This two-disc compilation was my introduction to 70s era Sparks. It covers their best songs all the way from their inception as the band Halfnelson through Interior Design. With the exception of maybe one or two tracks, every song in this collection is great and I would recommend this as a starting point for anyone wanting to find our more about this fantastic band.
I wasn’t sure what to think of this album when I first listened to it. It feels more like a straightforward rock album than their last two with their weird, off-kilter arrangements. But, now a few years away from its release, this CD has grown on me. The album starts off strong, but somewhere near the last third of the CD tracks like “Lighten Up, Morrissey” and “Photoshop” start to drag the album down. Thankfully, the album closes with the excellent, “Likeable” which redeems it.
Graveyard Disturbance is a silly, made-for-TV quality horror film from Lamberto Bava, and it’s surprisingly bloodless considering the director. At times the dialogue becomes self-aware and there’s the potential for some good horror-comedy moments, but this is mostly squandered. There is some 80s cheese appeal here and the monster makeup is pretty solid. Unfortunately, the monsters don’t do anything in this except walk around and then sit at a dinner table.
This evening I took the time to archive all my old Apple IIgs floppies. This is something I have been meaning to do since I got my CFFA3000 card. I have been pretty lucky in that, having been told since the early nineties that floppy discs will just disintegrate over time, all of my disks are in good shape and I have never had one fail on me. But I know it will eventually happen, and probably soon. Ripping floppies to disc images on the CFFA is a piece of cake. Each of these discs took about 3 minutes to pull down onto a thumb drive as a .PO disk image. The most difficult part of the process was scanning the actual disks into photoshop so that I could have a nice digital record of my horrible teenage handwriting (seen above). The best labels are the ones where I crossed out the name of some old pirated game and reused the disk for my files. You’d think there would be a nice application on the IIgs for printing disk labels?
For as much as I loved my old Apple IIgs (and the Apple ][+ before that), I didn’t really have that much personal data to save. I guess I wasn’t using the raw computing power of the Apple II for productivity and content creation and was more focused on gaming. What I do have is a bunch of college term papers and essays that are filled with the grammatical atrocities you’ve come to expect on this Web site. There is also a fair share of musical compositions that my brother and I churned out in Music Studio. Classics like “Robert is Coll” (sic) and “Ultra Coolness.” Yeah, I was really concerned about my cool factor in those days (but too lazy to fix my coll typo). Finally, there are a few discs of drawings and images that we created in Deluxepaint and PaintWorks Gold. I may post some of those in the near future. They are quite.. ahem… cool.
It took about twenty years, but I finally beat Dragon’s Lair. That’s twenty years of dying for no reason, guessing moves and general hair-pulling frustration. Dragon’s Lair is not a good game. It breaks just about every rule of good game design. What it does have going for it is beautiful visuals, the novel concept (well, novel for the early eighties) of an interactive cartoon and tons of nostalgia for middle-aged gamers.
The Wii version is, as far as I can tell, identical to the original LASER disc version with the added bonus of optional infinite lives, move hints and a special extended cut. The disc also includes the follow-up game Space Ace and the long-delayed sequel Dragon’s Lair II: Timewarp. Both of these follow-ups fix some of the broken mechanics of the original such as moves being more clearly indicated with flashes. Space Ace adds a little variety in choosing your path through the movie and Dragon’s Lair II adds special items which can be grabbed (but which have no apparent effect on the path of the story).
However, there’s not much to make this game appealing to modern gamers. It takes the lamest gameplay mechanic from recent games, the quick-time event, and stretches it out into a giant ball of frustration, repetition and rote memorization. Those of us who grew up in the eighties will enjoy it purely for the nostalgia, and some younger players may get a kick out of just watching the cartoon play out in its entirety without the gaming. Now I want to get a Wii version of favorite LASER disc game, Cliffhanger.
Another enjoyable story filled with shooting, kicking and revenge. This story is much more straightforward than others in the series, but it jam-packed with enough action and tension that I didn’t really care that there wasn’t much mystery to it.
Another quality pulp novel from Prologue Books. This one is filled with at least half a dozen cheating spouses and/or lovers with a dash of murder for good measure.
After a decade and a half of creating dance floor music, Sparks decided to ditch the beats and try something completely new (to drive the point home, the album opens up with “The Rhythm Thief.” Get it?). The result is one of, if not the best Sparks album of their long career. They turn pop convention on its head with a mix of symphonic arrangements, vocal layering and non-conventional song structures. Songs just flow from one lush arrangement to the next. Occasionally they reach levels of frantic (drum-free) energy in tracks like “What Are all these Bands So Angry About?” and “Ride ’em Cowboy.” The record finally explodes into a full-on rock epic with “Ugly Guys with Beautiful Girls” and closes with the cheery “Suburban Homeboy.” An amazing album from beginning to end.
Although still a dance music record, Balls feels a little more like a rock than Gratuitous Sax ever did. I don’t think I like it nearly as much either. The songs just aren’t as interesting. This record has its moments. “Calm Before the Storm” is especially good. Buried in here are also hints of what was to come next from Sparks. Balls marks the first instance of the f-bomb being dropped on a Sparks record. I always forget about that when my daughter is in the room and I am playing this CD.
This film is an Italian Exorcist rip-off that takes forever to get to the puking, cursing demon action. The first two thirds of this are filled with painful child acting and not much more. There is a moment when the possessed woman eats a banana peel off of the ground but, other than that there is not much reason to watch this.
