Well, this is a Zelda game. The formula has remained unchanged ever since The Ocarina of Time. The princess has been abducted and you must work your way through the various dungeons one-by-one, collecting a new power in every dungeon. Each game in the series introduces a new game-play element. In the case of Skyward Sword that is its (supposedly) precise motion controls.
Skyward Sword requires the use of the Wii MotionPlus controller. While it’s definitely an improvement over other games that have tried to use the standard WiiMote as a sword, you still end up just flailing your arms like an idiot. The key here is to realize that the game is forgiving enough to allow you actually to take your time and be precise for many of the bigger battles.
The motion controls are also a large part of the flying sections of the game. They work well enough, but there really isn’t much fun to be had while flying. It just needlessly lengthens play time as you slowly navigate to the next zone. I found myself abusing the “dive” function as a hacky way to increase my altitude rather than concentrate on manipulating the bird in slow arcs.
Wii frills aside, this is really just a standard Zelda game. Like with the DS Zelda games, I found myself getting bored by the simplistic narrative. On more than one occasion I had to set the game aside and move on to something else for a while. I would eventually return and get a little farther on but there’s only so much un-skippable, insipid dialogue a guy can take.
Now, there are moments of inspired challenge, but for each one of those, there are mini-quests that have you back tracking over finished areas over and over. This was not a bad gaming experience, but Nintendo needs to kick it up a notch. I’m hopeful that Breath of the Wild might break from tradition enough to bring back this once great series.
The story is implausible and Nick Cage is as ridiculous as ever, but the stylish direction makes this an entertaining thriller. It opens with a ten minute long shot and keeps bouncing back to that same moment in the plot to show different perspectives. Once the baddies are established things quickly fall apart but by then I was invested in whatever little plot there was.
My copy was bought used and man-o-man does it smell musty. The odor is, at best, like a stack of old newspapers in the dampest bayou floodplain basement, or, at worst, the bouquet of the finest Trader Joe’s wine. I’m not sure if the author’s intent was make his readers recoil in disgust, but, if it was, mission accomplished. Okay, it’s unfair for me to judge a book by the way it smells, and, as we all know, a book’s scent is not set by the author. It’s set by the publisher. Damn you Crown Publishers, Inc.!
Fortunately, this week I have a cold and my nasal breathing passages are all clogged up. I guess I should quickly review this book before the DayQuil wears-off. All-in-all this is a fantastic overview of Eichenburg’s work and a good starting point if you are interested in collecting his illustrations. The reproductions are all high quality. I especially like the side-by-side comparisons between initial sketches and the finished engravings. Many of the prints are reproduced at a bigger scale than the actual blocks. This understates the incredible detail and skill the Eichenburg brings to his art.
For the most part, text is kept to a minimum with only a paragraph or two written about each of the print series. That’s fine by me as artists writing about their own art can get pretty cringey. As an example, listen to the Sean Astin and Elijah Wood’s commentary on the Lord of the Rings DVD. You’ll want to take a swig of arsenic every time they mention “the craft” of acting. I digress. There are no hobbits in this book.
This is a strange old book. It’s a Nancy Drew style mystery but the main character is a teen-aged Shirley Temple. Characters in the book recognize her as the famous entertainer and then it’s never mentioned again. There’s one instance in the book where, in order to escape a desperate situation, she needs to utilize skills she had learned sitting in the make-up chair. This is just weird concept. The mystery itself is not that deep and Shirley isn’t even the one who solves it. The whole plot about a haunted lake might have been the impetus of her investigation, but it’s soon forgotten. What the book does have is some wonderful line illustrations by E. Joseph Dreany.
The title of this one is a bit deceptive. The book is actually a history of British wood engraving. It starts out at the very beginnings of art history by making the tenuous claim that European cave art was actually a form of engraving. There are some nods to Chinese works, then quite a bit about the woodcuts of the Albrecht Dürer and other formschneider print makers (again, not wood engraving!). The author then breezes past the many decades of the golden era of commercial wood engraving only to spend chapter after chapter gushing over Eric Gill and works of the early 20th Century. Eric Gill is fine and all, and Gill Sans is a lovely typeface, but can Lynd Ward or Fritz Eichenburg get a little love here? Still, even if the writing is rather dull and the scope somewhat limited, the book is filled with plenty of examples of fantastic engravings in all different styles.
As a bit of a side note, the layout of the illustrations in this book sucks. Not once was the picture on the same page as the passages that covered it. Most of the time I would have to flip back 30–40 pages to find the relevant engraving, then flip back losing my place in the text. Were all my old college art history books this poorly organized and I’m just forgetting?
Wonderfully photographed and filled with memorable moments, but this just wasn’t my cup of tea. A little too meandering for my plot-craving brain.
I’m not sure why filmmakers insist on remaking films that were already great. The original Suspiria is one of my favorite movies, but perhaps there is room for improvement. Like almost every Italian horror movie, the plot is a mess. Is that reason enough for a remake? This new version is pretty good, and I’d prefer this to Mother of Tears any day. Wisely, there really wasn’t much of an attempt to match the colorful visual mastery of the original. The artistry is mostly in the performances and choreography. Dance plays a vital part in the story, which makes the the idea of a coven using a dance company as a front seem almost sensible. Where the movie falls flat is that it tries to cram too much in the story and runs on too long. The movie is never scary, so when we reach the insane ending the viewer is jarred in a way that I don’t think was intended.
A roving band of vigilantes are killing criminals left and right while the police try to track down a kidnapper. Not much action in this poliziottesco, but it’s moderately entertaining.
Penn details his weight-loss journey and his wacky diet. It’s an interesting take on how we view food and there are elements of his diet that might make sense for me to try. He keeps it entertaining and informative, but I miss crazy junk-food Penn. Snackers need a hero now that the Go-Nuts are no more.
I primarily have this book because I am interested in the spectacular Gustave Doré wood engravings. The text is a deep and thoughtful meditation on the divine yadda, yadda. To be honest, most of it was over my head. I would be reading and finally think I had a grasp on what he was talking about, then he’d slip into the medieval Florentine pop-culture references and I would be lost again. By the third book I was just reading the overviews, skimming the poem and spending most of my time in awe of the illustrations.
