour longer than was really needed. Good popcorn movie, but not the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars successor it seemed to think it was going to be.

Short Game Review: Shadow Complex

Jason — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:35:35 +0000

If you have 7 or more hours to kill, and you wish someone would make more 2D Metroid clones (with occasional, iffy use of the Z axis), this is the game for you. I hear it’s based on some Orson Scott Card novel, but I don’t know why they’d even bother claiming that, as it is a generic video game plot about a guy who has to take down a conspiracy of generic militants in robotic armor who want to conquer the U.S., and the characters don’t even appear in the novel. (That said, Peter David actually does much of the script writing, and it’s extremely enjoyable to sneak through ductwork and overhear bad guys saying the stuff that we always assumed bad guys must be discussing in video games.) Anyway, it’s slightly more expensive than a movie, but I’d say I’ve gotten decent bang for my buck.

Short Game Review: The Darkness

Jason — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:20:40 +0000

I got bored of playing the Chronicles of Riddick games, so I popped in The Darkness—the next story-oriented game I’d picked up on sale—not even realizing they’d been made by the same people. As it turns out, they’re basically the same game at their core: traverse a map which feels “open world” but is really quite linear; do optional errands for strangers; collect pieces of paper to unlock bonus art you’ll never look at; and shoot everyone who you’re not doing errands for.

The main difference, as I see it, is that The Darkness has an actual story, characters that you can may give a damn about, and more variety to the ways you can dispatch your foes (and literally eat the hearts out of their chests afterward). It is more effectively cinematic than many other games that try to be cinematic, working narrative interludes pretty effectively into in-game moments, and using loading screens to give us more of a glimpse into the protagonist’s head. Overall, I’d say that makes it better than Riddick, but it was lacking in Vin Diesel, so perhaps I’ll call it a tie.