Smashing the Gnat

The Nerdy News Blog - November 20th, 2010

2010-11-20T09:37:00.000-08:00

Forgive me, folks, for failing to write up last week's Nerdy News, so here we go for what happened this week.

FOX Announces That Fringe Will Be Moved to Fridays

Normally, I wouldn't find a change of day and time for a show to be anything remotely newsworthy. But let's take a look at the facts here. Fact: Fringe is a science fiction show on FOX with critical acclaim that's currently on Thursday nights. Fact: Starting on January 28th, it will be on Fridays. Fact: Firefly was a science fiction show on FOX with critical acclaim that aired on Fridays and was quickly canceled. Fact: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a science fiction show that aired on FOX that was moved to Fridays in its second season and was quickly canceled.
Opinion: Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcapOHCRAP!
FOX might as well have put out a press release that said we're thinking about canceling another awesome show because we're a bunch of morons.

Cryptic Studios and CBS Will Let The Fans Design The Next Enterprise

I realize I'm probably the only person you know who plays Star Trek Online, and hell, I don't even play it as much anymore. But I think this next bit is pretty cool. The game's developer, Cryptic Studios, along with Star Trek license holder CBS Studios and Intel have announced a contest that asks for fans to design the next starship Enterprise. I'm assuming it will be the Enterprise-F, since, according to the game's timeline, the Enterprise-E had a significantly longer life span than some of the other ships in its line. The grand prize is kind of lame, though - an Alienware laptop, the collector's edition of Star Trek Online along with a lifetime membership, the new Enterprise will appear in STO and you'll get a replica of your design. Personally, I'd rather have the replica and royalties for the use of my design. Oh well. The contest starts on December 9th. Check here for details.

Darren Aronofsky To Direct The Wolverine

That's right. The guy who directed head trips and arftsy flicks like Requiem for a Dream, Pi, The Fountain, and The Wrestler, is directing the sequel to the abysmal X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Aronofsky has worked with big screen Wolvie Hugh Jackman on The Fountain and it would seem that it was Jackman himself that got him the job. One of the things Aronofsky has done already is to change the title from something that probably would have been awful, like X-Men Kinda Origins: Wolverine Goes To Hollywood, to the simple title, The Wolverine. Supposedly, Aronofsky is looking to really separate his film from the Gavin Hood-directed nightmare that gave us magic adamantium memory-erasing bullets and the horribly realized Wade Wilson/Deadpool. He's called it a "stand alone" film, that "isn't connected" to its predecessor. Frankly, I don't see how that's possible since you still have Hugh Jackman playing Logan (though I actually still think he's great in the role). But combine this with the fact that they're rebooting Wade Wilson's origins for Deadpool, which should film soon if Ryan Reynolds' schedule ever frees up, and the craziness that seems to be involved with X-Men: First Class, and it's pretty obvious that FOX doesn't give a rat's ass about maintaining continuity in its X-Men film universe.

Oh, and for your amusement here's an image from a mid-90's Star Trek/X-Men crossover comic. I actually own a copy of it.

Yeah, that's Spock owning Wolverine with a Vulcan Nerve Pinch.

Win.

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 6

2010-11-15T18:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry I'm late, I had a busy weekend. Anyway, on to Zelda!

For this post, I delved deeper into Ikana Canyon. Frankly, I meant to play through the Stone Tower, but I didn't make it that far.
Appalled that I had done the Ocean Spider House on the wrong day and not received the Giant's Wallet, I went to the ocean once again to complete that task. Actually, I began that bit twice because there was a game crashing freeze once again. That's the second time that's happened. I had to restart the system and redo what little I had done on that day cycle. I'm once again wishing that I had downloaded Majora's Mask on Virtual Console rather than play it on the GameCube disc.
So, with thirty Gold Skulltulas dead and the morning of the first day all used up, I obtained my big ass wallet and proceeded to Ikana Valley to tackle the Gibdos' Well. Now this is one of the more annoying sections of the game. For some reason, a bunch of mummies regret that they never got to have some Deku Nuts and bombs, or never got to eat a fish. So they've spent eternity standing guard next to doors in some underground chambers. Its only when you give them what they want that their souls can rest and the doors will open.
Also, the mummies find bugs creepy.

The only tool you need to fool a mummy.

Unfortunately, there are a couple things that you can't get a hold of inside of the Gibdos' Well, like a blue potion, that forced me to go searching around for one. I didn't want to fetch the ingredients for it to take the witches in the Swamp, and I couldn't remember which Business Scrub would sell me a blue potion. I checked in Lulu's room in the Zora Cape before I remembered that he's right there in Ikana Canyon. So I dropped 100 rupees (And thanks to the Giant's Wallet, I made it back and then some) to buy the potion. I did have to break down and look at my old player's guide at the map of the well, if only to remember where I needed to go with the time-sensitive hot spring water. Yes, a mummy's only regret was that it had no scalding water to look at.
Once I wrapped up (Ha!) my business in the well full of mummies, I obtained the incredibly creepy looking Mirror Shield - much creepier than a bug, thank you - and made my way into Ikana Castle.
Since there are only four main dungeons in Majora's Mask, it's kind of nice having the small sub dungeon that is the Ikana Castle. It involves a lot of ReDead, which are pretty easy to kill when wearing the Gibdos Mask, Captain's Hat or Garo's Mask, since they begin to dance and not attack when you wear one of those masks. And because ReDead drop about fifteen to twenty rupees each, that new Giant's Wallet filled up quick. The goal of Ikana Castle is to get to King Igos du Ikana, a skeletal warrior king who looks like the winner at last year's Day of the Dead costume contest.


The runner-up didn't think to carry a sword.

After dispatching his two henchman, a murderous, skeletal version of Laurel and Hardy, you get to take on Igos himself. I always find it's fun to wear the Captain's Hat that is given to you by Captain Keeta, Igos' military commander. This brings about a quick, but rather funny cut scene that shows that Igos might have had a little too much royal blood in his system. Cue "Dueling Banjos." He isn't the sharpest of skeletons. Once you defeat him, he realizes how much he and his kingdom had lost its way, that their failure to trust in each other led them to a long war that destroyed their kingdom and their lives. He then teaches you the Elegy of Emptiness, a song that creates statues of whatever form Link is in, so you can create up to four statues at once as Hylian, Deku, Zora and Goron. Unfortunately, the Hylian Link stature is creepy as hell.

That's going to haunt me.

And so, with the Elegy learned, and midnight passed (my time, not game time), I played the Song of Time, saved the game and called it a quits.
I might double up on the Zelda blogs this week, since there's not much to this one and I've probably got a good three blogs worth of Majora's Mask left at least. I'm eager to finish and move on to Wind Waker and then Twilight Princess.

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 5

2010-11-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

Sidequests, sidequests and more sidequests! Unfortunately, I didn't do much in the main quest this week. I logged in a little time earlier in the week and started up in Ikana Valley. This is another point where I wish I'd never been given that damned player's guide. I can't remember anything! And what do I do? Instead of trying to work everything out for myself, I keep deciding to steal a peek at the guide. But hey, it does cut down my play time so I won't be playing Majora's Mask for the next 6 weeks.
Anyway, I forgot how much I love the Ikana Valley section of Majora's Mask. It has such an excellent atmosphere. The whole area is set up as a land of the dead, where a mighty kingdom that ruled Termina fell to ruin during a war with a far off nation. Now the spirits of the soldiers are trapped in the land of the living as ghosts and ghouls of various kinds. Combined with the prominence of the falling moon, the Ikana Valley is probably the most moody and eerie portion of the game.
The other sections of Termina all feel so full of life, whereas Ikana only has a handful of living people - just Dampe, the researcher and his daughter, the thief, Sakon, and a soldier who's so boring that he's invisible. Everyone else is dead. Maybe it's just my fascination with skeletons (it's very evident in all the doodles I draw as ideas for band logos and such), but all the roving skeletons looking for solace and release for their souls just sucks me into the story. I guess I just have a thing for the macabre. Crap, does that make me emo?

"Yeah, you're totally emo," said the vanishing, stick-wielding hooded cyclops. What a prick.

Anyway, I played a little ways into the Ikana Valley quest before deciding to go after some more heart pieces and upgrades. First off, I made Captain Keeta feel like a little bitch, despite the fact that he is a huge skeleton with a killer hat - which he then gave to me once I played him a ditty on my ocarina. Then I hung around the graveyard each night and ordered some Stalkids/Former Ikana Soldiers to dig up the graves so that I could get at the goodies, as well as healing the researcher to get the Gibdo mask.
There's another screwed up thing in this part of the game. The paranormal investigator guy dragged his little out into a section of the world where there are ghosts and the undead surrounding them at all times if their house, which doubles as a giant music box, doesn't have the water power to play the song that wards off the walking mummies. Good job on the parenting skill there, dude.
From there it was collectormania!
I saw that I had a measly nine hearts and decided that, rather than go on to conquer the hazards of the Ikana Valley further, I would pump up Link further. Thus today was spent with minigames and trading quests galore.
I managed to collect thirteen or fourteen of the game's fifty-two total pieces of heart. With only four bosses to collect heart containers from, you have to do a lot of collecting to get all twenty containers. I also managed to upgrade to the biggest bomb bag and the biggest quiver. In the case of the quiver, it involved playing some minigames that would have the Terminan version of PETA ready to kill somebody. See, in Hyrule, the target shooting games were innocent, involving targets like moving rupees and giant dartboards. In Termina, they use living creatures, trained to appear at the blow of a whistle only to be shot down by twitchy archers looking to win a prize.


The shooting gallery's proprietors at least tried to replicate their natural environment, so they can feel more at ease while they're being shot at by blood thirsty elven people.

What makes it worse is that the Swamp Shooting Gallery has Deku Scrubs as targets. We've already established that the Deku Scrubs are sentient beings with a language, monarchical government and even a bureaucracy. At the shooting gallery, they're being round up and murdered for sport. Seriously, this world just seems more and more screwed up the more I play this game. Termina has a moon with an angry face, big rock-eating bipeds who can roll around in balls, sentient plants, fish people with poor taste in music a land where the dead roam about and can't get any rest and pointy-eared humans who don't mind wantonly killing their neighbors. I know it was water pollution that caused all of Hyrule's problems. But what about Termina? I haven't figured that out yet.

I'm blaming this guy though.

He's freaky.
Coming next week, Ikana Valley and Stone Tower Temple.

As a side note: I'm moving these posts to Sunday nights, since I seem to play more Zelda on the weekends. Or in this post's case - early Monday morning.

The Nerdy News Blog - November 4th, 2010

2010-11-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Avengers Delayed?

Perhaps Nick Fury will educate Thor in the do's and don't's of foot massages?

Is Joss Whedon looking to spend too much money? According to BleedingCoolNews.com, Marvel Studios has delayed the pre-production process on the movie that will cause millions of fan boys to quite literally die from the excitement of seeing Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk all on one screen. I might be one of them. And by might, I mean almost definitely. But it's okay, the new Star Trek should come out before The Avengers hits the screen. But the film's shaping up to be pretty expensive, with big name stars like Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson, combined with what will surely be massive amounts of CGI and filming on location in New York City. So Marvel's accountants are understandably freaking out. With any luck, the movie won't be delayed. Cross your fingers, true believers.

James Bond to Reappear (Maybe) in Late 2012

Thanks to MGM's keen desire to blow all it's money like a drunken frat boy in Vegas with his daddy's credit card, many of its big properties, like the James Bond series and The Hobbit have gone through development hell due to lack of funds. In the case of The Hobbit, some iffy rights issues led to the film being a joint-venture with Warner Brothers. Agent 007, however, has not been so lucky. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's money problems have left it looking for another company to make it their bitch. Yesterday, however, MGM filed bankruptcy - otherwise known as a Financial Get Out Of Jail Free Card. Now that they've got some breathing room, MGM is aiming to get Bond 23 out in November 2012. Daniel Craig currently has a pretty tight schedule, so it looks like they may not get to film until late 2011 at the earliest. Luckily, the current Bond series doesn't rely too much on CGI, so post-production shouldn't take too long. Woo! Yay for big Hollywood companies going bankrupt!

TIE Fighters Will Soon Be In Your Living Room And Everywhere Else You Go

I don't think Homeland Security saw The Galactic Empire one coming.

So, file this one under "Now I Wish I Had An iPhone." This really isn't all that important, I just enjoyed the thoughts of thousands of people all over the country saying to their neighbors, "Hey, you've got a TIE Fighter on your face."
THQ is working on a new augmented reality game that has you shooting down TIE Fighters with whatever your camera sees as a background. It's a simple arcade shooter of little consequence, it just lit up my eyes with nerdy glee when I saw it.

Out.

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 4

2010-10-31T21:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry this didn't go up on Friday, I was busy with Halloween plans.
Holy three days of accomplishments, Batman! I got a lot done in this three day cycle.
Before we go into said accomplishments, let me point out once again that if you want to play Majora's Mask, either dust off your N64 or download it on the Virtual Console for your Wii. The emulation on the GameCube collector's disk that I'm playing the game on is terrible. It only seems to be Majora's Mask that has issues. I started playing this cycle earlier this week, but had the game lock up. All I could do was reset and lose all the progress I'd made since the last cycle reset, that included nabbing the hookshot and first egg from the Gerudo Pirates.
Heh, all female pirates. The guys must really enjoy it when the pirates come to rape and pillage.


Had Link been a day earlier, he might have been exposed to the filming of Gerudo Casting Couch 17.

Luckily, on this play through, despite some paranoia that I would suddenly lose hours worth of game time due to another game crash, I got through without losing any progress. Yay!
So once again, I met Mikau, who enthusiastically cried "Baby!" several times in his death throes. Maybe if he hadn't used up so much energy singing to Link, then Link could have gotten him to a Zora doctor? That old dude in the big hook-for-a-hand-shaped building seems like he could have helped. Oh well. Now Link gets to assume the life of another famous guy who no one knows is actually dead. Really, I find that kind of messed up. Link is compressing these people into masks, though it supposedly heals their souls when he turns them into masks, and then stealing their lives. And what happens once Link's quest is over? The moon won't fall and all, but as far as the Gorons and Zoras are concerned, Darunia is dead and Mikau just plain disappeared. Maybe the Zora's will find Mikau's grave... oh, wait, no. Link buried him in sand. All it will take is one good high tide, or maybe a hungry scavenger that's willing to dig to make that body disappear. In ten years, there will be an episode on the Zora version of Unsolved Mysteries, Lulu and the rest of the band will have moved on and Mikau will be utterly forgotten because Link turned the poor guy into a mask.
Oh, here's a scary thought. What if the Mask Salesman lied and the "Song of Healing" doesn't heal at all? Maybe it just turns everybody into masks and steals their soul or something? Link could be stealing people's souls without even knowing it. I wouldn't put it past that Mask Salesman. He's creepy.


And let's not forget that this "innocent" mask salesman happens to carry around a mask that can destroy the whole damn world. That's all kinds of screwed up.

Anyway, I got the Zora mask and then went on to the whole pirate fortress thing. I've never once done the fortress without the Stone Mask. So I made it a point to run over to the entrance to Ikana Canyon to find the poor dude who was just so damned boring that you couldn't even see him without the Lens of Truth. I mean, when you have to practice being noticed, then you've got some serious problems. I'm talking intensive therapy, not just a bottle of red potion. Poor schmuck. The main problem is I received a player's guide when I received the game, so I always played the game with a bit of a crutch. I've never made a crack at the fortress without the mask. I told myself I'd try it this time, but truth be told, I was feeling too damn lazy and I wanted to get all the eggs before the dawn of the second day.
After the fortress, I took a picture of one of the pirates to the horny dude who lives alone on the beach. Thanks, Nintendo, for making me provide that guy with something for his wank bank. He gave me a talking seahorse in return, but then I had to take the seahorse out to Pinnacle Rock. There, I had to commit the genocide of what seems to be an endangered species of Giant Sea Snake so that I could rescue some eggs and free the talking sea horse's girlfriend. I was given a piece of heart in return and then left to deliver the last of the eggs. I assume the sea horses started boning after I left.
I delivered the eggs, then learned a song from some tadpoles. Sperm symbolism here? I think whoever designed the whole Great Bay area must have been horny. Then I rode a big ass talking turtle with palm trees growing out its shell - not quite Discworld sized - to the Great Bay Temple.
I found this temple to be relatively easy. It involves a lot of redirection of water flow, but so long as you pay attention to the network of pipes, it's pretty easy to reason out what to do in this temple. You might forget a step or two and have to explore to find the proper room, but it's really not that hard. I also really like the giant waterworks design of the place. The whole temple is essentially a big water-powered machine, which lends itself to the semi-steampunk elements of Majora's Mask, such as motorized boats and such.
After a lot of valve-opening, I made my way into the lair of Gyorg. This is where I think the Great Bay Temple is weak. For one, I couldn't remember what the boss was. I can remember the bosses from the other temples clearly, but when it comes to Gyorg, I didn't remember him until I saw him.

To me, you're just another ugly fish. Sorry, dude.

Because of this, I thought maybe he'd be a fun challenge. But, no, this boss is horrible easy. Hit him with an arrow, turn into a Zora, jump in the water and zap him with my electricity shield. Repeat. Then he changes it up. He swims around spitting out the tiny Gyorgs he keeps in his mouth like an archerfish, while I spam the electricity shield until he's dead. Boringly simple. Oh well.
I actually had more challenge trying to play the horny fisherman's platform jumping game. I just kept falling off the platforms and into the water - at one point with less than two seconds left in the clock. And he just kept laughing that "Heh heh" laugh like some kind of rapist. Weirdo. But I got a piece of heart out of him. Oh god, I hope he didn't rape the seahorse.

Happy Halloween (there's still nine minutes left!)

The Nerdy News Blog - October 28th

2010-10-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

It's Thursday, that means it's time for this weeks updates! This was the week for rumors and denials, it seems!

Batman's Got His Next Title and Won't Be Fighting The Riddler in 2012

What they didn't tell you is that Christian Bale broke a glass milk bottle over the photographer's head at this photo shoot. He claimed the man was being "so f***ing unprofessional."

On Wednesday, director/writer/producer Christopher Nolan, who brought us the wonderful awesomeness that is the last two Batman movies, gave us a couple tid-bits about what to expect with the third and final part of his epic Batman trilogy. We'll be seeing The Dark Knight Rises on our local IMAX screens (there will be absolutely no 3-D) in the summer of 2012. Nolan also told us that the script that he wrote with his brother, Jonah Nolan, and David S. Goyer does not involve The Riddler. So much for everybody expecting that the recent casting of Tom Hardy (Inception, Star Trek: Nemesis) in an unnamed role would end up with him as Edward Nigma. Oh, good God. Don't let it be Robin.

George Lucas to Convert the Indiana Jones Movies To 3-D Too? Wait. Nope. Nevermind.

Damn you, quit messing with my childhood! And making me pay $3 more on a $10 ticket!

For a brief moment on Tuesday, I thought I was going to have a coronary. It's ridiculous as it is that George Lucas is going to convert all six Star Wars movies into 3-D and release them into theaters over the course of six years. I call it "ridiculous," but I'll still go see every one of them. Anyway, rumor broke like wildfire all over the Internet that Lucas was also planning to convert the four movies in the Indiana Jones series as a ploy to further enhance our rage as a fan base. Luckily, within a couple of hours, a Lucasfilm spokesman let it be known that it was all utter crap and we should pay them all our money to see Star Wars 3-D Spectacular on Ice.

Entertainment Weekly Is Kind Enough to Give Us A Glimpse At Captain America: The First Avenger


The people who pissed and moaned about Chris Evans not being a blonde won't like this...

Well, I have to admit, the boy cleans up well. I didn't like the idea of Chris Evans playing Steve Rogers at all when I first heard. Not because he wasn't a blonde, but because I just couldn't picture Chris Evans as being this legendary hero that the likes of Iron Man and Thor would view as a leader. Just listen to this phrase: "Robert Downey Jr. admires Chris Evans as a hero and leader." Did you scoff? I've got to hand it to director Joe Johnston, though. These pictures make me feel a little better about how respectable Chris Evans looks in the role. At least he doesn't look like the slacker skateboarder next door - kind of like his Scott Pilgrim role (only the second time I really liked him in a movie). Now hopefully I can wash out the bad taste of his take as Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four movies... Yuck.

Kieth Richards Cut From Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides? Wait. Nope. Nevermind.

Keith had actually just tried to smoke the little guy prior to this picture.

So this is another rumor that was circulating the ol' Intrawebs this week. The word was that Kieth Richards was going to be removed from his role as Jack Sparrow's father, Captain Teague, due to, get this, his alleged drug use. Wait, what now? People have been making jokes about how Kieth Richards has smoked every substance and object known to man at some point for decades now. They were making those jokes before he played Captain Teague in the previous Pirates movie, At World's End. So what's the big deal now? Well, Richards just released a new autobiography that apparently shows that he was even crazier about smoking stuff than anybody even knew. Lucky for all of us Stones fans out there, Disney had a spokesman come out and deny the rumors. Kieth Richards will definitely be in the next Pirates of the Caribbean. Thankfully, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are still out. I don't see how this movie can fail. Well, unless Keith smokes the film reels.

As usual, there's a ton of different things I could also tell you about, but you'll just have to look them up for yourself.

The Greatest Scary Game You Probably Never Played

2010-10-28T14:26:00.000-07:00

In light of Halloween, I've been trying to present some alternatives for your scary celebrations. Tonight, I bring you one of the best, most unplayed horror games ever.
Screw Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark and all those other old classic horror games, as well as the newer stuff like Dead Space, which I admit has scared me so bad at times that I've yet to finish it - plus I'm horribly stuck in this one spot. Why do I keep admitting the things that scare me on the internet?

File under: Things I know that scare Nate.

I wanted you all to know about a game that I've been playing for about seven years, totally riveted every time I play it. It's a sweeping epic of a story with a great, Lovecraft-inspired mythology and a truly inventive gameplay system that effected the player as much as what would happen in the game.
You might ask, "Where can I play this game?" Well, sir or madame, dust off your GameCube - if you ever owned one - or find a controller and a memory card so you can boot it up on your Wii. That's right, this gem was an M-rated Nintendo exclusive. And people said the GameCube was a kiddie system.
It's name: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

Oh, thank God, finally. Something with good cover art.

Released way back in the summer of 2002, Eternal Darkness was developed by Silicon Knights - then 2nd party developer for Nintendo and now 2nd party developer for Microsoft. It originally began life as a Nintendo 64 game, but Silicon Knights began to rework it once the GameCube's hardware was released to developers. The game came out to stellar reviews from critics and the few consumers who played it. In terms of sales, the game was a total flop, which is probably why many of you have never heard of it.
So let me tell you why you need to play it. In short, the game is about the struggles of twelve different people in different locations over the course of two thousand years. Their fates, both in life and death, are destined to intertwined as they fight against the minions of three different ancient Chuthlu-like creatures that fight against each other to gain dominance in our world.
To go with this epic story is a wonderfully inventive gameplay system: the sanity meter. As your character stares down the shambling zombie that's fully intent on sucking your intestines up like spaghetti, he or she loses a bit of sanity. As your sanity meter drops, crazy ass things start to happen. Yeah, the walls are bleeding. That fly on your TV screen? That's not really there. Oh, I didn't tell you? The sanity effects don't just screw with your character, they screw with you. Try playing this game in the dark with a surround sound stereo on and tell me that the whispering and crying going on around you doesn't get to you. It will.

That's no hug...

Mix with that stellar writing and voice acting, and you've got yourself one hell of a game. Still not convinced? It's been on several top 100/200 games of all time lists from the likes of Game Informer and IGN. It won Outstanding Achievement in Character or Story Development at the 6th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards in 2002, along with being nominated for Console Game of the Year, Innovation in Console Gaming and Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction.
The problem with my recommendation? Well, the game is kind of hard to find these days, considering it's eight years old and that it didn't sell well enough to warrant a lot of copies being manufactured. Sorry about that.

Slightly More Obscure Horror Movies That You Might Not Have Thought Of

2010-10-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

As people prepare for the forthcoming holiday, DVD shelves everywhere will be awash with the classics - stuff like Psycho, The Exorcist and The Omen, along with the schlock like Saw XXIV. Now, I'm what some of my friends call a "film snob." I'm the guy who knows all the useless trivia and talks about how the original French version of your favorite movie was so much better. So I'm using my film snobbery to give you some recommendations on some horror movies that you might have never heard of.

Sunshine
Directed by Danny Boyle - 2007

Could've done without The Right Stuff rip-off poster.

This film by Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire, might not appear to be scary at first glance. The film is about the crew of a ship sent to the sun in the 2050s in an effort to reignite fusion, after the sun mysteriously begins to go dark. To be honest, it's kind of a spoiler to ever tell you guys this, but about half-way into the movie, it becomes less 2001 and much more akin to Alien. Hell, even knowing that it takes that turn might ruin the movie for you, so feel free to yell at me if you feel that I, in fact, ruined it for you. Still, I'm sparing you all the details and, when I saw this movie, I left the screening feeling rather shaken up by the unsettling nature of some of the things in the film. I definitely recommend giving it a chance if you haven't seen it. Plus, Lost fans can be excited by seeing Hiroyuki Sanada - better known as Dogen, the leader of the Others in the temple - in one of his rare Western film roles. And it was the first time I saw Chris Evans in a movie and didn't think he was awful.

The Descent

Directed by Neil Marshall - 2005


Don't let this corny poster fool you. Seriously. This is a stupid poster. Why don't these movies have better posters?

This movie is probably the most well known of the movies I've listed tonight. By director Neil Marshall, whose track record aside from this film hasn't been great, had the honor of really disturbing my drunk ass last year at Halloween. The film follows a group of women on a spelunking trip, but one wrong turn leads them into the wrong cave for the most horrifying cave-crawling ever. The cinematography of this film alone makes it worth watching. Marshall went with a realistic approach to a cave - he kept it pitch black. The only light in the cave scenes are the lights brought by the terrorized women who are trying to escape the cave's ravenous, terror-inducing denizens. This helps create a stifling amount of dread. Unlike other movies, you really can't see anything coming until it's on top of someone. Added in the dynamic of people trying very hard to survive at any cost (even each other) creates for a really claustrophobic and terrorizing horror movie.

Incubus

Directed by Leslie Stevens - 1965


Dammit, now it's a bad DVD cover. What the hell?

Okay, so I have to admit two things. One: I've never seen this movie. Two: I've wanted to see it for years out of curiosity and a strong belief that I would find it highly amusing. The film was one of two films ever to be made in Esperanto, an artificially constructed language meant to be a universal second language that would allow everyone in the world to communicate easily. It was directed by Leslie Stevens, the creator of The Outer Limits. For those of you who don't know, The Outer Limits is like The Twilight Zone's copycat little brother. Stevens decided to film the movie in Esperanto in order to give it an eerie feeling and also forbade it from being dubbed into any other languages. Apparently, they didn't have an Esperanto coach on set, so the film's stars didn't do a very good job with their pronunciations. Speaking of the film's stars, this one stars the King of Ham, Captain James T. Kirk himself - William Shatner. This one was actually filmed a year before the premiere of Star Trek, so this is the young Shatner. And to think, ten years ago, I wouldn't have known that I could track this movie down. It had been thought lost until a copy was found and restored by the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) Channel. The movie itself centers around succubi. That's succubus in plural. As in, beautiful women who suck the life out of men by having sex with them. Also, it's said to have been a cursed productions, since three of its stars were dead within a year - one pair of actors - Milos Milos murdered his girlfriend, Barbara Ann Thomason Rooney, then killed himself. Another of their costars committed suicide. Thank God Shatner made it. But do you guys see why I want to see it now?

And that's it for tonight's blog. I'd give you a preview for tomorrow, but I don't know what that's going to be yet!

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 3 - But A Year Later...

2010-10-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, I fell behind. Way behind. This is like getting those TPS reports in, well, a year late.
Rather than restart my game and begin blogging over things I'd already blogged about, I figured I would continue the file I started a year ago. I found it with Goht and the Snowhead Temple already defeated. Guess I kept playing and didn't blog about that. Oops.

And I thought Gorons were weird in Ocarina of Time.

I do recall, though, that I always found Snowhead Temple particularly infuriating due to the central pillar that you have to raise and lower in order to access different sections of the temple. I'd say it's like the Water Temple of Majora's Mask, but the Great Bay Temple also involves manipulating the water. As I recall, save for the Windfall Temple, the dungeons in Majora's Mask tended to be more difficult than the dungeons of Ocarina of Time.

However, I did end up defeating Goht two more times today for various sidequests. I could have skipped the second defeat of Goht, but I forgot to retrieve my Powder Keg License after blowing up the entrance into the Goron race track. That is one thing where I can say I see why some people didn't like the 3-Day reset cycle in Majora's Mask - if you forgot to do something, you had to to repeat it all in order to finish it.

Goht is one of those bosses that can be either really fun or really frustrating to fight. If you're quick and can avoid the obstacles that pop up while you chase him down as a rolling Goron, it can be a fun and exhilarating fight. But if you're unfortunate to have rocks fall on you or be hit by Goht's beam attacks, it can be a long and aggravating boss battle. I actually had one of each of those instances when fighting Goht today.
Amongst the side quests I performed today were upgrading to the gilded sword, the best version of the sword you can get in the game and one of my favorites, helping out around Romani Ranch.

Did Link ever learn the importance of "Klaatu-Barada-Nikto"?

I love the whole '50's sci-fi approach to the creatures that invade Romani Ranch on the night of the first day. From the design of the aliens, that are beamed down by a giant ball of light, to the thermin-esque music that accompanies the early morning battle with the cow-stealing extra-terrestrials. So instead of Mars Needs Women, it's Mars Needs Bovines? Why would aliens come once a year to steal cows? Do they just make enough jerky to last the year? Regardless of ridiculous plots, it's a fun side quest to play. From there it's on to racing the brothers at Ingo Ranch to grab the Garu Mask, get the Bunny Hood, and safely stave off raiders from grabbing a milk shipment. Along with the Don Gero Mask and Kamaro's Mask, I managed to nab five masks in that three day cycle.
I started a new cycle after that, but only played far enough to get the Zora mask. You know that Zora Mikau was one hell of a rocker if he spent the last of his energy to spend his final moments improvising a song to tell you what happened. That's hardcore.

As a side note, I believe I'm going to make Friday the weekly Zelda day until I finish playing through these games. I figured those of you who read this blog would appreciate more variety in subject matter. I think I'll try to have two other blogs per week besides the Nerdy News on Thursday and Zelda Retrospective on Friday, perhaps with the odd TV, movie, music or game review here and there. I hope you guys enjoy the rejuvenated Smashing the Gnat.

The Nerdy News Blog - October 21st

2010-10-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

So where shall we start? Oh yes, the thing I just read a few minutes ago.

Martin Freeman Confirmed as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit

Unfortunately, Bilbo's not a pirate. But this picture makes me wish he was.

Holy hell, holy hell, holy hell! It's always awesome when you're top choice for a role in a movie you've been waiting for is exactly the guy you want! No, but seriously. Whenever I'd thought about The Hobbit, I saw Martin Freeman. He's short. I've only seen him in roles where he seems generally bewildered. And best of all, he has an actually English accent! Unlike Elijah Wood. They also announced who was playing the eight dwarfs who, along with Gandalf (Ian McKellan will be reprising the role for the two movies that make up The Hobbit), whisk Bilbo away. But honestly, who gives a crap about the dwarves? I can't remember their names even. Plus I didn't recognize a single one of the actors' names who play them. So whatever.

The Hulk is Coming to TV... Again

The Hulk's first job as a go-go dancer didn't end happily. One drunken night with Thor can ruin everything.

Part of Disney's purchase of Marvel Comics has led the two companies to work on taking some of Marvel's properties to ABC. Amongst the possible series the companies were considering was The Punisher, The Eternals and, the one I wish would get made - Moon Knight. But ultimately, two shows were decided on. One involving young heroes Cloak and Dagger, that will be called, go figure, Cloak and Dagger, to be aired on ABC Family. The Hulk was previously the subject of a quite successful TV series in the 1980's, and Disney/Marvel is hoping to create another hit. This will make the fourth actor to play Bruce Banner in less than ten years, including Eric Bana, Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo (who will appear in The Avengers in 2012). Everybody ready for some more ripped purple shorts?

Screenwriters Finally Begin Writing the Script for the Next Star Trek

Yaaaaaaaay!

Do I need to say anything else? I just hope they don't use Khan for the villain. I want to see some Klingons.

There won't be any of this guy though. Probably just as well anyway.

Fin.

Four TV Shows That I'm (Still) Royally Pissed Got Canceled

2010-10-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

1. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Dear Thomas Dekker, thanks for being less of a whiny bastard than Edward Furlong.

To this day, when I see someone who was on this wonderfully well done continuation of the Terminator franchise (set in an alternate universe where the events of the third and fourth movies didn't happen). Often, I end up pleading at the television set, "You're supposed to be on Sarah Connor Chronicles!" And then I get depressed. And then I get angry at Fox for pulling the rug out for what was a truly wonderful example of science-fiction on TV.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles wasn't just good for the Terminator franchise, it was just plain good. The show had solid writing, great acting (especially from Summer Glau as Cameron, the terminator sent to protect John) and surprisingly good special effects for a television show. It didn't pull punches and make sure your favorite characters survived every episode. A couple of my favorites got taken out with little ceremony. There was one particular "Bang, you're dead" moment toward the end of the second season that was particularly shocking. If you enjoyed the Terminator movies but didn't watch the show, you ought to check it out.
Be warned, though, a huge part of my ire is that the show's producers decided to take a risk by ending the second season with a huge cliffhanger. I repeat: a huge cliffhanger. And how did Fox respond? Oh, yes, they canceled it. Bastards.
On the bright side, the show's stars and producers have apparently been trying for the last year to get Warner Brothers to let them make a direct-to-DVD movie that would wrap-up the loose ends of the series. Though there hasn't been much in the way of developments in that regard. Sad face.

2. Firefly

Oh, come on, like you didn't see this coming. I'm sure this is on everybody's lists of "Got Canceled too soon." I actually never watched Firefly while it was on the air. Before last summer, I'd seen a couple episodes in reruns on The Channel Formerly Known as Sci-Fi and I saw Serenity when it hit theaters and enjoyed it. I probably would have liked it better had I been more familiar with the show.
How did it get canceled? Seriously, it was essentially a western set in space with extremely memorable and likable characters. The cast was top notch, with awesome actors like Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk and the aforementioned Summer Glau (who sadly is pulling double-duty on this list).

I'm actually going as Jayne for Halloween. True story. I just wish I had the hat. You know the one I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, Firefly suffered from a bad case of the common Fox-Is-A-Bunch-Of-Idiots. The network said the original pilot wasn't action packed enough and was essentially "too smart" and it showed the crew as being a little morally dubious for dealing with a villain like Niska (played with a large amount of creepyness by Michael Fiarman) to hook people in. So Joss Whedon wrote and filmed "The Train Job." While it was the third episode in the series chronologically, it was aired first. It's a great episode, but it left people somewhat confused because they weren't introduced to the characters properly. Then, to add insult to injury, Fox aired the whole series out of order. And they showed it on Fridays - a night that nobody wants. Small wonder it didn't make it past 14 episodes.
On the bright side, we did get a very fun movie, Serenity, that served as a sequel to the series and allowed us to get some closure to some of the story arcs of the series. However, hardly anybody went to see it and Universal lost a bunch of money on it, so we've probably seen the last of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and the rest of the crew (that survived the movie).

3. Star Trek: Enterprise

Ah, the often-maligned Enterprise. I grew up on Star Trek, and Paramount was eager to keep producing more when Voyager came to a close. What came next was Enterprise, a prequel that precedes the original Star Trek by a little over 100 years. Starring Dr. Sam Beckett himself, Scott Bakula, as Captain Jonathan Archer, the series got off to a rocky start. But anybody who's familiar with the various spin-offs of the Star Trek franchise knows that all of the spin-offs generally didn't hit their strides until the third season (though I still contend that Deep Space 9 was very good even in its first season). Combine that with the fact that thousands of infantile Trekkies who thought that Enterprise violated their sacred canon who boycotted the show out of principal, and that led to less than stellar ratings. But then, Enterprise was on UPN, which was never a ratings powerhouse (and shortly after the cancellation of Enterprise, it merged with the WB Network to become The CW - a terrible name for a TV channel, if you ask me).

There's a whole lot of swagger on that bridge. But we all know we're looking at the Vulcan. The sexy, sexy Vulcan.

Enterprise is the longest running of all the shows on this list, with a whole 98 episodes under its belt. It definitely did not start strong like Sarah Connor or Firefly. But as the show progressed, the writing and characterization got stronger and stronger. The second season saw some really strong episodes, and then the producers took a risk with the third season. Instead of an episodic story structure, the show launched a season-long arc in which the crew had to go into an explored sector of space to pursue an group of aliens responsible for a Sept. 11th-like attack on Earth. This got into some dark, Deep Space 9 like story-telling involving torture and other morally dubious actions taken by Captain Archer. The fourth season was one of the best seasons of Star Trek ever, but most people stopped watching the show in the first or second season. Even with a new producer and new two to three episode arcs that bridged gaps and explained many mysteries of the Star Trek canon (like why Klingons in the original series didn't have ridges on their head), the show just didn't have the ratings to survive. So, for the first time since the original series, a Star Trek show got canceled. This cancellation, combined with the poor performance of Star Trek: Nemesis, the last outing for the Next Generation crew, did lead to the JJ Abrams reboot that came out in 2009.
But, with Enterprise canceled in 2005, I found myself without new Star Trek to look forward to every season for first time in my life. Le sigh.

4. Dollhouse

I didn't even watch Dollhouse, save for the pilot episode which left me feeling it was a little lackluster. So why should I be pissed that it got canceled? Well, take a look back at the first entry, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Dollhouse premiered while Sarah Connor was in it's second (and final) season. Dollhouse consistently got lower ratings than Sarah Connor and less critical praise. However, when it came time to renew for the next season, Fox decided to go with Dollhouse, because Fox's own studios produced Dollhouse, whereas Sarah Connor was produced by Warner Brothers and sold to Fox to air on their network. Apparently, it was more cost effective to keep making Dollhouse than to keep paying Warner Bros. for the rights to air the episodes. Plus, Fox would make money off DVD sales of Dollhouse while Warner Bros. got the DVD sales for Sarah Connor.
So, Sarah Connor didn't get a third season, while Dollhouse got a second season. And what happened at the end of its second season? Oh. Yeah. It got canceled. Way to go Fox. Morons. Notice a trend in who canceled these shows?

I'm so bitter at you, Dollhouse, that all you get is a caption without a picture.

I might give Dollhouse another shot, since it was created by Joss Whedon, the man behind Firefly (and who will direct The Avengers due out in 2012). But for now, I'm content with being bitter, thanks very much.

I was working on another post, but I ended up doing this all day today...

2010-10-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

I made this:

Look like this:
I'll tell you I did it to fit better with the Halloween costume I'm working on. However, that would be a lie. I've been wanting to customize this sucker for a while.

God I'm a nerd.

Tomorrow's post shall be: Four TV Shows I'm (Still) Pissed Got Canceled.

I Hate Zombies... But For Some Reason, I Love Them.

2010-10-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

Let's be clear, folks. Ever since I was a kid, the very thought of zombies scared the ever-loving bejeezus out of me. Think about it. A terrible plague of what used to be people, hording about in search of human flesh and/or brains to consume. Mindless, merciless killing machines whose bite can turn friend into ravenous foe. That's scary as hell if you consider what it would be like if it actually happened. I still have nightmares about the zombie apocalypse. In fact, I had one just last week where I managed to lead a band of survivors to safety only to have a little girl who was with us turn into a zombie and bite me before I woke up. I was so rattled that I had to read a couple chapters of a novel just to settle my mind.
So what spawned my fear of the undead in my youth? Well, I chalk it up to two reasons: a general fear of cannibalism (my skin crawls any time I think about real life examples of man-on-man dining) and Zombies Ate My Neighbors, developed by LucasArts and released by Konami on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis in 1993.

Oh, my dear SNES game, how you would haunt me so.

Now, I'm sure that many of you have fond memories of this cult classic. Hell, even I do. My sister and I used to play it in co-operative mode all the time. It wasn't scary in any real way. In fact, it was quite goofy. Zombies would explode if hit with spray from a squirt gun and lobbing six packs of soda was akin to hurling a grenade. So how could this unassuming shooter cause me more than a decade of fear of zombies? It was the screams. You see, the point of the game was to go through the levels, rescuing innocent people before the vicious zombies, werewolves, axe murderers and other horror movie cliches could get to them. When you failed to rescue a survivor, a blood-curling scream would pierce through the speakers. My seven-year-old self simply couldn't stand those screams, and I would race to rescue the survivors as quickly as possible simply to avoid hearing it. Yeah, my seven-year-old self was a total wuss.
But now, fifteen years have passed since those wussy times. These days, I find myself playing all manner of video games involving large amounts of zombies. Games like Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, the "Nazi Zombies" portion of Call of Duty: World at War, and even Plants vs. Zombies are commonly found running on my XBox 360. However, I still avoid zombies movies like the plague, save for a few "Zom-Coms" like Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead.

But how could you not love that face?

This got me thinking. Why am I so content to go about dealing second deaths to the undead in video games while I get squeamish when someone tries to play their DVD of 28 Days Later while I'm in the room?

"Control, control. You must learn control."

It's all psychological. It's all about being in charge of the action. My inner seven-year-old wuss doesn't like zombie movies because I'm forced to watch gruesome examples of cannibalism and mindless hordes chasing down the innocent survivors. Meanwhile, my twenty-two-year-old self takes glee mowing down legions of zombies with chainsaws, machine guns and adorable tulips. It's much easier to take on these creatures of my nightmares in a scenario when I can actively affect the outcome. I can defend myself from the horde in a video game, and though I might get killed on occasion, I always can try again (Except for when I get left behind in Left 4 Dead. Thanks a lot for doing that, you bastards). With a movie, I can't do anything about what happens to anyone. I have no control over whether the zombies get the person I identify with most, which freaks me out.

Crap, I hope writing this blog entry doesn't give me nightmares tonight...

I know I'm not the only one who shares these feelings. Zombies at their core represent a fear of losing our individual selves through developing a distinct desire to go "nom-nom" on brains. George Romero might have presented zombies as a commentary on American consumerism in his film Dawn of the Dead, but I think zombies resonate with people as a primal fear more than a clever social commentary. Let's face it, we'd all probably lose our minds if we came home to find our families in the process of making meals out of each others faces. It makes them an extremely effective villain for any media, and especially in video games, because we don't feel guilty about killing that unassuming guy in the business suit, since he's chewing on what used to be your girlfriend's foot.
I know I'm not the only one afraid of zombies. I know I'm not the only one who's thought extensively about what he would do in case the so-called "zombocalypse" ever actually happened. I'll be the guy who's either so prepared that he'll kick ass or so scared out of his mind that he's the first to go. Not really sure. But if they get me, remember, aim for the head. And be smart, don't get any zombie blood on you - just in case.

It's been a while...

2010-10-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try to get back in the game on this thing. I got distracted by finishing college last year and I've just never picked it up again. More to come soon.

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 2

2009-10-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this entry covers a play through of three of the three-day cycles. The first two devoted to early side quests Clock Town and the third to taking care of the main quest and some side quests in the Southern Swamp.
The first two cycles would have been all in one, except I accidentally played the Song of Double Time, which warped me ahead to the next morning, instead of playing the Inverted Song of Time, which would have halved time's speed. Oops.
So I missed out on trying to complete one of the things I wanted to do: stop the thief from stealing the old lady's bag full of bombs. I wanted to make sure I got the Exploding Mask from her and the big bomb bag from the shop, so I ended up starting a new cycle later on to nab that before I quit playing that night.
One thing that makes Majora's Mask stand out from Ocarina of Time is that the large bulk of this game is made up of sidequests like that. It almost seems appropriate, since this is a side story. I remember, back in 1999-2000, before they announced the official name of the game, Nintendo referred to it as Zelda Gaiden. "Gaiden" is the Japanese term for "side story."
Some might argue that the amount of side quests in this game borders on the ridiculous, since there are only four main dungeons in the entire game, as opposed to Ocarina of Time's eight dungeons.
I feel that the side quests, especially the stuff you do to complete the Bomber's Notebook, like helping Anju and Kafei or protecting the ranch from alien invasion and wannabe-ninja raids help to flesh out the story world more. These quests let you get to know the characters in more intimate detail. To me, the emotional connection you create with these characters creates a greater sense of urgency. As I get to know the characters, the more I want to stop the moon from falling, because these people are just trying to go about their lives. The situation in Termina is not like what it was in Hyrule in Ocarina of Time. There, people knew the score. Ganondorf had taken over and people managed to adapt their lives to work around that. In Termina, people don't know what to do or what to think. A force beyond their understanding is at work and they don't know how to react. Though, I almost wish that Nintendo would have gone as far as making things much more chaotic in that final day, and shown us more of people fleeing from Clock Town. But that might have been a direction too dark for what they wanted to do.
In any case, I filled out some of these side quests and proceeded on to the Southern Swamp.
There, we had our now-standard sneak-into-a-castle sequence. But this time it was turned on its heels. Now it was Link in the form of a Deku Scrub sneaking through the gardens of the Deku Palace to reach the accused kidnapper of a princess, rather than sneaking into Hyrule castle to rescue the princess herself from captivity. I always found that fact amusingly ironic.
Then it was on to the Windfall Temple. This is a short and sweet affair, meant more as a learning experience akin to the inside of the Deku Tree in Ocarina of Time. This dungeon definitely has a little more atmosphere to it than its predecessor. The place is riddled with poison water, floating flowers that try to eat you if you're not in the form of a Deku Scrub and one particular room that is both very dark and full of little monsters who are nothing more than black balls with glowing eyes. Also annoying are the vicious moths that follow any flame you create. Luckily, they will also follow the fuse of a bomb and are easily blown to little bits.
With the fifteen stray fairies collected (I hope whatever lead designer at Nintendo who allowed those things to get into the game looking and sounding like that should have his head examined), and the boss key and bow and arrows in hand, I went on to fight Odolwa.

To my recollection, this is the only Zelda boss to date who looked to be an extreme risk for a wardrobe malfunction. A loincloth and a mask aren't exactly high fashion. But then, I guess they were going for a kind of tribal motif with him. Between his costume, the constant chanting of his own name (what are you, a Pokemon?) and the dancing, they hit the mark.
Odolwa is actually pretty satisfying as a first boss of the game. He's not too hard, but he's not a pushover. I mean, sure, he employs large bugs and fleshing-eating moths to do his dirty work after you smack him around a bit, but look at that sword! Link's barely taller than its hilt. It's hard to avoid damage in this battle, too, because of how chaotic it becomes in the latter stages. By this point, Odolwa is constantly summoning his bugs and moths to come after him, so you're struggling to get rid of them (luckily there are an abundance of bomb flowers around) while also trying to get in some arrow and sword hits on him. It can get a little hairy, especially if you haven't collected any extra heart pieces.
With Odolwa's dancing days over (sorry Kevin Bacon, looks like John Lithgow won this round), we meet the giant whose spirit was possessed by the ill-dressed tribesman. Once again, Nintendo's designers got a little weird. The giants are nothing but jaw-less heads with really long arms and legs and no body. I think they could have come up with something better than that, but beggars can't be choosers. The giants and the stray fairies look really weird and I just have to deal with it.
I took a little time afterward to collect a few heart pieces, bringing my container count up to six and then called it a day by playing the Song of Time and quitting.
So the next round will involve going north to visit the Gorons and meet the most articulate baby rock-eater ever.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 1

2009-10-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhh!!! Two posts in two days?! Holy crap! What's wrong with the world? There's fire and brimstone! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
Anyway, yes, I managed to find some time in my somewhat delirious sleep-deprived state to start playing The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated of all the Zelda games. There are exceptions, but it seems like whenever the subject of Zelda games comes up amongst friends and acquaintances, I hear the phrase, "I loved the Zelda games, except for Majora's Mask."
When I ask why, it always seems to be an answer like, "It's just weird," or "I really hated that time gimmick, it annoyed me having to start over all the time."
Yes, it is definitely a departure from the standard narrative structure of the other games in the series, but the originality of its gameplay and tone is what makes Majora's Mask so endearing to me.
From the opening title cinematic and into the first three day cycle of the game, especially in Link's initial pursuit of Skull Kid, the game sets up a moody and atmospheric take on the world set up by Ocarina of Time. There is a much more surreal quality to things here. In some ways, it's almost reminiscent of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam, where things are both dark and absurd simultaneously. The game mixes in a lot more character drama (like the infamously long Anju & Kafei side quest), more humor (like the absolute bizarreness of the Mask Salesman) to the slightly disturbing (the mask transformation sequences or just the fact that so many people are going about their lives idly when the world is literally about to end).
In the terms of gameplay, I find Majora's Mask to be vastly interesting. It takes the now tried-and-true formula of Ocarina of Time and adds extra mechanics like the mask transformations and the time cycle to give it a unique feel. While, yes, it can be a little tedious to have to worry about the passage of time so much, I think it gives the game a dramatic urgency that was unprecedented and has never been replicated quite the same way in the series.
But that's enough of my prattling on, let's get to tonight's play time.
I admit, I find the first three day cycle in the game to be very annoying. Essentially, it consists of a few small fetch quests and then a whole lot of waiting. Plus, you have to play through until you can get the Ocarina of Time and reset the clock to save, or you lose all of your progress. If you already have a decent familiarity with the game, you can complete every task you have to do before the dawn of the second day, leaving a lot of time to have nothing to do. So I went around filling the time with talking to people (which I quickly remembered actually freezes the clock) or trying to find ways of making the time pass faster (like having dance parties with the scarecrow or having the old lady in the inn tell you stories).
Very quickly, we get a sense of the tension this game tries to instill. The urgency of the sped-up Clock Town music on Day 3 and the fact that we can actually watch the moon get bigger really adds a lot to this sense. It is odd that Skull Kid is so easy to stun in the first confrontation with him. One bubble hit does the trick. It would have been nice if this had been a little more like a boss fight, since this is the first time there's anything resembling combat in the game. Oh well, I'm about nine years too late for suggestions.
Also, we learn early on that Link has gotten far more agile since the end of Ocarina of Time. Look at those back flips!
I will say, I'm a little annoyed with the lag issues on the Zelda Collector's Edition GameCube disc that I'm playing the game on (on my Wii), but I long ago gave my N64 and copy of Majora's Mask to my sister.
I suppose that will be it for tonight, my delirium is growing and I need some sleep. I'll hopefully get some more game time in sometime soon, but it definitely won't be tomorrow. The Righs have a gig in Tulsa with The Toasters.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 6

2009-10-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, yeah. It's been a month and a half since the last update. This semester has been pretty busy for me, despite the fact I made this schedule convinced it would be an absolute breeze. I could have gotten to this sooner, but a lot of my down time has ended up being spent with friends, off doing things away from my apartment, watching Hulu or working on my next novel project, so I haven't really been playing much in the way of video games. There's even been plenty of movies and TV shows that I've seen that I could have blogged about but didn't for reasons unknown, like Zombieland (awesome), Surrogates (meh), Stargate Universe (it's trying to be both the next Stargate and the next Battlestar Galactica) and Flashforward (pretty interesting so far, though the writing is a little haphazard at times).
That being the case, I suppose this is really more of an "Ocarina of Time - Days 6-8" entry. Late one night following my last entry, I finished off the Shadow Temple. I got tired and decided to put off the entry until the next day, but things happened, as they often do, and it got back seated. I have since forgotten all the clever quips I had come up with about it.
Then, some time a few weeks ago, I sat down and went through the Spirit Temple. Again, I ended up putting off the entry. Sorry.
Today, however, I played through the entirety of Ganon's Castle.
I always found this section of the game relatively interesting. For one, we get a hodge-podge of the different dungeons from around the game, some of the rooms fitting the theme and some not so much. We get Shadow Temple elements in the Forest Barrier section, for example. Also, we get a glimpse at what the Light Temple, a dungeon originally planned for but ultimately scrapped in development, might have been like. It was very much like the Shadow Temple. Ironic.
I once again fell upon the muscle memory I've developed over the many times I've played Ocarina of Time and breezed through to Ganondorf. A few of the rupee collecting rooms, namely the ones in the Forest, Fire and Shadow sections gave me a few problems due to a few misplaced jumps that led to automatic restart of the room.
One touch that I've always loved about ascending the staircases toward Ganondorf is the way the ominous organ music builds in volume as you get closer to your destination. It's a very nice touch.
Maybe if Ganondorf had invested all his energy into music, he could have brought world peace like Bill and Ted were supposed to with Wyld Stallions? But no, the water pollution ruined that chance.
So, Ganondorf gives his obligatory villain monologue, we had our little tennis match and then he was down. Another detail Nintendo did a good job on is how you can see holes appear in Ganondorf's cape as you do more damage to it. I'm sure if it were an M-rated game, we'd be seeing holes in more than just his cape, but, then, who really wants to see an M-rated Zelda game? It'd be a bad business move for one. But I digress.
As I played the escape sequence, an idea which I bet the developers got from Metroid, I found myself getting typically annoyed with Zelda's incessant gasps as flaming rocks hit me. We passed that one annoyingly placed ReDead and then that part was over.
Then Ganondorf turns into Ganon, I shoot him in the face, hit him in the tail, rinse, and repeat until he's down. Really, after playing this game as many times as I have, fighting Ganondorf and Ganon is just a little boring. All the challenge is gone. Oh well, I still love the game.
One thing that particularly interests me is the ending of the game, wherein two separate time lines are created. There's the one in which Ganondorf succeeds in taking over and is defeated seven years later by Link and Zelda, and then the one created after Zelda sends Link back to his original time and then, presumably, goes to warn Zelda about what will happen. The sci-fi nerd in me loves this kind of stuff.
So from here, it's on to Majora's Mask, which I feel is the most underrated of the Zelda games. Not sure when I'll get a start on that, but I'll try to make it soon.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 5

2009-09-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, I'm very sorry for not posting in so long. I started getting really busy around the time of the last post with friends, birthday plans, band activities like recording and gigs and then school. I doubt I'll be posting as regularly and I might have to condense future posts in the series based on weeks and not days. I'm not quite sure yet. Anyway, on to the brief time I played Ocarina of Time today, before I set off to work on school work.
My hour-or-so jaunt through the land of Hyrule today was rather uneventful. I went through the somewhat arduous trading process that results in obtaining the Biggoron Sword. Now, in no way is the sword a necessary item for the game, it definitely comes in handy. If you equip it and Nayru's Love while fighting the Iron Knuckles that appear later in the game, you can definitely dispatch them much more quickly and easily. It's definitely more handy in Master Quest, where you encounter a lot more Iron Knuckles.
There's some definite weirdness going on with the trading process. I mean, the "punk guy" who you give the blue Cucco, Cojiro, to is odd enough looking as it is for a Hylian. And the relationship he has with his mother, the "old hag behind the potion shop," seems a little less than loving.
But it's the Kokiri girl who takes the punk guy's place that's the worst. She gives me the creeps, man.
She just looks up at you with that weird little grin and says, "That guy isn't here anymore. Anybody who comes into the forest will be lost. Everybody will become a Stalfos. Everybody, Stalfos. So, he's not here anymore. Only his saw is left. Hee hee."
Yeah, creepy.
Of course, if you talk to her again, she goes on to speculate whether or not you will become a Stalfos too. More creepy. Seriously, what's with that girl?
Then it's off to give a saw to the head carpenter, punk guy's father. From there, the prescription for eye drops, the eyeball frog (which the doctor at the lake wants to turn into fried eyeballs... okay...) and then the drops themselves. It's the last one that can be a pain. Getting the drops to Biggoron requires some pre-planning, because without the strategic placement of a magic bean plant at the mouth of Dodongo's Cavern, you might not make it in time before the eyedrops expire.
So, I got the Biggoron sword after playing the Sun's Song a bunch of times. I mean, really, do you expect me to sit around and wait for three days to pass naturally in-game? Hell no.
Then it was on to nab the Lens of Truth. This is where things are a little stupid. They set up the Well as sort of it's own little mini-dungeon, but the truth is, all you have to do is go in, play Zelda's Lullaby to drain the moat, crawl through the hole at the bottom of the pool up front, go through the door, fight the Dead Hand and get the Lens. There's absolutely no need to go into any other room besides nabbing any Gold Skulltulas that might be lurking about. Master Quest had it right in that you had to go through the whole thing to get to the Lens of Truth. Oh well, at least I've got it.Huzzah, I can see through bullshit now! If only I had one of those in real life...

- Nate

P.S. - I totally stole the fisherman's hat while I was getting the Gold Scale. Ha!

Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 4

2009-08-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not adding to this in a while. It's been kind of a busy week.

Okay, let's face it. Pretty much everybody hates the Water Temple, even after all these years. The layout makes it hard to remember where you've already been, especially if you made like me this time around and forgot to get the map until late in the dungeon. When you realize you're going to have to lower the water level to get that small key you need and then raise it back all the way to get where you need to go, it's just aggravating.Then, there's the boss, Morpha, another prime example of Hyrule's water pollution woes. I mean, if we're talking nutrient pollution, then all kinds of nasty critters can grow in the water. This guy's pretty much the king of them all. Seriously, people of Hyrule, you need to learn the ways of modern water treatment. Or sue the Zora's for polluting upriver. I bet the EPA would help out in that matter.
I don't know what it was about the fight with Morpha this time around, but it took forever. I think it took me ten minutes to beat him because I just could seem to reel him in with the Longshot and get any more than one sword slash in at a time. Normally this is quick and easy. I even fell in the water a couple of times and got picked up and thrown around by a water arm. I was just off my game.
Also, a bit of a dungeon plot-hole. Where did Ruto go after you run into her? Seriously, there should have been some sort of "Ahh! A creature created by the wanton pollution of water done by my people is grabbing me! Help Link!" or something. She just tells you that she'll lead the way, then she disappears.
In fact, after the way Link literally carries her most of the way through Jabu-Jabu's Belly, it would have been nice to have her tagging along and helping Link in some way. You know, marriage is a partnership and Ruto was pretty hung up about being engaged to Link. She should have shown that she could be a supportive wife. But, no, when Link's off doing the heroics, she probably just ran off to spend his ruppees at the Water Temple's gift shop. Looks like Link dodged a bullet when Ruto became a sage and the whole thing was called off. Aquatic women, hmph. Who needs them?

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 3

2009-08-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Questions for Link:
Question: Who changed your clothes and pierced your ear while he slept for seven years? Did Rauru just get really bored? Or does he like to play dress up? Oh jeez, I don't want to think about what else he might have done to you, you poor man.
Question: Just how awful was the seven-year-old half-a-bottle of Lon Lon Milk that you just drank?
Question: Have the fairies not wised up and pushed for some kind of Geneva Convention-esque deal where they write an agreement that it's against inalienable fairy rights to be imprisoned inside a glass container for an indefinite amount of time without a fair and proper trial?
Question: Where do you keep all that stuff? Seriously? Deep pockets? Or other, less pleasant places?

Link's Answer: "..."
I went through the Forest Temple and the Fire Temple today, rather productive. The version of Ocarina of Time on the GameCube disc is the last version that was released. When I played the game on my old N64, I had one of the early cartridges that still had the Muslim chant with the Fire Temple music. That was way cooler than the pretty much non-existant music that's on this version of the game. I was totally humming the chant as I was playing the Fire Temple. Sometimes political correctness can be kind of lame. Oh well.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 2

2009-08-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

[NOTE: This blog is totally tongue-in-cheek, don't think I'm actually serious about this.]

I have a hypothesis to put forth.
All the troubles in Hyrule, were not caused by the evils of Ganondorf. The races of Hyrule have not suffered from generation to generation, game to game, due to the lust for power of one man.

The true culprit here is water pollution.

I came to this conclusion as I was exploring the Zora's Domain and talking with the locals, as I habitually do even though it's nothing I haven't heard before.
FACT: A Zora in the game claims that all water in Hyrule flows from the Zora's Fountain, where Lord Jabu-Jabu resides.
Now, let me get this straight - a giant whale-thing lives right on the mouth of the water source for an entire country, where all it does is apparently eat large amounts of food that are given to it by the Zoras? Well, what happens when any creature ingests food? It comes out the other side. So we've got Jabu-Jabu fouling up the water with his excrements right at the start. Then the water flows into Zora's Domain. And what happens in the Zora's Domain, the Zora's have to relieve themselves somewhere. There's more water pollution right there.
So all the water in Hyrule is filled with Jabu-Jabu and Zora crap.
We know that nutrient pollution in water can cause abundances of parasites like hookworms, bacteria and toxic algal blooms. These don't cause deformities in Humans, but we're talking Hyrule here, land of the Hylians, Zoras and Gerudos. Gorons are apparently not effected by these problems, because they apparently don't need water, just rocks. And let's face it, they're weird enough as it is for that fact alone.
Could Jabu-Jabu-Poo have been the reason why Gerudos can only produce one male every 100 years? Perhaps. Is an abundance of toxins making Hylians (and perhaps Zoras) a little less than bright? Quite possibly.
Case in point: Dampe. Look at him and tell me some part of your brain doesn't play "Dueling Banjos." [Yes, I realize the screenshot's from Majora's Mask.]Another example, somebody would have to be a little less than bright than to start a business where people have to swim through a lake to get there and then pay to fish. I mean, forcing your customer to swim just to get to your location is a little absurd as is, but when a customer has to pay to fish when there's a freaking lake right outside, that's just bad business. No wonder you were so surprised to see a customer in there, dude. It might also explain the baldness.

Another example is the poor business decision of the Zora who runs the diving game. I mean, okay, first you make someone pay twenty ruppees to dive what has to be sixty or seventy feet into three meters of water and then dive for twenty-five ruppees which they get to keep and then you give them a prize. So on top of risking lawsuits for endangering your customers, the ones that actually survive their swan dives would have a fairly easy time of making a little extra cash from you and then get a prize from you. Zora dude, I don't see how you can possibly make money this way.
Yet another example are the poor senses of sight and hearing of Hylian guards. I mean, seriously, you can make so much noise around them and they still just don't notice you. You can even blow up a bomb and they just stand there twiddling their thumbs.
There you have it. Water pollution. That is the greatest evil of all the Zelda games. I applaud Nintendo for making such an environmentally conscience game.

Anyway, I collected a few more pieces of heart and beat Jabu-Jabu tonight and nabbed the Master Sword before I quit. I'm sitting at nine hearts and ready to go get the Hookshot tomorrow before tackling the Forest Temple and maybe the Fire Temple as well.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 1

2009-08-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

I have arrived, my friends, at the game that started my love of Zelda. In fact, it was the game that probably started the love of many Zelda fans around the world. Many have called it the greatest game of all time, and I can often see why.

Let me be straight with you folks. I have played Ocarina of Time so many times that I have this game memorized. I don't need walkthroughs (unless I'm trying to find all 100 Gold Skulltulas, something I've yet to ever take the time to do) because my brain is its own walkthrough. This is a game that I always come back to. When I got a GameCube and my sister wanted my N64, I refused to give it up until I had ensured that I could play Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask via GameCube discs. I could give up the system, but I couldn't stand the thought of not being able to play the games any time I wanted.
Before I booted up the disc today, I was convinced that I wouldn't have much to say on the game. I can't make all kinds of jokes about my desperation at the game's difficulty, because Ocarina of Time has long since stopped being difficult for me. There's no longer a way for me to accurately gauge the game's difficulty. Also, since I've played the game all the way through before, I was afraid I'd have little to comment on because there was nothing new for me to experience.
So it surprised me that, when I started playing today, it felt as if I was playing with fresh eyes.
I guess having just played through the first Zelda game, trying to get through the second and failing, and then playing through A Link to the Past, I suddenly saw what this game might have seemed like to people who had played through the other Zelda games and then booted up Ocarina of Time for the first time in 1998. In comparison to the 2D originals, this game is simply breathtaking. It completely revamped the gameplay and came with a gorgeous presentation with far more detail and story to it than any Zelda game before.
I found myself realizing just how much more was put into this game than its predecessors. Many of the side characters began to take on personalities of their own, since they had more than just one or two lines of dialog through the whole game. The game takes time to establish exposition and makes you more fully understand why your quest is so important and what the stakes are.
The first time I ran out onto Hyrule Field and realized I had this huge open space to run around in without having screens scrolling over to the next area of the field was glorious. I simply felt that I was more free and unrestricted within the game world.
It really was like seeing with fresh eyes and I did not expect that feeling at all.
In any case, in the three hours I played today, I beat the first two dungeons, gathered about six heart pieces and killed off a fair amount of Gold Skulltulas and got the adult's wallet. Pretty good for three hours, but then, I know what I'm doing.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part IV: A Link to the Past - Day 5

2009-08-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

"Total Games Played - 054"
The End.

So I died that many times? Thirteen times in Skull Dungeon. Nine in Misery Mire. Seven in Ice Palace. Only five in Ganon's Tower. I didn't quite catch the whole count, but damn, this one turned out to have taken more effort than I'd imagined. Still, totally worth it. After all the pain and frustration of Zelda II, this one was very fun.
I revved up the ol' Virtual Console to discover that I was wrong, I hadn't actually beaten the sixth Dark World dungeon, which I now know to be called Misery Mire. I had gotten to the boss, but hadn't actually beaten him. So I went back in and found that my measly sword swipes weren't cutting it. So I looked up potential upgrades, and whaddya know, I never got my sword tempered at the smiths'. Upon my return to that boss with my new red sword, I cut his balls off. His eyeballs, that is.
Dungeon seven, Turtle Rock, was a bit of a pain in the ass, but I got through. I had another case of finally reaching the boss only to get wiped out once again. I just dislike having to retrace my steps all the time (except for in Metroid, but even then it gets kind of annoying). I took out that big old fire/ice rock-turtle and set my sights on Ganon's Tower, which was conveniently right next door. Funny that a rock turtle would be in Turtle Rock, who'd have thought?
Ganon's Tower was kind of hard to navigate around, and thank God for the red mail to reduce my damage more. Enemies that take three hearts from you for one hit are a little bit ridiculous. Once I finally found my way to the big key, everything else went by pretty smooth, and I managed to beat Aganhim with little difficulty. But wouldn't you know it? It turned out that damned wizard bastard was just Ganon in disguise (and before you roll your eyes at me, I knew, it was just a little joke).
Fighting Ganon in the pyramid proved to be a little annoying. Not because of Game Overs, but because I kept getting knocked off the arena. Unfortunately, getting knocked off means restarting the whole battle. Once I beat him, I realized that a couple of the times I got knocked off, I was probably about one more Silver Arrow hit away from killing him. Damn.
But soon he was dead, and the Essence of the Triforce spoke to me - which was weird cause I don't remember the Triforce ever speaking before. Then I got some flybys over Hyrule, seeing what people were up to now that peace reigned once again. Cute.
So where does this game stand in my analyses? Well, it definitely went much further than the original in establishing the Zelda mythology. I can't speak for Zelda II, since I wussed out on it. A lot of the hallmarks that would appear in the progressively more substantial Zelda narratives made their first appearances here. That Ganon, the King of Evil, was once Ganondorf, the King of Thieves, is first mentioned here. References to the Seven Sages appeared, though they were the Seven Wise Men in this chapter of the Zelda franchise. The wishes granted by the Triforce appear here. All that we now consider the classic elements of a Zelda story are here. While the rest of the main Zelda games would take their gameplay cues from Ocarina of Time, they would all take their story cues from A Link to the Past.
Speaking of Ocarina of Time, that's coming up next.

- Nate

P.S., While I was searching for screenshots to put up on here, I found this picture.

I'm sorry, but the nerd in me would have to take a double-take at that tramp stamp.

Zelda Retrospective: Part IV: A Link to the Past - Day 4

2009-07-31T10:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, I've been a little remiss in posting this blog. Been a crazy few days filled with laziness, a party, some fried chicken and some Shakespeare. Okay, maybe not crazy. Mainly just lazy. It still has "-azy" in it.
In the meantime since the last post, I've tackled the fifth and sixth dungeons in the Dark World, used a walkthrough, only to find heart pieces, I swear, and discovered the Waterfall of Wishing and upgraded my shield and boomerang. Sweet.
The icy fifth dungeon located in the middle of Lake Hylia once again saw a themed dungeon similar to the ones that would come along in later Zelda games.
Things I hated about the fifth Dark World dungeon:
1. No traction! There were several rooms where I was going through and just wanted to go up or down the stairs. But, try as I might, Link just couldn't quite line himself up right in order to use said stairs because the ice had him sliding all over the place. Very annoying.
2. Green, fanged penguins. What assholes.
3. The fact that I just kept getting lost! I'd die thanks to those damned penguins or some other thing and I just could never seem to find my way back to where I wanted to go.
Things I liked about the fifth Dark World Dungeon:
1. There's only one. The boss was ridiculously easy, so it was just a breath of fresh air to have worked so hard to get all the way to him and not have to die four times to beat him. Though I was a little concerned when I found him frozen over and was kind of low on magic with no potion to replenish it. I started shooting the Fire Rod and on the very last bit of magic I used, the boss thawed out. I would have been have been pissed if I had to leave just to get more magic.

After that I did some heart collection and then found my way over the the big swamp, where the desert is in the Light World. Upon entering this dungeon, I had a little bit of Post Traumatic Stress. Why? Because populating the large, main rooms of this dungeon were beasts that bore a strong resemblance to Horsehead, the first boss from Zelda II. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I discovered that they were easy to kill, taking only one or two sword swipes depending on their color. So I went on a Horsehead killing spree to gain some slight vengeful satisfaction from the suffering of that reverse-Centaur race of creature. Bastards.
This dungeon turned out to be moderately easy in comparison to some of the other dungeons, I had it figured out pretty well, and once I found the nifty Cane of Somaria, the last bits I couldn't get through came together and I went off to fight yet another floating eyeball boss.
Then a thought occured to me: Why were the developers so obsessed with floating eyeballs for bosses? There are three of them in this game. Look for yourself!

So, now I can embark upon the quest to rescue the final maiden (Link's pimpin' in this one) and then tackle the final dungeon in the game after that. Then it'll be on to the game that started my love of Zelda, Ocarina of Time. Nice.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part IV: A Link to the Past - Day 3

2009-07-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

Question: Is Link's hair pink in A Link to the Past? I mean, I know it's reddish/blondish in the artwork for the game. But in Link's actual pixelated form in the game, is it, in fact, pink?
I mean, the pink could be his hair, or it could be his hat. But when Link gets turned into a rabbit in the Dark World, his fur is pink. Why do I seem so concerned about this? I have no idea. Simple curiosity, I guess.

Anyway, I'm glad to say that I've gone through A Link to the Past all the way to the end of the third dungeon in the Dark World (the one in the Lost Woods) without any advice from a guide. The game is harder than the other 2D Zelda's I've played prior to this series (i.e, Link's Awakening, Oracle of Ages, The Minish Cap), but I've managed to get through. I didn't get the flippers until I went into the 2nd Dark World dungeon, only to find that I need to be able to swim and I think it was sheer luck that I remembered somebody in Kakariko Village mentioning somewhere with Zoras where you could get the "power of a fish" or something like that. As it turns out, the first house I tried in Kakariko was that very guy. Then trying to find a route across the river to get to the Lost Woods in the Dark World proved to be time consuming until, after probably close to an hour of searching, I noticed a subtle arrow made of grass pointing across the river. I whipped out the Hookshot, and whaddyaknow, I got pulled across. Nice.
I also never realized the Hookshot had its origins in A Link to the Past (unless it was somewhere in Adventure of Link after the point where I quit). I had always thought it was new to Ocarina of Time. Hmm, well now I know.
I am finding it more difficult to get through dungeons without getting Game Over screens as well. Especially in the last two dungeons that I've completed, my Game Over count has dramatically risen. I imagine one is supposed to use the Fire Rod against the boss in the third Dark World dungeon, but I kept finding myself low on magic when I got there. And all the Wallmasters sending me back to the beginning where frustrating. There was one room in particular where there were two Gibdos, two blue, floaty electrical thingies and a switch that needed a statue pulled over it to open a door. Of course, you had to pull the statue through a narrow passage, leaving you very vulnerable to the Wallmasters above. I don't know how many times I had to redo that single room. I think some of the angry expressions I threw at Adventure of Link resurfaced for that one.
I need to track down those other two bottles so that I can keep more fairies. And I imagine that there's an upgraded shield somewhere too. If I could find more Pieces of Heart, that would be nice too. I'm debating whether to go to a guide just to get those extra side quest items in order to make the main quest easier.
The dungeon in the Lost Woods turned out to be a pain in the ass, but I was rather intrigued with how reminiscent it was of the Shadow Temple in Ocarina of Time, since it incorporated similar enemies - Wallmasters (which are even more annoying in this game than in Ocarina of Time), Gibdos, Stalfos and all those other undeadish-seeming enemies. It would seem that, like the Zelda games that would succeed it, A Link to the Past features themed dungeons, like the one I just finished.
Oh, and the Fire Rod? Much fun against Gibdos.

Zelda Retrospective: Part IV: A Link to the Past - Day 2

2009-07-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

“Well, that's no ordinary rabbit. That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on.”

-Tim the Enchanter - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Yes, I became a rabbit for a short time today. And after the debacle of Zelda II, I imagine that I was a foul, cruel and bad-tempered rodent.
Today is Day 2 of A Link to the Past and, boy, it feels good to be making progress in a game after trying to get through Adventure of Link. Bare with me people, I'll probably be traumatized by that cruel, merciless game for quite some time. It takes time to heal from trauma.
I made my way through the caves leading up Death Mountain and got to the dungeon atop the summit today. I'm not sure that I ever beat this particular dungeon before I stopped playing in my last attempt to go through the game. This dungeon proved a little more difficult than the first two, and I had a few game overs before I finally beat the giant centipede-boss at the top.
I then discovered that I love the Master Sword in this game. This is a weapon of true badassedness, for, when my hearts are full, I can shoot swirling beams of death at my enemies.
And I did grin and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and large chu—
Okay, I'll skip a bit.
With this sword of mighty... er... might, I went after the recently rekidnapped Zelda at the palace and fought against Agahnim - a fight that I scraped by on the skin of my teeth.
I do continue to see parallels to things that would pop up later on in the Zelda series. The Dark World is a similar idea to the Twilight Realm in Twilight Princess. Now, if you'll let me be a nerd here, I'll go on to speculate that perhaps the Dark World is, in fact, the Twilight Realm several generations on - its civilization gone and now overrun by the monsters that populate the Dark World. Or at least, that's how the writer in me would position these stories if we're looking at them in any sort of chronology. I'll probably go into this more in the conclusion to the series. Also, the battle with Agahnim - and the tennis match of deflected energy - is much like the battles that would appear in Ocarina of Time with Phantom Ganon and Ganondorf.
I set down the game today after a tragic game over trying to get through the maze heading toward the Dark Palace. Oh well, I'll tackle it tomorrow.

- Nate

P.S. - Sorry for all the Monty Python and the Holy Grail references.

Zelda Retrospective: Part IV: A Link to the Past - Day 1

2009-07-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,

I concede defeat. You are the better man... er, game.

Sincerely,
- Nate

Yes, dear readers, much to my chagrin, I have given up on my attempts at Zelda II. The game is beyond me.

Quite simply, I suck at it.

So, today I booted up the Wii and clicked on the third game in the Legend of Zelda series, A Link to the Past, which was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992 (in the USA, at least, 1991 in Japan). While I had an SNES when I was a kid, I had not yet discovered Zelda when I was playing it. So, I never owned the game until I downloaded the Virtual Console version for the Wii a couple of years ago.
Unlike the previous two Zelda outings, I've actually taken the time to play this game. However, I've never gone further than the first three or four dungeons - mainly due to obligations to school and simply choosing to spend my time on other things. Sacrilege, yes, but it's just the way it is. Also unlike the first two Zelda games, I feel as though I'm in familiar territory. Even though I didn't get into Zelda until Ocarina of Time, I have played through Link's Awakening and The Minish Cap, which are both very similar in game play to A Link to the Past. So I feel I'm far more prepared for the experience. I believe this is a game I can play without help from a walkthrough - unless I get horrendously stuck. I feel that I probably won't, though, because this game is much more merciful about giving some hint at where one is supposed to go next. I've already got the first two pendants today (and zero deaths!).
I guess Nintendo decided that they wanted to be a little more friendly to everyone after the brutal beast that was Zelda II. The SNES was supposed to reach a broader audience, so it would make sense that they would want the game to be more accessible. After playing the first game and attempting the second game, I was immediately grateful for the longer reach of Link's sword and the relative ease of finding hearts and rupees. This game, in tandem with the first two, helps to illustrate how the overall difficulty of games have been generally toned down as they become more popular amongst the general population.
I also noted things in this game that were reminiscent of more recent games in the series. In the field that you pass through before reaching the desert where the second pendant is, there are a number of statues similar to ancient Aztec or Mayan art. Similar designs would show up in The Wind Waker, especially in the Tower of the Gods dungeon midway through the game, and also in Twilight Princess. An obvious thing is the music and locations. I swear that the Kakariko Village theme MIDI file in A Link to the Past is the exact same one as the one used in Ocarina of Time. As a musician, I can generally tell the difference from one recording to another, but I couldn't detect any difference in this one. And of course, Kakariko Village goes on to make appearances in Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess.
All in all, I'm looking forward to finally playing all the way through A Link to the Past. It's been a long time coming.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part III - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - Day 3

2009-07-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

Folks, I just don't know what to do here. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is quite simply kicking my ass.
I have made no progress since the restart. I just now got all the way to the bridge after Spectacle Cave. But guess what happened? I received one of many game overs thanks to those red axe-throwing assholes that populate Death Mountain and the bridge that follows it.
This is a game that requires incredible reflex and observation. I simply just can't seem to progress. The fact that every time I game over puts me all the way back to the Northern Palace, where Zelda sleeps, is ridiculous. It means making any actual headway in the game is practically impossible (for me, at least).
As I've said before, this game is merciless.
Unfortunately, I don't have much else to say. I had an amusing series of pictures planned out that would have made up this post rather than the words preceding this sentence. Unfortunately, my camera was stolen some months ago and I can't get my webcam to work. Sorry guys!
I suppose I'll keep at it for a few more days, but I might have to just go ahead and move on to A Link to the Past soon, or else Adventure of Link is going to keep me in some kind of eternal limbo.
I feel like Sisyphus in Hades pushing the boulder up a hill only for it to come tumbling back down, for all eternity.

Ugh.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part III - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - Day 2

2009-07-15T15:30:00.001-07:00

Okay, so, I haven't been playing much. I've spent much of the time between this and the last Zelda blog. I played a little last night, trying desperately to get through Death Mountain without a guide, only to fail miserably each time. One of the biggest problems I have with this game, and it might just be a result of the port onto GameCube disc, but every time I lose all my lives, I get sent all the way back to the very beginning of the game. This makes making progress incredibly difficult. I felt that perhaps I hadn't levelled-up Link enough and then had a Final Fantasy-inspired idea that I've done a couple times after going to nearly the end of the game and discovering my characters weren't powerful enough (and was at a point where I couldn't dungeon crawl to upgrade).
So today I picked up the controller for a few hours and decided to start a fresh file. I made the quick jaunt to Rauru Town, then went up to Parapa Palace, where I levelled-up Link enough to where I needed 1200 to make it to the next level. This time, I made mince meat of Horsehead on the first try and got the upgrade after placing the crystal. So that left Link with level 4 attack and level 5 health and magic. Much better than the first file.
So, I went to tackle Death Mountain yet again, trying to make my way to Spectacle Rock. I was almost there when I got hit that one last time.
I've been seeing that screen way too often for my tastes. This game is absolutely merciless. If I have to start from the very beginning every time I get a game over, retaining only my level and my items (but none of my gained experience points), I don't know how I'm possibly going to get through this game in a reasonable time frame. If I could play the game non-stop and without a single game over, then maybe I could get through.
I guess I just suck at Zelda II. I'm going to keep at it though.

- Nate

Moon Review

2009-07-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

Hey all. I realize I've not been updating the last few days with the Legend of Zelda series. I've been out of town a lot the last few days, so I haven't really had the chance to play and blog. On one of my incursions out of town, I had a chance to see Moon, a new science fiction film that's hit a limited set of theaters around the country. Only one theater in the OKC area is even playing it, the Quail Springs AMC.
Moon is the first feature film from director Duncan Jones, better known as Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones, the son of David Bowie (whose actual name is Robert Jones).
The film stars Sam Rockwell, who gives, what I believe to be, his best performance ever. Kevin Spacey also provides the voice of GERTY, the computer/robot that is the sole companion of Sam Bell (Rockwell), a miner contracted to maintain the Selene moon base, where the company that hires him mines Helium-3, a gas found in lunar soil that is solving the Earth's energy crisis. Sam has two weeks left in his contracted three years and is eager to return to Earth to see his wife and finally meet his daughter in person when he begins seeing things that aren't there. Then, after an accident on the surface, Sam awakens to find that things aren't as they should be.
One of the most striking things about Moon is that it carries the torch of the cerebral, thinking-man's science-fiction of yesteryear. These days, science-fiction movies must have dumbed down storylines and a lot of explosions to have any hope of succeeding. That's probably why this particular film was kept to limited release, because it has no real action to it at all. Moon is more akin to sci-fi films like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddessey or Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (which starred David Bowie), and not just because it's carried by a single man and a computer. This is a film that forces the audience to think about what is going on and makes them consider the morality behind the events that occur within the film. Hollywood simply doesn't make science-fiction films like this anymore and that is a damn shame.
I've always thought Sam Rockwell was underrated, but now I truly believe it. He carries this film singlehandedly and feels very believable as the everyman stuck alone on the moon. One doesn't tend to think "blue collar" when they think "astronauts," but that's what Sam Bell is and Rockwell portrays it wonderfully. I don't think it was quite a Best Actor worthy performance - but it may be worth a nomination. Then again, we still have another five months in the year for someone to out do him. It was definitely the finest performance I've seen from anything that's come out this year.
The film itself is a little slow to develop, mainly due to the lack of action sequences that moviegoers (myself included) are so used to in science-fiction. There is, however, a lot of dramatic tension that Jones manages to build consistently throughout the second and third acts and that helps propel the movie more smoothly.
Apparently, Jones is building his own movie mythology. He stated in an interview that he was planning on giving Rockwell a cameo in the next movie as Sam Bell. The next film will apparently tie into Moon but will be its own independent story and not a true sequel.
I think Jones is going to be one of the new directors on the scene that everyone needs to keep an eye out for. This is a stellar film for a first timer and it shows a lot of promise. Hopefully people will catch on and go see it. If you like things blowing up and can't stand quiet, cerebral films, it's not for you. If you see that Moon is playing somewhere near you, I highly recommend that you go see it if you like old-school science fiction. If it's not playing near you, rent it as soon as it's available. I'll probably be buying it to make my friends watch it.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part III - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - Day 1

2009-07-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Initial Thoughts on Zelda II:
1. When did Zelda turn into an RPG/Platformer?
2. When did they decide to ban recovery hearts?
3. Man, Link likes hookers.
4. F*** you, Horsehead!
5. "I am Error." Huh? Do you mean that your name is Error or that you are in error? People, you need to speak more clearly.
6. When did the Crusades hit Hyrule?
7. "I found a mirror under the table"? Did Link just talk?!
8. All these old wizard dudes sure like to live with young girls.

Enemies I've quickly learned to hate in Zelda II:
1. Iron Knuckles.
2. Fox-Headed Dudes who throw boomerangs.
3. Bearded little demon toads.
4. Flying/walking/fire-breathing bone fish that live under a bridge.

Yes, I started playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link today. Some of you warned me as to the difficulty of that game. You were quite correct. It's atrocious. How did those developers sleep at night when they released the game in 1988? I mean, did they know how many people who would probably be driven insane. The fact that it took me about eight tries just to beat the first boss, Horsehead, doesn't bode well. I have a feeling this one's going to take me longer than two days.
It hit me immediately how vast a departure this game is from its predecessor and from its successors. Between an experience point-fueled upgrade system to a semi-random encounter system, this game is very reminiscent of a traditional role-playing game. On the other hand, there's a large emphasis on jumping and hacking in a side-scrolling platformer environment.
This game either didn't know what it wanted to be or wanted to be many things at once.

Well, let's see how this goes.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part II - Legend of Zelda - Day 2

2009-07-08T14:59:00.000-07:00

You know what they say: "Once a cheater, always a cheater."

Well, for me, it held true. After thirty-nine deaths and about eight to ten hours of game play, I beat Ganon today and completed the main quest of Legend of Zelda. And, oh boy, I definitely had to rely on that IGN walk through to get me through it.
I booted up the game (I was playing using the Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition disc for GameCube) at around 11AM this morning, after finding out that I wasn't going to be recording with the band. I started from the good ol' starting position, collected some rupees to buy a potion, grabbed some recovery hearts from some downed enemies to fill my life gauge back up, and then went back to dungeon six, the bane of my Zelda-playing experience of yesterday. This time, going in fully prepared, I went in and kicked that dungeon's ass in no time flat.
I was doing well in the seventh dungeon too, until accidently pressed X in the start menu. On the Collector's Edition disc, X is equivalent to Select on the old NES controller, so that took me to the continue/save/quit screen. I hit continue, but I didn't realize that selecting it would take me back to the start of the dungeon and removed all but three hearts from my nearly full set of heart containers. Rage ensued.
What kind of design choice is that, seriously? I mean, how many people who have played this game since it came out in 1987 have accidently done that? How many veins have popped from necks from the fury that issues forth from occurences such as this? I sat and pondered this a moment, then resumed my gameplay.
It turns out, dungeon seven was quite the maze and it took me a long time to finally find my way to the boss. But I quickly dispatched him and moved onto eight. I'm guessing I went through eight all right, because I'm already having trouble remembering even playing through it, other than being frustrated with the large number of Blue Darknuts, who are hard to kill, and that was only a couple of hours ago.

I made my way to dungeon nine, the home of the pig-man himself - Ganon. Well, okay, I relied on the walkthrough for this one. When I realized how immense the dungeon was, I decided that, rather than waste hours trying to get through it, I'd make my way toward Ganon that way. I got all the way there with little problem. I saw where it took four blind hits while Ganon was invisible followed by a silver arrow hit. Well, as I hit Ganon the third time, I died.
So, I went out to find rupees for a potion and then ninety more to replace the magic shield I'd lost to a Like-Like. That in itself probably took half an hour. Killing hordes of ghosts in the graveyard helped quite a bit. I made my way back to Ganon, wiped him out and then hit the end. And then I hit the most story-intensive part of the game: a whole two lines of dialogue!

So, what does playing through this game tell me? For one, I can tell you know that, thanks to technological advancements, the series quickly became far more story driven. The lack of dialogue means less opportunities for hints, making the game that much harder. I never owned an NES, and I'd heard from many people that all the good old games were really hard. This game confirmed that notion in my head even moreso than my attempts to play other NES games. I suppose, back then, video games were more of a niche, so the audiences wanted more of a challenge. Now that gaming is more broad, games needed to be eased up for the sake of the layman's sanity. Also, this game allowed for a lot more imagination. It's far less linear than the Zelda games that succeeded it. Granted, you might need a certain item in one dungeon to access something in another, but you could potentially do these out of order because the game doesn't direct you from one to the next. The only hint that you should be playing them in any particular order is that a "Level-#" shows up at the top of your screen when you're in a dungeon.

I'm not brave enough to try to second quest. Plus I would like to continue on to the next game in the series. So, that's game number one down. Six to go. Tomorrow I'll be hitting up Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in Part III of the Zelda Retrospective. This is another one I've never played through, and many call it the worst of the Zelda games. I'll be sure to let you know if I agree.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part II - Legend of Zelda - Day 1

2009-07-07T20:10:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I've been cheating... I've been cheating a lot.

But damn! This game is hard! How did any one ever figure the damn thing out back in 1987? Perhaps I'm too used to my cushy, three-dimensional, story-driven Zelda games where there are hints as to what you're supposed to be doing next? You start the game with nothing in a field with no prologue, no hints, nothing. Luckily, the cave with the old dude who gives you a sword is in plain site. From there, though, it gets hazy. I very quickly decided to rely on IGN's walkthrough of the game since I didn't want to spend hours and hours dying over and over again just trying to figure out where to go. For the sake of this series, I decided to not use the walkthrough while in dungeons unless I get absolutely stuck. Since the walkthrough greatly enhanced the rate at which I played through the game today, I've made it all the way to the sixth dungeon. I have thirteen heart containers, the magical sword, a magical shield, the white tunic and the blue ring. Even with these upgrades, I still find the game quite difficult. To illustrate that fact, I'll point out that I've died a total of thirty times in my play through, sixteen of which have been in the sixth dungeon.
This game is nearly incomprehensible. To play it without any sort of guide would require hours of trial and error. Hours which I'd much rather spend being able to make dinner (teriyaki stir fry tonight, my own recipe) while watching stuff on Hulu (the pilot to Firefly). This game is simply merciless, offering almost no hints other than an occasional old man in a cave. There are lots of old men in caves in Hyrule at this time. And a lot of shopkeepers in caves. Apparently people can't remember how to build houses. And it could be the same old man and the same house keeper and they're just following you around and hiding in different caves throughout Hyrule. That's just creepy. (Yes, I do know that it's an old game and they could only allow so many character designs.)
Back to the sixth dungeon though. That thing is a bane on my gaming existence. I just keep dying. I ought to go get a potion, but that requires 68 rupees. And unlike in other Zelda games, that amount of cash is hard to come by. I would never have gotten the Blue Ring if IGN hadn't pointed out a few secret stashes of rupees. Plus, by the time I got the potion and got back to the dungeon, I'd need to use it. The Wizzrobes are just plain kicking my ass. I got all the way to Gohma once, but I only had one heart left. Plus, whenever I die, I start out with only three hearts and the enemies in the dungeon aren't exactly being liberal with the dispensing of recovery hearts. One time in between two of my sixteen deaths in that dungeon, an enemy dropped a fairy and I thought it was a miracle. I still died later.
To you true Zelda veterans, you who have taken the time to actually play this game honestly without any help, I ask: How the hell did you do it?

- Nate

P.S. - I'll be at the band's drummer's house helping him to lay down the drum tracks for the songs I've written. I might be putting off Day 2 of the original LoZ to Thursday.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Review

2009-07-07T09:51:00.000-07:00

Can someone please put a leash on Michael Bay? Seriously, would that be at all possible?
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is simply a mess, created from the indulgences of a giant man-child of a director. While he may have done a pretty good job with the original Transformers, a movie that I had very low expectations for but ended up loving, this film is a lumbering behemoth of a movie that can't decide where to go. It's long, it moves slowly and it can't decide where to put its focus. It's like a giant zombie with ADD, only a movie.
Weighing in at around two hours and forty-five minutes, Revenge of the Fallen starts out strong with a nifty bit of narration and shots of aborigines circa 17,000BC finding Transformers on their land and then a great action sequence with the NEST unit, a team of elite soldiers who have been paired with the Autobots for the purpose of hunting down Decepticons. The NEST team is led by Major Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen). From there, we see that Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is getting ready to go to college and that his parents Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White) along with girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) are having trouble dealing with this fact. Different loud things happen and adventure (eventually) begins. The key plot point of the movie is that the Transformers have been coming to Earth for a long time, but that fact was lost to history amongst humans and Transformers both. The titular character, The Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd, who I actually had the pleasure of meeting a couple of weeks ago), seeks an ancient machine that was built on Earth that would sap the energy out of the Sun, thereby destroying it and all life on Earth. Of course, things are far more complicated than that, which is one of the big problems with the film. Writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Ehren Kruger simply try to balance too much into the story. In fact, the film is so complicated that later on, characters will actually say lines to no one in particular that explain why they're doing something. I even had trouble remembering what characters were doing what and why, and I'm generally very good at following complex plots. I was especially confused with the motivations and actions of a general that was apparently higher up in NEST's command. I simply could not figure out what the guy was up to for a large portion of the movie.
Also, there are way too many characters, many of whom could have been weeded out or given less screen time, like the far-too-many comic-relief characters. Sam's roommate, Leo Spitz (Ramon Rodriguez) is almost entirely useless to the plot save for being the one that finds former Sector 7 agent Simmons (John Tuturro), otherwise all he is there for is to whine a whole lot. While Sam's parents were a lot of fun in the first film, in this they are given more screen time than they really need and the comedy is extremely forced. A gag involving Sam's mother eating some "green" brownies goes on far too long. They are later kidnapped by the Decepticons in an effort to create some dramatic tension for Sam in the film's climax, but an intervention by Bumblebee removes all effectiveness from the scene. Even worse are the Twins, a couple of Autobots named Skids and Mudflap. As established in the first film, the Transformers learned English (and gained their various accents and attitudes) by analyzing the Internet. Skids and Mudflap apparently chose African-Americans, and the characters' idiocy and appearance (one of them has gold and silver "teeth," reminiscent of a grill) are borderline offensive. Not to mention, they do absolutely nothing important for the story - they're just there to be dumb and funny.
This is a film that could have easily dropped forty minutes from its run time, but Michael Bay's predictable indulgences left it dragging. I checked my watch about forty-five minutes into the movie, thinking it had gone on much longer. Any time I check my watch in a movie, that's a sure sign that the pacing is slow and I find myself feeling uninterested in the film.
The action sequences are fun to watch, but in sequences involving larger numbers of 'bots, it's hard to keep track of who's who. That was one of the things about the cartoon, the Transformers all looked so distinctly different that it was easy to tell them apart. In these movies, the attempt at hyper-realistic transformations leaves the robot forms looking largely identical.
There was some nice fan-service in there, like Frank Welker returning as Soundwave. I can't complain about Hugo Weaving's Megatron, but I do miss Frank Welker being the one to talk back at Optimus. Starscream also showed some of his true colors, maneuvering to take the lead of the Decepticons, which was great. I still feel like the Transformers themselves are under-characterized. Over all, they have very little personality. Some more scenes that are just Transformers talking to other Transformers would be nice, because we'd get a sense of who the Transformers are.
And, of course, all of Bay's hallmarks are there. The kiss at sunset? Check. A whole crap-load of stuff blowing up? Check (but that's a good thing for a Transformers movie). The movie being way too long (I'm looking at you, Pearl Harbor)? Check. The glorification/exploitation of the female body? Check (but, hey, we're talking Megan Fox here and that's never bad). Throw in a large dose of "ugh"-inducing testicalular-based humor and a mostly funny little Decepticon that Mikaela keeps in a box, and there you have it.

In the end this movie basically just ends up being kind of "Meh." Apparently, Michael Bay doesn't want to do another Transformers movie as soon as Paramount/Dreamworks want to release another one. I would love to see what a different (see: better) director could do with the franchise. Here's hoping they make a good selection.

- Nate

Zelda Retrospective: Part I - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest

2009-07-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this is going to be the first in a series of blogs that overlook the Zelda franchise. I just recently finished playing through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest and it gave me inspiration. This is an announcement that I will embark upon a journey through the various console Zelda games, namely The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. This will be a long on-going series of commentaries that will review the games as games themselves, analyze how the franchise and games in general have evolved over time and maybe to have a little bit of fun at the games' expense. I expect this series to take a long time because we're talking about a lot of long games, and since I'm trying to get a job and will be going back to school in a little less than two months. Also, I'm leaving out the Zelda titles that were released on Nintendo's handhelds, because that would just take even more time. But perhaps later on? Anyway, on to Master Quest.
Back in 2003, as an incentive for pre-ordering The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the GameCube, Nintendo offered up a free bonus disc. This disc contained two versions of the same game. The first was the standard version of Ocarina of Time, the game that kicked off my love of the Zelda franchise and ignited the burning desire to own a Nintendo 64 that consumed my ten-year-old heart. The second was what made me want this particular disc so badly: Ocarina of Time Master Quest. Back in the late 1990's, Nintendo was working on the 64 Disc Drive (64DD), a disc-based add on for the Nintendo 64. Master Quest was known in Japan as Ura Zelda, but it was never released since the 64DD was sold at very underwhelming numbers. Essentially, Master Quest was meant to be in the same vein as the second adventure in the original Legend of Zelda, in which you could go through harder dungeons by naming your character "ZELDA" after completing the main quest.
Master Quest isn't really a different game from Ocarina of Time. The story, dialogue, cutscenes, items and everything are the exact same as the regular Ocarina of Time. When you get into the dungeons, however, all bets are off. Though the maps are identical, with the rooms layed out in all the same positions, the puzzles, enemies and progression through the rooms is drastically changed. This version is meant for Ocarina of Time veterans, because you have to be very familiar with the original game to stand a chance of getting through some of the game's more merciless puzzles and also because there are several sidequests from the original that now become mandatory if you hope to get through a dungeon. Items like Din's Fire and the Fire Arrow and the Scarecrow's Song are now essential if you hope to solve certain puzzles. Harder still are the many extremely well hidden switches that I often spent large amounts of time trying to track down or missed completely and had to look up on a walkthrough to understand what I needed to do to move on. It's interesting to note that now, there are less enemies overall within the dungeons, but there are a larger number of harder enemies that take multiple hits like Lizolfos, Dinolfos, Stalfos, ReDead and Iron Knuckles. Also, because of the progression changes, you might find yourself completely bypassing certain rooms or unable to get into them until you've gotten an item from later in the game. This, of course, tends to mean that there are Gold Skulltulas in those rooms. While the Gold Skulltulas outside the dungeons remain in the same places that they are in the original quest, they are in drastically different places in Master Quest and are often much harder to find.
The various changes make a huge change to the overall difficulty of the game - everything is now much harder.
The switch to GameCube also allowed for a few minor upgrades to graphics. The game runs at about 24 frames per second (according to some articles I read on IGN), as opposed to modern games which run in at least 30 frames per second but tend to aim for 60 frames per second. This means that movements on screen might look a little rugged and choppy, especially if you're used to the high definition games that are on the market today. But you'll get used to it after a little gameplay and, really, the game is still great to look at for something that essentially came out eleven years ago. Plus, the GameCube disc can run in progressive scan, so if you have a 'Cube or a Wii set up on an HDTV with the right cables, you can get a slightly better picture out of it.
The gameplay of Ocarina of Time was revolutionary back in 1998, with its Z-targetting system, such a huge game world, and an unheard of camera system that could move into a 1st person free-look. This all worked fantastically on the N64, but on GameCube, it misses a few points. For one, I had the problem of forgetting that this particular Zelda came before the free floating camera that could be manipulated to any position via the C-Stick, as it can in The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. When I first started the file, I kept finding myself trying to manipulate the camera only to bring out an item, since items have been mapped to the C-stick and also to the X, Y and Z buttons. I found myself always using the buttons rather than the stick for my items because it is a much more intuitive and responsive way to do it.
The mapping of C-Button functions from the N64 controller to the GameCube controller's C-stick is most problematic in the use of the ocarina within the game. Because there is no button assigned the the C-Up button from the N64, the ocarina's C-Up note must be played via the stick. This makes many of the songs that use that note much more difficult to play. If a song didn't use C-Up at all, I would always use the X, Y, Z and A buttons just for the sake of convenience. This would be a minor gripe, but considering the prolific use of the ocarina throughout the game, it's tedious. It also makes the ocarina mini-games with the Skullchildren in the Lost Woods and with the Frogs in Zora's River much more difficult.
I hadn't played Master Quest since I first received and played through the disc in 2003, so I've come back into it with fresh eyes. The game still holds up remarkably well and is still very challenging. It's not for Zelda newbies, but veterans who haven't played it should take a look. The game disc is pretty hard to find these days, I'd recommend checking around local or online stores that sell used games. Luckily, the Wii is backwards compatible, so, so long as you have a GameCube controller and memory card, you can play the disc on a Wii if you still don't have a GameCube.

Oh, also, I discovered while playing this that Ganondorf has Obama ears. I'm serious.

Tommorrow's post will be on the first day of play of Legend of Zelda for NES (I'll be playing it on the Collector's Edition GameCube disc). I've actually never played all the way through the NES Zelda games, so this should be interesting.

Star Trek - A Second Opinion

2009-06-05T21:02:00.001-07:00

First off, I'm sorry for the lack of updates. The last week and a half has seen me moving into a new apartment and aiding the family while my grandmother was in the hospital (she's out and she's okay, by the way), and I just got Internet service in my new apartment tonight.

So, now on to our subject matter. On Monday, just after a too-thick-to-drink chocolate shake from the Warren's diner, Megan, Julie and I went to see Star Trek again. For me and Julie, it was a second viewing, for Megan it was a third (which is just ridiculous since she'd never even seen a Trek movie before I gave her a crash course in the franchise over the last few months, yet she's seen the movie more than I have).
In any case, I walked out of the film with a more tempered opinion of it than the one I put up in my initial review.
Frankly, I was still on a contact high of brand new Trek after the disappointment of Star Trek: Nemesis in 2003 and the cancellation of Enterprise (which was just starting to get really good) in 2005. The movie was certainly quite good, but I definitely overlooked some of its flaws because I was still giddy from having just seen it.
So how does it hold up now? Aside from some science-geek and cinemaphile nitpicks and a highly-underdeveloped villain, quite well. It's still fast-paced and incredibly fun, it still has some superb special effects and it still has some great acting. Where it falls flat are the characterization of Eric Bana's Nero and some glaring logic problems (that, admittedly, most movie viewers would not cue on to).
Nero simply didn't get enough screen time nor enough to do. I probably did not catch on to this initially due to the fact that I read IDW's comic Star Trek: Countdown, which featured a story by the film's writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. This comic gives the details of what happened in the 24th century that made Nero as insane and vengeful as he is in the film. When I first saw Star Trek, I didn't question anything about Nero because I knew why he was the way he was. However, this time I noticed that all that's really said is that Romulus, Nero's home planet, was destroyed by a supernova (a science nitpick I'll get to in a bit) and he wanted to make the whole galaxy suffer for not helping to save his planet. Nero simply isn't developed enough. I think the writers aimed to make him more of a tragic villain, yet other than an image of Nero's wife who died in the calamity, we're never given any real reason to connect with Nero. There is nothing shown to make the audience connect with him in some way, to feel any sort of sympathy. Had we seen Nero as a man so torn by grief that he's fallen into insanity, he would have been a high effective villain - and Trek movies have a tendency for great villains, like Kahn, Chang and the Borg Queen. However, all we see is an insane, flamboyant, tattooed Romulan who we know very little about and who simply seems to want to watch the galaxy burn.
Another thing that irked me this time was not glaring but flaring (pun intended). For the most part, I love JJ Abram's cinematographic style in the film - with it's documentary style camera movements and angles. What I didn't like was the fact that every other second, there is a lens flare. Most were small and subjected to the sides of the screen, but on occasion there would be one that would totally white out the picture and it started to get on my nerves. The little ones I could deal with, but the big ones that interrupted my field of vision started to annoy me. I even found a humorous edit of the trailer for the Original Series episode "Space Seed" with the lens flares added in, so I apparently wasn't the only one who noticed. It's not really a problem with the film itself, but it started to bug me. It's something I can learn to ignore, however.
The science-geek in me had some problems with the science of the movie, namely supernovae and black holes. Generally, Trek has been really good about keeping to actual science (for the most part), so it was a bit of a disappointment to see problems like that. Apparently, Romulus was destroyed by a supernova that hit with little warning (an event depicted in Countdown, which likewise gave me the same thought). However, even a supernova of a nearby star to Romulus would have taken years to reach the planet, unless it was the Romulan star itself, because supernovae move at less than the speed of light - so there would have been plenty of warning and, thus, Nero would have no reason to be so angry. Also, a black hole is created at one point in the film, and the subsequent destruction shows that everything that is destroyed by it is simply sucked in. However, the debris would have formed a visible accretion disk that would orbit the black hole. That's a minor quibble and doesn't present much of a logic problem for the story as the supernova one does, but oh well, that's just me griping cause I've taken an astronomy class and actually learned something.
All in all though, I won't contradict everything I said in the first review, because those opinions still held true. I loved the acting and the story. I loved the action set pieces and I was still just as blown away by the incredible special effects. It's not as perfect as I initially made it out to be, but it's still a great movie in all respects.

One more gripe about it: I never want to watch it in anything but High Definition, because the film is simply gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, I don't have an HDTV or a Blu-Ray player. So when this movie hits home video, I'm out of luck. Anybody have any high paying jobs to offer me?

- Nate

Terminator Salvation - Review

2009-05-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

Warning: There are some spoilers in this review, but if you've seen the trailers, then you should already know this stuff.
I'll be straight with you. It was very difficult for me to just take in Terminator Salvation as a movie in its own respect. I constantly found myself comparing it to the previous Terminator films, especially the first and second, as well as the excellent (but unjustly cancelled) TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
The film essentially follows two interwoven plotlines, one involving John Connor (Christian Bale) and the more prominent one involving Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Both characters start at different places, with the opening of the film set in 2003, where Marcus agrees to donate his body to science after his impending execution. Cut to 2018, where John Connor is fighting the machines and we soon see Marcus alive and well. The film proceeds to tell these two characters' stories, focusing more on Marcus than John Connor. This decision is slightly contrary to what a Terminator fan like me might expect, since John Connor is supposed to be so important to the resistance against the machines yet he is only playing a supporting role here to Marcus in their eventually shared quest to protect Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin).
One problem that immediately struck me was how much the trailers gave away about the plot. Several trailers reveal that Marcus is at least partially cybernetic, and since the reveal of this is a good hour into the movie, it fell very flat and didn't have the impact it could have. Any time Marcus got thrown around before they finally revealed him, I found myself wondering if they'd finally show him to be a machine.
Another problem is that much of the performances just feel wooden. In the first couple of scenes, I was concerned Bale would be doing his Batman-growl through the entire film, but that luckily didn't happen. Worthington seemed to just shout a whole lot, but he did seem to manage to give the character some substance. Common's and Bryce Dallas Howard's roles turned out to be largely forgettable. Moon Bloodgood proved to be a strong point, but it was Yelchin that I felt stole the show. He brought a sense of humanity to the character that I felt was missing from the rest.
In the context of the franchise, Salvation lacks the strong characterization that pervades other entries in the franchise, especially the second film. The film simply felt hollow, with none of the other characters aside from Reese and his small mute sidekick, Star, really connecting with me. At the very least, John and Marcus both managed to capture my attention in the last forty-five minutes or so, but the failure of getting both protagonists to connect with the audience shows a strong failing in the film. And perhaps it's because this film is set entirely in the future that this film can't be as humanizing as the first two. It's simply an entirely different type of story. Another problem within the context of the franchise is that John seems to be terribly open about the fact that Kyle Reese is (or will be) his father. We know that in 2027, Reese goes back in time to protect Sarah Connor, but this movie is set in 2019, years before anyone but John know about the existence of a time machine. And yet, there he is exclaiming in front of everyone that Kyle Reese is his father, and no one, not even the people who don't know John, question him on how that's possible. I feel, as a fan, that it was a critical error on the part of the writers to not make John's need to keep his heritage a secret.
There were some nice nods to continuity, such as the recorded diaries from his mother (voiced by Linda Hamilton) that John listens to throughout as well as the initial appearance of the T-800, which sported a decent if sometimes obvious CGI rendering of Arnold Schwarzenegger's face circa the first movie. A few lines are lifted directly from the other movies as sort of in-jokes for the audience and a couple of locales are at least reminiscent of locations in the first two movies.
One strong point in the film was that there were some really great action set pieces. I was especially impressed by a desert highway chase involving Marcus and Kyle aboard an old tow truck with two motorcycle-like Terminators pursuing them and by a chase sequence involving Marcus and John through the resistance base camp. If only for the glitz factor alone, Salvation is fun to watch.
Overall, Terminator Salvation is an enjoyable film to watch and certainly doesn't feel as campy or forced as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It lacks a certain substance found in the first two films (especially the director's cut of the second), but it definitely shows potential for future sequels - which are definitely coming. The film would have benefited from a more singular focus in its plot and strong use of characterization. I almost feel like those missing elements might have been cut on the editing room floor. I'd be very curious to see an extended cut of the film. In all, if you're looking for a fun post-apocalyptic free-for-all, I'd certainly go see it.

Update/Recommendation

2009-05-20T19:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, first off, I intend to go see Star Trek again at some point in the very near future. In retrospect, my initial review was perhaps a little too glowing - probably because I wrote it straight out of the movie theater and was still suffering from a contact high with the film. I'll get back to you to see if it still holds up.

Second, a review of Terminator Salvation should go up sometime tomorrow. I'll be heading off to the Warren Theater in Moore in an hour or so to attend a midnight showing.

Third, a recommendation:
Black Bone Child - Black Bone Child
I just wrote a review of this album for Independent Clauses. Check out the website, I'm a staff member. Anyway, this album is a fantastic piece of blues-rock and is very very fun to listen to. Check out their myspace to listen to a few tracks.

The Second Coming of Star Trek

2009-05-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Well, folks, I've seen it. At 7PM tonight at the Warren Theater in Moore, OK, the Voice of the Theater spoke, the trailers rolled and then it began. The film I've been anticipating for something close to the last two years.
Star Trek.
The JJ Abrams-directed, Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman-written flick is both a loving tribute to and fresh breath if life into the Star Trek franchise. In fact, I would go on to say that this is one of the best science-fiction films to be released in years.
The film is a sort of sequel, prequel and reboot at the same time. Through some complicated bits of time travel and back story, actions that take place in the twenty-forth century of the timeline that's been set up by the last forty years of Trek and creates a new, separate timeline. This allows the filmmakers to create a story that both honors the established canon and creates new opportunities for story telling at the same time. The film proceeds uninhibited by the veritable Sword of Damocles of canon constraints, which makes for surprising twists of story that this life-long Trekkie did not expect to see. It sets up a new franchise with some very interesting possibilities.
The film itself is nothing short of epic. The script is wonderful, managing to incorporate the strong characterization inherent within the franchise along with strong crowd-pleasing action sequences. Every time I thought they had spent too long focusing on the action, they relented with character moments and that made the movie all the more enjoyable for me, as a bona fide Trekkie.
I said on this blog last October that as long as the characters felt right, I would be satisfied with this film. Other than a few minor parts, the casting and characterization of these iconic characters was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The most prominent reason for this is the spot-on casting, especially the choices of Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy and Zoe Saldana as Uhura.
Pine simply exudes with the brash confidence that one would expect of a young Kirk. This is exceptionally well done because Kirk does not remain this way through out the entire film, but has a definite growth over the course of the film - seen especially well in a moment when Uhura tells Kirk that she hopes he knows what he's doing, and rather than providing a cocky quip that he would have delivered earlier in the film, his only reply is an honest "So do I." I did not expect to love Pine's performance nearly as much as I did.
Quinto was perhaps the most obvious choice for Spock that anyone could have come up with. Between his resemblance to a young Leonard Nimoy and the cool and unattached performance that he's given as Sylar on Heroes, he was a simple shoe-in for the role. He excellently portrays the emotional turmoil that is presented to Spock due to his heritage as well as the hardships he faces through the course of the film.
It seemed that Karl Urban was possessed by the spirit of DeForest Kelley while filming Star Trek. He doesn't just portray the character well, he is Dr. Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy. He has an incredibly strong introduction nearly the beginning of the film and the consistency with which he delivers the character persists throughout without ever feeling like imitation. Between his wonderfully in-character scripting and the way he performed the part, Urban was simply a joy to watch.
Saldana's Uhura was refreshing because the character was finally given her due. Throughout the original series and the movie, Uhura was ever present, but without much to do story-wise. In this new film, she plays a major role and her interactions with both Kirk and Spock give her far more character than she's ever had before. Uhura was always sort of a blank slate, a character that we never really knew much about. In fact, a running plot point in the film is the mystery behind her first name, something that was never once said before in any of the episodes or films. So seeing Saldana really give the character substance was great.
As for the rest of the cast, they were very strong, but perhaps not as much as the previous four. Simon Pegg was hilarious as Scotty, and while Scotty was used for a fair amount of comic relief in the episodes and movies, he has his serious moments. In this, he's given nothing and I'm hoping that he'll be given more to work with in the sequel.
Likewise, Anton Yelchin's Chekov was nothing but comic relief, with a few jokes on the accent and such. Yelchin does put his heart into the performance, staying true to Walter Koenig's campy Russian accent and being the exuberant youth at the navigation console.
John Cho isn't really given much to do as Sulu other than one cool fight sequence. It's hard to give a verdict on his performance.
Surprisingly, I found myself slightly disappointed with Leonard Nimoy's return as the future Spock. Mostly it was the portrayal I would have expected, with Spock even seeming like he had developed more since the last time we saw him. Unfortunately, there were simply a few lines that I felt were forced and those just kind of bugged me.
The special effects and sound are nothing short of amazing. From the opening shots of the battle between the Kelvin and the Narada to the ice planet monsters, this film looks and sounds positively incredible. I continually found myself in the theater thinking "Wow" at many of the effects shots.
Perhaps, though, the greatest achievement of all is the film's accessibility. My friend Megan was in the group I saw the film with tonight. She came in relatively fresh, with very little experience with Trek. I had had her watch the second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh films to kind of give her some background and a feel for the characters. She expressed it best when she said that it was a good enough movie that she thought anyone would like it, but it had enough nods to things she'd seen by watching other Trek that it made her feel like she was in the know. If this film can attract all the new fans that I think it could, then perhaps we'll get to watch more new Star Trek for years to come and, as a fan, that is wonderful.
Though, it's not that I didn't have some minor problems here and there with things. For one, I didn't care for the usage of Beastie Boys in one of the scene - I mean, the film already had such a great score in all the other scenes, couldn't they have used that? Also, the way Kirk jumps so high up in rank so quickly felt contrived and unrealistic. Some of the comedic scenes also got a little too ridiculous at times, feeling more slapstick than the usual dry humor found in the franchise. These problems, though, were not enough to ruin the film for me.

In the end, I definitely need to see it once, twice or maybe a third or fourth time more. But this is most definitely one of my new favorite Trek movies and it easily equals the caliber of The Wrath of Kahn,The Undiscovered Country and First Contact or even surpasses them. I haven't quite decided yet.

Star Trek is back. Or, to quote James T. Kirk at the end of the fourth film, "My friends, we've come home."

- Nate

Clawing at Wolverine

2009-05-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

Haha! I'm so clever with titles, aren't I?

(Warning, there will be some spoilers.)

So, last Friday I went off to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine with my good friend Megan. Admittedly I had fairly mixed expectations. I saw some of the trailers and set pics early on, thinking that it probably wasn't going to be that good of a movie. Then, after the famous Internet leak of a work-print, I heard a lot of positive buzz and I started to get excited. But then, but Thursday evening, I saw where the film's rating on RottenTomatoes.com was a pitiful 37%. So I really wasn't sure what to expect.
Wolverine ends up a film that starts fairly strong and then descends into cliche and some glaring logic problems.
The opening, an altered but relatively true to the comics take on the emergence of Wolverine (James Logan in the movie, though the character was originally named James Howlett in the Origin comic which this scene is taken from) was great. It's followed by a spectacular look at Logan and Victor Creed (later known as Sabretooth) as they fight through every major war from the Civil War until Vietnam during the opening credits. This sequence shows especially well how Logan and Victor start to grow apart based on their individual taste, or distaste in Logan's case, for violence and death. A montage used to show characterization is a somewhat rare thing in a film, so I appreciated its use.
After some scenes meant to get Logan and Victor on William Stryker's Team X, there is a fun action sequence where the members of Team X show off their talents. Ryan Reynolds shines here in his delivery of Wade Wilson (the future "Merc with a Mouth," Deadpool). Then some nice, if dragging, scenes with Logan working as lumberjack, putting his life behind him with a pretty wife.

And upon the death of that wife, it just goes downhill with a giant Hugh Jackman-yelled "NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Literally, from that point, the film delves into cliche and horrible logic problems. As if the Episode III-Darth Vader-"Where's Padme?"-reaction at his wife's death wasn't enough, through the course of the film we see a 1964 Harley-Davidson with Wolverine atop bursting out of an exploding barn, that same motorcycle inexplicably survive direct hits from a .50 caliber machine gun, and a walk into the sunset near the end (though it does have a nice little twist).

The one thing that bothered me more than any was the glaring plot hole caused by Logan, Victor and Remy Lebau (Gambit). The film makes it clear that Gambit would like to see Victor dead. Logan, who also wants Victor dead, approaches Gambit for help but Gambit sees that Logan wears similar dog tags to Victor's and therefore doesn't trust him. Logan exits the building to find Victor. Gambit follows him out and his behind Logan when Logan elbows him the face, apparently knocking him out. Logan and Victor fight and just as Logan looks ready to finish Victor off... Gambit is suddenly running across the rooftops and jumps off and delivers a big kinetic shockwave to both Victor and Logan, preventing Logan from dealing the obvious death he was about to bestow on Victor. And then, Logan and Gambit both simply let Victor walk off after that.
How did Gambit suddenly get on the roof tops? No idea. Why did Gambit prevent the death of someone he wanted dead? No idea. Oh, and why did Logan just let Victor walk off? Again, no idea.

And let's not go into the mockery they made of the origins and powers of Deadpool, or the ridiculously useless boxing match between Logan and Blob, or the totally inaccurate depictions of Emma Frost and Silverfox (For one, those two aren't sisters!). Whereas many other Marvel comic films have managed to streamline the origins and cinematic translations of the characters with a fair amount of finesse, Wolverine is haphazardly done, as if a ten-year-old was sitting around saying "Wouldn't it be cool if Deadpool had laser eyes?!". The film breaks so far from the source material that it offends Marvel fans by default.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, quite simply put, is a mess. I couldn't give anyone a recommendation to see it. Though, once it's on DVD, making a drinking game around it could be really fun - like every time there is a total logic problem, a cliche or a plot hole, you take a drink. Yep, that would get you hellaciously drunk.

- Nate

Remake of TMNT: Turtles in Time coming to XBox Live Arcade

2009-05-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time was one of my favorite games on the Super Nintendo, back in the days of yesteryear. I remember sitting down to play it, either by myself or playing co-operative with my sister, and powering through different levels like "Bury My Shell At Wounded Knee," and battling bosses pulled from both the cartoon and the live-action movies. Many hours were spent playing it, but never once did we ever manage to beat it. I believe my sister and I only reached the final boss once. Maybe twice, but Super Shredder was never defeated.
And now, my friends, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time is getting a second wind in a remade 3D version for XBLA that looks to preserve the classic gameplay.
Unfortunately for me, I'm one of those poor, unfortunate gamers who does not own an XBox 360.

Somebody want to buy one for me? My 21st birthday's coming up in a few months.

Oh, and here's some poor quality video of the remake in motion.

- Nate

Holy Long Overdue Update, Batman!

2009-05-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

So, yeah, it's been about six months since I last updated on here.

My bad.

I'd update the three of you who follow this blog on what I've been doing this whole time, but you guys know. But I'm going to be trying to update this regularly for the sake of being able to say I maintain a blog. And, who knows, maybe I'll attract some more readers?

Oh, and I started a twitter, check out the link on the widget to the right.

Coming soon:
Music recommendations, a review of Star Trek and perhaps a review of Wolverine (if I feel like being cruel later).

- Nate

Crogan's Vengeance Review

2008-11-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, this is sort of a special review for me today. Crogan's Vengeance is a fun historical adventure graphic novel by Chris Schweizer, son of Mark Schweizer, who is known for his St. Germaine series of mystery novels.
I'll admit, I have some bias on this book because of an online pen-pal-type friendship I've had with Chris for the last few years. I first got turned onto his work when I stumbled across his old band's Purevolume account. That band was called Calico Jac k and, the pirate aficionado I am, I had to check it. Chris and I have traded messages online on and off ever since.
Well, I'd been waiting awhile for Crogan's Vengance to be released by Oni Press, and when I found out it had, I immediately rushed out to good ol' Silver Bullet Comics here in Norman. I figured if anybody would have it, they would. Lucky me, they had got one copy in the day before and I bought it on the spot.
And I am sure glad I did. Crogan's Vengeance is a hell of a lot of fun to read. The best I compare it to is an Errol Flynn movie rolled into a comic strip. Schweizer's pacing is excellent, and the story keeps moving briskly. Even the scenes low on action play out quickly because the characters pop out so well and are distinct. "Catfoot" Crogan is the type of gentleman rogue that everyone can love while the villainous D'or is just as easy to hate. Schweizer has a classic sense of story, evoking the spirit of classic Hollywood historical epics without descending into parody. Characters are fun and engaging and dialogue is witty and brisk. The plot is also quite clever, leaving the reader wondering what scheme Catfoot is going to come up with next. Schweizer's command of history, especially pirate history, is also quite admirable. He sticks to the facts and brings in enough real history to make any pirate geek like me smile.
Schweizer also illustrated Crogan's Vengeance and he did it quite well. First off, the pages are all black and white, which adds to the classic feel of the novel. Even in black and white, the book has wonderful atmosphere and he captures movement really well. A sequence involving a ship nearly capsizing during a storm is especially impressive. His characters are exaggerated to cartoon proportions, which helps them stick out more from one another, while his backgrounds style relatively simple but still realistic.
Overall, this book is simple wonderful. Its swashbuckling charm should be enough to win over any fan of comics or of pirates (or those who, like me, are fans of both). Luckily, this is but the first in a series following the different members of the Crogan family throughout history. Crogan's March, which tells the tale of French Legionairre Peter Crogan, circa 1912, is set to come out in 2009.
Oh, and one more thing, even in hardcover, Crogan's Vengeance will only put you out $14.95. It's well worth the money.

- Nate

Quantum of Solace (+Star Trek trailer)

2008-11-15T22:52:00.000-08:00

Essentially an extended epilogue to Casino Royale, the new James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, is heavier on action than the 2006 franchise reboot but not quite as engaging when it comes to characters.
From minute one, the audience is taken through the high-octane life of the 00 Agent as he tries to track down the mysterious organization that his love from the previous film, Vesper, was working for when she betrayed him and killed herself. Bond swears he's doing his duty, but the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake seems to prove otherwise.
I've been a big fan of the Bond movies since I first saw the Connery-era Diamonds Are Forever. I've always been especially appreciative of the Connery films because the character of Bond seems so much richer than the Bond we see in the days of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, in a world of ridiculous (though, admittedly, quite fun) gadgets and zero character consequences. So when Casino Royale came out, I was delighted to see a Bond film where Bond felt like a real man working in the real world with real consequences, to an even stronger degree than the early Connery films.
Quantum of Solace does feature these things, but I would say to a lesser degree than its predecessor. While Bond does have to grow and, in the end, get over the betrayal he felt from Vesper, I didn't see as much of that growth as I'd have liked. At points it seemed like false alarms, a friend (whom I won't reveal for the sake of anyone who hasn't seen it) dies in his arms and just when you think Bond is realizing what his actions are costing him, he turns around and leaves his friend's body in a dumpster, saying that he wouldn't care about it. Ultimately, we do have a satisfying emotional payoff, but the ending of this film simply wasn't as resounding as Casino Royale. Whereas in the first of these two films, we see Bond go from a somewhat eager new 00 Agent to the cold-hearted assassin that Ian Fleming made famous, we see Bond go from cold-hearted assassin to an even colder-hearted assassin.
The action scenes were also quite good, though a few of the action sequences seemed a bit contrived for this more realistic take on Bond. But, to be fair, none of those were too contrived, because I didn't even remember how contrived they were until I started this paragraph.
It was a hell of a ride and will still be an important chapter in the legacy of this new Bond (and, by the way, I like Daniel Craig in the role as much as I like Sean Connery). I'd say it didn't quite live up to the bar set by Casino Royale, but ultimately you still get a great film.

As for the trailer for JJ Abrams's Star Trek, a film I have already discussed at length on this blog... I don't know. I sincerely hope that the trailer is not indicative of the entire package. To me, Star Trek is about the characters. Yes, a Trek film needs its fair share of action, but the characters are supposed to come first. Look at Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country or Star Trek: First Contact. All three of these have a good blend of character and action, with a little humor, and are widely considered to be some of the best of the films. I realize the trailer is only two minutes of a two hour movie, but I hope JJ Abrams knows what he's doing. I'm still optimistic, but I'm also wary. As long as the spirit of Trek is preserved, and we get a good movie, I'll be happy.
One thing that worries me though: I live in a college town and there were a lot of my fellow college students in the theater. At the end of the trailer, I heard a fair amount of snickering. They had better get pretty creative with their marketing to entice my generation to go see this movie. There's still a bit of a social stigma assigned to people who are openly Trek fans. They need to make sure this looks like a movie that everyone is going to want to see, Trekkie or not.

- Nate

The Return of Recommendations

2008-11-02T20:05:00.000-08:00

Sorry that I haven't done one of these in a couple weeks. Gotta get on the ball.

Band That You've Never Heard Of:
The Atomic Atoms - Yet another band got to review for Independent Clauses. This Cincinnati Folk-Rock band are a little bit Johnny Cash, a little Tom Petty, a little Weezer and maybe even a little bit of The Cramps. Their debut album, Electrophile, caterwauls through energetic power-country/pop-punk and thoughtful ballads. Unfortunately, the band is no longer together. Shame. But you can still listen to the music. I'd recommend it to fans of alt-country music, Weezer, Modest Mouse and good music in general.

A Graphic Novel Almost Everyone's Heard Of, But I'll Recommend Anyway:
Batman: Year One - Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli & Richard Lewis
Why do I recommend this? Why are you asking, moron? This is one graphic novel that I find myself rereading all the time. The main inspiration behind Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and told through the masterful writing of comic book legend Frank Miller (300, Sin City). Batman is still the only DC Comics character I care to read and this is by far my favorite story of the Dark Knight that I've read. Granted, there are a lot of them out there that I haven't read that I've always been told are incredibly. I sadly don't have much spare cash for comics.
Plus, I just wanted something different on the list and I hadn't recommended a graphic novel yet.

Awesome Youtube Video(-ish)
Sarah Palin Got Pranked
(In a Sarah Palin voice) It's just a couple of those cooky Canadians, doing those mavericky things that comedy mavericks do. But this time they did it to Sarah Palin, and garsh, don't you know? She actually believed she was speaking to French President Sarkozy.

I think that'll be it for now.

- Nate

Thoughts on JJ Abrams' Star Trek

2008-10-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

First, let me apologize for my lack of updates this week, my novel has been kicking my ass. But I've been kicking back these last few nights and have finally made enough headway to get on here and make some posts.

Second, let me put this out there. If you don't like it, stop reading this blog, because it'll probably be something you'll see a lot of.

I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I even have this lovely white ringer t-shirt that simply says "trekkie" across the chest (Thanks goes to my sister on that one).

That being said, it's time to dive into my opinions on the upcoming Star Trek film. The re-pre-sequel-imagining-boot is directed by JJ Abrams (Mission: Impossible III, TV's Lost, Alias & Fringe) and will be released in theaters May 9th, 2009.
There are really two main camps within the Trek community when it comes to JJ's upcoming film. One faction is eagerly anticipating it and think a fresh take on Star Trek is welcome and needed if the 41-year-old franchise is going to endure. The other is claiming that this film constitutes heresy, because recasting the original Star Trek crew and re-imagining all of the series aesthetics, not to mention bringing the characters together chronologically before the original series goes against the story canon established in the franchise.
I fall more in with the first group. I've recognized that I'm a hell of a lot younger than the majority of Trek fans and that that group isn't going to last forever. I also recognize that it is the older fans who more frequently beat on the bible-that-is-canon and whose lack of support due to supposed "canon violations" caused the most recent Trek series, Enterprise (which had become an excellent series by the time it was canceled in its fourth season).
Plus, canon junkies should be satisfied that the writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, are such huge fans that they even went the extra mile of trying not to negate the storylines of the Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books. They're even canonizing some of the stuff from the books, like that Kirk's mother's name is Winona.
But because of insatiable canon junkies, Star Trek needs an infusion of fresh blood. The reason the original series has endured these forty years were because of its characters and the daring story lines. This was the series that featured the first televised interracial kiss. This was the series that had a black woman and a Russian as regular characters during the heights of the Civil Rights movement and the Cold War. It dared to challenge hatred and champion humanity in trying times. Hell, it was even reported to be one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s favorite television shows. And right now, with America on the cusp of trying to decide where its society will take itself and the world watching in baited breath as we try to deal with economic and social problems that ultimately affect the entire world, we need Star Trek almost as badly as we did in the late 1960's.
I don't have high hopes that this film will be a riveting allegory on today's social problems and vices. If it is, I'll be vastly impressed and incredibly thankful that JJ Abrams could stay so close to the spirit of Trek. I imagine this will at least be a fun film and will hopefully be on par with the better Trek movies (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn is widely considered to be one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, not just the best Trek movie).
My main hope for this film is that, with its big name stars (and hopefully excellent writing from Orci and Kurtzman), it will attract enough uninitiated film goers to the theaters that it can spark new life for Star Trek as a television series. I'm not looking for the cast of this movie to be in some kind of "New Adventures of Old Star Trek," since there's no way they could even get all these people to be regulars, not to mention that would negate canon and I'd prefer to see it preserved if possible, after watching hundreds of episodes from the different series. What I am looking for is something to carry the torch. If it were me, I'd create a new show, set in the 23rd century (Kirk's era), with the same design aesthetics as the film but with a new crew on a different ship. That way, it would be similar enough for new fans, who will hopefully be brought in by the movie, to feel comfortable with it. Plus it would open the possibility of guest roles by the actors from the film as their characters. Even better, the characters on this new ship can make references to the "current" adventures of Kirk and company here and there by mentioning events that happened in various Original Series episodes to create a more cohesive sense of canon for older fans. The best thing is, Bryan Fuller, one of the most underutilized writers to work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise and also the creator of ABC's hit Pushing Daisies has been adamantly talking about wanting to create a new series very similar to this idea. I hope somebody at CBS-Paramount listens.

Now that I'm done talking about all that drivel, on to my reactions to some of the stills from the film that CBS-Paramount released last week.

First up, the most important of them - the crew on the bridge:

Okay, so this one I'm kind of ambivalent on. I don't really mind so much that they redesigned the bridge. In fact, they'd been warning us that they would. However, cast members and set visitors who happened to be big fans of the Original Series all kept saying how wonderful and true this set design is to the original. My immediate reaction was that this looks more like the bridge of the Apple iNterprise. But, on closer inspection, I saw that pretty much everything is where it's supposed to be, even the red railing, but most of it just has been covered in white, chrome and blue. Someone said it looked like someone barfed iPod on the bridge, and that's not completely inaccurate. However, that yeoman's station was not in the Original Series and is a blatant change in design. Here's hoping it sees the classic Exploding Console duty and is gone by the end of the movie.
The actors, on the other hand, look fantastic in this. I still have my doubts about Chris Pine (Bottle Shock) as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but I admit, he definitely looks like he got into the character, just judging by the way he's sitting in that admittedly awesome-looking captain's chair. I have hope for him. Karl Urban (The Lord of the Rings, Doom) was another big question mark, especially as a fairly young New Zealander playing the grizzled Southerner: Doctor Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy. But in this image, it's like he's channelling DeForest Kelley, and I feel my doubts slipping away. I also took note that Kirk and Sulu - John Cho of Harold & Kumar fame - have shiners. Did they have a bar fight with some rowdy aliens? Or each other? I never had any doubts about Zachary Quinto (Heroes) as Spock, and he still looks great here.

Okay, so here we've got the entire Original Series crew, sans Spock. Again, Pine seems to have a bit of that Kirk groove to him, and Urban keeps looking better and better. I love Zoe Saldanya as Uhura - she's beautiful but still looks like she could make you feel like an elementary school kid with her smarts and charm. Uhura is supposed to be a strong female character, despite her relatively light duties in the Original Series, and I hope JJ's given her her due. Cho looks decent. I'm still pretty iffy on Anton Yelchin (Charlie Bartlett) as Pavel Chekov. For one, the kid is younger than me, which doesn't seem right in the slightest, and he looks nothing like Walter Koenig. They didn't even bother to straighten the curls out of his hair. Simon Pegg, on the other hand, looks like he's going to be fantastic. Standing there in the background, the look on his face just screams "Ach, no. I cannae do it, Cap'n. It'll cause too much harm to me wee baerns!" Other than his hairline being a little too high, I'm sure Pegg is going to be an excellent Montgomery "Scotty" Scott.

So this is our villain, Nero, played by Eric Bana (Munich, Troy). This dude appears to be some kind of Romulan renegade. It was with this picture that we got some story details (which everyone already knew anyone, but hadn't had confirmed). Nero is apparently from the 24th century, not long after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, which left the Romulan political structure in ruins. If Orci & Kurtzman were looking to the novels, the Romulan Empire is even split into two seperate states by this point. Apparently, Nero and his cronies have a plot to go back in time to kill Kirk, which causes 24th century Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy from the Original Series, to go back in time to stop them.
I gotta say, he looks pretty bad ass. And anybody who has seen Munich nows that Eric Bana's got some serious acting chops. Here's hoping this is aTrek villain on par with Ricardo Montalban's Kahn Noonien Singh or Christopher Plummer's General Chang.

WTF? No, seriously, what's going on? Spock is choking Kirk? Most illogical. Zachary Quinto has said that Spock is not as in control of his emotions at this point though, so I guess this is a glimpse. I'm glad they included the subtle green tint to his skin. And apparently, this is public, cause that looks like the bridge. It also looks like the top of McCoy's head there by Kirk's chin. He has witnesses, so maybe Kirk should file charges?

This is the USS Kelvin (an in-joke JJ Abrams puts in his movies, since his grandfather's name was Kelvin). Though not the Enterprise, it is a Starfleet ship and should give us an idea of what to expect from the full view of the Big E. It's very reminiscent of the Original Series, but it has sharper detail that reminds me of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I'm satisfied.

And that's it for my Star Trek ramblings. I felt those were the pictures really worth commenting on, so there you go.

I'll try to get you guys my weekly recommendations tomorrow.

Live Long and Prosper, for my fellow Trekkies.

This week's recommendations

2008-10-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

So, in order to keep a decent amount of content available, I'm only recommending one thing maximum from each category.

Music You've Probably Never Heard Of:
Band Marino
Think of an indie-pop band. Now think of indie-pop band if they had banjo, mandolin, fiddle, accordion and other folk instruments thrown into the mix. Aside from an amusingly clever name, that's pretty much what you get with these Florida natives. I was introduced to their music because I reviewed their album The Sea & The Beast over at Independent Clauses. I later had the opportunity to meet them for an interview at the Conservatory in Oklahoma City and see them perform live. The album is well worth the cash and so is making the effort to see them live.
It took me a few spins of The Sea & The Beast to really understand just how infectious their music is. It's insanely catchy and original to boot, ranging in influences everywhere from indie and pop music to bluegrass and a even hint of Sergio Leone. I highly recommend the tracks "Chasing Rainbows" and "Como Se Dice Senorita - Act I: The Laymen's Lament," but the crown jewel is definitely the insanely catchy "Every Time I Make A Girl Cry I Know I've Done My Job."
Check them out.

Some Book I Just Read For Class But Really Enjoyed:
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Okay, so I read this one for my Category Fiction class and was a little apprehensive after reading the synopsis. It's a sci-fi novel targeted at a teen audience, about a girl in a future society where everyone is given an extensive surgery when they turn sixteen so that no one is judged by the way they look, and then they spend the rest of their teens partying uncontrollably before they grow up and lead happy lives. I don't want to give away too much, though the plot isn't all that complex. I was more impressed with the story world Westerfeld created and, as someone who really cannot stand the obsession with beauty and trivial matters some people have, the rebellion against a society where vanity is such a prominent social norm was very engaging. It's easy, fun teen-reading (though still suitable for adults) that has a nice philosophical backbone.

That'll be all for tonight, folks. My apologies that I don't have a movie to recommend this time. Maybe later? I still want to watch Chuck before I go to bed. Okay, there, a TV show to recommend - Chuck. It's awesome. I might tell you why later.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS3) - Review

2008-10-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

I suppose this is a little late in coming, since Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, developed by LucasArts, came out in the middle of September. I, however, just completed the game today in my efforts to relax on this lovely three-day weekend I've had.
I suppose curiosity killed the cat when it comes to me shelling out the $8 it cost me for a five day rental (thank you, Blockbuster), but with this game being hailed as official canon and all, I just had to play through. So, wanting to witness the new Euphoria engine that LucasArts has been touting about for the last couple of years as well as find out what the hell Darth Vader was up to with some secret apprentice, I decided to devote my weekend in passionate gaming on my roommate's PS3.
The result turned out to be a mostly positive experience.
The game follows Darth Vader's secret apprentice, codenamed Starkiller, as he terrorizes the galaxy at Vader's bidding, taking down Jedi that survived Order 66 (the other nerds out there will know that that is the order given by Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith to exterminate the Jedi) and making sure no one, Imperial or otherwise, lives to say they saw him.
Storywise, the game is solid. Some of the advertising might have you believe that there are branching paths to take in the game, but it follows the same path until just before your final boss fight, where you decide whether to follow the Light Side of the Force or give in to the Dark Side. Though the plot was somewhat predicatable, especially the Light Side ending (which is the "official" ending that fits into Star Wars canon), it is still fun and there are a few good surprises in there. Rather than try to barrell through the game a second time before I had to take the game back to Blockbuster, I just found the Dark Side ending on Youtube. It was good, but it didn't have the same sense of resolution as the Light Side.
The use of actual actors for motion capture, likenesses and voice was a brilliant move on LucasArts' part, because it makes the characters feel much more natural and empathetic. Not to mention the fact that these characters now might be able to make the transition to live action via the forthcoming live action Star Wars TV series set in the same time frame. However, I think they should have made an effort to get James Earl Jones and Ian McDiarmid in to voice Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, respectively. Though Matt Sloan's Vader is downright perfect sometimes, it often just doesn't sound quite right. Surprising, Sam Witwer (known to some genre fans as the short-lived Crashdown in Ron Moore's updated Battlestar Galactica), who portrays Starkiller, also portrayed the Emperor and did a good, but not great, impersonation.
Now, for the technical stuff.
Anybody who has ever played God of War or Devil May Cry will probably be pretty comfortable with The Force Unleashed. It's all about fast combat and beating the ever-loving shit out of stuff in very cool ways. Literally, you can pick up a Stormtrooper with the Force, swing him around a bit, zap him with some lightning, throw your lightsaber into his gut and then fling him into an abyss. Starkiller is nicely customizable with the games levelling system. Basically, with every level you gain, you get points in three different areas - Powers, Combos and Talents - that allow you to decide which Force Powers to upgrade, which awesome melee and force combos to learn (getting them all by the end of the game is not difficult) and what attributes you want, such as more life and less damage taken or faster recharge rates on your Force Powers. Also, you can customize Starkiller with different lightsaber crystals and costumes that you can find hidden throughout the game's levels. It's a fun system to work with, because you have to make strategic decisions about what to upgrade based on your playing style. I, for instance, tended to use combos of Lightning with melee attacks, so I bolstered my defenses so I could survive longer at close range and increased the potency of my lightning attacks. It's much more satisfying than having all of your abilities and attributes pre-determined, though it's not a system that hasn't been done before.
Also, much like God of War, there is a high degree of repetitiveness, because all you really do is barrell through constant streams of enemies until you hit a boss, most of which can be killed with similar tactics, and then have to go through some interactive cutscenes that at least look cool enough to make the monotonous fights a little better. I would live to have seen LucasArts come up with a few more animations than they did for the interactive kill sequences on some of the larger non-boss enemies. It was cool to see Starkiller finish off an AT-ST by jumping up between its legs and cutting it in half, but after the eighth or ninth time, it was just boring.
Some greater attention to some of the gameplay mechanics would have been nice too. The Force Grip was something I found especially flawed. The environments were full of objects that could potentially be picked up and thrown at unsuspecting enemies, or with enemies that could be picked up and thrown at other enemies, but it proved so difficult to control anything with the dual analog control I largely ignored it until the final section of the game when I had a bit more control over it. The targetting system was especially flawed, because it changes as you move, so you might have your eyes set on a Stormtrooper running from your left to right that you want to zap with lightning, but end up missing him completely because your target won't stay with him. This also plays a role in the times when you really need to use that grip ability and just came seem to grab the object.
There were points where these flawed gameplay mechanics made the game insanely difficult. There were also points where the game was just flatout difficult in general. In an effort to add to Starkiller's general badassery, the game is often filled with dozens of enemies at one time. Sure, when you clear out a hangar full of Stormtroopers, nasty assault droids and a couple AT-STs, it's pretty satisfying. But not when you have to start over ten or eleven times because it's so hard to stay alive. Battles against other Jedi characters were also frustrating, especially the second to last boss fight, because some Force attacks seem completely impossible to dodge.
One last technical thing, all the claims of technical acheivement LucasArts made with this game fell short. I saw occasional framerate drops, which sometimes left Starkiller vulnerable in a tight spot. Also, the "advanced physics engine" needs tweaking, especially its collision physics, because I often found Starkiller running with half his body through a wall, standing on things he shouldn't have been able to and looking like he was floating while running uphill. I never really did see this advanced enemy AI that had them reacting realistically to being thrown around, because there were so many enemies on screen most of the time that I couldn't take the time to notice.
In the end, I generally enjoyed my experience with The Force Unleashed. If LucasArts can deliver another compelling story and fix some of the gameplay issues, I'd happily play a sequel.

7.5/10

Recommendations

2008-10-07T20:24:00.000-07:00

I think I'm gonna start making recommendations for various things now and then, just so this blog does something more constructive than telling you to not ride your bike home in the rain.

Though, it'd probably be more constructive for me to write the novel analysis for my Category Fiction class that I'm supposed to be working on. Oh well.

Music You've Probably Never Have Heard Of:
The Gaslight Anthem - Think of Springsteen fronting a punk band and you'd get the general idea. They're even from the same part of New Jersey as The Boss, so the vocalist, Brian Fallon, even has a similar accent.
The Vision of A Dying World - Folk rock from San Diego. I was lucky enough to receive and review these guys last three releases for Independent Clauses. I especially enjoy their latest full length, "...And the Grammar Lamb." They're pretty eclectic though, so they'd be an acquired taste for most people.
Drag The River - Alternative Country at its absolute best. Chad Price and Jon Snodgrass are incredibly talented songwriters and vocalists. This music basically sounds like indie rock that just happens to be country. It's fantastic.

Books That You Might Have Heard Of:
The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - I just read this one not that long ago, and I admit, it took me a little while to get into, but I definitely enjoyed the mix of the supernatural with the techno-thriller genre. This is the latest in a series that follows the highly intellectual FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast, so you might want to start from the beginning, Relic, but I had never read any of the other books and followed along well, aside from a few references.

Films That You Might Have Heard Of:
Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961) - If you don't like subtitles, don't even bother. This classic of Japanese cinema is probably my favorite film by director Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. This film was later remade into Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, which established Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name. Both a blessing and a curse, the film was carefully transferred to DVD on the Criterion collection, giving it an excellent transfer and special features, but giving it a walloping price tag of $35 or more new. Fortunately, you can generally rent it at Hastings for $2.99

I suppose that will be all for today.

Adios.

Some Words of Advice...

2008-10-06T17:47:00.000-07:00

...If you ride your bicycle the two and a half or whatever miles to campus, pay attention to the weather forecast.

It could be raining on your way home. And that would just suck.

Introductions and Salutations

2008-10-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

Greetings readers.

Yeah, sure. Like I really talk like that.

Hey folks!

Better.

Anyway, hi. I'm Nate. This is my blog. It's called "Smashing the Gnat" cause I managed to smash a gnat hovering in an annoying fashion in front of my face by clapping it out of mid-air while I tried to think of a name for the blog. For some reason I thought that sounded cool.

So let me give you the details - This is going to be my personal blog, where I'll post whatever it is I feel like posting. I'd say the vast majority of the time, it'll be stuff involving movies, TV shows, music, video games, my writing projects or whatever. Basically, it'll be whatever comes to mind.

So enjoy!