Jams And Slams

Spider Hats, Magic Man, and Trains

July 27, 2012 by Christopher

This Week’s Jams:

Adventure Time (again!): I just can’t get enough of this wonderful cartoon show and so I’m going to probably talk about it, weekly, forever. This week’s episode “Sons of Mars” saw the return of Magic Man. (In his first appearance, he turned Finn the Human into a giant foot to teach him a lesson, and that lesson turned out to be that Magic Man is a jerk. That was the whole lesson.) This week, Magic Man’s brother (a four-headed being from Mars) comes to earth to punish Magic Man (yeah, he calls his own brother Magic Man). Magic Man swaps bodies with Jake the Dog, who is spirited away to stand trial on Mars. Finn, using a transporter fueled with human caring, travels to the red planet to save his friend. Bonuses: another view of Earth with a giant chunk missing from it (I find this mesmerizing for some reason), The Immortal King of Mars is Abraham Lincoln, and there’s a tiny manticore with some self-esteem issues. Plus, a little back-story on why Magic Man is such a jerk, maybe, further explored by this bit of tantalizing promotional art. This episode was totally math.

Railworks 3: Train Simulator 2012: I bought this game during the Steam sale thinking I might write about it for a Sim-Plicity feature. I figured I’d be all, ha ha, a game where you drive a train is dumb and look at me, I’m driving a train like a jerk and it’s stupid — BUT!!!! — it’s actually a pretty impressive simulation and it turns out driving a giant diesel train through Europe at 120 kilometers an hour is somewhat intense and harrowing. I couldn’t even dork around with the fly-over cameras: I found leaving the view from inside the cab made me distinctly uncomfortable. What if there is something on the tracks? What if I miss a signal? I am responsible for this giant train and all the souls on board and by God I will not drive it unsafely! Downside: after a while, you’re just kind of sitting on a train for a half-hour waiting to reach the next stop and it gets pretty dull.

Spiders Wearing Hats: Hats of water! A gallery of waterdrops on spiders’ heads. It’s cute, because, well, I don’t know why, spiders are kind of gross. But water hats make them cute.

Peggy Isn’t Gone: I finally got into Mad Men this year, and while I think it’s an excellent show, I don’t know if I’d watch it if Elizabeth Moss (who plays Peggy) wasn’t in it. Well, I probably would, actually, because what else am I going to do, read a book?  Ha ha, no, never. At the end of this last season, Peggy left Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, which was a good move for her but slightly alarming to me, because she’s great. Creator Matt Weiner assures he she will still be on the show next season.

Hey, Breaking Bad Fans: Early appearances of Bryan Cranston on Lifetime, and Aaron Paul on The Price is Right. Aaron Paul is magnets-level excited.

This Week’s Slams:

The Hobbit May be a Trilogy: I find it sort of tiring to even think of The Hobbit being two movies, but now they’re talking about making it three. How about one movie? Can we do that? Is that still on the table? What even happens in the Hobbit that requires so many movies? They have lunch, walk a bit, trolls, barrels, Gollum, a dragon, some war. You could fit that into one movie, no sweat.

Netflix is Sinking Fast due to several missteps, poor judgement calls, and competitive streaming options. I still like it, mainly because it lets me watch The I.T. Crowd without having to get off my lazy butt and pick the DVD off the shelf. But it sounds like it’s going down the tubes — the internet tubes — fast. This isn’t really a slam but I couldn’t find any other shit to complain about.

NBC Looks for Broader Shows: They want to focus less on charming, quality comedies like Community (“I would categorically not rule out that it’s not the last season”) and Parks & Rec, and more on shows about monkey doctors. That’s annoying. Then again, I found spiders in water hats to be amusing, so maybe I’ll watch a monkey doctor show.

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Movies

Prisoners from Space and Jerks from Manhattan

July 26, 2012 by Christopher

We caught up on a few movies over the weekend, and here are some quick reviews:

Lockout: What I was hoping would be a big, dumb, fun action movie turned out to be just a big, dumb action movie. There’s a prison, in space, filled with horrible villains who are in suspended animation. The president’s daughter goes up to make sure the space prisoners’ rights aren’t being violated, and a prisoner escapes and kills the only two guards who bother to protect the big button labeled “Let All The Prisoners Out Of Stasis.” Naturally, there’s only one guy who can infiltrate the space prison to rescue the president’s daughter, a wise-cracking former special commando agent (or whatever) who is waiting to go to space prison for a crime he totally committed. Oh wait, SORRY, he didn’t commit it, in a shocking twist that’s never been done before ever.

This movie was terrible and no fun and after about forty minutes we just fast-forwarded to the end. Part of the problem, I think was that it was rated PG-13. Look, if you’re going to do a movie about horribly killing a bunch of space prisoners, make it rated R. There’s a scene where Guy Pearce puts an explosive collar around a guy’s neck and it explodes, and they don’t show it. Show it. Show all of the violenceseses. Give yourself a fighting chance to make your dumb movie at least gross-out entertaining. You have people being sucked into space and you don’t even get to see them pop. Lame.

Also, why not let Guy Pearce speak with his normal accent? He’s never been great about hiding his Aussie accent anyway, and Aussie accents are great, and an Aussie accent in space would be even greater. It might seem unlikely that a top American covert commando tactical spec-ops agent assassin (or whatever the damn hell) is Australian, but then it’s unlikely to have a prison in space, so don’t sweat it. You have Peter Stormare, too, and, come on, you’re not fooling anyone by trying to make him sound American. Let him talk how he talks, all Swedish or whatever. Not enough Swedes in space. Plus, the main two bad guys were Scottish, so having all those accents flying around (in space!) would have been fantastic. Being able to not understand any of the dialogue totally would have helped this film.

Friends With Kids: Wealthy gorgeous young-ish people in Manhattan with vaguely defined jobs dress really well and live in beautiful expansive apartments and attend fancy dinners and go jogging a lot in Central Park. But they have problems, you guys! Because raising kids is hard when you have a million dollars and live in New York and rent cabins for ski trips! The stress of interviewing all the full-time nannies you can afford just gets to you. I can totes relate because I am rich and beautiful but sometimes I’m like, AGGH, I haven’t had sex with Maya Rudolph as much as I used to so my life is garbage!

This movie is notable for having an incredible cast of some of my absolute favorite actors/comedians — Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd — and essentially doing nothing with them but having them all be kinda whiny beautiful jerks. I love Adam Scott, too, but he’s a unlikable idiot for way longer than he should have been (roughly 99.9% of the film). The director and lead actress was Jennifer Westfeldt, who has been dating Jon Hamm for years, so even if she’s bummed at making a crummy by-the-numbers romantic comedy, at least she can go home and stare at Jon Hamm. No matter how bad a day you’ve had or how bad a movie you’ve made, being able to go home and stare at Jon Hamm has to help.

Wanderlust: Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston are beautiful youngish people who live in the city (Manhattan, the city that never sleeps and also the only city that exists anywhere, ever) and are ambitious career types, but then their careers go bust and they have to go live in Atlanta with comical jerk Ken Marino, but along the way they wind up stopping at a hippie commune in Georgia and one of them winds up liking it while the other doesn’t, and then the first one doesn’t like it but the other does, and then conflict, and then resolution. Great bunch of comedians and actors: Justin Theroux, Malin Akerman, Joe Lo Truglio, Jordan Peele, Alan Alda, Todd Barry, Kerri Kenney. Lots of hippie humor. Some dongs and butts, jokes about weed and toilets, and Paul Rudd being inexplicably weird while talking to himself in the mirror. It was okay. Decent rental.

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Jams And Slams

Finn The Human, Spelunking, and the return of Heisenberg

July 20, 2012 by Christopher

I think every Friday I’ll try to post a list of the best and worst stuff that has crossed my various screens during the week. I’m calling it Jams and Slams because that’s the stupidest name I could think of.

This Week’s Jams:

  • Adventure Time. I saw the pilot for this cartoon a while back, thought it was cute, and promptly forgot about it. Then I caught an episode earlier this week and completely fell in love with it. It’s a cartoon kids will like because Jake the Dog and Finn the Human are brave, cute, and have silly, romping adventures in a magical world filled with oddball characters. Adults can enjoy it because it’s funny and a bit dark: Finn is the only human left on earth after an apocalypse (clues to which are scattered around the episodes), and the supporting cast of characters are often psychotic and dangerous. The best thing about just signing on to this show is that Cartoon Network reruns a handful of episodes per day, so your DVR can quickly be chock full of them.
  • Breaking Bad and Inside Men. Breaking Bad has returned for its final season, comprised of eight episodes this year and eight more next year. Walter White is now the full-on bad guy, less the loving family man and more the merciless Heisenberg. Inside Men is a four episode series broadcast on BBC America (the final, slightly disappointing episode aired this week), about a milquetoast money manager who plans and executes a multimillion dollar heist. Both shows have something in common: a wimpy dweeb reaches deep down inside himself and finds the cold, calculating heart of a master criminal.
  • Spelunky for X-Box 360. I’ve played my share of Spelunky on PC, the completely unforgiving platform adventure, and I’m pretty amazed at how the X-Box 360 version turned out. Dare I even say it: it’s better than the original. Unfortunately, I’m still terrible at it. Tom Francis, our ambassador to Spelunky, has written regularly and enjoyably about both versions.
  • Steam’s Summer Sale. Steam is once again selling ALL OF THE THINGS. And so, you will be reading about me playing Train Simulator sometime soon. Lucky you.

This Week’s Slams:

  • Conan The Barbarian (2011): Wow. I figured this film could go one of two ways: fun to watch because it’s fun, or fun to watch because it’s crap. Somehow, it’s just no fun at all because it’s astoundingly boring. I made two stabs at watching it on two different nights and fell asleep both times.
  • The Trailer for Looper. I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of this film. As I understand it, the mafia uses time travel to send their enemies into the past to have them killed, which seems needlessly complex and potentially disastrous. If you must use time travel to whack people, why not at least kill them first and then send their dead bodies back to dinosaur times? Also, why do it at all? Don’t they have rolled-up carpets and woodchippers in the future? But my main question is, why cover Joseph Gordon-Levitt with distracting amounts of makeup and prosthetics to make him look like a young Bruce Willis, when even with distracting amounts of makeup and prosthetics he doesn’t look anything like Bruce Willis? And, if you’re going to cover Joseph Gordon-Levitt with distracting amount of makeup and prosthetics anyway, why not just make him look like Old Joseph Gordon-Levitt and have him play both versions of himself? The mind reels.
  • Pornographic Classics: Due to the phenomenal success of Fifty Shades of Grey, some classic novels like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea are being retrofitted and re-released with explicit sex scenes. The publisher asks, “You didn’t really think that these much-loved characters only held hands and pecked cheeks, did you?” No, I fully assumed Sherlock Holmes was humping Dr. Watson, and I was right.

 

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Sim-plicity

I am a Farmer

July 16, 2012 by Christopher

In video games, there is a direct link between food and health: eating food in games is often a way to heal yourself. You’ve probably wondered at some point, “Why does eating a loaf of bread or a bunch of grapes instantly heal my horrible stab wounds?” And that’s a fine question, but what you should have instead been wondering was “Where does all that food come from?” Because, see, food comes from farms, and I played a farming game, and I need an intro paragraph to get started talking about it.

So! To answer the question you didn’t ask, I decided to buy a game called Farming Simulator. And no, I didn’t buy a heavily discounted copy Farming Simulator 2009. Screw Farming Simulator 2009. This is Farming Simulator 2011. Yeah, baby! It’s updated with all the recent farming advances! It’s state of the art farming! This ain’t your grandfather’s farming simulator! (Your grandfather’s farming simulator was a farm.)

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Sim-plicity

I am a Surgeon

July 9, 2012 by Christopher

The objectives of most of the video games I play fall into one of two categories: kill all of the people, or help some of the people by killing all of the other people. As a result, I’ve spent thousands of hours committing extreme and remorseless acts of violence upon virtual human beings. While I find causing horrible injuries to be a lot of fun, I figure it might be nice try to healing a few, so today I’m going to put down my knife and stop cutting people, and pick up a knife and start cutting people. But in a helpful way.

I bought a copy of Surgery Simulator, by Excalibur Publishing, a game that lets you perform a number of surgical operations on sick or injured patients, or as my gamer brain interprets the goal: kill all of the injuries with careful medical violence.

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Summer Movie Fantasy League

Seventy Seven

July 9, 2012 by Christopher

Well, this is a first for our Summer Movie Fantasy League, though since it’s only the second summer we’ve done it, firsts are not terribly unexpected.

Kris and I each chose ten summer movies we thought would have the highest combined domestic opening weekend box office totals, and we also chose three movies we thought would combine for the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score. While the box office results aren’t yet complete (I still have three movies left to open, and Kris has five, including The Dark Knight Rises), all of our low score films have been released. The results are: a tie.

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Sim-plicity

I am a Bus Driver

June 25, 2012 by Christopher

Over the course of my long and storied gaming career, I’ve done a lot in service of saving the world. I’ve slain dragons, rescued princesses, and disarmed nuclear weapons (not to mention, detonated a few). I’ve protected the President, assassinated Hitler, and obliterated aliens from other galaxies. I’ve piloted fighter jets, submarines, battle mechs and interstellar space ships, all with the goal of saving humanity from utter destruction. Long story short, I’ve saved the world. A lot.

Frankly, I’m tired of it. Let other gamers save the world: I just want to live in it. Luckily, there are a number of down-to-earth simulation games that will allow me to do just that. Today, I’m looking at a sim called Bus Driver, by SCS Software, that lets me inhabit the presumably uncomplicated guise of a driver of buses.

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Summer Movie Fantasy League

The Second Annual Summer Movie Fantasy League!

June 18, 2012 by Christopher

If you recall, last year my wife Kris and I engaged in a summer movie fantasy league (we got the idea from Film Drunk), where we held a draft and picked summer movies based on what we thought their opening weekend totals would be. I won, but not by much.

We’re now in the midst of our Second Annual Summer Movie Fantasy League, and I’m long overdue for boring you with the details.

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Movies

Prometheus: Two Reviews

June 14, 2012 by Christopher

Kris and I took a day off work to go see Prometheus on opening day, so eager were we to see the new sci-fi film by Ridley Scott, creator of Alien and Blade Runner. I’ve written two reviews, and here’s the first one:

It’s a good, entertaining monster movie, but not the landmark piece of science-fiction I was hoping for.

Okay, now onto the second review, which is absolutely filled with spoilers, because despite my disappointment in the film as a whole, it was very entertaining, and it is a great deal of fun to talk about in detail.

Spoilers — lots of them — below.

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Site Blather

Once More, With Feeling

June 13, 2012 by Christopher

Okay, I’m back. I’ve said this before, but this time I mean it. Well, I’ve meant it before, but this time I totes double-swearsies mean it. I am going to write some things for you to read, or at least for you to scroll through quickly before unsubscribing.

As you can see, provided you’ve been here before and remember what things looked like, and provided you’re actually here now and not viewing this through Google Reader like a jerk, things look different now. Also, there is more stuff here than there used to be. This is due to the efforts of my friend Des, who has redesigned the site and also gone and yoinked everything I’ve ever written for all the other websites I started and then abandoned, and stuffed it all in here, because I couldn’t figure out how to do it myself and even if I could have figured it out I probably never would have taken the time to do it (lazy).

Over to the right, there are what we will call “features” while trying to keep a straight face. These are all things I’ve done that have appeared elsewhere on their own sites, but are going to live here now. The features are still in various stages of reassembly, mainly due to me letting my other websites expire without making sure I had everything backed up because I am an idiot (also lazy). Here’s the current state of the union:

  • Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman. This is my Half-Life 2 webcomic. With the exception of a couple navigation buttons everything seems to currently be working, but if you spot any errors or problems, drop me a line.
  • Living In Oblivion: My blog about playing as an NPC in The Elder Strolls IV: Oblivion. Currently, it’s a bit of a mess: The entries are all there but I lost the cropped images for the most recent few posts. I still have all of the originals so I’ll be replacing them soon. There’s also some weird question mark thingies in a lot of the posts — working on removing them. Once that’s done, the old WordPress site will redirect to its new home here. Not sure if I’ll ever finish this blog, but maybe!
  • The First-Person Observer: My fake in-game news site. Everything is archived and should be readable; again, if something seems to be malfunctioning, let me know using the contact page. I plan to start writing entries for this (occasionally) again.
  • The Elder Strolls: A ten-part series I wrote for PC Gamer’s blog about playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as an NPC. The content isn’t hosted here, but the page links to each of the ten entries. This series is complete.
  • The Demo Man: I used to write reviews of free game demos, because who would ever need such a thing? They’re free! That’s the joke, see. Right now, this section is incredibly incomplete: I wrote these reviews on like four different sites, including Shacknews back when they were into that sort of thing. So, I still need to find/rebuild them all. I will, eventually. And maybe I’ll start writing new ones from time to time.
  • To The Death! A little project I did in Garry’s Mod where I made AI-controlled people and monsters from Half-Life 2 fight each other. I doubt I’ll ever add to this, but I included it because people still ask me about it sometimes.
  • Not My Desk: My old temping website. I haven’t really looked through it so see if it’s all working, but it should all be there: essays, archives, etc.

I also have a huge backlog of blog posts from some of my old, long-gone blogs, like 1fort and First-Person Shouter, and they’re all still around, somewhere, and I’ll see about building them back into the site at some point. At the same time, like I said, I’ll be writing new things, hopefully regularly.

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