Another “secret life of _____” CGI animated feature. In this case it’s the secret life of video game characters. I went into this expecting it to be a wall-to-wall nostalgia blast, but that part of the movie ends after the first fifteen minutes. From then on the film focuses on the characters from various fictional games. It’s entertaining, but it’s your average by-the-book storyline and characters types.
This game had one of the best trailers ever. None of the narrative spark that permeates the trailer is in the actual game. The closest thing you get is a few paragraphs of backstory on the character selection screen. This is unfortunate because Dead Island is a big open world game that gives you no incentive to explore it’s lush and detailed map. Rather than tell a story or develop characters, the quests are of the fetch and return an item variety. Even the opening cutscene is an insult. It consists of the worst “beeyotch”-laden rap song a 12-year-old wannabe gangsta could come up with.
The combat mechanics are fun and keep the game going for a while. But without the narrative hook, the chopping and bludgeoning just becomes tedious. The game doesn’t even let you play it as a pure action challenge because it uses a horrible recovery from death system that removes any real challenge in defeating particularly tough segments. Hit a thug, die, come back to life and hit him again… repeat until you win. Such a disappointment.
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.
