The film opens with George C. Scott witnessing a horrible car accident. The story then shifts to four months later with George, still distraught over the tragic loss of his station wagon, deciding to move into a big empty mansion in Seattle. What proceeds is a bloodless, yet creepy ghost story that reminded me much of The Ring. As the details of the haunting are revealed the movie loses its creep factor, but the mystery and (as expected) great acting kept me engaged until the climax.
Zeno Clash brings brawling and melee combat to the FPS genre and makes it work. Whenever a game has attempted this in the past it has always been kludgey. Mirror Edge is the only game I can think of that came close (that, and maybe the boot from Duke Nukem 3-D). The fights in Zeno Clash work because the action is a little bit slower, more focused and the dodge and block mechanics require timing and skill missing in your typical button masher.
On top of this is a wildly inventive art direction in which your tribal hero meets humanoid bird creatures, giant moles, a squirrel bomber and a number of other truly imaginative enemies. The environments are a bit sparse and the creature animation can be wonky, but these technical shortcomings don’t distract much from the game play or the interesting, flashback-heavy story line.
Who would have thought that the director of such legendary cheese-fests as Starcrash and Hercules could create a gritty and disturbing giallo? The titular “killer” is well cast with an appropriately creepy weirdo and the film has a few good moments in which you think you know what’s about to happen and it twists on you—nothing mind-blowing, more like cliché avoidance. There are a couple of instances of illogical plotting which prevent this from being a great giallo, but it still was much better than most of these Italian thrillers.
This is a sequel I have been meaning to play through for a few years now. The original Deus Ex was very well executed, although I would be hesitant to heap as much praise on it as seems to receive these days. Its big hook was the open game play it offered: sneak, negotiate or kill… it was up to you. Invisible War has some of those choices, but it is dumbed down to the point where you might as well just kill everybody you meet because there is no advantage (or fun) to choosing a different path.
The game also lacks the precise allocation of RPG stat points that you got in Deus Ex. Instead, you get to fill a few slots with “biomods.” These are essentially generic power-ups. I never felt like I was creating a unique character. By the end of the game I found myself just ignoring any new biomod canisters I came across because they didn’t really do that much.
What Invisible War does do right is maintain the feeling that every object in the world can be manipulated. I loved just randomly throwing chairs at bystanders and watching the rag doll physics work. The graphics are also much improved and hold up quite well. The story is just as convoluted as the original, but, for what its worth, we do get to see some of the main characters reprise their roles (sans the amateurish IT department voice acting).
Painkiller is a first generation FPS that’s about a dozen years too late. Unlike most modern shooters, your goal is singular: shoot everything. Story, characters, game play variety and puzzle-solving are all out the window. That said, I think there still is a place for games like this, but I found Painkiller lacking in a couple ways.
First, although the game has a sort of achievement system for getting power-ups, completing the level tasks just wasn’t fun. Who wants to search around a poorly designed game map looking for barrels. Rather than rewarding meaningless exploration or OCD item hunting, there needed to be a system that rewards risky game play (big points for melee attacks) or high skill shooting (headshots). The core of the game is shooting, don’t make us obsess over things that have nothing to do with our modus operandi. Secondly, if you aren’t going to give as a story, at least crank up the comedy (Serious Sam) or horror (Doom 3) that would motivate us to progress through the game just to hear that next witty jibe. The Black Edition includes the expansion Battle Out of Hell which I found to be slightly more challenging and well thought out that the original.
Sometime during my late teens I started reading a bunch of H. P. Lovecraft books. His style never fully caught on with me. He always seems to be describing horrors by simply saying they are indescribable. I decided to reread this short novel in hopes that my passing years would have made me more accepting of his work and, for the most part, I liked it. He has the horror elements down, but he doesn’t seem to know how to create suspense. About one-third the way through you’ll have it all figured out and it’s just a matter of waiting for the dim-witted characters to catch up.
Catching up on a classic I missed in high school. I thought it was okay, but not the sort of plot-driven narrative I enjoy.
Growing up, this record (along with the Flash Gordon soundtrack) was what Queen sounded like. I had no idea that their best, most creative days were far behind them. In retrospect this is indeed a very cheesy album. The heavy handed anti-gun politics of “Put Out the Fire” don’t help the cause. Since when do Brits get to complain about the second amendment? “Body Language” reeks of leg-warmer coated jazzercise routines. However, the record makes amends for all this cheese by closing with “Under Pressure”—quite possibly one of the best singles of the entire decade of the 1980s.
This film is a pre Dawn of the Dead zombie flick that takes place in the idyllic English countryside. The first half of the film is awful. The story is boring, no one, especially the cops, behaves like a normal person would in the same situation and the main characters are mid-seventies hippy-types trying to be cool, man, but they just come off as unlikable jerks. However, once the zombie action kicked-in the movie drew me in. There are some genuine moments of tension and a sprinkling of over-the-top gore.
This book is really an economics lesson presented in layman’s terms. The plot and characters are merely a device to get you from one lesson to the next. However, the lessons about prices and markets (usually given in the form of a conversation between characters with differing viewpoints) are so interesting that I didn’t really care too deeply about where the story was going. All in all a quick, intelligent read.
