Caliber 9 is a highly regarded Eurocrime thriller about an ex-con who is released from prison and everyone suspects he’s still got the money from that botched job that landed him in prison. The movie contains no less than three scenes in which gangsters discretely hand a package to one another in a chain of exchanges, all of which fail. You’d think they would learn. It’s mostly good but there is a side plot of two cops who constantly argue Marxist theories which have nothing to do with anything in the movie (the Marxist crap is probably why critics like this one so much).
A weird, arty film about a pair of lighthouse keepers that is reminiscent of David Lynch. I’m sure there is some grand metaphor here about death, heaven and redemption or something. I just wish the plot was more interesting. Despite the occasional creepy visual, there really is no tension here. Just two guys acting strange in glorious black and white.
Marcello Mastroianni is an antiques dealer who is taken in by the police, accused of murdering his lover. It’s not as much of a crime thriller as that description implies and is more a study of the character of a charming grifter told through a series of interrogations and subsequent flashbacks. Jazzy Piero Piccioni score and swell black and white cinematography. I love how the hard-boiled cops need to grab a manly cup o’ Joe to warm up, but then are reduced to drinking from tiny Italian espresso cups like a bunch of European dandies.
Vietnamese martial arts picture about a female kung-fu loan collector whose daughter is kidnapped and taken to Shanghai. There are some really dumb plot points here and that’s not including the overused trope of a tiny woman who can apparently beat up any six-foot navy-seal type who goes against her. The gang is stealing children to harvest their organs and the police don’t want to act because they might not completely crack the whole case open. The fights are okay but it all feels a bit like a fan film compared to infinitely superior films like The Raid 2.
Hob is from the same studio that created Torchlight and much of the same beautiful artistic style is on display here. This is pretty much a Zelda clone in which you keep clearing out dungeons in order to gain abilities that let you clear out harder dungeons. It even has nearly identical swordplay mechanics.
Like just about every “arty” indy game, Hob tries to tell its story in an obtuse way without dialogue. It works okay but the ending presents you with a hard choice. A choice which you can’t freakin’ understand because the entire game is spoken in Simlish. That means your final decision will be based on a random stick push rather than thought. Whatever. It was mostly fun and moved quickly, so I basically liked the game.
This is another wood engraving based on an ink drawing I created for the Nox Archaist manual. This was engraved in Resingrave plastic engraving medium which offers smooth lines and pretty good control. The main problem with it is that it does not hold the ink of a layout sketch. I started this print by trying to do an acetone transfer (which worked very well on my Ettin print). The resingrave was having none of it.
So, I reverted to the old standard, transfer paper and lots and lots of tracing. Then reimbursing the lines in ink (which, as mentioned earlier, will just smudge on the resingrave block).
It took about a month of hacking away with plenty of COVID-19 booze fuel to keep me going:
Here’s what the (almost) final block looked like:
I always relish that first ink roll. The block will never look this velvety good after this first proof:
After this first proof I added more hairs to Black Phillip. With this print I have finally succumbed to the wood engraving cliche of depicting a hairy mammal (the goat is pretty hairy too). Contact me if you want to buy a print (or use Etsy, I get paid more if you buy direct).
The WiiU is not known for much other than being a failure. The whole two screen thing doesn’t make any sense. Bayonetta is the first game I have played through on the system and is one of the few WiiU titles that was held in high regard. This game is part of a two pack that includes the sequel as well. I have only played part one.
Bayonetta is a spazzy game for spazzy people. After playing Devil May Cry 4 I was pretty sure I disliked this style of fighting game. There’s just way too much going on and it feels like button mashing after a while. I was ready to give up and then things sort of clicked with me about five chapters in to the game. I came to accept that exploration is meaningless, the story in nonsense, and you only move around the world as a means of getting to the next fight. Your goal is to keep replaying old levels in an attempt to perfect your scores and gain more money. By approaching it like a casual arcade game, there is some fun to be had.
But eventually, tedium begins to take hold again in the last third of the game. It becomes an endless repetition of the same types of fights, and just when you think you’ve beaten the final boss, there’s another larger creature waiting. Worst of all, the game will not save your progress mid-level so, after that intense battle, you can’t stop and take a break lest you have to do it again. No wonder to demographic for this style of games is Mountain Dew chugging tweakers.
And a final note about the story: It’s a confusing mess probably written by a mentally-challenged manga fan.
Legend of Grimrock brings the real-time dungeon crawl formula of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder to the modern age. Perhaps the best single improvement is auto-mapping. I know that filling out that sheet of graph paper was half the fun in the originals but I really didn’t miss it here. You are still exploring the layout and looking at your map to guess where secrets might be located. You can even jot down notes if you want to be thorough. But because I was not constantly having to look away from the screen, I was able to get a feel for the spaces much more quickly and look more carefully for secret buttons and loot. This is crucial because, in reality, Legend of Grimrock is a puzzle solving game at its core. The goal is to figure out the correct combination of levers, buttons, and pressure plates to trigger in order to open doors and make your way deeper into the dungeon.
The combat works the same as in the old games. You have four characters with a front and back row. Right-click a weapon to perform an attack and use the WASD keys to dodge and move around your enemies. The magic system is much improved too. Your mage will have a sub menu of nine tiles and the various spells are triggered by quickly clicking runes on the tiles. Weaker spells use a single rune, more complex ones have more complex patterns. Remember, all this is happening in real-time, so the combat feels much more like an action game than a tactical RPG.
As far a story goes, there is only the barest amount of narrative to follow. Most of the details are in various notes you find lying about and the occasional vision while you rest. Nothing fancy, but the final boss fight brings it all together into a satisfying finish. What the game lacks is a diversity of environments. There are only three wall tile types and when everything is laid out in a concise grid, lots of visual detail would have brought it up a notch. Thankfully, the game is just about the right length for the minimal amount of content in the game.
This quarantine has been hard on all of us, but let us not forget the dedicated work that still continues for our nation’s homeopaths. They’re out there in the middle of the fray insuring that the correct dosages in parts per million are being applied to their tinctures. All this despite the disruptions in the world-wide rhinoceros horn supply chain.
Why do I do this to myself? I am always disappointed with classic science fiction. This stuff is so boring. Of the two books, The Sands of Mars is the better one. It is wildly off-base with its depictions of Mars. He just nonchalantly assumes there is plant life everywhere and you can walk around without a space suit. Many of the plot points from the film 2010 are in this story and the ship’s description is very much like that of the Discovery. I don’t remember much about the first story except that it involved the last city on earth or something.
