The original BioShock was a great game with an interesting plot and a wonderfully unique setting. I never really understood the bizarre take on Ayn Rand though. It seemed to say that if objectivism is taken to its logical extreme that would mean people who believe in individualism and self-ownership would immediately start modifying and enslaving people against their will? That makes no sense at all, but it was enough to give you a bad guy to pursue. BioShock 2 takes place in a more deteriorated Rapture several years after the fall of Andrew Ryan. This time, however, the collectivists are in charge and, whad-do-ya-know, they suck too. I guess the theme here is it’s cool to be an indecisive, on-the-fence moderate.
This sequel plays about the same as the original but there have been a few improvements such as the removal of those annoying pipe-dream style puzzles that represented hacking. The combat, while fun, was pretty difficult for me and I often felt like I was dying without warning. I eventually got the hang of it once I had enough power-ups. This game felt like it moved along a little better than the first with less back tracking. The story comes to a decent finale and, in the end, I think I liked this game just as much as I did the first one.
I created this print during the height of the anti-Iraq war protests. It’s about being against everything and for nothing. After I finished editioning this print, I created a two-tone reduction print version of it that looks much cooler, but I only manged to make one copy of that.
The Blues Explosion (at least on these earlier recordings) occupies a nice space between the raw, rootsy rock of bands like the Bassholes and the driving rock of Touch and Go bands like The Jesus Lizard. As much as I like this release, I think the follow-up Orange is much better.
This was a good Indonesian action film that has a minimal plot and zero character development. A bunch of cops go in to clean out a drug lord’s apartment complex and everything goes horribly wrong. What it lacks in narrative competence it makes up for in tension-filled and well orchestrated scenes of blazing gun play and brutal fist fights.
I have enjoyed all of Jason Scott’s documentaries. His films tend to be about somewhat niche areas in computing and how those technologies affected the people who use(d) them. This one is about the DEFCON hacking convention. There’s a little bit of history about the convention, but mostly it is interviews with attendees and organizers about what it is they like so much about the gathering. To me, I felt like about quarter of the movie could be interchanged with any film about a group of people with similar interests meeting up in Las Vegas. I’m sure attendees at a shower curtain rod convention would tell you about how shower curtain people are the friendliest of people and how you can just strike a conversation with any other attendee… oh, and the parties are just awesome. No one parties like a shower curtain rod sales professional.
But this all can be forgiven because I think this film is directed more towards people who actually participated in the event. I am sure they will get a kick out of all the nostalgia and reminiscing. The other three-quarters document the various events that take place during the conference. These are the things that make DEFCON unique: stuff like cryptology contests, badge hacking, lock-picking, weird gizmos and, of course, the controversial speakers. A former co-worker of mine from when I was working as an office temp in Bloomington, Ill. makes an appearance. He goes by the name “V1ru5” here and he probably doesn’t remember me, but he was the guy who actually told me what DEFCON was back in 1999 and offered advice when I was contemplating going to the Game Developer’s Conference that year. Anyhow, I’d recommend this documentary to anyone who has a greater than normal interest in technology and wha-do-ya-know, you can watch it on Vimeo for free.
Apparently there is something wrong with my IIgs. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Briel Computers (a small company dedicated to making retro computer kits) put their 4 meg Apple IIgs RAM card on sale on eBay. My IIgs runs pretty well, but I that extra 2.8 megs of RAM would make things run a lot better (it would be nice to have more than 5 windows open in Finder without getting memory warnings). I clicked the “Buy it now” button and waited patiently for my card to arrive so I could supercharge my nerditude. Well, when the card came I carefully installed it and powered up the Apple II. At first everything seemed cool. The control panel indicated I was brimming with RAM and the CFFA3000 was not showing any problems. But when I attempted to boot into System 6, everything just froze.
Fortunately, Briel was about as helpful as could be and offered to send me a new card. Something must have broken in transit, right? Well, the second card came and I had the same problems. We were never able to figure out what was going on. We thought it may be that my motherboard is the issue. I wouldn’t doubt that, but, personally, I think my power supply is very suspect. That thing emits buzzing noises that only my daughter can hear. She refuses to come into my room when the GS is fired up.
In any event, I am back down to a whopping 1.2 meg ram and am now keeping my eye open for another GS. In the end I got my money back and, but if I ever get a new Apple IIgs, I will contact Briel again about buying RAM. So, if you live in the Chicago area and have an old Apple IIgs you want to unload for cheap, drop me a line.
I don’t think I really like science fiction. Sure there have been a few stories I liked, Dune, The Ender series, and the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, but most of what I have attempted to read has been either overly technical, poorly written or just plain dull. This one is kinda a little of all three. The story is about four intergalactic space travelers, the first to ever leave Earth, who teleport to various planets around the universe and meet with (conveniently enough) humans who don’t seem at all surprised that aliens are visiting their planets. All of the characters have superhuman telepathic powers which they use to save the day on each planet. Unfortunately, that’s about it. The plot is stupid, the characters are boring and nothing interesting ever happens.
Crysis feels much more like the Far Cry sequel I wanted back when I played Far Cry 2. Once again you are dropped into a lush island paradise in which you must shoot everything that moves, including the chickens. The overall level design is fairly linear, but each set piece can be approached in many ways. I would always prefer turning on my cloak and then sneaking into a secure location before going on my shooting sprees. It’s not quite a Thief game, but this stealth system works reasonably well. And once the snooping ended, the gunfights were very fun and manageable.
The story is not terribly interesting. Like the original Far Cry there is a not-so-surprising sci-fi twist about two thirds the way through. This twist provides a nice change of environment, but fighting squid monsters just isn’t as fun as creeping through the bush to take out commies.
I was familiar with about the first fifteen minutes of this movie from the old LASER disc video game, Cliffhanger. I always preferred Cliffhanger to Dragon’s Lair because you were given move hints on screen. Anyhow, it turns out that Stern just used footage from this Miyazaki film and shoehorned a game on top of it. The movie is actually really good and doesn’t have the heavy-handed back-to-nature message of Miyazaki’s more recent films. It’s just lots of action and well-paced fun.
Darksiders is a game that is utterly derivative of Zelda. You are tasked with exploring various “castles,” each of which gives you a new power that will open up new areas on the map. Some of these new powers include Link’s hookshot, Eopna the horse (named Ruin here), a magic musical instrument, double jump, and the Portal gun is thrown in for good measure. However, unlike a Zelda, this game is supposed to be dark and edgy. It’s kinda like a modern superhero movie where they try to make a kids’ franchise dark and brooding. I can’t wait for the reimagining of The Wonder Twins.
You play War−one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse who snarls his way through the entire confusing story. As far as I could tell there’s a war between Heaven and Hell and the seven seals have been broken or some such nonsense. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on. The characters are stupid and undeveloped and the fictional world makes no sense. It seems like every dialogue sequence contains a line or two about, “you know this is the law!” followed by a meaningless battle in order to stay within regulatory boundaries of this unspecified law. Apparently, the world beyond is a boring government bureaucracy.
Story aside, the game isn’t that bad. How can you go wrong when you rip-off one of the best games of all time? The castle puzzles are pretty good, and the boss battles are satisfying. What this game lacks is the sense of exploration that you get with Zelda. There weren’t many moments when I was tantalized by some seemingly unattainable treasure that required a power I was yet to aquire.
One final complaint is that this was a super sloppy PC port. Controller support was crap. I had to download an xBox controller emulator to play the game. The game ships with a corrupt intro video that prevents the game from launching. The fix is to delete an AMD video in the install directory. Lastly, a recent Windows update broke the video in the cutscenes. Only the bottom half of the screen was visible. That required rolling back a Windows update which did all sorts of weird things to other programs. I own the sequel, so I hope they fixed those issues for that game.
