zork: nemsis (pc)

1996 / graphic adventure / zombie studios / activision

this aint your mother’s zork dearie, though grues are certainly included (but of course!).
dripping with moody atmostphere, tons of creepy, and more than a touch of madness.

a sample taste of the epic-ness of the design: at game start, you’re walking towards a building complex. the first small temple structure you encounter is, no lie, a tomb. filled with empty(?) coffins. how’s that for mood. then, walking towards the main structure, you pan up (360 z-vision) and not only is this building of an immense height but it’s surrounded by dark storm clouds just waiting to unleash. and the only thing you hear…is the constantly howling wind. as you struggle all by your lonesome to figure out how to open the main door lock shaped like skeletal hands, complete with rusty groans as you pick at each bony finger. nice. less than 10 minutes in and i was pretty much sold. i live for atmostphere…it’s what makes me want to keep clicking.

aforementioned selling out does not include further jaw drop once i unlocked the front door and entered the main temple…and then found that the temple interior stretched on forever, courtyards and corridors and crumbling tombs galore. at that point in my gaming experience, i had yet to encounter a game environment where your path was not strictly limited to the mission objective. the temple of agrippa was HUGE and i was free to wander about everywhere. it’s interactive fiction actually designed to fully involve the player — cuz what else would the curious visitor do in such a place (other than run away in terror)? to solve the mystery, you gotta explore to find the clues, and the game designers didn’t hold your hand or force you along a restricted path. make it easy for the player? aw hell naw! and that, right there, i love. you choose your own (game) destiny.

the game world is immense. it’s structured like myst where you travel to different realms and solve concentric set objectives. there are four alchemists and you have to find the purified form of their assigned element in each of their own territories. pulling inspiration from the truly dark and twisted story, the designers of nemesis managed to one-up the awesomeness of the agrippa temple for the look of each realm. this is zork after all, and though there’s no zorkian humor, there is the bent wackiness to play with. thus, for malveaux who represents fire, you explore a monastery that’s zoroastrinism gone mad extreme. flaming shades of orange everywhere and i swear, i heard the crackling of fire. it wasn’t hard to imagine the heat within each room i wandered into. take that type of immersion and multiply it three more times for the other elements — earth, water, and air. not only is each element’s theme played to the hilt, every design also heavily bends towards each alchemist’s occupation. thus kaine’s granite irondune is an unyielding military fortress, sophia’s glassy conservatory is all soft curves and lush velvets, satorious’s asylum is a frozen steel corkscrew sanitorium. i can go on and on about the visual design. cuz really, it holds nothing back.

likewise, the story is equally immense, taking a fantastical premise (alchemy) that somehow ends up making a statement about love, sacrifice, and selfishness. and it does this through story events that are thoroughly, and unapologetically, for mature players. cut scenes reveal adultery, game puzzles require a steady hand in the face of squeamish. certainly not elements you’d find in most other games but it’s obvious that nemesis designers were aiming to create a fully realized interactive experience and not dumb things down for easy digestion. muchly appreciated.

what’s a game without the puzzles? again, no skimping on design here. there are a huge number of them, some simple, many medium difficulty, and all fluidly integrated into the theme and plot. zork is fantasy, so some of the puzzles required the player to think outside of reality and within the game world’s logic. the concept is well applied and a nice deviation from yet another board game puzzle (ew) or route the maze (double ew). in some instances, working to find the solution even revealed character background and story. no lame fetch quests here!

sheer delight: character names. excepting alexandra and lucien (bah, so normal!), i wax much praise on the fact that they named a character thaddeus and the character was all sorts of twisted badass. malveaux? yes! in a darkly vein of the zorkian tendency to wacky naming. sartorious indeed.

zork: nemesis is in my top three of best games evar. and it has been for these many years. few titles come close to the epic magnitude of this beast in story, design, and sheer gameplay volume.

the journeyman project (pc)

1993 / graphic adventure / presto studios / sanctuary woods

playing jp1 is like experiencing a thoroughly geektastic scifi story in the first person. and it’s not stupid scifi either — we’re talking smart, well thought out extrapolation of existing culture, society and technology (my fave definition of “science fiction”). all this conveyed through gorgeous still frame renders and incredible attention to detailed world-building. i sound like i’m repeating my jp3 post but jp1 proves presto studios to have been crazy design geniuses from day one.

when i first fired up the game back in the day (it came on a cd…ooo shiny!!), you got an alternative history briefing (love) and an opening cinematic “flew” your perspective around caldoria. and i remember thinking, yieah, i’d love to Live There (floating city like bespin but colored!). then you “wake up” in your apartment with the only objective of showing up to work at the TSA. my next HOUR, not kidding, was spent dawdling about the apartment set — playing with the bathroom faucets, listening to ambient music in the living room, watching surrealistic 3d graphic animation on the telly. it seriously felt like i was in my own futuristic apartment, just wasting time before i had to go to work. and here’s the thing — none of that extra animation/music/detail was necessary to the plot, i.e. temporal crime will not be stopped by getting down with trance in your living room. what it all does is load up your sensory experience and overindulge the escapist nerd in you (ok ok me) that’s always wanted to wallow in fantastic environments. and set the mood of course. mood is further helped along when, right before your transporter transports you, a fly gets caught in the field and is…zapped. bzzzt! pure glee when i first saw it, plenty of chuckling just recalling it.

that kind of extra detail is carried into every time period you travel to. morimoto mars locale is as creepy and mars-ish as an industrial colony would be — steel plates everywhere and the only vista out the windows are pure harsh red. norad iv (omg, we’re on #4 now?!) is appropriately futuristic military tech. and the world science center is a stunning shiny stained glass mosaic hall open to the sky, appropriate for a world conference. the art directors at presto were some kinda brilliant.

but what’s pretty without atmostphere? there are loads…as an example, in the morimoto colony, atmostphere gets helped with a disembodied voice randomly announcing stuff. added to the fact that you are supposed to avoid human contact all cost (people would surely freak if they saw your timejump mech suit getup) creeping around corners, afraid of running into people, and then suddenly hearing a humanish voice over the loudspeaker occasionally spooked me. everywhere you walked in the world science center halls, there’s a dull mummuring going on. actually felt like i was snooping about a place filled with people just on the other side of the doors i was passing by. yieah, i bought into the game world hook, line, sinker.

what keeps you clicking ever onward is the story. at each temporal locale, you’re supposed to hunt down the robot that’s planning to disrupt history. thus, the mystery is gradually unravelled with each bot you capture and destroy. look past the pretty graphics and there’s a story twist worthy of the best scifi, where the villain aint who you thought, who’s villainizing for a believable reason — a reason that seriously questions the value of extraterrestrial contact. science fiction at its best.

presto studios musta been a group of serious nerds, cuz the detail gone into this game’s design and story is of the highest caliber. no half-assed effort here. and truly, the talent shows with every single click.

the journeyman project 3: legacy of time (pc)

1998 / graphic adventure / presto studios / red orb entertainment

why why why did presto studios close?! boo. they understood game design — how to tell a damn good story, player immersion, gorgeous environments, and superbly detailed world-building. jp1 had all that, of course, but jp3 tossed in seamless fmv, great actors integrated with the cgi set, and rare enough, a fantastic soundtrack. jp3 is game perfection.

above all else, the story and the presentation of story killed. look no further than the epic opening cinematic — complete with orchestral soundtrack, a ton of shit getting blowed up, and, my favorite, gage blackwood getting pissy, crying over his suits getting locked up, then reading the news on a touchscreen the size of your wall (omgomg gadget nerds froth for this). and that’s just like, the first 6-7 minutes.

all three jp’s are very decent stand-alones but, jp3 in particular felt like the pinnacle of an arc built upon the foundations of its prequels. it not only snags the main villain from jp1 and gives him a saga-worthy backstory, but the reason you even start off on your journey is cuz the main villain from jp2 did an about face and made you look. as the story progresses (the plot thickens eh!!) so does the mystery. and what a mystery. time travel does not drive the story here so much as act as a means to the end. the clincher is figuring out character motives…why who did what and at what time to what significance. everyone does something that ends up affecting something else. in fact, this device carries into much of the puzzles as well — everything’s about cause and consequence to propel the story forward.

of course, player immersion relies heavily on the environment design as well. and in this, presto has been adept since jp1. first, everything’s gorgeously rendered. and i’m talking drool-worthy 360 panning in practically every node. unlike the prequels, your viewfinder is enlarged to two-thirds of the screen. motivation enough to sometimes stand in a locale and just GAWK at the surroundings. like in the middle of the main temple at shangri-la or at the bottom of the atlantean well. second, when presto peeps create an environment they a) realistically extrapolate the technology and society depending on the time period and b) add in crazy details like chipped paint. realism adds loads to immersion obviously. sure the TSA hq is fulla fancy gagdets but it looks and feels like a real working space. vega thalon is approriately gray and stainless steel cuz it’s a prison colony. when you hop back into the past, each locale is a very believable interpretation of the respective cultures — atlantis is painted in brilliant mediterranean, el dorado’s chock fulla mayanish glyphs, and, my fave, shangri la’s got the tibetan influence down pat. escaping into other worlds indeed.

in jp1 you aren’t allowed to talk to the locals cuz they’d take one look at your futuristic getup and freak. in jp3, you get a new suit that morphs into anyone you take a pic of (vely cleva ah!), so’s you can blend in and get in. thus, in addition to the already excellent core cast (actors for gage, michelle, and sinclair, you guys are the trifecta of time travel awesomeness), there are a ton of npc’s in every environment that you interact with to solve puzzles. every bit part is excellently played — they’ve all even got the accents down(!!). and wear cool costumes and super awesome wigs!! dialogue trees are short and to the point. it’s worth noting that the actual spoken words are performed with such manner and intonation that flavor the environment without a ton of needless extrapolation. that’s because all the “needless extrapolation” is provided by…

…arthur! but he’s so damn snarky about it that you can’t ever hate on his wisecracks. when he’s occasionally serious, then you know wisdom (of the game progression sort) is about to be voiced. arthur’s the best AI sidekick ever. even more than oscar from syberia (who whines at times) and loads better the m$ clippy (who’s way too damn chipper on monday mornings). it helps that max weinhold is the voice. cuz there’re a ton of pop culture references bound to make even kevin smith chortle in nerdish glee. someone should cosplay as arthur at pax eh.

then, there’s the ending to this ride. the last scenes pack a surprisingly emotional tone. no spoilers but i do think that they were walking around in the best futuristic burial ground ever. and, well, all the actors were spiffy in their respective x-file trenches. very cool.

i so wish that this story can be continued. for now, i sate my obsession by having my cell phone greet me as agent 5 every time i turn it on.

the official blog (heehee!) and the official site (heeheehee!!).

final fantasy 8 (ps1)

2000 / rpg / squaresoft

have likely cashed 300+ hours of my life to this game. and i don’t even like the hero and heroine all that much. it’s the rpg elements that sucked me in, collecting the damn cards, maxing out each character’s stats. ff purists may complain that the rpg system is different, but i wouldn’t know the difference because this was the first ff i played. i like the junctioning mmkay, along with the crazy long gf scenes (caveat: if i have to watch leviathan and shiva again, i will stab myself with a stalk of celery…omg cactuar quest, omg.) 1000xp per level up is kinda stupid though and defeats the purpose of rpg nitpicking.

i totally heart the graphics and design (but of course, it’s amano eh). major props to the world designer…the environments manage to be fantasy drenched with techno and splashed with a shit ton of shiny surfaces. yieah imma sucker for all that shiny. monsters were appropriately chimera and wack (snow lion imma talking to chu) and best of them all is the marlboro. flying machine in an ff game? check. gimme balamb garden to fly around any day. check out cactuar’s stache! and tonberry’s tail (w00t fish folk). totally dig seifer’s gunblade but wtf with squall’s fur collar. i’m rambling. cuz there are so many design elements i loved from this game.

soundtrack’s as lush as the visual design. there’s no one winged angel flapping around — instead it’s a totally different style of trance-y new age in minor keys. intro’s still got the latin though (WIN). i love that even individual pieces such as the landing and dance of the balamb fish can stand on its own as just plain interesting tracks.

as for the story, well, uh, it’s just eh. rather undeveloped at parts (who went back in time and did what now?! and why!?!?). what i liked more were the characters — goofy laguna, raging fujin, seifer (WIN), selfie, pupu (is so too a character), and moogle(s). even then, the characters were kinda ho-hum and not all that exciting. cuz the hero and heroine were so damn formulaic for fanboy appreciation. blech. at least cloud had a reason to be emo, squall’s just a poser loner.

one would think that for a person who’s all about story and character that i’d ditch this game fast. the gameplay sucks me in though. bad enough that every once in a while, i have to replug this into the console and button mash through it all again.

the fire (novel)

2008 / katherine neville

not what i hoped it would be. it read so…cliche. boo!

the prequel to the fire is the eight. i first encountered the eight about 10 years ago and it is as engaging a read today as it was back then. neville amazingly inserted gobs of history in between the action and the pace never slowed. unlike (ew) dan brown, neville’s style, edit, and arrangement kept everything going with no loss of menacing villian.

the fire, well, it’s like a super poor copycat of the eight. a lot of the same elements are there — alternating stories between past and present, interesting historical revelations, romance, rich descriptions of people and things. unfortunately, the flow is poorly edited and, dare i say it, there are too many words. it’s as if neville is wallowing in descriptions and exposition. by inserting all these historical bits that are supposed to add to the mystery into the protagonist’s stream of thought, the important clues get lost as flotsam because the main character is too busy describing useless things like how her boss cooks. sure it’s delicious to read about but it really does nothing for the actual story and plot. between the point of having a gun pointed to her head and her subsequent rescue, the protagonist “thinks” through two long paragraphs. um, who cares? by the end of the story, she hooks up with the boring one-dimensional male lead and walks off into sunset having checked off all the requisite character development points. i is sad.

the only truly interesing parts were the sections set in the past. but that too led to disappoint. after a fantastic build up (escape from captors!) and super involving character development (loved the byron and haidee bits), you get…dropped. like a stone. because all the focus veers onto one character who, though important to the plot and the whole mystery of the chessboard, kinda shortchanges the reader with a choppy denoument to his tragedy. the second half of the book only mentions byron and haidee as passing reference. it’s like going back to vhs after you’ve seen the glory of bluray. in fact, the whole second half, last third?, of the book seems rushed and uneven. by the time the villain comes out, you’re like, who? and why are you villainizing the hero? and do we care? nope.

the fire actually became a chore to read through. complete opposite from the excitement and all-nighter that was its prequel.

syberia (pc)

2002 / graphic adventure / microids / benoit sokal

amazing imaginative world, to say nothing of the art and score. apparently it’s entirely possible to humanize automatons. from the first scene, from the drops of rain on the ground to the automaton pallbearers slow marching in lockstep, all the way to way to the last when kate flees a decaying symbol of russia into the unknown, this game does not disappoint. the story slowly but surely sucks you in. one of the few games where the lack of a definitive ending did not bug me, because what mattered was kate’s journey and witnessing her character change.

art style all carried the same tone (that of gradually increasing decay, hence lots of mute) but varied with each locale. art deco and steampunk gives way to rich academic granite, slides into crumbling russian concrete and finally into the fading shine of a dying retreat. i fell in love with every single environment and the music theme that grew increasingly dramatic as you neared the story’s end. cut scenes, and there are plenty, are not mere pretty graphics — finishing an objective awards you with a mini movie that takes the story deeper into the mystery. that’s how game elements should propel a story forward, people. subtle into statement.

UI is simple and straightforward. don’t recall that any of the puzzles were particularly frustrating either. you can double click and speed walk kate. but it’s still rather annoying that she has to walk everywhere through a buncha screens to accomplish objectives. even though the scenery was nice, i wish there was a map ability to zip to and from with.

and oscar! not my sidekick, he’s my friend! he’s whiny, sure, but lovable. i would love to own that train as well, wind up gears and all. snag a room at that dying spa retreat…its got all the right touches of gloom to suit the emo in me.

love love love syberia. it’s what adventure gaming should be — using game mechanics to move a story forward even if the player is not the first person. as a story adventure it succeeds in capturing the imagination even without the usual clearly defined ending. proof that, if you design it right and pace it just so, the player’ll not only get sucked into the story-verse but remember it long after.

betrayal at krondor (pc)

1993 / rpg / dynamix / sierra on-line

note: text below is copied from my gush page — which was the original inspiration for “dribbles”. couldn’t think of a single thing i wanted to say different about this game so i just snitched the text intact for placement here.

incomparable. totally of the non-suckitude. super-duper, ninja-gaiden, how do you like them apples integrity. developed by dynamix (they who are neato) and produced by sierra (back when they were The Cool Company) in the early 90s. there’s so much history and love that accompanies my unshakable fanaticism for this game. have been pretty into raymond feist’s midkemia universe ever since picking up a copy of magician: apprentice back in high school (i still remember seeing it in the dime-paperback rack of the old school library, with the light filtering all yellowy through the dirty windows and showing up every minute pixel of dust…). unlike all the cool kids, i never had net access during the high school years, so when given a t1 connect during freshman year at ucsd, i fricken went all out and yahooed Every Single Thing i was interested in. was utterly enamored with the fact that i can find out so much about all the stuff i’ve ever been interested in – without going to the library (and risking late fees) or talking to people (because most people suck). one of the first sites to top a feist search result listing was kirl woll’s now defunct site devoted to midkemia love. from there, i found a link to a free download of BAK. this was back when sierra was cleaning out their vaults and offering up their older games in its entirety for download on their site. i figured it’d be fun to try out and installed it.

and for god knows how long, you’d not see hide nor hair of me cuz my ass was huddled in front of the comp day in and day out, utterly engrossed in the superb story and excellent gameplay. when the roomie went to bed, i plugged in the headphones and turned off all the lights. when people sat around bored out of their heads when it was raining, i crawled through sewers and escaped traps. fought dwarves and transported kegs of ale. time-traveled. alternated casting fetters of rime and flamecast on those deserving moredhel. i played so often that my roomie ended up playing it on my comp as well. she got better stats the first time around (bah!).

BAK is an rpg-styled adventure with emphasis on the rpg elements. however, it’s not a hardcore rpg a la baldur’s gate where you can get totally nit-picky about stats improvement and what not. it uses turn-based combat (which the lack of hand-eye coordination in me loves) and game developers dynamix created a truly amazing spell system. i never had cause to complain about the graphics cuz, unlike my usual graphical adventure picks, it isn’t the reason why i wanted to play this game. the pictures more than gets the job done. there is repetitive use of the same puzzles but because it requires incorporating knowledge of the game world up to what point you’d played, it was never bothersome. in fact, i don’t think i’ve ever seen another game do same thing. there’s quite a bit of effort put into adding realism into the world as well…for instance, stashing your extra loot in an unlocked trunk that’s sitting in a high-traffic area practically guarantees that your stuff will be stolen. nobody was doing this kinda detail back in the early 90s folks. i love that there were a million weapons i can choose from and that there were always bigger and badder trinkets to wreak havoc upon the wimpy masses.

because the game was so massive, i kept having to start over initially because the control-freak in me just couldn’t let go of the fact that i’d missed this, or that i didn’t do that, or that i could’ve done that way better than i did. so i went trawling on the net again and found this site. an incredible font of BAK knowledge…complete illustrated walkthroughs, strategies, listing of all the weapons, enemy stats breakdown, and the list goes on. again, this is pre-diablo era so for a guy to plot down this much information about a game on his own spare time is pretty freaking cool. story of my stupidity here: way back when, i was a total newbie to computers/internet and didn’t know that i can print out pages of websites. so i hand-copied down the entire walk web and most of the look web section of that site – complete with colored pictures and mini drawings. so that i’d have spell and item reference when playing. i still have the binder where i store those pages.

the first version of this game that i’d downloaded included a VERY cool bug where, if exploited carefully, allowed me to increase one of my character’s stats up the wazoo. it’s insane when he caused one-hit kills near the end of the game. sierra subsequently released a non-bugged version, though imo, the buggy one is loads better. i’ve both versions saved on floppies. also have the cd version of this game and that one rules because the music has been remastered into .wav files and not .midis. the tracks are more symphonic especially considering the sweeping epic style of music. unfortunately, BAK is a dos game and thus it’s a major headache to get it to run on xp. i haven’t been able to get it to run since win98. bah humbug.

BAK occupies the honored status as both my first ever computer game that i got for myself and installed on my own (and very first computer), and it is also the game to Completely Sucker Me into pc gaming. it’s where i learned how to handle resource-distribution in a game and how to explore a maze. how to strategize in battle. how much of a control-freak i am because i scoured the map for every single item and enemy the game had to offer. to this day, i will not consider myself finished with a game if i did not do Every Single Damn Thing…bugs and weird engine/graphic anomalies included.

the incomparable BAK help web.

harry potter and the deathly hallows, part 1 (film)

2010 / david yates

version 7.1 is what all the other pooter flicks only aspire to be.

look, i get that the mood and tone of the series become “darker” (emo!) as the story progresses and the characters mature. so, in translation, the films started off light-hearted and then slid into the dark. but films 1 through 6 always felt hollow to me. particularly chamber, where Every Single Shot was a “lookit how we recreated the pooter-verse!” and accompanied by The Same Damn Musical Phrase of “zing! do you feel the magic!!”. i watch those films because i’m a fan of pooter and not because i think them particularly good cinematic storytelling. what i enjoyed about the whole pooter-ride, what made the story come alive, what made me [heart] seven fat books, were the characters in the pooter-world. the story and drama are nothing without staunch harry, bossy hermione, tactless ron, smart-ass fred&george, overly protective molly weasley. yet in films 1 through 6, characterization was most often tacked on as an afterthought — those films were more concerned with moving through plot points than storytelling. so what we end up with is kinda like an elaborately visual summary of the books. i don’t like the end result but i get why they did it. condensing such a huge story into a cohesive two hour limit requires aggressive chopping (though i aint never gonna get why they thought it necessary to burn down The Burrow. wtf?!).

this film though, pooter v7.1, is all about that fantastic characterization. breaking book seven into two parts is the best decision ever made by the pooter franchise folks. with two and a half hours to play with, yates got plenty of time to dig into relationships, elaborate on the mood, and splash artistic shots galore throughout. everything flowed so much smoother because, for once, we’re not in a super rush to get to the next plot point within X number of seconds. there’s time for each lead performance to really breathe. the humor i missed so much from the other films, and which was so much a part of the books, is completely believable and unforced here simply because we now have time to savor the interactions between characters. the zero-dialogue dance sequence is brilliant, ron finding himself emotionally satisfying.

not that the rest of the ginormous cast wasn’t also super-fab. felton and alan rickman particularly. they got little screen time but damn if they don’t slam you with just the force of their eyes. jason isaacs quaking in his boots made voldy even more menacing. and boy, voldy was truly, truly menacing. the last time he menaced me from onscreen was that single shot of him dressed up brooks-brothers style and standing on platform 9-3/4. a worthy Big-Bad. accessorized by the batshit crazy bellatrix of course (w00t!).

the visual nurd in me totally hearts the color palette. blue-grays ftw. there are some truly fantastic environments too — the cracked rock cliff where harry and hermione set up camp comes to mind. starting from azkaban, artistic details got screen time to set mood (remember when the whomping willow changed throughout the seasons?). pooter v7.1 takes this artistic stuff up a notch what with snape’s Awesome Cape Action in the beginning. and yes, that amazingly animated sequence explaining the hallows. it’s pixar-poignant with an edge of pan’s labyrinth. Damn Good Stuff.

the visual nurd in me (ha!) rated xenophilius lovegood as hot and Could Not Believe that he was played by rhys-ifans! mister rhys-ifans: please shave more, you are surprisingly teh hot stuff. also teh hot stuff is head snatcher guy (whatshisname?). i guess i just like long dark hair sweeping around (but not snape’s curtain o’ grease).

oh yieah, one surprising thing: pooter v7.1 is also the first film in a Long Fricken Time to actually scare me. bathilda bagshot was fraking creepy — and there wasn’t even any gore! just shots of her face half-cast in orange shadows freaked me out a bit…this with me knowing exactly what happens since i’ve read the book so many times.

stuff i wish they’d squeezed in: harry retrieving mad-eye’s eyeball, luna’s friends drawing. on the other hand, what they did squeeze in was soooo good. like neville’s defiance and loyalty on the train. the seven harry’s. hermione obliviating her parents. ron and harry talking after ron explained the ball of light to hermione. harry and hermione dancing. gut-wrenching dobby ending. script writers rightfully cut and re-organize points when adapting a novel to film. pooter v7.1 switched things around as expected but, unexpectedly, did so very well. not only is my inner pooter-nurd glowing, my inner movie geek and storytelling cravings also got served. it took six films to get to this point, people. pooter v7.2’s got a lot to live up to.

the lost symbol (novel)

2009 / dan brown

it’s. just. BAD.

dan brown picks interesting subjects (in this case, noetic science) and interesting locales (going underground in DC!) but damn the story execution is sorely lacking, oh let’s see now, plot logic – flow – pace – style – engaging characterization, [just fill in the blank]. to be fair, the lost symbol actually improves on the the da vinci code in all these aspects. but where code survived on a great plot device (jesus and the magdalene) in spite of its clunky writing, symbol was just Dull. brown’s suspense tactic is to always throw heavy-handed hints at the reader, trying to get you all riled up about the Oh-So-Mysterious-Secret. along with the one-liner cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter, endless hinting is just so cliche and LAME. particularly in symbol where the secret’s big reveal is something like, i dunno, five chapters in and then…there’s no follow-up on this!! like, hey, i’ve revealed the secret…aaaaaaaand that’s it! the rest of the novel is spent protecting this secret and not how the secret impacts or changes any of the character’s lives. what was the point of the build-up if this noetic science thing wasn’t even gonna end up anywhere? at least in code the revelations kept coming till the end.

i’m a control-freak so i forced myself to finish this drivel. it hurt So Much to plod through over 500 pages of disjointed everything. at least i didn’t have to pay money for this one.

william shakespeare’s romeo+juliet (film)

1996 / baz luhrman / leonardo dicaprio / claire danes

i’m not a real fan of the actual play (which i suspect has much to do with it being one of the easier shakespeare’s to digest and is therefore thrust down our throats from grade school to high school — and hence me od’ing from it all). yet this adaptation, modern re-telling, abridged fantasy, whatever you wanna call it, is one of my most favorite films. every re-watch reminds me of what i think film-making can be: riveting storytelling, fantastic visuals, lingering moments of omg wtf just broadsided my brain?!.

and there’s this other thing — i’m so familiar with the lines from romeo & juliet that most of it is cliche. totally over-used. here, they’ve updated the cadence of the language so that every single word is a completely new perspective. that has to be the best thing about this film — the way the actors made shakespeare their own. they could’ve been dressed in potato sacks and i’d be a fan as long as they spoke the way they did. the puns on guns/swords and even the lewd double entrendres were clever but that stuff is not what stays in my mind way after the curtains have closed. it’s what they said, and how they said it, that tells the story. gives the story its moments of depth and meaning. makes my shakespeare read-alouds totally lame in comparison (well i guess i ain’t no dicaprio haha).

watching this 10 years later as an old fart, i’m utterly amused at how young (and dewy looking!) dicaprio and danes look. they’re, like, children! which i guess is the whole point since the characters are supposed to be 14 and 16 or some crazy young age like that. perfect casting. my favorite performance is mercutio — cross dressing, drugs, and all. the special edition dvd includes excerpts from dicaprio’s video shoot with luhrman. apparently luhrman shot a video concept of the film to test if modernizing shakespeare would work. dicaprio flew to australia to work on this video project without any pay or promise of future casting. the resulting video is no less amazing than the finished film. i kinda wish i can watch that version from start to finish! in any case, that there is dedication to art. to taking a chance because why the hell not. because i’ve an overactive tendency to dramatize, dicaprio’s leap of faith makes me wish i’ll one day get a like opportunity where i can go for broke. here’s to that.

this film is completely mixed in with my memories of my first year at college. that soundtrack echoes all the hours i spent for the first time on my own. so i guess my relationship to this film is, like, all sentimental and stuff. as an old fogey who loves shakespeare though, it’s simply magnificent and has not dimmed any throughout the years.

titanic: adventure out of time (pc)

1996 / graphic adventure / cyberflix

a bargain bin purchase simply for the pretty pictures. which then became a two-day, non-stop clicking session. which then turned me into a gigantic titanic nerd. it wasn’t just that the creators went all out for authenticity in rendering the ship of dreams — they created a plot that seamlessly fused the history of that time with the ship. got you involved, see, and even if you weren’t a titanic nerd to begin with, you wander about everywhere on the ship so much that you can’t help getting sucked in by the drama of it all.

you, British Spy, start off in an attic in war-ravaged london — soundtracked to static-icky radio broadcasts of the RAF and air sirens. (a copy of futility lies about as a wink for those in the know.) then, explosion (ka pow!) and yer plopped onto the titanic. because you, British Spy, are now given the chance to undo past wrongs and, if all Game Mission Objects are acquired, avert WWII. wow.

even though you begin the game with just one mission objective, along the way you get yourself into loads of other trouble because, as British Spy, your job is to Snoop and Snoop A Lot. which, of course, is perfect because you get to Snoop around the freakin titanic. no better place to Snoop if you ask me. i’m sure the game designers purposely bait your appettite for titanic goodness because you start in a 3rd class cabin and have to engage in a series of side-plots to work your way up to Snooping a 1st class stateroom. so even if you hated any sort of gaming, you have just gotta click around some more because you simply must gain entrance to the oh-so-elusive turkish bath. the squash courts. the renault. the smoke stack (yes, folks, the freakin’ smoke stack). the crow’s nest. dude, like, you can even go up to the prow and do the kate-n-leo pose, with water wooshing below you. srsly. if i’m gushing, it’s because i’m gushing fer real. the details in each and every room/location is rendered not only with historic precision but amazing mood and lighting. it made me want the Grand Staircase floor tiles in my house, maybe plop that glass dome in my house for good measure too. wandering around the lower decks to the squash room was claustrophobic, standing in the middle of the turkish bath no less spooky.

if you were a gaming nerd, you’d still get your satisfaction. there are a ton of characters to mingle with, each with a background that nicely fleshes out the various people of the time (rich, poor, clerics, and bodyguards, whoo!). dialogue fuels plot in most adventure games — this is one of the few times where i never tired of listening to characters ramble on and on. answering them differently actually leads to different consequences. a dialogue tree that’s not just for show after all! then there’s the intrique — code machines, the rubaiyat (which, fer reals, was on the actual titanic), adolf hitler, bombs, and that infamous pair of binoculars. collecting various combinations of items gives you multiple endings. a pc game for them alt-history nerds. or wannabe heros.

this game’s now at least $100 bucks on ebay or amazon. a collector’s item. i still have my copy. i am uber-snobby about that fact. i love me my titanic. momentous historical events FTW.

a dedicated fanblog by a dedicated fan.

agatha christie’s and then there were none (pc)

2005 / graphic adventure / AWE productions

how can you design a murder mystery game where none, NONE (haha i said “none”!), of the characters freak out about the dead bodies piling up?! there’s just one character who occasionally yelps about a murderer being loose on the island. the rest of the time, you see characters milling about the pool table or watching films in the projection room. wtf!? a little more sense of fear and urgency please!

the lack of urgency kills (ding!) the motivation. why should i bother solving the mystery if none of the other characters are worth saving? blah blah blah, yawn.

other things that bugged — the loooong exposition in dialogue exchanges. made further unarresting by the pixely character renders. and why is it that woman is always wandering around a cold, rainy island with side-boob showing? the designers must have been like “realism, bah!!”. which also explains how side-boob chick was never fazed while wandering about a room where a bookcase “door” opens up into a concrete dungeon. because, realistically, that would be so uninteresting — even given the fact that, urm, hello, there’s a murderer on the loose. [/sarcasm]

graphics were pretty fab though — a touch of realism mixed with a painterly quality. the interior design nerd in me kept revisiting all the bathrooms (yes, bathrooms). graphics is the only thing that i liked about this game. even the inventory system annoyed me. since you can pick up a ton of stuff, you had to click through several screens to find things. when it came to combining different items, that sure was a pain in the keister.

i don’t actually hate this game. the graphics and occasional moments of cool (provided by the music) kept me clicking. but even with the multiple endings, i can’t be bothered to reinstall and play it again.

inception (film)

2010 / nolan / dicaprio / gorden-levitt / paige / cottillard

i like my visuals to be sprawling urban with a dash of gloom.

so.

i’m All. Over. This One.

all over the grays, the rain, the skyscrapers, and then, BAM, super lush colors (hello, ms. marion!). what a trip. eye candy for sure.

performances were sublime — notwithstanding leo’s penchant for forehead scrunching. out of the group, joe (can i call ya joe?) sucked up all the attention by sheer physical presence. don’t quite remember the last time i paid so much attention to a guy wearing a striped vest. he made those striped vests cool. yieah. striped. vests. watching him brings home the importance of the physicality of a performance. his fight scenes weren’t just another matrix-y rehash. exact, deliberate moves all the way through actually helped reveal character. wasting no moves, point-man arthur’s so obviously an adept of dream-physics and thoroughly lives up to his “point-man” role. all without him saying a single word. the guy knows what he’s doing when it comes to heisting in a dreamworld.

personal wish list includes a better fleshed-out ariadne. she was just kinda there to show you how effed up cobb’s life has become and then not much else. i mean, what was her motivation to be part of the team? also, slightly less gun fights/car chases/actions of that ilk. i’m just bored from those sequences is all.

the random side-note: dude it sucks to be fischer. his brain just got invaded. after and because his dad died. remind me to take anti-dream-hacking lessons lest someone decides to fuck with me and mine (yes of course i’m implying that i have SuperUltraRad ideas that everyone else wants a piece of).

currently obsessively rehashing scenes in my mind. have a feeling i’ll be doing that till at least the next year. not because of the ambigious ending (thanks mister nolan, that was fab btw!). the whole mythology of dreaming in this flick is just so freaking familiar. the part of me that walks through walls in my dreams is swimming in all the imagined possibilities now.

kick-ass (film)

2010 / aaron johnson / chloe moretz / mark strong

30 minutes after leaving the theater and i find myself in an odd state of emotions. the laughs and smart-ass deadpans pale in comparison to how my heart is breaking for the little girl.

no srsly.

underneath all the insanely cool ninja moves and snappy dialogue is a story about real kids. who become real heroes. because they won’t give in under the threat of very real violence.

i love the m.o. contrast between kick ass and hit girl. one person simply wants to do good (and fulfill his hero fantasy) while the other knows only that bad guys deserve to be destroyed. it’s a contrast of personalities, of what it means to do good, of what a difference age makes. all this conveyed in superbly layered performances by the actors. srsly now. this cast is amazing. not only did they deliver smart comedy, they made me believe in their superheroism.

and thanks to the writers for creating that perfect balance between laughter and relatable storytelling. sure super powers are cool and all. but time and again us geeks retreat into comic books for the story hooks. this flick has hooks in spades — from Everyman to good ole Vegeance to a touch of freakishly realistic violence. like kick ass says, superheroes may not exist but evil and crime do. the writers never let us forget that dark edge — they may play off the novelty of wannabe superheroes for laughs but there’s enough meat in the dialogue and performances to leave you uncomfortably aware that it’s children facing the darkness. growing up is harsh, grownups are needlessly dark. getting involved too young means entering the darkness too young. kick ass has already gotten a taste of the darkness and red mist is thick in the middle of it. whether hit girl survives or not is the after taste.

so maybe my over-imaginative mind reads too much into stuff. but i can only over-analyze if there’s Stuff for me to delve into. kick ass has so much Stuff that i’ll be mentally occupied for a good long while.

and yes. i dream of a sequel. the last time i left the theater so moved and so excited was A Very Long Time Ago. thank god there are some storytellers in hollywood who don’t suck.

persusasion (film)

2007 / hawkins / penry-jones

why won’t she close her mouth?! and stop looking confused!!

this is a heroine i could not love. couldn’t muster up any sympathy for her. i get it that she’s a very reserved personality but come on, there’s still got to be some reason an intelligent man like wentworth decides she’s worth pursuing even after such a long period of disappointed separation. the only animation to her behavior is taking charge after whats-her-name fell. the rest of the time she’s busy intoning sensible blabbity blahs in Meek-Mousey-Manner, or else looking confused in close-ups with aforementioned fish-mouth. bah. i guess you just love who you love. that’s like the only reason i can come up with why wentworth is still so stuck on her after so many years.

haven’t ever read the book, but, amid a self-imposed austen-fest, i wiki’ed the persuasion storyline. on paper, it’s fast becoming one of my more favorite austen stories because it deals with life after life’s decisions have been “made” for you by society dictates. i’m at an age where i can appreciate that, so i was excited to watch the film adapation. two hours later, and i just want someone else to remake this already. not that the actress was bad at all, but maybe a different approach. one that’s less of the artsy-fartsy emo close-up.

and who decided that she had to run the Grande Marathon of Bathe just to get her man? wtf was that all about?? seeing her run back and forth completely destroyed the mood and immersion. after the third cut to her running about, i’m sitting there scratching my head and wondering why none of the passerby haven’t stopped her and hailed a cab already.

just plain odd. i guess it’s watchable in a once-a-year type of thing. definitely not a re-run fave like the a&e pride & prejudice.

lost in austen (film)

2008 / rooper / cowan

So. Fun.
totally popcornlicious fun.

first off, the premise is that a 21st century, none-too-polished gal finds a portal into the bennet’s household in her bathroom. that, right there, is ridiculous to the point of genius. her bathroom ferchrissakes!

props to the writer. the dialogue cleverly mixes modernisms and the austen cadence without any awkwardness whatsoever. you get the expected hilarity that comes with the clash of centuries (spurting out bumface at a proper dinner table for example, ha!) but you also get an equal balance of seriousness intoned in austen lingo. no dialogue ever sounds forced…

which leads me to the acting and story. with any silly premise there’s the risk of actors who don’t believe enough in the story and gives performances that are caricatures rather than characters. the heroine could have easily become a bumbling “modern” girl who runs from one culture clash gag to another. but this is austen. and at the heart of austen is always the passion that comes from realistic human interaction. thank god the writer and the actors kept that bit in the core of their work. and because this flick is not restricted by the original novel’s plot, we get the satisfaction of seeing so much more character development (like darcy’s) forced to be relate-able to our standards because the heroine is, quite simply, one of us. by the end of three hours, i was cheering on nearly every character in the film and feeling sad for those who got the short end of the story stick. i wanted more. i wanted to see every character’s story continued.

the unexpected twist? why, the unexpected plot twists themselves! and boy were there many. no character is truly evil — case in point, i’ve a crush on wickham now…wickham people, wickham!!!. georgiana is suddenly SO much more interesting. and i’ve finally a bit of respect for mr. and mrs. bennet’s marriage. making bingley a drunk? stroke of genius!!

the other stroke of genius i won’t mention. but if you are a fan of colin firth and his wet shirt (hi colin! call me!!), well. well well well. more elliot cowan is all i can say. (and more of that pemberly location too…good lord the gardens are delish).

i can’t stop gushing about this flick and even now i’m cracking up from flashbacks. purists be damned. love lost in austen for all its fun silliness and you will get three hours of fall-off-the-couch squeeing. love love love!

oh yes…steer the punt from the cambridge end? well do you!?

shivers (pc)

1995 / graphic adventure / sierra on-line

one of the first graphic adventure games i played. been in love with this one for over a decade now.

lush environments and at moments genuinely creepy. the setup is a haunted museum dedicated to odd and mystical things — death ceremonies, greek gods, aliens, spirits. trumps any haunted house. finish off the setting with a fully fleshed out background story and you get a game where concept marries execution perfectly.

i think there’s an unspoken rule that most people willingly suspend belief when playing a game. continued suspension however, depends on how well the designers tied up all the bits — from story to visuals to game puzzles. even though you’re clicking through a bunch of static screens in shivers, you never lose that feeling of wandering about in a huge mansion. by making the setting a museum, the designers got away with creating a unique theme for each room — yet all themes are cleverly tied together by a singular design style. add to that a straight-forward goal of “collect the missing pieces”, forcing you to explore every nook and cranny. the result? total immersion.

to match the variety of themed rooms, there’s also plenty of thematic music and sound effects. one of the best background “noise” mixes is found in the theater — the sound designer duped a line from hamlet in a garbled bass. (i read that in the game manual.) a neglible detail in gameplay but a treat for nerds like me who’re a sucker for layered meaning.

loved that the puzzles ranged from organic (you can’t get to the other side until you move that pile o’ wood, eh) to actual puzzles like chinese checkers. a nice variety to satisfy the puzzle-nut in me.

and, ah, the creepy! every once in a while, while yer just wandering about minding yer own business, things will randomly…move. a shadow flits in and out of the corner of your eye. or shit, something’ll just jump out at you in the dark. BAM! unexpected fun in a graphic adventure game. corny but done to great effect. part of the delight in wandering about the game environment.

shivers is out-of-print these days. you gotta trawl the ebay to find a copy — and even then it doesn’t play on all xp machines. what would be awesome is if the game designers got a pass to remake this one again. in 3D. oh my, wow.

my superawesome yet charminglydorky shivers fansite.

pride & prejudice (film)

2005 / kiera knightly / matthew macfayden

macfayden is totally mute-button hot in this flick. (the hair, oh that lovely lock of hair falling across his troubled brow…!). emphasis on the mute though. i can well mute my way through this entire flick. someone (who? hollywood?) decided to lower the sunshine and make this a moody romance. which, you know, is a logical interp considering that darcy’s the original emo hero. but then it’s like the decision-makers chickened out and half-clung to the book’s exact dialogue in hopes of also catering to the die-hard austenites. except you can’t mix classic austen diction with modern words and concepts. it just comes across as Trying Too Hard. ew. touching his leg?? EW. who thought that one up?! the pre-screen UK audience rightly got the heebeejeebies when they objected to this scene. just totally out-of-character for an austen story, much less the hugely iconic pride&prejudice.

who decided that lizzie should be an angerball? a puzzling deviation. taking away the essence of lizzie’s attraction — why should darcy be intrigued by a woman gets angry like any other female? he likes her exactly for her cheek and her ability to cast herself in a humorous light. lizzie is the delightful contradiction to society’s notion of “good female form”. i’ve no doubt that women get angry and get mad. but making lizzie mad at being slighted just cheapens her character. misses the point entirely.

so we have this new type of lizzie who openly expresses anger. then there’s the darcy who doesn’t emote much. no visible development of character — he’s just hot eye candy. also eye candy is wickham. not a villain here. he stands arouund and steals a lydia that we can’t even bother to hate cuz her character is, quite simply, too thin to carry weight. i get that it’s difficult to transfer a novel into a two hour feature film, much less a novel of such length and historic popularity. but to lose the essence of story in that translation begs the question — why bother in the first place?

serenity (film)

joss whedon

it’s, like, cool — but then also awkward. cowboys in space is a fab concept (part of why i love trigun, pew pew!). the awkward comes from the ill-fitting dialogue cadence. it’s not written badly, just badly delivered. like the actors haven’t wrapped their tongues around the rhythm of it yet (despite having filmed an entire season of firefly). and since i speak chinese fluently, i have a hard time buying the occassional mandarin word/phrase they toss about. cuz the pronunciation is like, ew.

on the other hand, excellent story execution. a film that takes sci-fi seriously as social commentary, and not just a vehicle for showing off flashy spacecraft and glowy blue lasers. the story device isn’t unique (i think most sci-fi nerds are familiar with the experimentation gone wrong twist), but what makes it carry weight is that it’s not used as a gimmick. it’s presented in a cause-and-consequence context — resulting in a well-fleshed out story-verse. add to that non-linear characterization (trademark of mister whedon) and it’s compelling story-telling. well worthy of soaking up.

and yieah, ok, summer glau? more please. all action stars should be required to study ballet. srsly.

someone should hand mister whedon a wad of cash so he make sequels to this. having the story just stop after such a setup is so damn depressing.

eragon (film)

edward speelers / jeremy irons / john malkovich

casting? quite spot on for most of the roles. speelers as eragon is especially notable — he had the right combo of innocence and not-quite-annoying idiocy that fit the written characterization exactly. and my girlie side loves the crush-worthy casting of garrett hedlund (in black! whee!). i mention the casting first because, if not for speelers, malkovich and hedlund, the film doesn’t carry interest. not even with a big-ass blue dragon.

i had the benefit of watching the film before reading the books. this first viewing wasn’t too off-putting — corny but watchable due to the aforementioned casting. the film was interesting enough that i decided to read the books.

wow. what a difference.

for a newbie storyteller, paolini is excellent. he does traditional fantasy superbly. plenty of details to enrich plot and characters. how in the world did this stuff get lost in translation to film? pity. i’ll never understand the mind of the film producer who decides to cut up what wasn’t broken in the first place. much of what made the book engrossing (such as the witch character angela or the politics between the varden and the dwarves) were not developed properly in the film. what’s stupid is that the stuff dropped are what make up a lot of the plot in the later books. if they ever decide to make a sequel film (is that even possible since the first did so badly?) the producers’ll end up with something akin to princess diaries 2: what a mess of lame-osity since we murdered part one.

watching the film after reading the books is just a cringe-y experience. a two-hour fest of involuntary wincing from me. and holy crap, did they ever under-use djimon or what. the only things that kept me watching were speelers, hedlund, and baby saphira.

damn idiot producers.

sherlock holmes (film)

2009 / guy ritchie / robert downey jr. / jude law

so it doesn’t exactly adhere to canon. (never got the impression that holmes was an especially…action-y…chap.) wannabe gun fu aside, all the wacky genius of holmes got excellent screentime (drug abuse? yes. anal-retentive attention to detail? oh yieah.) the focus was on holmes the man, frailities and all. not that the wannabe gun fu or camp-heavy “mystery” didn’t thoroughly entertain.

really though, the meat is in the performances. juicy, juicy performances. loved that they didn’t make watson the usual bumbling idiot — i mean, seriously now, anyone welcome to holme’s company for a lengthy period must have been whip smart in his own way. i can’t see the sherlock having patience to hang around someone who can’t keep up with the mental pace. jude law makes the best sarcastic, smart-ass watson ever. watson and holmes exchanges were just so damn fun to watch.

whoever wrote the script: thank you for not treating the audience like a dumb-ass. sure the dialogue’s peppered with dramatic movie one-liners — but hey, it’s full of SAT words too. in a non-pompous way. delivered by actors who breathed the characters so well that it established atmostphere without heavy-handed exposition. this is a world inhabited by overly-smart people. if you can’t get that, tough. the plot’ll move on without you. and that’s just awesome.

slumdog millionaire (film)

2009 / boyle

an instance where the music and visuals so captured my imagination that i’ve succumbed to the ride whole-heartedly. not every movie can achieve this — all parts have to be just so, from pacing to acting to cinematography. when done right, oh my, what a great emotional rush.

my first viewing was more of an artistic appreciation. a clinical view even. none of the plot twists were particularly engaging despite my brain registering the uniqueness of it. by the third viewing, this time at home, all the heavy-handed drama sunk in — helped along by the amazing soundtrack and main theme. i’m lost in it now. i love the sweeping wide-shots of bombay, dev patel’s intensity, the amazing dance choreography at the end. by the time the graphic credits roll, i’m sitting on the couch mulling over destiny, love, and all the itty gritty bits that make up life. definitely not a popcorn flick.

the hand of the director and storyteller is so blatant in this film so i know my emotions just got played like a banjo (yes, a banjo). but it’s cool. i don’t mind. if only all films can play me so well.

always running (autobio)

luis j. rodriquez

he grew up in the city right next to mine. that’s always my first thought when i think of always running. we grew up in the same area but came away with totally different sets of experience.

i’m a minority too. but i never, ever suffered. no racism, no broken families, no need to gangbang just to belong (well, being an introvert helps on that last count i suppose). so really, i don’t share much other than the purely superficial with mr. rodriquez. reason says that i should not be able to empathize. but i do. i don’t know why but i do. i’m attracted to all stories of minorities who struggle despite never having to jump that hurdle myself. it’s not so much needing to understand the minority struggle or feeling solidarity with my fellow peers. it’s really about the story of the guy who conquers society’s expectations of him simply because his will is that strong. mr. rodriquez takes all the crap that flows his way, takes all the crap he created through his own mistakes, and still, through all that crap, finds his way out to know who he is as a person and to stand by who he found himself to be. i think there are a lot of people who think they know who they are but when it counts, second quess themselves because they are hindered by society beating down on them. to have lived through what he did and still be able to write honestly and eloquently about all his ups and downs is what makes rodriquez a worthy hero.

so many re-reads later, the one scene that sticks out in my mind is when the counselor(?)/teacher(?) goes to his little bedroom shack in the backyard and finds that the inside is plastered from floor to ceiling with rodriquez’s art. he poured his heart out for himself and himself only despite the insanity of his lifestyle. art for the artist’s sake. not for seeking laurels. that bit has stayed with me for many, many years.

i would love to sit in on one of his lectures. he has quite a way with words — somehow weaving a rolling rhythm with just everyday speak.

confessions of a shopaholic (novel)

sophie kinsella

have never loathed a character more. can’t even stand to flip through this book to find the main character’s name…because i then run the risk of possibly stabbing something, anything, at hand. stabbing it really, really hard. several times.

there’s anger at a character because the character was written to be villainous and therefore deserving of the reader’s hatred. then there’s hating a character because, oh my god, for whatever reason the author thought exaggerated stereotypes of women can build an endearing heroine. exaggerated stereotypes, especially stereotypes that go against the grain of common sense, shouldn’t be a basis for anything. why is that so hard for society to comprehend?! kinsella writes this book about a woman who shops endlessly because she’s an idiot (not even because she’s full of insecurities, she’s just STUPID) — and the public eats this shit up. why, for god’s sake, why? because shopping is what girls do and so it’s acceptable to shop till you’re piss-ass broke cuz, hey i’m a cute and modern girl who can dig myself out of the hole!? how about we just NOT perpetuate girl+shopping stereotypes already.

what makes the character extra annoying is that she has no personality whatsoever other than shopping. and drooling after a guy who is a total ass. in fact, i don’t recall any multi-dimensional characters in this book. everyone has one distinguishing characteristic and that’s it. possibly the only non-annoying character is the best friend. at least she’s honest about her shortcomings and doesn’t gloss over apologies to herself or her friends.

unfortunately, this was one of my first encounters with chick-lit. that was about five years ago. i still haven’t picked up another chick-lit novel. this crap has put me off the genre so much that i have no clue when i’ll even glance at another such book. i prefer not to engage in stabby feelings.

diablo (pc)

1996 / rpg / blizzard entertainment

after seven years, i’m finally, finally, starting to get bored of this game. i’ve maxed out my sorceror as much as i can stand to grind and i don’t bother beating diablo anymore because he’ll never drop anything good.

and that there, is the allure that kept me clicking through many a night — A Good Drop. what is it about leveling up a character that’s so damn addicting? seriously, all i’m doing is pillaging monster corpses in hopes of picking up a bigger and better trinket for my little pixel guy to wear. i don’t co-op and i don’t pvp. just me and my lil sorcerer buddy walking around the dungeons for ages.

it is nice to know that i’ve leveled up a character so that he’s well-nigh invinceable. one-hit kills are teh awesome. i never play barbarian or rogue because i like the magic and i like range attacks. my favorite quest is the warlord in dlvl13 because damn that loot is always fun to shuffle through. blood knights are totally fun to wack. fireball and chain lighting are my good ole standbys.

a few years ago i got my first ipod courtesy of john romero. he had all soundtracks from diablo on it. thank you john. i listen to it in my car but i’ve long turned off the soundtrack during actual gameplay (repetitive themes much? ew!). still, the music is indicative of how lush the gameworld has been wrought. there’s not a lot of stuff to go through (except for the sixteen dungeons) and the objectives are way simple. but the graphics, the music, the voice-acting — all did a lot to create the medieval mood. loved it the minute i started walking about tristram.

recently replayed this again because 1) i never uninstall diablo and 2) part three is coming out soon (as per blizzard time). have a feeling i won’t be uninstalling this any time in the future…it’s a comfy, familiar retreat i can run to when people piss me off. as aforementioned, one-hit kills are teh awesome.

hancock (film)

2008 / michael berg / will smith / charlize theron

it could have been so much more. what it is emotionally shortchanges the audience. the snarky take on a disenchanted superhero (who has to pay public damage fees no less) is a fun premise — but when the majority of the scenes are played with an undertone of dark satire, cliche comebacks that supposedly add humor come off as a cheap undercut. it’s like the film can’t decide if it wants to be serious or if it wants to be teasing superhero movie cliches. it didn’t do the latter very well. should’ve just stuck with dark emo because there was So Much to work with — the pathos of the lonely hero, the lovers who can’t ever be together, near death experiences. those hamfisted attempts at humor just rocked the plot flow.

something else that rocked the plot flow was charlize suddenly showing up with dark eyeshadow and dressed in low-cut black. well that’s stupid. for a woman who’s trying to escape the past by hiding behind suburbia, you’d think she’d stick with jeans. but no, the movie makers just had to pander to what they perceive the audience wants and dress her in hot, sexy black. because us audience just watch movies for hot chicks and badass heroes. have them doofus heads ever wondered why certain fantasy/scifi films make it big and some don’t? lord of the rings and star trek get the big bucks because they don’t treat the audience as slobbering, idiot fanboys.

and maybe in the end, that’s where hancock fell short. the producers took a good story and mucked it up with their hollywood bullshit. if not for will smith and charlize theron’s performances, i would drop the ball on this one. but i like what they did with their characters.

nibiru (pc)

2005 / graphic adventure / future games

so, um, it took me about two years to finish playing this game. the story just didn’t hook. no character evolution, no great revelation of mystery, no amazing insight into, well, anything. just the usual humdrum of clicking your way through locations till the game ends. which is sad y’know when all else (graphics, gameplay, dialogue, voice-acting) were top notch. to be fair, the plot setup was conventional but interesting. adventure gamer nerds dig foraging for ancient lost treasures and nazi intriques. but from there, the plot went, urrr, nowhere. the hero is just so mundane and vanilla that i didn’t really participate in his adventures so much as stand around and observe his comings and goings. made the ending emotionally-detatched and feel rather perfunctory in execution.

at least the numerous locales were pretty. lots of atmostpheric effects like in syberia (but for some reason, not a lot of rippling water). i like me lots of grand interiors so i wasn’t all that moved by the swamps and mines i had to trudge through but hey, great sets anyway. no details lost on visuals. rust, drips, peeling paint, lots of dank and dusty corners. plus, no funky glitches! martin didn’t step into any walls or steps. having had to sludge through paradise, non-glitchy nibiru is much welcome.

excellent details into environment building. there’re lots of objects to click on. items to be picked up are not obviously displayed. which is cool. adventure gaming is about exploring after all so it’s nice to actually get to do so. other realistic details? the fact that when you enter a dark room, any dark room, you better find a light switch. i think there were at least four light switch moments in the game. how can you click around if you can’t see anything?! doh!

the non-realistic part? sticking a red-hot iron in yer pants. because yer pants is where all inventory items are stored. rocks, crowbars, wrenches, dynamite…yieah. there’s a party in your pants alright!

favorite dialogue sequence? when martin’s trying to get isabella out. isa’s mom’s a hoot. any and all dialogue with pedro’s also a riot.

gripes? why oh why does everyone seem to think that mayans would ever put so many fricken puzzles in their temples?! i would like to think that we’ve arrived at a point in adventure game design where colored-ball puzzles randomly popping up in a mayan temple would be construed as wtf mayans aren’t gameboard puzzle fiends. i much preferred shoving drums in and out of statue noses as a puzzle to sliding around damn tiles (damn tile-sliding, dammit it to the eighteenth circle of hell!). and oh yieah, puzzles should not consist of me traipsing back and forth to procure an utterly plot-irrelevant item in order to get to an item of actual relevancy. hotdog and bottled wine puzzles, i’m looking atchu. grrr. arrrgh.

nibiru’s a very classic adventure game. if only it had a gripping plot. then i wouldn’t have uninstalled it right after i finished it.

wanted (film)

2008 / bekmambetov

i would really like it if angelina ate something. like, she and i can sit down and share a big mac. we can work through our aversions to greasy meat together — i get to broaden my palette and she gets to, you know, fucking eat.

but other than her disturbingly skinny arms (swear man, she didn’t look this skeletal in tomb raider), angie was super fab. thank god for that face and those smoky eyes. i spent the first twenty minutes laughing at the absolute tongue-in-cheek absurdity of having angelina jolie show up outta nowhere, inform the total geek that his dad was an assassin, then kick gun-fu ass as only angelina jolie can. she’s one of the few people that i don’t mind not stepping into make-believe land for. i know i’m watching angelina and not the character. and that’s fine. cuz it’s angelina(!). who still needs to eat. seriously now.

the premise and settings were full-tilt looney. in a good way. who doesn’t enjoy a good old guild of assassins? with a thousand year history and all! the textile factory was completely unexpected. but cool. really cool. loved that heavy-handed loom of fate bit. binary in weaving? sure. why not. like hidden messages in the koran. the brain-fluff in me loves that kinda crazy mish-mash of unreality, precisely because it makes reality that much less grim. having morgan freeman deliver the fluff sure helps the digestion too. but. having morgan freeman say bad words is just…odd. i can fully embrace all the ridiculous bull this flick pulls, and even sit through the unnecessarily bloody montages that Go On Forever (okay mr. artistic director, i get it, let’s move on now), but damn if morgan freeman dropping the f-bomb didn’t kill my suspended belief like a skunk on the highway. wtf man. totally didn’t make sense.

one other annoyed gripe. that oh-so-angerful “what the fuck have you done lately” bit at the end was, how you say, errr, dumb. i get it, i get it, he’s finally beating his oppressors. hooray for you, mr. geek turned Dark Emo Hero. then he turns the anger onto us for not doing the same so awesomely as he has? is this the writers’ way of saying all us drudges are drudges because we won’t viciously turn on our existence and blast our own demons? that line smacked of the mousy kid who used be nothing, then showed up at the high school reunion with a filthy load of cash and condescended to those who couldn’t reach his heights. maybe i’m just being overly sensitive and paranoid. but it sure made me want to slap Dark Emo Hero a couple on the head. he lost cool points with that. it turned what was a fun ride through lala land into glorifying violence. because with that one line, the writers are telling you that those in control of their own destiny are the ones who viciously kill in the name of vegeance. they are awesome. they are cool.

NOT.

if i don’t watch that last bit though, i like the rest of the flick just fine. drooling over mr. tumnus and all.

the mummy (film)

1999 / stephen sommers

love movies. yet every once in a while i get glutted on the overflow of tedious crap (thank you, formulaic hollywood “creatives”) and need a reminder of Movie Fun. how fun a reminder was the mummy? why, so fun that even the script crackled with snarky, witty energy. reading about the rick o’connell character setup in the script still gives me the chuckles.

the magic ingredient is all sommers. i know this is a popcorn flick — stereotyped characterizations (american cowboys love shoot-outs!!), over-blown special fx (i can see heees eyeballz!!), good ole monster villains (zeh mummy eez aliiiive!!!). sommers polished off all the cliches with clever dialogue. really clever dialogue. cuz the dialogue did its job — you remember each character not because they were running around all heroic. you remember the characters cuz each one was alternatively the right amount of snark, smart-ass, dumbass, or dead-pan sarcastic. every bit of the story, characters, and sets winked a homage to old-fashioned hollywood monster movies. i think the popcorn works because the story and the characters are all earnestly and sincerely portrayed. in paraphrase, the mummy is about some undead voodoo guy who comes back to reign havoc on a slapstick band of heroes. hardy har har. but you get sucked in because cast and crew believed in every characters’ journey, villain to hero. each character had his/her own story. the multi-layers balanced out the deliberately silly sequences.

but that’s not all! you start off with the cliches and you end up with the cliches (we ride off into the sunset with the girl y’know), yet somewhere in the middle you get a convincingly ditzy librarian heroine who screams like a man (gotta love the non-girlie squeals) and gets the hots for the admittedly super hot villain. sommers flips the switch on the cliches so smoothly. the mummy is a romcom in disguise folks. most everyone i know is rooting for the guy and girl to hook up. you know they will and it is still so very fun to watch.

oh yieah. the delicous, yummy actors. john hannah made me cry in four weddings and a funeral but dammit if i don’t love him forever more as the not-quite-sleazy (but definitely greasy!) brother. right spot on in every scene. the movie wherein i was first introduced to the hotness that is rachel weisz. and the hotness that is brendan fraser. because i like my heroes ruff, gruff, a bit bad, and a whole lotta clean-cut hawtness.

a few good men (film)

1992 / rob reiner / aaron sorkin

have never been in the armed forces — so aside from wishing i could learn how to do that flashy gun drill in the flick’s intro, i also always end up getting mentally slam-dunked by the insular world of the military. there’s actually no such thing as conduct unbecoming a marine but that’s how we glorify our soldiers, the guys whom we want to do what they do with the utmost honor and love for country and countrymen. that they can’t always walk the straight line makes for excellent drama, way to suck you in.

the super snazzy dialogue doesn’t hurt either. tom cruise can be so excellent sometimes, delivering lines with nary a hiccup that i don’t even hear the over-crafted writing. i love his daniel kaffee more than i love jack nicholas’ jessup. jessup is straight-up a hard-ass military man, unbending and rock-solid. which is cool cuz he’s the foil. kaffee is all layers under the smirk. you can see the fierce in his eyes. redirect on the mess hall sequence is just so much fun to watch. other standouts i love are low-key pollack (who’s morals satisfyingly strike the final chord) and the guy who played dawson to such perfection. my favorite character is dawson. my favorite moment is when he salutes kaffee. in the end, the story goes back to him, the solidier on the line. he may not be on screen all that much but his character is relentlessly drilled into your emotions through kaffee. so even though the obvious journey is kaffee’s, the one that lingers in my mind is always dawson’s. master story crafting.

only occasional awkward moments sadly belong to demi moore. it’s great to see a female role not tethered by romantic themes and it’s great to see demi moore bring it to life. just kinda uncomfy at those angerball moments when there were a lotta words to get out (this is sorkin afterall). she didn’t always carry the wordy rhythm too well. she does good when it counts though so i overlook the rickety parts cuz it’s real fun to watch her nerdy j.a.g. attorney. plus, bonus(!), random noah wyle and cuba gooding jr. appearances. like finding a dollop of chocolate when you only had enough to buy vanilla.

i’m not a courtroom drama junkie but this one i don’t mind repeat viewings. a good story, a great delivery, and i dig moral dilemmas muchly.