Charlie Chan’s Secret
A perfectly serviceable Charlie Chan movie that’s less goofy than the last one I watched. There is a pretty neat seance sequence with some spooky visuals. Not much else to say.
Fists and Guts
Gordon Liu bamboozles two petty crooks into helping him track down the “housekeeper” who stole his family treasure. This housekeeper also happens to be a master of disguise and Kung-Fu expert. What follows is several loosely tied together capers that always result in the wrong target. Most of this is cringey attempts at comedy but there are a couple of fights that are reminiscent of Dirty Ho as they are played more for novelty than action.
Shanghai Cobra
This was a 1945 Charlie Chan movie whose plot revolves a bank and several mysterious deaths of bank employees. I don’t really understand why Charlie Chan was selected as the man for this case; something about a failed arrest of a Shanghai criminal. The plot and the solution to the mystery revolves around a video jukebox thing in which you talk to a live representative who can see the patron on a video screen. I highly doubt this was possible in 1945.
I never realized how much of Charlie Chan movies were actually played for comedy. Some of the humor comes from the obviously culturally insensitive stereotypes, but there is a lot of genuine slapstick gags and Number Three Son and Birmingham get an ample amount of important screen time (played by actual ethnic minorities!).
I don’t know the actor who is playing Charlie in this installment, but he is (of course) an elderly white man who talks in a not-really Chinese accent. It’s more of the Tonto, Tarzan and Frankenstein variety.
The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism
I think this 60s Gothic horror is a re-imagining of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. Unfortunately, the story and direction is pretty flat and dull. Everything feels restrained. The first thirty minutes are a boring carriage ride to the castle where we are slowly introduced to the characters. The stand-out here is Vladimir Medar energetic portrayal of the not-so-honest priest. When they finally get to the castle the art direction kicks into gear. There are Bosch inspired murals, torture devices and colored gels galore. It’s too bad that they couldn’t make more of the inspired visuals. Christopher Lee shows up at the end as the main villain and does his best to salvage things. I have a feeling this one might improve with repeated viewings.
Fanatic
Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro are reunited in this ultra-low budget slasher film about a creepy cab driver who fantasizes about creating a movie starring Munro. So much so he follows her to Cannes where all the murdering begins. About a third of the movie is B-roll footage of the actual Cannes Film Festival or guerilla film making where they just shoot their scenes in front of real stars. There is a certain amount of cheesy 80s comic charm to it but it’s barely a movie.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Barely anything happens in this film but it manages to feel tense and action-packed throughout. It’s carried mostly by its performances and the occasional comic beats. It also serves as a nice time capsule of 70s New York.
Bravely Default on Nintendo 3DS
I picked up this 3DS JRPG because of one novel feature: the ability to turn off random encounters. For the most part, I find Japanese RPGs to be fair to middling at best and the constant random battles and grinding everywhere has not endeared me to the genre. Being able to turn them off is a blessing. There’s nothing worse than conquering a dungeon only to have to keep fighting random grunts over and over just to pass through that area again.
Bravely Default does actually have some interesting combat mechanics in which you can bank turns in order to attack in bulk later on. I really didn’t mind the random battles that much as I was leveling up and learning new class skills. That said, there’s a point about halfway through the game where there is a time/multi-verse shift and you are forced to play through everything all over again… and again… and again. I very quickly got tired of it and turned down the difficulty and the encounter rate. A more clever game would have done a better job of making each world reset seem different than the last in some meaningful way, but Bravely Default is not that game.
The story eventually does make a turn and leads to a fairly satisfying ending with a nice, albeit predictable twist. Most of the plot is your standard “stop the evil that is corrupting the world” that feels like it was written for immature 10-year-olds (and Gen Z’ers… but I repeat myself). You’re often forced to read intra-character “party chats” that are just time-wasting filler. Your party’s characters are established in the opening cinematic and never really grow beyond that. But it’s a JRPG, what did I expect? Ultima?
Consider Phlebas
A sci-fi story about a changeling who fights on behalf of the non-human species in a galactic war. He gets in with a bunch of mercenaries and space hijinx ensues. I felt like it was way too long and went on tangents that had nothing to do with advancing the characters or story. It eventually got back on track but it took a while.
QBob Progress Report #8 – Launch Day!
After almost eleven months of hard work, today is the day we are releasing QBob: Remastered to the world!
The last bit of content in the game was getting John in the “booth” to record new dialog for the final boss. There are a dozen or so new insult, taunts, and mad ramblings to which QBob will be subjected.
Most of the past month or so has been spent building up our Steam Store presence with tons of graphical assets, creating a few trailer videos, undergoing lots of Valve content reviews, and porting the game to other platforms. Much of the hardest work her on this final stretch has been building the game for MacOS and Ubuntu. Craig did all of the work getting the MacOS game working. Apple makes it very difficult to create anything (despite what hipster Web devs may say). I handled the Ubuntu port using a virtual machine and it was easy-peasy. In theory, that build should run natively on Steam Deck™, but I have no way to test it.
Finally, I created a thirty page manual for the game. I would like to have a few of these printed up to distribute, but that’s going to be kind of expensive.
So now, without further ado, here are the links to everything QBob: Remastered that is being released today!
The Deadly Tower of Monsters on PC
The premise of this game intrigued me: you play as a character in a 50s sci-fi B-movie whose actions are narrated by the director’s DVD commentary track. The design is supposed to be retro-futuristic but you see strings and bad rubber masks, etc.
Turns out that this premise is not executed very well. The voice of the director is completely wrong. There’s a winking, self-aware DVD producer voice that ruins any sense of immersion. Creatures which are supposed to be bad stop motion, just look like sloppy game animations. The characters just look like the monsters they are supposed to be and never feel like actors in costumes.
On top of all that, it feels like hardly any effort was put in to making the actual game play fun. It’s sort of twin-stick shooter-y at times, and point at bad-guy and button mash at other times. This is the sort of game mechanics that you would create if you were following a “let’s make your first game in Unity” tutorial. If it’s any consolation, at least the game was short.