I loved the Lord of the Rings movies so I realize I have a huge bias towards liking this no matter what. So, yes, I loved this movie. I looks much better than LOTR and the acting is much improved too. The story is not as strong though. It feels padded with a little too much reliance on flashback, and, as usual, I would have liked to see less CGI creatures and more latex. Can’t wait for part two.
Also known as La Morte Accarezza a Mezzanotte, this is more of a Italian police story rather than straight up giallo. The cover art would suggest that this is nonstop wall to wall spiked-fist punching. Sadly, the spiked-fist punching is limited to one or two brief (although crucial) scenes. The movie opens with a silly drug use experiment that leads to hallucinogenic visions of the aforementioned spiked-fist punching murder. Our main character then spends the rest of the movie trying to find out what it was that she saw. They never really explain how she somehow forgot having witnessed a grizzly murder in the first place. But that’s neither here nor there as far as this movie was concerned. Eventually, the bad guys are established and this all leads to a rather thrilling climax. I’ll have to admit I was genuinely surprised by the plot twist in near the end.
Not much to say here. Another great collection of instrumental perfection from Shadowy Men.
The second Baby Shark story is just as brutal and action packed as the first with great characters and writing.
Gutfeld’s latest is a bit more focused than his last book. The primary theme of the book is that people who say they are tolerant are the most intolerant people when it comes to opposing political viewpoints. His focus is primarily on liberals but he does pay some lip service to conservative outrage as well (but not much). Again, I think Gutfeld is better heard rather than read, but I’d still recommend this book if you like funny conservative/libertarian political commentary.
I’ve been playing a lot of adventure games these days. In Syberia you play Kate Walker, a lawyer working for a high-powered corporate client who is looking to close the deal on the purchase of a Wonka-esque toy factory. As you journey farther in the story and get closer to your goal, the world becomes more and more fantastic. The graphics showing all this wonderous worlds and characters are certainly a step up from The Longest Journey. The pace may be slow, but I liked most of the puzzles. The voice acting is very good and I really enjoyed the story. The game ends a bit abruptly so be sure to have Syberia II installed and ready to go so you can continue on your quest.
Dream Zone is a graphical adventure for the Apple IIgs that I was never able to complete when it was originally released in 1988. I managed to get about a quarter of the way through the game before I was stumped by one of the game’s unfair puzzles. Now, twenty years later and with a little help from the Internet, I have managed to beat the game. These pre-Craft of Adventure era games can be pretty brutal and a walk through will come in very handy. Now, this is about to get fairly spoiler-y so if you want give the game a try before I go on, you can play Dream Zone in your browser right now. It’s worth trying out.
As much as I love these text/graphic hybrid adventures, they all seem to suffer from the usual “guess the verb” problems. Dream Zone does a fairly good job of avoiding this most of the time with its click interface. But the click interface is deceptive because on at least three occasions you are required to come up with the specific actions yourself when a simple “use” action would have sufficed. The worst puzzle, and the one that stumped me back in ’88, is dispersing a crowd from in front of a bar. No game object works. No clickable action works. The solution is that you are supposed to say “free beer” to make the people scatter. How anyone was able to figure this out on their own is beyond me. The other horrible puzzle is one in which you are required to cuss in order to be sent to a room of punishment. Eventually you will find the room, but the solution to the puzzle requires you to visit the room twice (and again involves that pesky crowd outside the bar).
If you can manage to survive these cruel puzzles without throwing your monitor out the window, the rest of the game is rather enjoyable. The idea that this is all dream allows for some rather fun and creative moments like the giant bureaucracy staffed entirely by pigs. The art is cheesy and somewhat amateurish but it really fits the surreal theme of the game. The music is also wonky but appropriate. The whole production has a very homebrew quality to it and it’s obvious they are using off-the-shelf software like Paintworks Gold and The Music Studio to create their game assets. But—and this may just be nostalgia—I really liked this game and wish there were more 16-bit era graphic adventures like this. I mean, check out this insanity:
I stopped going out of my way to see these superhero films quite some time ago. As a result, I never saw Thor or Iron Man 2. I suspect this put me at an Avenegers disadvantage because to me the first 30 minutes or so of this movie sucked. It seems to be all just tying in threads from these other movies which I passed on. And once you start adding gods and space aliens you’ve lost me. I was hopeful that Joss Wheadon would add some stakes to the plot. Kill someone off early on so we know that you mean business like did in your TV shows. Instead we have lots of physics defying poser model animations, a ridiculous looking bad guy and lots of spinny CGI camera movements. Eventually, once all the boring set up is over things get a little more entertaining. The interactions between the characters are fun for a while and I appreciated Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark much more than I did in Iron Man as he played against his mostly dull co-stars. Seriously, Scarlett Johanson is a terrible actress. I think the only time her facial expression changed was when the wind was blowing against it on her alien motorcycle flying thing. Okay, this move was adequate, but please stop making more. Enough already.
I started reading this book without knowing anything about it. I had previously read and very much enjoyed Vin Packer’s The Twisted Ones which told the story of three disturbed youths and their descents into darkness. I suppose I expected much of the same here, only this time, judging from the cover photo, the “ones” were going to be twisted girls rather than boys. What I didn’t expect was that this is actually a fictionalized account of the same murder depicted in Peter Jackson’s excellent film, Heavenly Creatures. The book hits many of the same beats as the film but Packer packs in a less subtle take on the suspected lesbian relationship. This isn’t surprising since it turns out Vin Packer is the pen name of Marijane Meaker, who, according to Wikipedia, pioneered the genre of lesbian pulp fiction back in 1952.
Back in the late 80s, I learned much about computer programming from this book: Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer. This is the same book that I used as a guide when creating Malfunction for my Apple IIgs back in 1988.
The book takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a simple text adventure game using Applesoft Basic. The final product is an adventure called “Haunted House.” It’s about as crude and bare bones as a work of interactive fiction can be, but it does what it needs to: there are objects, rooms and key puzzles.
Well, in a recent flurry of Apple retro computing I got side tracked into porting this game into JavaScript. The result is here. Click the screenshot to launch the game in a new browser window (requires JavaScript, duh – View the actual page if you are viewing this in an RSS feed reader). It’s a fully working port of the original, with all its flaws and quirks. The only additions I made were to make the EXITS display more cleanly and added the verb “drop” to the vocabulary.
