A Shaolin monk on the run vows to avenge the death of a friend and, over the course of many years, he gets married, has a girlish son, and attempts his revenge twice. Unfortunately, his white-haired nemesis Pai Mei is also a master of the tiger style and the task of vengeance falls on the aforementioned girlish son. There is a lot of humor mixed in and the husband/wife dynamics are far more interesting than the kung-fu plot. It’s a fun movie but may be a bit to simplistic for my tastes.
While this game was a pretty big improvement over KQV, it still was just too mired in Sierra adventure game brutality for me to really enjoy. There has been some attempt to make the puzzles a bit more forgiving here, including allowing for the player to take multiple paths to victory. I did alright through about the first third of the game then it just gets nasty. The worst offenses being several “walking dead” moments when I got to a puzzle and was unable to pass because of an item or interaction I missed hours beforehand. I gave up and just relied mostly on a walk-through for the rest of the game.
Although I long for the blocky graphics of the AGI games, the pixel graphics and animations in King’s Quest VI are pretty amazing, especially the background art. They also hired actual voice actors to add some life to the story. For a King’s Quest game, this had a pretty solid story despite several of the usual fairy tale tangents.
Competent and straightforward surf music from this Portland group. This record isn’t the most exciting stuff this band has done but it has its moments. Unfortunately, most of the moments are the covers of “Mr. Moto” and “Squad Car.”
Discogs.com has been nagging me for months that this was available for cheap from a number of resellers and completing my collection of Missing Links was just five dollars away. I got it and it is exactly what I expected: another great collection of (mostly) fuzz guitar instrumentals from the master.
This was a freebie from GOG.com that I went into knowing nothing about it. The first thing anyone who plays the game will think when they begin is, “Wow, this is a complete Portal rip-off.” Then you get about halfway through an you’ll think, “Wow, this really is a complete Portal rip-off!” Now, Portal was a near-perfect game, so if you are going to rip a game off you might as well steal from the best, but they could have at least tried to change a few more of the story points. You start off as a test subject in a puzzle-filled lab armed only with a fancy future gun that shoots two colored beams. You slowly discover that things aren’t quite what they seem as the test facility falls into ruin and, eventually (and here’s where things get a little different), you battle Cthulhu and the old gods of H.P. Lovecraft. That last bit wasn’t a joke (oh, I should have said, “spoiler alert”) and it’s just as stupid as it sounds.
Now, the core mechanics of the game are unique. You are not creating teleportation holes. Instead your gun magnetizes various items in the rooms with either green or red polarity. Through this you manipulate the environment using the magnetic fields to push, pull and launch your way through puzzles. It lacks the kinetic energy of Portal but offers pretty tough challenges near the end of the game. However, I felt like it went on a bit too long and was bored by the puzzles and the story by the end.
I just bought another Shaw Brothers box set and am watching the films in chronological order. This one has a few familiar faces from Blood Brothers. However, I was quite bored by the movie. The plot is way too simple. For example, within the first moments of the film the main characters discover there is a traitor in their midst. In the next scene they reveal the traitor as he collaborates with the baddies. Not even an attempt at suspense. The rest of the film revolves around recruiting allies with hand-gestures and tea cup orientation. I guess the kung-fu is performed well, but there is nothing terribly memorable about the fights.
Come Drink with Me is heralded as the film that defined the kung-fu genre in the early sixties. I am unfamiliar with martial arts movies that where popular before it, so I can’t vouch for its originality, but I can say that, although it is less kinetic than most of the kung-fu movies I’ve seen, it feels fresh and exciting. This is mostly due to its well-defined and interesting characters and a pacing that builds from one fight to the next. We go from your standard swordplay battles, to a mysterious rooftop chase, and finally, by the end of the movie, characters are using magic wind blasts and piercing stones with their fingertips. Note that this is the first appearance of Cheng Pei-Pei’s character “Golden Swallow,” also of the aptly named, Golden Swallow. The two movies make an excellent double feature.
I have never bothered to create a top-ten list of my all-time favorite video games. Maybe I should since it seems the only way to get people to read your Web site is to organize everything into numbered lists. In any event, were I ever to compile such a list Nox would be somewhere in the top five for me.
After a recent upgrade to Windows 10 (excellent by the way), I was going through and making sure all my treasured old programs still worked. In the process I booted up my GOG.com version of Nox and noticed it had some issues. After much searching and fruitless forum posting I finally found a workaround. In case you are wondering, you need to install a game mod called “Nox SDL.” You can download the patch here. Once I got the game running, it wasn’t long before I was sucked back in to my fourth play through of the game.
This game is so great. I don’t know about you, but I immediately realized that when I could play with my character stripped down to his briefs:
Beating the game would be difficult, but you could play the entire game running around like a crazed streaker if you so chose.
The game was marketed as a role playing game in the style of Diablo but that’s not what it really is. Although there are a lot of standard RPG tropes—leveling up, collecting loot, upgrading spells and abilities—Nox has much more in common arcade-style top-down action games like Guantlet and Smash TV. The game play is fast, exciting and there isn’t much thinking and strategy. If it moves, kill it! As simple as this sounds it is sounds, the game is incredibly fun. There’s just enough exploration and level variety to keep you going. The story is paper thin but it’s filled with humor and the main villain Hecubah is terrifically voice acted.
I even bothered to record a bunch of game play footage to post on YouTube and make tons of money off of the idiot millennials who watch other people play video games:
See, what I mean? It’s just awesome! I really wish someone would take up the mantle and reboot Nox. A few modern games like Torchlight look like it but are still firmly RPG games with horrible inventory management and no twitch game play. Magicka comes close, but I felt the mechanics were too complicated and the game seemed overly concerned with co-op play. For now, the GOG.com version will suffice. As soon as I finished this playthrough as a conjurer I immediately felt the itch to start over again as a fighter or wizard.
One of my favorite games of the coin-op era was Atari’s 720. It had a simple, but unique control scheme that’s pretty much impossible to replicate through emulation. You would basically jump then spin a knob (dressed up like a joystick), and the more times you spun the dial, the more points you got. As abstract as it was, this felt like skateboarding.
OlliOlli is the only skateboarding game that I have played that comes close to matching the rhythm and feel of 720°. The controls seem complicated at first: flick and spin the left stick to jump and press A to land. But once you start to get the hang of it (you never really get the hang of the landings) there’s an incredible flow as you grind from one obstacle to the next. Landing is everything though. If you don’t time that tap of the A button just right you lose out on big points.
In the end the game is better compared with a bullet hell shooter. Timing and memorization are everything. Strategy and exploration have no place here. Still, trying to get everything perfect is addictive and the reward of hitting a huge combo just right is greatly satisfying.
Of all the films in this DVD set, this one features the best fight choreography. I guess it’s a sort of love story as Golden Swallow if framed for a series of massive clan killings by a lover from her past. The fights are brutal and the tone is dark. I really liked this one despite the goofy narrative setup.
