With the addition of a keyboard player, this CD has a slightly different sound than their previous records. SCOTS dabbles a little bit into soul and funk with mixed results. “Banana Puddin'” is probably the only song in SCOTS repertoire that my 9-year-old daughter likes.
The major label follow-up to Ditch Diggin’ is every bit as good and the production sounds much better. Even thought it was a modest hit which bristles my I-was-into-this-band-before-you fur, I still love “Camel Walk.”
Although I don’t think it’s hardly the best book in this series, I burned through this one in just a few days. These Baby Shark books are just tons of action-packed fun.
This starts out as a chicken themed EP but it turns out SCOTS only had two chicken songs in them and one of them was a Link Wray tune. Half the EP is live material and most of the songs aren’t quite as kinetic as SCOTS can get.
Probably my favorite record by SCOTS. All of the checklist items are here: a little twangy country rock, a little reverby surf, and a little Link Wray fuzz guitar. All of it is wrapped in a wonderful self-deprecating Southern hillbilly schtick.
I love these Baby Shark books. They are just great, action packed reads. I burned through this book in a few days and went right to the next one in the series. Great stuff.
The Icewind Dale series is built on the same game system as the Baldur’s Gate games. Unlike Baldur’s Gate these games are focused more on the fighting and less on the story. As far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. These old Infinity Engine games are just filled with pages and pages of boring fantasy text. It’s hard to get a sense of character and mood when every NPC has a ridiculous apostrophe-laden name like “Yxbudur’zmutkimdu.” Just point me towards a horde of goblins and let me click them to death. Icewind Dale II is very good at just keeping the monsters coming and follows a very linear progression from area to area. Not until the later chapters do you start to get bogged down with quests requiring putting specific items in specific containers to solve puzzles. The shift of pace was a little jarring and took me a while and a few jumps to a walk-through to get past some areas. I prefer the sword as a puzzle solving tool.
Many of my old complaints about the D & D system still apply here. There’s too many numbers thrown at the player and it’s difficult to know which weapons are more powerful than others. The magic system is immense and it was just too much work to figure out which spells were best against which enemies. C’mon devs, us gamers are lazy! Give us a tutorial mission or two for each class. All that said and in spite of my ignorance of the subtleties of the rules, the combat is fun and satisfying. I hope recent Kickstarter projects attempting to modernize this game system are sucessful.
Watch as Peter Lorre plays a Japanese man who is a master of disguise. This movie is pretty boring but it does feature a super-spy villain whose cover is a light-hearted vaudeville ventriloquist.
Although there are some great songs on this record (“Nashville Toupee” and “Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl”), there are a couple overly-long stinkers. They don’t seem to have quite gelled as a band yet and there is a certain spark of energy missing from the music. After this record is when SCOTS really began to hit their stride.
Giana Sisters is a reworking of an old Commodore 64 game that itself was a note-for-note ripoff of Super Mario Bros. This new version has updated graphics and sound and around eighty new levels to explore. As far as platformers go, this is as about as derivative as you can get, and yet, the solid controls and cutesy graphics make this one worth playing. There is a very gentle difficulty curve, and it isn’t until about two-thirds the way through the game that things finally start to ramp up and get tricky. If you manage to beat the game you are rewarded with a final challenge level that is actually the original version’s entire set of levels all linked together as a single challenge level. I had a lot of fun with this one and am looking forward to taking on the new incarnation of the series, Twisted Dreams.
