Another solid pulp novel from Prologue Books. This time the story follows a group of ex-soldiers out for revenge against their old captain. None of the five main characters is without their dark side so you aren’t quite sure who to root for.
There have not been many wild west shooters. I guess there was Outlaw for the 2600 and, of course, now there’s Red Dead Redemption (a game which will never come to the PC). But when Call of Juarez came out, it was about the only Western themed game around. The old west had all you needed for a decent FPS: guns, outlaws, sparsely populated towns and dysentery.
I liked Call of Juarez. It has a nice blend of shooting, platforming, stealth and story. There were times while I was sneaking around it felt very much like my favorite FPS, No One Lives Forever except without the awesome dialogue. The shooting mechanics are good, and it has a “bullet time” mechanic that you will completely over use. The story is simple but is told in a unique way by having you play as two separate characters. Nothing revolutionary here, just a solid first-person shooter with a unique setting and narrative style.
Okami follows much the same formula of a typical Zelda game. You proceed through the game by defeating the boss at the end of a dungeon only to gain a power that gives you access to the next dungeon. Between each dungeon there are overworld levels to explore, wandering enemies to battle, items to collect, fish to fish and characters to bore you with endless unskippable dialogue.
It all sounds very mediocre, right? But where Okami sets itself apart is in its Japanese woodblock inspired rendering and art design. It’s not quite as sharp as the cover art would suggest, but it remains a colorful and playful world filled with tons of unique looking characters and enemies.
My biggest complaint, and this is kinda backwards, is that the game is just too long. There were at least three occasions when I thought that *this* boss battle would be the last. Thirty-six hours later I finally beat the game, and by that time I just wanted to move on to something else. The story is alright, but after the third time you defeat the big baddie who was advertised as the ultimate evil and destroyer of worlds, you stop caring about the narrative. The aforementioned endless dialogue doesn’t help either.
I bought this CD based on their cover of Grand Master Flash’s “White Lines.” It’s a great cover, albeit a bit too long. The rest of the disc is filled with fast and messy punk rock music. Most of the arrangements hinge on a distortion pedal that switches between growling guitar and screaming guitar at the appropriate changes in the songs. Not the most memorable stuff, but as far as noise rock goes this ain’t bad.
Nancy Sinatra may be best known for being the sister of the great Frank Sinatra Jr., but she also, with the help of Lee Hazelwood, recorded a bunch swinging 60s tunes many of which were hits. This CD is a great collection of songs and includes, of course, the song which made her a star, “Leave My Dog Alone.”
Silver Apples are a wild sounding collection of Radio Shack grade electronic noises backed with some great drumming. It’s always nice to hear electronic music that isn’t dance music. The vocals (which will annoy your typical millennial laptop-music babies) have a great prog-rock operatic style that just flows over beepity bloopy sounds. It’s hippytronica.
This was a fairly by-the-numbers fantasy story with the usual characters: a wizard, a prince, a dwarf, a thief and a fighter. The only thing missing was a D.M. and graph paper. There seems to be some forethought into constructing an epic story so I will eventually read the rest of the series to see where it goes, but I am not a anxious for the next installment as I would be for a new Kingkiller or Fire and Ice book. By the way, what kind of author includes an interview with himself as an appendix to his own book?
Although it had its moments, this film feels like it’s trying too hard to be hip and cool. It reminded me of one of those recent on-the-cheap Japanese splatter films like Tokyo Gore Police. Like those films, this movie could have used a little stronger grounding in reality. The only person playing it straight was Hauer and that wasn’t enough.
Having recently watched the very good Super, I thought I would skip right through Supers 2 – 7 and go right to 8. But, lo and behold this is actually not part of the Super franchise. It actually is a monster movie set in the 1980’s that attempts to mimic an early 80’s Spielberg production like Goonies or E.T.. I liked this one for the most part, clichés and all. But, the last act, when the monster is finally revealed, lacks any of the excitement that the first two-thirds of the film foreshadowed.
As I have noted many times on this site, I am a bit sick of super hero movies. Super could have been a in-joke laden parody of the genre but it avoided most of that in favor of dark comedy. Really, this is basically a retelling of Taxi Driver with tights instead of a mowhawk. At times it just screams, “Indy film!” but, nonetheless, it enjoyed the characters and story quite a bit.
