I watched this because the music was by Gazelle Twin. Ostensibly a horror film but it plays mostly like a teen drama with some of the most wooden acting you will ever witness. The story is about a gifted music student who is jealous of her sister and discovers the doodles of the devil in a dead classmate’s notebook. No she isn’t possessed, she just naturally speaks in a deep, emotionless vocal fry. So boring.
Part two is more of the same from this Mexican brawling platformer. You explore the world and as you complete sections of the game you are given fighting powers which open up more areas. The combat is fluid and controllable and has a gentle ramp-up in difficulty where you constantly feel as though you are improving.
The world is open to explore, but backtracking is kept to a minimum. Only at the very end of the game did I find myself retreading completed zones in search of missing collectables. For the first time ever, I’ve played one of these games to 100% completion and, let me tell you, some of those final challenges are insanely difficult, requiring every bit of skill I had mastered until that point.
Again, nothing revolutionary here, but my tempered expectations left me much more satisfied in this second iteration of the game. Yeah, I got the good ending!
Say what you will about Tom Cruise, he knows how to put together a decent popcorn movie. The plot revolving around a sentient A.I. is dumb but it does the job of stringing together a set of thrilling action sequences that don’t feel like CGI cartoons.
I have been slowly building out a little library of wood engraving books and this one is a book that has been a suggested read for me on Amazon for years. It’s one of the only modern-ish books on the topic of wood engraving and it serves as a pretty complete guide. The order in which the process is covered is deliberately a bit wonky. It starts with the last step, printing, and then gradually works its way to the engraving process with a large portion devoted to the principles of design as applied to this starkly black and white medium.
I’m starting to think this Jess Franco guy might be a bit of a pervert. Here we have another movie about a swingin’ couple who wants to lure a young girl into their depraved web of smut. Franco managed to get Christopher Lee on set for a day or two to play the leader of a Marquis de Sade cult who spends most of his screen time wearing a red maître d’s coat and reading Sade passages. The best things that this movie has going for it are Franco’s excellent sense of composition and design (when he can manage to keep the camera in focus), a Bruno Nicolai soundtrack, and Jack Taylor—Spain’s perennial perv.
I have a on-again/off-again relationship with modular synth music. The majority of what’s out there is just arty-types feeling like they’re scientists as they twist knobs and “experiment.” This record bucks my stereotype by actually having a purposefulness to the songs. The theme of this record is to revel in sound in “all its glory.” The three main tracks combine sound design, rhythms, and spoken word into throbbing meditations on how a sound can evolve into music. “The Siren Is a Simple Device” is my favorite. It literally turns air raid sirens into instruments all while explaining the physics of the siren itself. “Sonic Sculpture” yearns to hear the sound of a piano falling down the stairs. I guess Colin Newman’s “Slowfast (falling down the stairs with a drumkit)” wasn’t extreme enough. These days, Umor Rex has become my go-to label for new music.
This is part of a five game package of Might and Magic games that GOG.com goes on sale for like three dollars every few months. I gave the first game the old college try but that was pretty painful even with third-party mods. The second game seemed like more of the same. This third game is probably the first one that’s even remotely accessible to a modern gamer.
It showcases a rather large graphical jump up to VGA. The character designs and pixel graphics are pretty great:
The game may look like Eye of the Beholder but it plays more like The Bard’s Tale. You control a party of characters who you recruit from a guild, and then you map your way through grid-based dungeons and towns fighting monsters and picking up text clues. The combat is a simple turn-based system that barely requires much strategy aside from knowing when to cast healing spells. If your team is powerful enough, you can just click attack, attack, attack and you will burn through most foes. That is, until you can’t. In some areas the enemy difficulty ramps up exponentially.
Where Might and Magic III begins to set itself apart from The Bards Tale is its large open over-world. This is also where the game begins to fall apart for me. The world is expansive, with many places to map out and explore, and yet you are given very little guidance as to what your goals are. After spending countless hours walking everywhere I realized I still had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. That’s when I just gave up. There were quests here and there within the towns but there was no meat to the story. Say what you will about simple “kill the evil wizard” RPG plots, but at least they give you a reason to continue playing. The satisfaction of leveling up kept me in there for a while and that might be enough to sustain hardcore role-players, but not me.
It’s Portal with cubes! Not quite, but it’s still a spacial puzzle game in which you are trapped in a bleak lab environment and must puzzle your way to the exit. This tenth anniversary edition adds a story via voice over communications with outside entities. It helps to give some context to the levels, but it’s not really critical to the game.
The main course is the puzzles. The idea here is that there are various colored panels that perform distinct actions: red creates a pillar, yellow a platform/staircase, blue a springboard, and green generates a moveable cube (with magnets! How do they work?). The first dozen or so levels are ridiculously easy. Eventually new twists are added like rotating walls, magnets, guide-able laser beams, rolling objects, and automatons. You slowly build up the skills to manipulate these new elements using those initial four building blocks. By the end, some of the puzzles can get pretty spatially mind-bending. The minimalist story comes to a nice little conclusion that makes it all feel worthwhile.
You probably don’t notice anything different, but I have switched Web hosts. MediaTemple was acquired by GoDaddy and very quickly their service turned to crap. GoDaddy incessantly tries to up-sell stuff and they charge for just about everything you can get for free anywhere else. Most annoyingly, they phased out unlimited e-mail addresses that MediaTemple would always offer. GoDaddy sucks. Avoid them like the plague. Giving Namecheap a try and so far they’ve been great.
Also: I’m just now discovering that many of my beloved em-dashes were converted into curly-apostrophes when I migrated off of drupal. This will require a post-by-post search of the database with some clever regex tokens.
This one is a giant Dover paperback with glorious, near actual-sized reproductions of most of William Hogarth’s prints. But, because I am a glutton for punishment, I read all the accompanying text. The introduction was a solid history of the artist, but all the plate blurbs are just literal descriptions of what we are already looking at. It’s like one of those DVD commentaries that Arnold Schwarzenegger would record.
