Although I’d give them props for creating a game with a truly unique theme, this Wadjet Eye adventure falls a bit flat. The game is set during the 1920’s land boom of southern Florida and focuses on the player-character, Alfie Banks. Essentially it’s a character study, but, unfortunately, interactive storytelling doesn’t lend itself to well so such narratives. Games excel at mood and environment but creating riveting characters just doesn’t seem to fit the medium all that well. Without a strong narrative plot focus (i.e. save the princess or defeat the evil villain) it’s hard to justify the extra time spent clicking options and parsing dialog trees to get to the same point that a short paragraph of exposition would.
The best adventure games are ones in which the plot and mood develops as the player explores and interacts with the environment. In A Golden Wake there is no sense of discovery. You are told what you need to do and your options are limited. The author just wants to paint his portrait and the puzzles are just a customary nuisance put there to force you to click on stuff. “Puzzles” may be too strong a word. In 90% of the game you are just following a path, clicking on all the objects and waiting for the next section to open up.
But still, the theme and setting are novel and they were enough to keep me mindlessly clicking. I love, love, loved the 1920 dance scene that was featured in the trailer (and the above screenshot) for all its pixelrific glory. Unfortunately the game didn’t quite meet my expectations. Flapper DDR needs to be made. Left, right, left, left, charleston…
Apocalypse Now by Coppola, Carmine and Francis Coppola
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CD(9/10)
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Not so much a soundtrack as it is an abridged version of the movie that you can listen along with, the double CD Apocalypse Now focuses on narration and dialogue instead of music. Sure there’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and that stupid (aren’t they all) Doors song, but for the most part the atmospheric synth sounds are limited to background here and there. That’s okay by me. I love the movie and this soundtrack evokes the same dreamy and poetic quality of the film in an auditory format—a headphones record if ever there was one.
Although technically speaking this is a soundtrack, I don’t think any of these songs made it into the film 1984. That’s fine. The dance floor beats don’t really fit the tone of a dark and cruel dystopian future. Nevertheless, I have always really liked this CD (with the exception of the overly long “Julia”). Along with the attempts at police-state pop music, there is a nice mix of instrumentals where Lennox’s voice is just there for atmospheric effect. Not quite Edda Dell’Orso, but I’ll take what I can.
The final movie in the Dragon Dynasty Volume 1 DVD pack is probably the best of this set. The film banks heavily on the skill of its star: a very young Jet Li. Li is just so much more dynamic and skilled than most of the other martial artists in these older films. However, his skill might be a cinematic trick. It feels like they may have sped the film up for the fight sequences. In any event, this is another mostly comedic story that relies on over the top acting. Despite this, the story and character development work. My only major complaint is the horrible, ill-timed synthesizer music that just cheeses everything up.
Gary Cooper stars in this black and white western about Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok. It’s a very boring movie and much of the main dialogue consists of the two leads calling each other “Bill” every few seconds. There are tons of politically incorrect depictions of native Americans and hero characters defending “the white man.”
Mad Monkey Kung Fu is all about the acrobatic fight choreography and feel a lot like a Nineties Jackie Chan film minus the crazy stunts. There is even a bit of drunken fighting. It’s a colorful film and plays as a comedy for the most part (if you can forget that the hero’s wife is being held as a slave girl by the villain the entire film).
A Shaolin monk on the run vows to avenge the death of a friend and, over the course of many years, he gets married, has a girlish son, and attempts his revenge twice. Unfortunately, his white-haired nemesis Pai Mei is also a master of the tiger style and the task of vengeance falls on the aforementioned girlish son. There is a lot of humor mixed in and the husband/wife dynamics are far more interesting than the kung-fu plot. It’s a fun movie but may be a bit to simplistic for my tastes.
While this game was a pretty big improvement over KQV, it still was just too mired in Sierra adventure game brutality for me to really enjoy. There has been some attempt to make the puzzles a bit more forgiving here, including allowing for the player to take multiple paths to victory. I did alright through about the first third of the game then it just gets nasty. The worst offenses being several “walking dead” moments when I got to a puzzle and was unable to pass because of an item or interaction I missed hours beforehand. I gave up and just relied mostly on a walk-through for the rest of the game.
Although I long for the blocky graphics of the AGI games, the pixel graphics and animations in King’s Quest VI are pretty amazing, especially the background art. They also hired actual voice actors to add some life to the story. For a King’s Quest game, this had a pretty solid story despite several of the usual fairy tale tangents.
Competent and straightforward surf music from this Portland group. This record isn’t the most exciting stuff this band has done but it has its moments. Unfortunately, most of the moments are the covers of “Mr. Moto” and “Squad Car.”
Discogs.com has been nagging me for months that this was available for cheap from a number of resellers and completing my collection of Missing Links was just five dollars away. I got it and it is exactly what I expected: another great collection of (mostly) fuzz guitar instrumentals from the master.
