Monthly Archives: July 2006

Road Trip

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Very entertaining and enjoyable movie. I enjoyed Road Trip when I first saw it in the cinema, far more than I originally expected to. It’s just as good on DVD. I’d forgotten some of the moments, and it was a delight to find myself laughing out loud honestly at the good bits.

This film has a feel to it which is similar to American Pie, if you enjoyed that, you’ll probably enjoy Road Trip. A guy in college accidentally mails a video to his girlfriend, of him cheating on her, kind of, and the story details the events that follow.

Tom Green narrates the story, playing the part of the ‘still in college loon’ giving a tour to potential new attendees. It is through his flashbacks that we learn of the events. Tom is excellent.

A fun movie, a sexy movie, a cool movie, some entertaining moments, and a very National Lampoon’s Animal House feel, which is no bad thing at all.

Ravenheart (David Gemmell)

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Without doubt, one of David’s finest books, and now my favourite, just edging Legend into the second place spot. David gives us more emotion, characterisation and heroism of all kinds stuffed into 250,000 words than any other author I know. The characters in this book leap from the page, they are fully rounded, interesting, believable and easy to empathise with. Gemmell presents battles of a different kind in this book, including a court scene which is just excellent as the more conventional battles. There is, a seige 😉 kind of.

The plot clips along at his usual pace, takes slightly unexpected turns, and delivers us to the destination weeping and rejoicing at the same time. I enjoyed this Rigante far more than the previous two [Sword in the Storm and Midnight Falcon], mainly because the number of major characters is lower, the prose is less abrupt, and the story feels more personal.

A fitting tribute to David’s late step-father.

Tomb Raider

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Well, well, well. A mixed bag. No, not Lara, she’s nice.

Want a one line summary? Tomb Raider is an excellent action movie spoiled by long periods of exposition and emotionless dialog.

The director is obviously excellent when it comes to action sequences. The four main sequences are all superb, with the 2nd and 3rd sequences being some of the most exciting action I’ve seen in a film for a while. Not in the same style as The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, or Charlie’s Angels, but more the Die Hard style of action. It’s good. Angelina rocks 🙂

The pace during those action scenes is excellent, the initial pace of the movie is good, but it just dies to a slow crawl after the third action sequence, for far too long. Then, when the last action sequence comes along, it’s not quite enough to lift it back up again.

The story is ok, if you liked the game, you’ll appreciate it, but it’s not terribly impressive, and the threat never felt very real, which meant the point of the thing never felt very right.

Sure, Lara kicks ass, but you have to ask yourself why.

Don’t get me wrong, I was entertained, but I just lost my suspension of disbelief during the dialog, it dragged on too long. More action, less chat would have worked better I think.

I’m glad I went and saw this on the big screen, if you get the chance, go, but don’t expect something quite as good as The Mummy or Mission Impossible. It is however, on a par with The Mummy Returns [which also suffered a little from long exposition] and much better than Mission Impossible II.

I will be buying the DVD.

Oh, and a nice bonus – Lord of the Rings trailer on before the movie – most excellent

Shrek

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Go and see it.

Do not pass go, do not collect your £200, just go and see the movie.

Forget the fact that it’s a kids movie, forget the fact that it’s got astoundingly good computer animation, just enjoy the humour, I haven’t laughed this much in the cinema for a long time.

In a topsy-turvy fantasy faerie world, our out-of-the-ordinary hero, Shrek, rescues an out-of-the-ordinary princess, with the aid of a talking donkey.

Excellent lines, excellent scenes, excellent mickey taking [Disney, Matrix, River Dance, Blues Brothers, the list goes on ….] and just thoroughly entertaining.

Truly something for all the family.

Once you have seen it, come back, and read this phrase again, “the toad!”, and you’ll be chuckling for hours.

Dungeons and Dragons

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I think the only quote I can sum up to reflect my opinion is, “no redeeming features what-so-ever”.

I have a longer opinion, but it boils down to the above.

Oh, and the editing crew needs shooting.

Reviews

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So, I wanted somewhere to post my reviews of stuff, and decided this was the easiest approach since Blogger doesn’t support categories. I’m going to post all the old reviews I wrote, but since I have no idea on what date they were posted, I’ll just stick them in as I come across them, and all future stuff will be correctly dated.

WoW

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So, World of Warcraft finally finished patching and I got to play again. Levelled an undead warlock to 7 and then a Tuareen (sp) Shaman to 3 (took like 12 seconds).

Levels 1 to 7 in WoW *are* more fun than in EQ. EQ’s tutorial has come a long way to making the first few levels fun, but every race and every class plays the same tutorial, no variation, which means once you’ve done it once, you’re going to have to repeat the same steps for any other race/class combo. At least with WoW the first few levels vary based on race, although there’s little difference in the grand scheme for classes, but there is some difference at least.

And ok, it basically amounts to ‘finding the first quest giver, bringing back what they asked for and then hunting for more quest givers and killing the stuff they talk about’ for 7 levels, and in some ways EQ’s tutorial is structured better (it explains the game concepts as part of the quests). But the bottom line (look, two sentences one starting with And and one starting with But, sorry grammer) is that starting in WoW is just more fun.

It’s pacier, I never died once, and I had fun completing the quests. It looks prettier, EQ still hasn’t caught up in that regard.

You know what though? WoW *still* has less soul. You can’t talk in channels or in /shout when you’re low level, to stop spam-bots and account-sellers advertising. It also means you can’t talk to yor fellow players in the early stages. I waved at a few folk, but no response. The only time anyone interacted with me was to ask, and I quote,

“r u a mge”

To which I replied, “No my wretched undying friend, I am a warlock”. To which the reply was,

“kool”.

Ah well, so much for immersion. I’m sure it would be the same in the EQ tutorial.

There’s no real need to group for any of the early quests in WoW, where-as in the EQ tutorial unless you’re twinked to the gills some of the tasks are much easier grouped, and I think that probably goes some way to encouraging more interaction. The only time I’ve been in the tutorial recently we grouped with a random stranger to take out one of the task bosses. Other than EQ2 I’ve not played another mmorpg really, and I only played EQ2 in beta, so I can’t really compare other tutorials / new character starting processes.

I’m downloading Star Wars Galaxies at the moment, because I’ve never seen it and it has a free 10 day trial, so we’ll see how that compares.

Patch-of-Doom

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I thought ‘I know, I’ll just stick WoW onto my machine and play for 14 days for free, for a bit of a break from EQ’. Hah! 120 minutes later I’m still patching.

Gah.

Brain Pain

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A lot of my job is second-nature now. Making changes, fixing problems, suggesting solutions, pretty easy stuff, although that’s mainly due to experience. But every now and then we have to make a change to a paritcularly complex system, that we perhaps don’t touch very often, which has it’s own specific unique issues that must be considered.

Today was one of those days. My brain hurts! 4 hours of solid focus to make a change that would take 20 minutes on any other system.

Another day, another baked on stain

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Another day goes by, another hot day to be precise. I spent half of it headbutting mindless and pointless processes at work. It wasn’t as bad as yesterday in that respect. I’ve decided that Scott Adams is in some way watching me at work. Yesterday was a non-stop process mire. This was yesterday’s Dilbert (sorry about the lame popups). Just right on the nail, totally described my day.

There is some solace in the fact that I’m obviously not alone in my pain-at-work, otherwise Scott wouldn’t get so much stuff right, it can’t happen by chance surely? It is scary that so many organisations are so screwed up that Dilbert is basically an honest representation of life at work.

In other news, I’m totally addicted to the last 30 pictures on live journal (not safe for work). In fact, may not be safe even if you’re self employed or unemployed. Make sure there’s no one else in the house near you. I can’t be held accountable for the images on that link – it’s the last 30 things posted to live journal and we all know bloggers are basically weird. The rate of new content is incredible, every 15 seconds will replace the entire page, and if you send the link to someone else you can totally expect it to look different when it gets there.

The guy who hosts the little script that does that stuff also has some really cool stuff on his main site. I love the frogger game 🙂

Anyway, I really should try and sleep.