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.
I think I would have liked this book better if I had listened to the audiobook version instead. As it is, it’s an enjoyable read, but my inner reading voice has absolutely horrible comic timing. I feel the Gutfeld’s stream of consciousness asides would work better if delivered by the man himself.
9 is more or less a continuation of what Public Image Ltd. was doing on Happy? If anything, I think I like a few of these songs (“Disappointed” & “Happy” to be specific) a bit more than my favorites from the previous record. In the summer of 1989, while they were promoting this album, I saw P.I.L. perform in Chicago with New Order and Sugarcubes. Ah, the olden days. A few years after this record P.I.L. followed it up with a greatest hit compilation which included the horrible song “Don’t Ask Me.” That song was the bane of 120 Minutes. Dave Kendall must have been the only person on Earth who liked it. It was at that point that I gave up on Public Image Ltd.
