Wheels on Meals is a 1984 Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movie that is a precursor to the horrible Lucky Stars films that would follow. Fortunately, here the action take precedence over the uncomfortable comedy. It’s the story of two skateboarding food truck vendors in Barcelona who get caught up in Sammo’s investigation of a female pickpocket. The stunts are nowhere near as crazy as peak Jackie Chan, but the ending features so pretty good martial arts work.
It’s the origin story of the perverts from Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars! It really isn’t much better than the sequel but it has an incredible Jackie Chan stunt sequence in which he roller skates under a semi-truck and causes a thirty car pile-up. Of course, that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie which is comprised of mostly overly-long and incoherent “comedy” sequences.
Another film from the creator of Hundreds of Beavers. It used the same black and white old-timey style, but it’s even more home-made looking (and acted). I laughed out loud a couple of times which is more than I can say about most comedies these days. Not as good as Beavers but worth watching for the Milwaukee references alone.
A 1965 proto-giallo about a novelist who returns to an off-season resort in search of a girl he photographed the year before. Turns out she died and mystery shenanigans ensue. The atmosphere is moody and the pace is slow, but it is padded with an exceptionally rich score. The structure can be a bit too arty for its own good as visions, dreams and memories at inter-cut in a manner which only serves to confuse the viewer. It’s one of these mysteries where there are like five characters total, so the whodunnit reveal is never very surprising.
Sammo Hung directs and stars in this incoherent mess of a movie. You would never know he’s the star from the promotional images. They all prominently feature Jackie Chan instead of Sammo. Jackie does his stunt fight thing for a couple of scenes, but most of the story is about our heroes, The Lucky Stars: a group of pervy men trying to grope and peep women. The comedy is painfully unfunny and the premises always go on way too long. There are maybe three standard Hong Kong action sequences that seem like they were spliced in from another, better movie. After watching, I found out this is part three in a trilogy of films. This probably explains some lack of any development (or explanation) of the main characters. I guess now I will have to torture myself with the other two movies.
When Steam launched in the early 2000s and everyone hated the idea of downloading their games, there were only a handful of games available. I remember Dark Messiah being one of the first non-Valve games on the platform. It had a demo which I tried and enjoyed. You were able to kick enemies and watch the physics engine do its magic. I thought, “this is cool” and then promptly forgot about it for a couple of decades.
Well, I’ve finally played the game in its entirety and doesn’t quite stand the test of time. Despite using the Source Engine, it has some pretty bad performance issues. In theory, I should have been able to play this at 1080p with all the bells and whistles turned on. I had to down-res it and go to medium settings and it still had below average frame rates.
Then there is a sluggishness to the controls. Every attack is prefixed with a swirling weapon flourish that just makes everything seem unresponsive. The kicking and throwing physics attacks are still okay, but they are under-utilized and less effective than they could be. Half-Life 2 did it much better.
All that said it’s not unplayable. The levels are (thankfully) pretty on-rails making it a more casual gaming experience than a modern open-world RPG where you are forced to follow quest arrows and talk to boring NPCs. In a bit of a twist, your character isn’t necessarily a good guy. There is a “good” ending, but where’s the fun in that? There’s a lot of unrealized potential in this game and it’s too bad it doesn’t hold up.
The Crimson Diamond is a throwback to early Sierra 3-D adventure games like King’s Quest and Space Quest. Unlike their far-more refined contemporaries at LucasArts, the Sierra games still used a text-based parser instead of a pure point-and-click interface. The text input allows for much more detail in the way puzzles are structured, but it also introduces some major annoyances in terms of guessing verbs in hopes of instigating a particular action.
The Crimson Diamond attempts to mitigate some of these known problems by including quite a few quality-of-life improvements like a notebook and shorthand commands for common actions. Overall the game manages overcome most of the limitations of the mechanics. As far as adventure games go, it was not as difficult as any of the original Sierra titles were but there’s a bit of a twist to that assessment that I will discuss a bit further down.
Much like the very first graphical adventure Mystery House, this is a murder mystery. You play as a mineralogist assigned to investigate if diamonds indeed exist in the remote Canadian forest area of Crimson. You find yourself in a lodge filled with suspicious characters and then shenanigans ensue. The setting is mostly limited to the lodge and grounds around it and the game-play is very process oriented: collect fingerprints, identify footprints, and eavesdrop on conversations.
It’s all wonderfully illustrated and written with quite a few memorable characters. The art style mimics that second wave of Sierra games starting with (I think) King’s Quest IV in which the graphics are still pixelated, the palette is limited, but a slightly higher resolution allows for more detail. That three pixel blob is now a seven pixel blob and it kind-of/sort-of looks like what it’s supposed to be.
Aside from some technical problems (which are slowly getting fixed with each release) my biggest problem with the game was its end-game. I was not prepared for the final interrogation in which I was supposed to type in the names and actions of the guilty parties and much more. The idea here is that it will add replay-ability as you realize all the clues you missed, but I do not have the patience to replay most games, especially an adventure game. I would have preferred if the game had a similar, lower stakes version of this interrogation in the first act to prepare me in advance and make me more aware of the importance of note-taking and the thorough investigation of everything.
But, overall it was enjoyable and more detail oriented players will probably like it quite a bit.
For whatever reason this Philip Marlowe novel did not click with me. I had long stretches where I put it down and then was completely confused by the plot when I picked it up again a week later. Also, it didn’t quite evoke the film noir vibes as much as his previous books. I was probably just never really in the mood for this one so take this review with a grain of salt.
In an effort to broaden my appeal, I have created this wood engraving featuring both nudity and vomiting. The kids are gonna love it!
My goal for the month of October has been to covert the original MIDI based music from QBob into a more sonically robust modern format. I made a passing attempt to do this in the early 2000s when I thought Amiga tracking programs were the future of music. Madtracker was my go to program for creating sample-based techno songs and I managed to convert the track “Erie” but that was about it.
Cut to 2024 and I have actually expanded beyond the scope of shareware music software. My current DAW of choice is FL Studio. It has all the features necessary to directly convert .MID files into FL Studio’s file format. It actually comes bundled with a fairly good sounding general MIDI patch too. I could have just imported the files, used that patch and called it a day. Instead I took the time to hand craft various synths and samples to better match what I imagined these songs sounded like back in 1996 when they squeaked out of my old Soundblaster 16/Waveblaster card.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I also made lo-fi Waveblaster versions of all the songs too for posterity. That said, the new versions are sounding great. I have more-or-less finished the music ahead of schedule. The only thing left is give them a final mastering pass which is always a challenge since my PC speakers aren’t very accurate.
What is now going to follow is probably the most time-consuming part of this whole project. The goal is to completely redo all the game sprites to make them have smoother animation, alpha channels, and a more consistent style.
My plan would have been to use Adobe Flash to do all the animations, but then Adobe killed Flash in 2016. What I didn’t realize is that Flash was rebranded as Adobe Animate and now has a more video production focus. I have been (re) learning the software and I feel like this will work nicely. If this wasn’t an option I would probably have to buy Toon Boom Studio or some other program I am completely unfamiliar with.
So far I have completed two character make-overs and the game is already looking more slick and colorful.
