The Wire: Season Four

The impression I got from everyone else's old posts on season four of The Wire was that though the show gets really good in its third season, the fourth is when it really takes off and edges it's way into the "greatest of all time" discussion. That's high praise and I was hopeful that the season would live up to all that hype, and now that I'm through the season I can say I believe it did. Season four of The Wire, while building on the foundation of the previous three seasons, just clobbered them all easily in terms of quality. It seemed like in the past The Wire was at its best when exposing just how broken and fucked up systems in Baltimore are- be it politics, the war on drugs, or general drug-dealer operational infrastructure. Season four just hammers on these subjects hard, all season, and in addition takes on education as well. It's a show that by design wants to frustrate you- with every new lazy bit of hypocrisy in the school system, every time a politician solves a problem by creating one and letting the next guy figure his way out of it, every time a drug dealer chooses to kill a rival over short-term problems rather than think about the long-term effects, it just drives home the point that these systems are all completely fucked and no amount of idealism is really going to change things. Spoiler Alert: I knew that this season would focus on four middle-school boys and that its ending would leave me depressed, so naturally I assumed at least one of them would be killed. But no, that would be too easy. Instead all four live to see the next season, and a majority of them continue on a life that seems more depressing than a tv character's death ever could. So while I loved The Wire's fourth season like many others did before, the question remains: does it rank among the best of all time? This one I'm not so sure about. I can't get over how slow those first two seasons were, and while the third was great, I'm not sure if the excellent fourth completely redeemed that slow start. Some shows take a while to get going but it'd be hard for me to recommend the series to someone unless they were 100% committed to seeing it through to the end; it really takes a long time to get going. Still though the brilliance of season four has me also wondering if I missed a lot of subtleties in earlier seasons, so at some point after I finish off season five I would like to go back and rewatch the first season at least.

Pokemon X

One of the things I find so appealling about the Pokemon series is the continuity and how you can constantly move Pokemon from old games into the newer ones. For instance, that Blastoise you trained back in 1997 could eventually be transfered to a GBA version of the game, and then to a DS version, and finally onto the 3DS version- Pokemon X and Y. Unfortunately I missed many generations of the game and after playing Pokemon Red as a youngster, but I've played the two most recent versions, White and X over the past year. Everyone knows that each game in the series starts you off with a choice of water, fire, or grass Pokemon, and what's more is that Pokemon X and Y also offer you a choice of Pokemon from the first generation starters. As such, I felt I was finally able to put together my plan for an all-star team, including three different starters from three different generations made of three different types- Fennekin (fire) from X and Y, Oshawott (water) from Black and White, and finally Bulbasaur (grass) from Red and Blue. Combine these with a couple legendary Pokemon from the most recent two games, and finally one more strong Pokemon I owned in Pokemon White, I'd have a team that could cover any battle situation, learn all the HMs, and cover several generation's worth of Pokemon. I excitedly downloaded the game back in October and jumped right in to set my plan in motion. And then came the delays. In the past you've been able to use Nintendo hardware to transfer Pokemon from one generation to the next, but suddenly going from DS games to 3DS games meant the need for an online app, the Pokemon Bank, which didn't even come out until a few weeks ago. This costs $5 per year but is free to try for a month, which I took advantage of. Downloading the app meant I needed to delete some old games on my 3DS too, as Pokemon X was taking up almost all of the room on my SD card. Then when I got the app working, I found out I needed to download a different app. So I deleted Pokemon Bank and downloaded Pokemon Transfer instead and... it still didn't work. Turns out you need both apps! So I deleted more old games to free up space on the SD card (which is at this point entirely dedicated to Pokemon software) and finally I was able to snag my old Pokemon and bring them from White to X. I realize this is a complete first world problem, but what a hassle! That's way too many steps to transfer Pokemon when compared with the ease it's been done in the past. I mean seriously, I've left out details about making sure your Pokemon are in just the right box, and the constant input of my password on a tiny keyboard each time I reconnected to the internet; it was just not the fun, streamlined experience I was expecting. Still though, once I got my team together things progressed exactly as I hoped. The team was dominant for most of the game and I was able to power through it, but still came close enough to a last-ditch win-or-lose-with-the-last-move battle againt the elite 4 with everyone at level 65-ish, which seems high for a Pokemon end-game. The game itself was great. Even if it still follows the same pattern of 8 badges, elite four, a team of villains, a rival, and a legendary Pokemon, there was enough new stuff here to make this not feel like a cash grab. Most notably the series finally moved on from sprites to cel-shaded figures, including all of the previous generation's Pokemon. You can also easily jump into a battle or trade with anyone on the internet, or even make a blind trade, almost instantaneously, a far cry from the pain in the ass that was transferring your own old Pokemon to the game. They also introduced mega-evolutions for some of the best Pokemon, allowing them to become more powerful for the duration of a battle. I can only confirm them for Venusaur, Gyarados, Gengar and Lucario, but when I return to the game again for more post-game activities I'll likely seek out more mega-evolutionary items to get the rest of my team up to my Venusaur's level. So yeah, aside from that one inexplicably terrible system, Pokemon X is pretty great and since I have it saved on my SD card I'm sure I'll play some battles with B-Town or Sheridan in the near future. To anyone else with a 3DS, if you've been interested in getting back into Pokemon, there's no time like the present.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

This is the third Terrence Malick film I've seen, and all three have elicited more or less the same reactions from me. Here's a rough play-by-play that applies equally to all three movies:

5 minutes in - Wow, this is pretty.

10 minutes in - Ah, nothing but voice overs and whispers so far. That's cool. He's setting up a nice slow burn here.

25 minutes in - Seriously, this is just fucking gorgeous footage. I wonder when the movie will really start, though.

40 minutes in - Wow, really? We're already forty minutes in? Feels like we've only just scratched the surface of the plot here. I still don't get the sense that I know any of these characters on any level. This will all pay off though, I'm sure.

1 hour in - Holy shit, now that there's some plot to go with all the beautiful scenery, I am loving this movie. Let me grab my computer and read a little bit about it.

1 hour and 15 minutes in - I guess I'll look up from my computer when I can hear something happening in the movie.

1 hour and 30 minutes in - Maybe I'm missing something big in these muffled whispers. Time to shut the computer.

1 hour and 45 minutes in - Really though, this looks so beautiful. I'm still not sure what any of the characters are doing but they all sound so calm and peaceful in their voiceovers and whispered murmurs.

2 hours in - Wait, there's another hour?

2 hours and 15 minutes in - Yeah, I definitely missed something plot-related. Let's open the computer back up and see what it was.

2 hours and 30 minutes in - I guess I didn't miss much, actually. The climax is coming up, though, and I should really pay attention here. Let me close my computer.

2 hours and 40 minutes in - Was that the climax? Didn't really feel all that climactic to me. Or maybe that was the point? Gosh, this is still just so damn pretty.

2 hours and 50 minutes in - And here are the credits. Nice. I think I really liked this movie. I'm not entirely sure what took place or why it took three hours, but it was just so beautiful.

And that's where I'm at right now. Another Malick movie, another visually stunning masterpiece, another futile attempt on my part to try to figure out if I even understood the message here, or whether there even was one at all. An hour in - and again, that seems to be the magical point where my interest peaks in every Malick movie - I was very actively considering whether or not this was the greatest war movie I'd ever seen. Two hours further in, well, no.

Movies are wide-ranging with their intentions and goals, and this was probably the most visually stunning war movie I've ever seen. But despite all its star power and its three-hour run time and its very basic plot (American soldiers push forward into Guadalcanal and take the island away from the Japanese) I made virtually no connection to any of the men on screen as individuals. Oh, hey, Woody Harrelson just blew himself up. I hardly knew him. Oh, geez, Jared Leto just bit it. What was his character even up to in the first place? Oh, wow, that's George Clooney. Hang on, this is literally the final scene of the movie.

Malick's original cut on this one was over five hours long, and in addition to the aforementioned actors - and Sean Penn, John Travolta, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Nick Nolte, and John C. Reilly - it featured scenes with Billy Bob Thornton, Gary Oldman, Martin Sheen, Bill Pullman, Viggo Mortensen, and Mickey Rourke that were cut entirely. Like, honestly, an all-star cast was cut from this film and it was still overflowing with recognizable faces doing very little beyond walking through amazingly shot landscapes.

I guess Malick decided very late in the editing process that he wanted to remove as much dialogue from the film as possible, reducing it down to little more than three hours of guys walking around on a tropical island and, to be fair, shooting a lot of Japanese soldiers. It made for just a beautiful movie - have I driven that point home hard enough yet? - but one I don't think I'll really remember any characters or moments from, years down the road. And, again, I feel the exact same way about The New World and The Tree of Life.

Valkyria Chronicles

Here's one of the oldest games in my backlog, a purchase made at GameStop on a whim some three years ago on B-Town's recommendation. (Thanks, B-Town!) I finally started it about a week and a half ago and I've poured close to forty hours into it since then. Wow! I've got a lot of gushing to do, so let's break this one down into some categorical focal points.

Setting:

The game is set on the fictional continent of Europa at the outbreak of the second Europan War in 1935. Sound familiar? Allow this map to drive the point home even further:

(Click to enlarge, I think.) Anyway, this is so clearly based on World War II in Europe, with one major difference; the real World War II had the Germans fighting a two-front war against the allies in the West and Soviet Union in the East. Here, there is no central power; instead, an empire (in red, above) and a federation (white, in the West) are at war, and poor little Gallia (blue) is stuck in the middle. Virtually all of the game's action takes place in Gallia, and you command a squadron of the Gallian militia. The squadron includes a bunch of foot soldiers and a couple of tanks, but no airplanes. It's that lack of planes, I think, that really differentiates this world's setting from the Europe of World War II. That and about half a dozen fantasy, science fiction, and Anime elements that we'll get into.

Story:

The game kicks off when the Empire invades neutral Gallia as part of a much larger effort against the Federation. This really isn't all that unlike what Germany did to neutral Belgium in World War II. The Empire also begins capturing, enslaving, and mass-murdering a race of people called the Darcsens, which isn't really all that unlike what Germany did to, well, you know. Anti-Darcsen sentiment also runs rampant in your own troops; this is because the Darcsens have been accused of all kinds of dark magic and curses and the like. Oh, and there's this super rare elite breed of people known as the Valkyria, who are more or less invincible in combat. I'd draw parallels between them and the concept of the Aryan master race, but that one seems too forced; consider it a sci-fi trope, and nothing more.

Anyway, the Empire rolls in, and it's up to you and your ragtag group of militia members to hinder their progress in various parts of the country. Deep in the woods, among cities, across deserts, you name it. Twenty-three mandatory missions and five optional side quests later, you've forced them back out of Gallia and saved the day. Of course, you haven't done so without your share of casualties.

Gameplay:

Here's where Valkyria Chronicles really shined. The story and characters were interesting enough to have made for a solid RPG on their own, but the combat was what roped me in. At a literal zoomed out level, it's a pure turn-based strategy game in which you have a certain number of moves per round, and you can spend those moves giving your units orders. But as soon as you select a unit, you zoom in, so to speak, and take control of that unit like you would in a third person shooter. The zoomed out view, then, gives you time to collect your thoughts and plan out your turn, but once you zoom in on a unit, that unit is in danger if it's under enemy fire.

There are five classes of units in Valkyria Chronicles, aside from tanks. You've got lancers, who fire heavy explosives meant for taking down tanks. You've got shocktroopers, the best pure "soldiers" in the game capable of both dealing and absorbing a lot of damage. You've got scouts, who can move farther and faster than anyone else in the game, but take more damage and deal less of it than shocktroopers do. You've got snipers, who have extremely poor movement and die pretty easily, but who are also capable of cross-level one shot kills. And you've got engineers, the maintenance workers meant for an array of tasks like fixing damaged tanks and clearing landmines. And that's it. I like the job tree systems in games like Final Fantasy Tactics, but there's elegance in simplicity here. For most missions you can deploy around eight units or so, and figuring out the right balance of units in most levels was half the challenge. Also, you can swap out your units for fresh ones (or for different classes altogether) at little camps throughout the levels. In fact, capturing these camps from your enemies is a major part of the gameplay in most missions.

Between missions, you can level up your units and develop new weapons and armor for them. But, unlike in many other games, units level up and get equipped as an entire class; for instance, I used a shocktrooper named Alex in all of my missions and hardly ever used a shocktrooper named Edy, but Alex didn't become stronger or better than Edy at any point in the game.

Lastly, the game features perma-death; if your units fall in battle and you can't reach them to revive them in time, you'll lose them forever. A lot of strategy RPGs have this feature, but what's unique about Valkyria Chronicles is that from a pure gameplay perspective there's no real reason to restart a mission just because somebody dies. Since you get plenty of units throughout the game, and since replacement units are just as capable in battle as experienced ones, the death of any militia member isn't really a detriment to your progress in the game. Still, I wouldn't blame anyone for restarting a mission after losing an ally; you really grow attached to these characters, especially as you get deeper and deeper into the game with them. More on that below.

Emotional Response:

I've been calling the militia members "units" throughout this post, but they truly are detailed and well-defined characters. There are fifty-three of them in total, and I probably only used thirty of them at all, and maybe only twelve or so regularly. Still, each one of them was fleshed out pretty fully with character art, a small bio section, and a collection of unique strengths, weaknesses, skills, and vices. One of my favorites was Cezary, a cocky but cowardly sniper who made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was happiest far away from the front lines. Another favorite of mine was Wavy, a bespectacled and battle-hardened Darcsen scout who had no qualms racing stoically into the fray. And of course there's fan favorite Jann, a super-gay lancer voiced by John DiMaggio (Bender from Futurama) who wore makeup, raved about his squadmates' muscles, and always sassed the bad guys something fierce after killing them. I had my shit list, too, when it came to people like Homer the super-depressing engineer, Theold the mopey lancer, and Nancy the dorky and clumsy scout.

I lost four characters in total over the course of my playthrough; three died in the same mission storming an enemy's camp in an early mission before I had learned how to play cautiously and wisely; up until that point, they had been regulars in battle for me, but since this was early enough in the game, I hardly cared. No, the loss that stung the most was Alex, the aforementioned shocktrooper, who died somewhere in front of the enemy's castle toward the end of the game. Alex was a brash and carefree seventeen-year-old kid who dreamt of flying through the skies after the war. His dying words, alone in the cold night, were, "The sky looks... so close... I can... almost touch it..." Fuckin' A, Alex. You were missed.

Of course, the game also features a few main characters who can't be killed in combat because of their importance to the story. (When other characters would die, these special units simply "retreat" and are ready to go again in the next battle.) The relationships and camaraderie between these five or six characters is built up and developed significantly in cutscenes between missions, and there's some great emotional payoff, both painful and pleasant, along the way. The Rosie-Isara relationship was just touching as all hell. And the Welkin-Alicia romance felt genuine and earned when it could have just felt like fanservice for shippers.

Conclusion:

All in all, this was a fantastic game. I don't know why I put if off for so long, but I'm very happy I finally played it. The good news is that the story doesn't even necessarily end here, as two other games and an anime series and manga series all exist. The bad news is that the anime, the manga, and the third game are all in Japanese only, and the second game is for the PSP, a system I don't currently own. Gah! Realistically, I'm sure I'll move on quickly from here; it only takes a compelling game or book or TV show to get your mind off of another one. All the same, it's such a rarity for me to be left wanting more from a video game or TV show, especially five years into the Back-Blogged project when my mindset so regularly alternates between "finish it quickly" and "move on to the next one."

Yes, Valkyria Chronicles was something special indeed, and I've enjoyed my brief obsession with it immensely.

Portal 2

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the sequel to Portal came out; that advertising mega-blitz feels like only yesterday. Portal 2 was the game in Trev's collection I was looking forward to the most, and as such I held off until I was nearly done with his games to reward myself with one I knew without a doubt I would love. I was right, Portal 2 is awesome and a perfect sequel to the original Portal in every way. We pick up with Chell, the AI-destroying hero from the first game, still trapped inside Aperture labs and placed in suspended animation for a long time (thousands of years?) after the events of Portal. Stephen Merchant voices another personality core who attempts to wake Chell up and save her from the decaying wreckage of Aperture Science labs, and that's one of the biggest differences here in Portal 2- all of the slick and clean environments of the first game are now falling apart and overgrown with plant life. The task now is no longer to defeat a rogue AI but to escape the premises, but as walls fall down around you you can get a look at just how huge Aperture Science labs are and how difficult it will be to find your way out. Still though the game manages to keep up a brisk pace with Merchant's sidekick-bot keeping things interesting during the many testing chambers. As in the first game you're constantly bouncing back and forth between test chambers and behind-the-scenes areas that provide a rich and hilarious history of Aperture Science- J. K. Simmons provides the voice of Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture, who provides pre-recorded commentary as you traverse through some of the company's more dangerous experiments- including a fluid that lets you run faster, or another fluid that, when sprayed on un-usable walls, allows portals to be placed almost anywhere. Valve really took everything that was great about the first Portal to the next level; my only worry was that it would be too much of a good thing and that by making the sequel significantly longer Portal 2 might lose some of the magic of the first game. Nope. Not at all. Now I'm desperate to play through the equally-lengthy multiplayer content. Anyone want in?

Downton Abbey: Season 4

I don't have a ton to say about this one yet. A large part of that is probably that I caught up to the American airing on Blu-ray and most of my friends and coworkers haven't even finished this season yet. I think the finale is in two nights, so, hey, let's all have a discussion about it in the comments section then, huh?

But, man.

Fuckin' Bates.

Breaking Bad: Season 5, Part I

Breaking Bad is one of the greatest TV dramas of all time - it's in my top three, personally - with nary a dud episode in its five-season, six-year run. It's the story of a man with terminal cancer and undying pride taking his life back and going out on his own terms, losing every shred of goodness, decency, and morality along the way. More so than any other great TV show, it focuses almost exclusively on one man: Walter White. Yeah, Jesse is a great deuteragonist, and sure, characters like Skyler and Hank and the various antagonists of the series are all plenty deep and defined in their own right, but this is Walt's story first and foremost.

You all already know this because you've all already seen Breaking Bad, I'm sure. I only bothered bringing it up because my biggest takeaway from my second romp through the first half of the fifth season was that this stretch of eight episodes belonged to another character as much as they belonged to Walt; that character was Mike, the badass grizzled hitman whose relationship with Walt meanders for three seasons or so between partner and hunter. In many ways, Mike is a foil for Walt, a cool and collected professional contrasting heavily with Walt's fiery egotism. Walt claims he's in the meth game purely for his family's sake; with Mike, that actually appears to be the case. Both men serve as mentors and father figures for Jesse, but where Walt lies to the kid and manipulates him, Mike's concern for Jesse's well being and future is honest and genuine. And where Mike remains loyal to his guys on the inside, paying them off and making them whole with a substantial chunk of his own drug money, Walt has no issue with orchestrating the murder of each of those same gentlemen in a calculated and coordinated strike, all out of a fear that one or two of them would snitch.

It's this season - or half-season - to me that really turned the tide against the Walt supporters in the "battle" between those rooting for him and those waiting for his demise. Sure, up until now, Walt's done some terrible things, but nearly all of them were excusable to a certain degree. Cooking meth? Look, someone's gotta provide for the family somehow. Letting Jane choke on her vomit and die? Eh, she'd have done that anyway. Getting Jesse to murder Gale in cold blood? Hey, it was very literally done to save his own life, and likely Jesse's as well. Poisoning Brock in order to manipulate Jesse into helping him kill Gus? Yeesh... but... Gus was a drug lord ready to kill Walt and his whole family, and while poisoning a kid to manipulate your own apprentice into working with you again is a very shitty thing to do, so were most of the things Gus did in the first place.

But here, with his hunter and adversary out of the picture, fortunate to still have his life, Walt wastes no time jumping back into cooking meth against the wishes of both Mike and Jesse, his last two remaining partners. It's here, in this fifth season, that Walt begins to act reprehensible with no real motivations beyond pride, wrath, and the legacy of Heisenberg. He also cons his wife's sister into taking his side in their marriage issues by playing off Skyler's anger over all of his lies as guilt she's hanging onto from a one-time affair. Contrast this behavior to the actions of Mike, the consummate professional who just wants to walk away from the game. His hand is essentially forced by his own loyalty to his guys - he wants to pay to keep them quiet instead of just killing them all, which is, you know, relatively admirable - and it's with the utmost reluctance that he agrees to work with Walt at all. And in the end, when it all comes crashing down on Mike and he knows he has to run away forever and never see his granddaughter again, Walt can't even let him ride off into the sunset; instead, he shoots him in the arm over a petty argument about whether or not Mike "owes" him any sort of thanks. And just before Mike dies, Walt comes to the realization - out loud, for Mike to hear before he fades away - that another source can give him all the info on Mike's inside guys, and that it won't be hard to locate and kill them at all.

Mike gives him a stern but quick "shut the fuck up and let me die in peace," and then does exactly that, his final moments consumed with regret; he's dying, his men are all going to die, and really, what was it all for? Walt's pride, and nothing else. So ends the life and story of Walt's best foil in the show's entire run, a trained and talented killer, a seasoned veteran of the meth distribution process, who could make things work alongside sleazy lawyers and Mexican drug lords alike. In the end, even Mike was no match for Walt's self-centeredness.

Golden Axe II

Keith and I also tried out Golden Axe II, but it was clear from the outset that Keith just wasn't interested in this one. Luckily, Mrs. Keith was interested enough in the three-move game to accompany me through five levels or so. We got some sort of game-ending message about how we needed to play on a harder difficulty to unlock the final level, but I'm calling bullshit on that. We beat this game by the skin of our teeth, Danielle out of continues and me clinging to my last life when the apparently-not-quite-final boss fell. Consider it beaten!

Unfortunately, Golden Axe II did away with my two favorite parts of Golden Axe in the elf-dwarfs with potion sacks and the fire-breathing dinosaurs, and nothing noteworthy was added. Here's a rare example of a Genesis game failing to live up to its own predecessor. Yeesh.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Gain Ground
Streets of Rage 2
Golden Axe II
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Streets of Rage 2

Yeah, Keith and I may have tamed the rage on the streets just a week ago, but it din't stick. The streets were just as rage-filled today when we tackled yet another round of side-scrolling beat-em-up action. Long story short, the whole ordeal played out almost exactly like the first one but with improved graphics and controls. Where the first Streets of Rage was a sloppy and shitty mess, this one was just kind of a messy and uninteresting mess. So, you know. Improvement!

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Gain Ground
Streets of Rage 2
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Killzone Shadow Fall

I was forced to buy a bundle when I got my PS4. Killzone Shadow Fall was bundled in. I used to love all first-person shooters. However, I've grown tired of all of them except Halo. And that really only applies to multiplayer. Still, I like it better than a lot of FPSs I've played, but that's not saying much. Anyway, this game plays like a standard FPS that doesn't do anything new or exciting. It all felt so familiar. Also, this game was praised by reviewers as not holding your hand as much as other FPSs. For me, that translated into me never knowing where the fuck I was going. Which sucked, especially because the collision detection wasn't always working right so I would run into random rocks all the time. It didn't help that I played this game so sporadically and forgot all of my abilities over and over. Did I mention that I had a robot buddy who could do a lot of things like break shields? The problem is that I had to use the touch pad, which I did not enjoy. With that being said, it's the best looking game I've ever seen. The sound is incredible to boot. I think back at how the launch games for last generation looked and played and compare them to what we have now for new games coming out for PS3 and XBOX 360 and I get excited for what is to come. Still, all the shine in the world won't make a boring game better. I could tolerate this thing because it was so pretty to look at it and it was perfectly serviceable. Still, I would never recommend getting a PS4 just so you could play this. So boring.

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Something weird has been going on lately. Either I've acclimated my expectations to the shittiness of the Genesis library - a strong possibility - or the games I've played of late have genuinely been better than several of the earlier offerings. For instance, there was nothing amazing about Shinobi III, and if anything I've grown tired as hell of these side-scrolling arcade-style beat-em-ups. But this game felt genuinely decent. The on-screen images and animation were crisp, by 16-bit standards, and combat was at least somewhat intuitive, with more than one attacking action available.

Anyway, what matters more than Shinobi III itself is that beating Shinobi III has pushed me past the halfway mark in the Genesis project. It's hard to believe, but that's 17 games down now and only 16 remaining. As winter turns to spring and the days grow longer and I grow increasingly tired of the Genesis, I doubt I'll push forward with the same fervor; just because I got to this point in a month and a half doesn't mean I'll be done with this by the end of March. Or April. Or even summer. But it seems very reasonable that I'll be done here soon enough. I wasn't excited at all to receive 33 new games to log to kick the year off, but these don't seem like they'll be choking up my backlog for years to come. The same cannot be said about plenty of PS2 and Xbox 360 titles I've purchased on several isolated whims.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Gain Ground
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Golden Axe

This is yet another game Keith and I tried out last weekend. We tore right through a mode called "beginner" only to learn that it was just three stages long out of six total. Now, normally I wouldn't give a shit, and I'd call that game beaten and move on to the next one. Except, shockingly, Golden Axe was pretty fun! You play as a ripped barbarian or an axe-wielding dwarf running around fucking up soldiers and skeletons and knights and such. You can even attack these little elves running around with sacks full of meat and potions in order to get the meat and potions. Hell, you can even ride on fire-breathign dinosaurs. This was yet another side-scrolling beat-em-up, but it was easily my favorite one yet. And things are looking up, with two more Golden Axe games yet to come.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Gain Ground
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Misery vs. Misery

Alright, alright! It's clear that I need an entirely new back-blog just to keep up-to-date on my all the back-blogging that I'm failing to actually finish. Still, here is a double-whammy that I had the intention to delivery back-to-back. What we have here is Stephen King's novel Misery and its film adaptation by the same name starring Kathy Bates and James Caan, directed by legendary Rob Reiner. How did these match up? Let's get to it.

As most people who follow the items I read already know that I'm a big King fan. Never got around to Misery, though. Huge fucking mistake on my part. This novel easily one of my new favorites out of King's work -- and certainly my favorite take on King having the protagonist being a writer, of which many of his stories follow that premise. Story is simple and pretty famous. For those completely unaware of what exactly I'm talking about, here's a quick synopsis. A famous writer, Paul Sheldon, (known for a series of books that sort of like a novelized version of Downton Abbey who's pivotal character goes by the name Misery -- get it?) gets into a car wreck while driving some winding back roads during a snow storm in rural Colorado. Left for dead, a local hermit, Annie Wilkes, happens discover the wreck and saves the guy. Next thing Sheldon knows, he wakes in small house in the middle of nowhere belonging to Wilkes -- the biggest fan of Misery there is... and also a complete lunatic and serial killer. Shortly after his rescue/imprisonment, Annie manages to finish reading the last (and final) Misery novel where Misery is killed off to end the series. Wilkes loses her shit and locks the writer down in order for him to write one last Misery novel. A happy story where Misery lives. And the battle between the Sheldon and Wilkes begins. 

So, how does the book compare to the movie. Well, I'm going to be that guy. "The book was way better." Seriously, it is!

The film adaptation does follow the novel fairly closely. Some elements are rearranged. Some scenes omitted. But, essentially, it's the same shit. The one thing in the film, though, that really stands out to me was the one scene where Wilkes needs to cripple Sheldon after he attempted to escape. What does she do in the film? She places a wooden block in between Sheldon's ankles, reveals she's holding a sledgehammer, and starts swinging. 

Oh... it's tough to watch. 

Then we have the novel. What does Annie do there? Yes, she cripples Sheldon, but not by breaking his legs. SHE FUCKING CHOPS OFF HIS RIGHT LEGS WITH AN AXE!!! ARGH!!! This pretty much summarizes the difference between the two stories. The book is way, way more violent. Not only does Sheldon loses a leg in the book, but there's another time when Wilkes just barges into his bedroom and saws of his thumb with an electric knife. Jesus... 

The book doesn't pull any punches. It's gruesome and terrific. Like I said before, definitely one of my favorite King novels. The one last praise for this book is that it's fairly meta. What do I mean by that? Well, King really goes into the practice of the writing process when Sheldon is forced to sit down and work on the latest Misery novel. In fact, King writes whole chapters of Misery for the audience to read (the story within the story). Also, Sheldon only has some shitty typewriter Annie bought for cheap that falls apart (losing keys) as the book goes on. As you read through these later chapters, King keeps it accurate by having the certain letters omitted as if you're actually reading the pages from this broken typewriter. I certainly liked that, even if it got impossible to decipher at some points. 

Quick wrap-up: Movie is pretty good. Book is way better. They also completely depart during the ending. How so? I'll leave that for people to find out on their own. One of them, however, is waaay more violent than the other. Love it.   

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

Here's the DS-only sequel to 2006's Final Fantasy XII, a controversial installment for the Final Fantasy series due to its completely revamped gameplay and years of development hell leading to things like the main character being replaced at the last minute with a kid who had little to do with the game's plot. Well one year later came its sequel, Revenant Wings, which completely revamped gameplay again, but managed to at least put main character Vaan at the center of his own story. The game is no longer really an RPG, but a real-time strategy game in which Vaan and a few other characters control monsters and attack enemy groups in packs. I've really barely played any RTSes except for WarCraft 2 when I was a little kid, and unfortunately FF XII: Revenant Wings couldn't measure up to the lofty standards of that really good game at all. Most of the problems in gameplay seem to stem from the fact that the DS doesn't seem all that suited to RTSes. It has two screens, sure, but both of them are fairly small and it was often difficult to click just right to tell your party which enemies to attack. Controlling almost entirely with a stylus made things even more difficult- RTS games require many button's worth of input, and often come with a high level of control customization so you can set up hotkeys for your own personal preference. Sure, difficulty in RTS games is supposed to come from trying to multitask, but all the time wasted navigating menus in Revenant Wings was mostly frustrating. Also the AI could be pretty bad- often I'd tell a player to walk away from an enemy so he could go heal himself, but he'd just stand around fighting and get himself killed. So yeah, this is another in that pile of Final Fantasy games that came out in the last decade that try to do something completely different from the rest of the series; and while I was a big fan of Final Fantasy XII, I just didn't enjoy its sequel much at all.

Gain Ground

Here's another Genesis game Keith and I checked out the other day. We made it through about eight levels out of fifty total, but luckily a "select level" cheat exists that enabled me to just pick up where I died in previous attempts to make it through the game. And hey, I won't lie - some levels, I skipped altogether.

Anyway, the point of this one was to navigate at least one character from your arsenal (initially three, eventually twenty) to the other side of the map, cutting through enemies and avoiding their fire along the way. Each character was unique in what type of weapon he or she wielded as well as what direction he or she could fire. Some characters, for instance, couldn't shoot backwards, making them extremely vulnerable in anything but straightforward segments of levels. In essence, then, this was really more of a real time strategy game than any of the other myriad shooting-or-punching games I've played so far on Genesis, and for that it earns my faint praise.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Gain Ground
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Infamous: Festival of Blood

I really enjoyed both Infamous games, so downloading this small expansion of sorts to Infamous 2 was a no-brainer when it went on sale last May. Festival of Blood is technically a stand-alone game and not just DLC for Infamous 2, and you can play it without having played either of the first two games.

It takes place on "Pyre Night," a fictional one-night holiday that seems like a cross between Halloween and Mardi Gras in the fictional New Orleans-like city of New Marais, the setting of Infamous 2. Cole gets bitten by a vampire queen named Bloody Mary (of course) and has until sunrise to defeat her or else he'll remain a vampire forever. The game lasted for something like eight missions, and I want to say the previous two Infamous entries were in the mid-thirties in that regard. I played the game for a couple hours this afternoon and a couple more just now and beat it about as thoroughly as it can be beaten. I even collected a hundred blood jars to max out my vampire powers and found all ten "hidden messages" from Mary, which got me nothing more than a sweet PS3 trophy.

The game itself was short but sweet. The good and bad karma spectrum is put aside for this one; you're a vampire, so who could blame you for draining the blood of a few dozen civilians? Instead, Cole's Pikachu-like electric powers are supplemented by some new vampiric skills, the best of which was easily the ability to turn into a bunch of bats and just fly around the city. Grinding on electric wires used to feel like the quick and easy way to get around town in these games, but with this new flying feature, riding the rails felt slow and tedious.

There's not much else to say here. Fans of the first two Infamous games would do well to check this one out, and its brevity is a blessing for anyone as backlogged as the authors of this blog. At the very least, it gave me a quick Infamous fix that I've needed since beating the second game fifteen months ago.

Downton Abbey: Season 3

Through three seasons, the structure of Downton Abbey's long game is pretty easy to break down. Season 1 focused on aristocratic British people before World War I, and laid out a pretty clear image of the way things were, and had been for decades, dating back to the Victorian Era if not earlier. Season 2 introduced the war, and along with the body count it brought, the changes it forced. Women were doing more with all the men gone, the nobility's standards were growing a little more lax due to the shortage of help and money, and new technology was enabling both the servants and their masters to accomplish more with less effort. All of these things hinted at the coming of a new world order after the war, which brings us to Season 3. From a socio-political standpoint, it may have been the strongest season of Downton yet. You had the old guard - Robert and Carson, namely - getting bent out of shape over all sorts of new ideologies shared by the women and the young men. In their eyes, the end of the war would enable a return to normalcy; in everyone else's, the war had ushered in a whole new era. These contrasting belief sets were front and center all season long and they affected all kinds of important events at Downton, making for some wonderful undertones of tension and conflict throughout the season.

But this was also easily the most overdramatic season of Downton yet, offering up more death and tragedy than Season 2, which had included World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. Some of it was genuinely moving television, but too much of wasn't. Between visits from an American grandmother and a feisty teenage cousin from Scotland, a love quadrilateral of sorts among the kitchen maids and footmen, and the tremendously boring - spoiler alert - Bates in prison arc, I just don't get the sense that Season 3 advanced an overall story nearly as much as either of the previous two installments. Downton Abbey was as fun and soapy as ever in Season 3, and its thematic message about class reform was at its strongest, so in no way was this a bad season of television. It just felt so much more inconsequential, except when it was birthing heirs or killing off main characters.

Collateral

We follow Jamie Foxx, a cab driver who dreams of owning his own limo service, as he minds his own damn business driving his cab. Unfortunately for him, Tom Cruise aka Victor steps into his cab and asks him to drive him to six places for a cool $600. What Foxx doesn't know is Victor is a hitman. Unsurprisingly, this all goes awry and what we get is Jamie Foxx trying to save his own life without necessarily helping Victor make his hits. It's not always that interesting, but the action is good and so is the acting. The film is pretty damn gritty thanks to Michael Mann. I don't have a ton of complaints and there are far worse ways to spend 2 hours, but I dunno. I would have liked the characters fleshed out a little bit. Still, pretty good.

Downton Abbey: Season 1

I doubted the quality of this show for a long time. I envisioned a boring show paced like Mad Men. What I got was a show that somehow reminded me of The OC. I had no idea this was such a soap opera. It's completely ridiculous, but damn addictive. Dowton Abbey, an estate that these people thinks needs to be protected, is going to be inherited by a lowly lawyer cousin named Matthew Crowley. They spend most of the time trying to marry off their daughters to random men of wealth. Blah blah blah just watch it if you haven't. It's embarrassing to admit, but this show is hard not to like.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

I have a hard time believing the same man that directed Jurassic Park also directed this movie. There's just no way Spielberg cared that much when he made this. It sucks. This movie has none of the charm or wonder that the first one did. Gone are the characters that love dinosaurs. Instead, we have Ian Malcolm, his impossibly bland girlfriend and his impossibly dark daughter. I understand that The Lost World book followed Malcolm, but based on all the liberties that this movie took with the book, they probably should have either had new characters entirely or brought Sattler and Grant back. Also, I loved how intimate the first film felt. This film, on the other hand, had a bunch of inGen goons on the island for little to no reason. This film somehow looked worse than the first one too. But if we ignore all that and just enjoy the dinosaurs, we still have to deal with the fact that this movie was incredibly boring. The T-Rex sequences sucked. The Raptor sequences sucked. We got one look at Stegosauruses. I know I'm rambling, but this movie is just so damn unsatisfying. Ugh.

American Reunion

Jumping right into bullets here. So many disconnected thoughts.

• This is the first movie I've posted in more than four months. In that same amount of time I've watched 22 seasons of television, read five books, and beaten 27 video games. I can neither explain nor justify this, but it's something that should be noted.
• I really liked the first two American Pie movies, but I was eleven and thirteen, respectively, when they came out. I think the first one may have even been the first R-rated movie I saw, over at a friend's house. They're fairly stupid movies, filled to the brim with sex jokes and horrible plot holes, but when you're thirteen years old, what more do you want from a movie? Plus, Tara Reid was sort of attractive back then, and not a poster child for botched plastic surgery with her career in a tailspin.
• Looking back, the first movie at least had a little bit of fraternal camaraderie to it. Four bros make a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, and although farcical hijinks ensue, there's an undeniable feel-good element behind it all. Toss in the horribly awkward but sort of endearing father-son conversations shared by Eugene Levy and Jason Biggs, and you've got yourself a pretty decent high school movie.
• The second movie's plot was nearly nonexistent; the bros have been away at college and they want to live it up all summer long in a cabin by the lake. Most of the bros just want a second chance to fuck specific women, from Shannon Elizabeth to Stifler's mom. But again, the charm of the characters was enough for half-a-lifetime-ago me to enjoy the movie on its own merits.
• In 2003 came American Wedding, which wasn't even able to round up the whole cast. Chris Klein, Mena Suvari, Tara Reid, and Shannon Elizabeth had better things to do with their careers, apparently. (Here's a fun game to play for all four of these actors - check out their post-2003 filmographies on IMDb. There's a very real reason all four of them were willing and able to participate in American Reunion in 2012.) American Wedding wasn't very good. Half the cast was missing and the film's sole plot point was to get Jason Biggs and Alyson Hannigan married. It achieved this goal with an abundance of lazy jokes and tired character quirks.
• The franchise didn't die off even there, instead churning out four straight-to-DVD movies featuring no one from the first three movies but Eugene Levy. I never bothered with any of these and they were done by 2009.
• In 2012, this came out. It made perfect sense, really. I mean, holy shit, check out the DVD cover. So many familiar faces, and not one of them a movie star. I can't reiterate loudly enough how high this cast's average stock was back in 2001 or so, and thus how terribly they've fallen. Alyson Hannigan of How I Met Your Mother is easily the most successful actor of the bunch, and if not for Wilfred and Orange Is the New Black I'd be stuck wondering if any of these people had worked at all in the last five years. Anyway, I remember seeing the trailer for the movie, or at least hearing about it, and, recalling my own fondness for the movies as a teenager, I resolved to see it. I never did, and forgot about the entire franchise until...
• I found this movie for five bucks at Shaw's last week. I didn't know Shaw's sold movies and I haven't made an impulse buy like this - not online, but passing by a rack in a store - in years. Nor had I thought about the American Pie franchise in years. But suddenly the movie was in my basket next to some lettuce and orange juice, well on its way into my backlog.
• The movie has no reason to exist. I know you can glean that from its title and release date a good nine years after the original trilogy, but there's just nothing going on here. The whole graduating class of '99 is off to their 13-year reunion (why not ten? why not fifteen?) and we just spend a couple of hours with each of them - no more than half an hour with any one individual, I'm sure - learning what they've been up to and how depressing their early thirties have been. Biggs and Hannigan have a kid and a bad sex life, even though the first two movies suggested that Biggs was horny as hell and Hannigan was ridiculously sexually adventurous. Stifler just kind of casually sexually harasses women at work and his boss does not respect him. Chris Klein has become an ESPN talking head and thus a "big deal" but he has no connection to his starfucker girlfriend. Good thing ex-girlfriend Mena Suvari is at the reunion, stuck in a similarly unfulfilling relationship! Kevin is happily married but, shit, he's run into Tara Reid. Can he possibly enjoy seeing his ex-girlfriend without being a weirdo about it? (That's more or less his entire arc in American Pie 2, too.) Finch is still an eclectic goofball, but this time around Stifler bangs his mom. Jim's dad is hapless in the wake of Jim's mom's death, but he does share a night with Stifler's mom. And Shannon Elizabeth, the Shermanator, and Natasha Lyonne each show up for five-minute cameos designed to remind the audience what their gimmicks in the first two films were.
• All this is fine, and not even a dumb reason to make a movie. Before Sunset and Before Midnight exist solely to check in on the lives of the two people who met and talked the night away in Before Sunrise. Make no mistake, I'm not comparing this movie's merits to those movies at all; just saying that, "let's see what the characters from that long ago movie are doing these days" isn't an inherently terrible movie. "Reunion" is right there in the title and all. But the film's biggest misstep is easily the introduction of the current senior high school class, who serve as rivals and foils for our own guys. Jim's next door neighbor, who he used to babysit for, is now eighteen, and just throwing herself at Jim because she had a crush on him fifteen years ago. (This makes no goddamn sense. Attractive eighteen-year-olds do not want to take a ride on married guys who look like Jason Biggs.) Furthermore, the girl's boyfriend and his bros become the villains of the movie by default, even though Jason Biggs wants nothing to do with her in the first place. This whole unrealistic set-up is just a way to get some "end of Act 2 tension" into the film. Of course Alyson Hannigan would be upset to see drunken naked teens throwing themselves at her husband. Of course the teenage dickhead bros will crash Stifler's party.
• There's a modicum of self awareness to the whole thing, with the guys getting at least a little perturbed by the fact that, at thirty, they just can't have the awesome parties they once did anymore. But again, this was kind of sort of the theme of American Pie 2 - "Guys, we're getting older, and we're all going to drift apart. Best to have this last summer blowout to end things with a bang!" That was in 2001, when these guys were ostensibly twenty.
• All in all, this movie was exactly what I expected it to be, and really, all I could have hoped for it to be. I'd give it a C-minus, but the very faint nostalgic twinge that made me pick up and purchase this movie in the first place bumps that up to a C-plus or so.
• Here's waiting with bated breath for 2019's American Hangover, in which which the guys, closing in on forty, once again swear that they can't keep partying like this.

Virtua Fighter 2

Under the options menu in this game, I was allowed to give myself unlimited time per match, to set the CPU difficulty to "easy," and to not receive any damage. That's right. In a fighting game, I was able to prevent myself from taking any damage.

I still lost a fight once. Stupid ring out.

Anyway, this one was done in like ten minutes. Love those options. One of the best games on the Genesis yet.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Streets of Rage

Here's the thirteenth game I've beaten from the Genesis project, and the first one done co-op. Keith shares a co-beating credit with me here, and while I'll leave the door open for him to post his own opinions on this game, or at least comment on this one, I can say pretty confidently that he was as flabbergasted by the lag-laden clunky controls as I've been on every single Genesis game to date.

Like at least half of the Genesis project games played so far, this one was a side-scrolling beat-em-up. It was notable for little more than its utterly anticlimactic ending. There were eight stages and the first six stages ended with boss fights. The seventh and eighth stages did not. There was no final boss. We finished the eighth level and credits rolled. A quick glance at an online walkthrough indicates that this wasn't supposed to happen, and there was indeed supposed to be a final boss. But we can both assure you, there was no final boss. Blame the emulator, blame the game, blame the walkthrough. I have no idea.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Futurama: Volume 8

I've struggled a bit to come up with a fitting send off for Futurama, a show that has bounced in and out of production for well over a decade and provided me with a number of heartfelt episodes, some great science fiction nerd references, and plenty of stupid laughs. At first I was going to make a post about my top ten episodes of all time, but ranking them became way too cumbersome for me and I wouldn't be able to do any of them justice with annotations.

I also considered drafting up a drawn out negative rant about the decline of the show these past few years, and how nothing can stay good forever. But that felt almost unfairly charged; the show, after all, is one of my all time favorites and it deserves to be remembered for its decade-plus run of greatness more than for it eventually petering out.

And it's not like I can just describe the show and what I love (or at least once loved) about it. This is my fourth Futurama post on the blog, for one thing, and for another I doubt that there's anyone reading this who hasn't seen the show at this point.

So instead, I'll just say this. Futurama was a great show, and we're all lucky to have seen it brought back from cancelation not just once, but twice. All the same, this current cancelation should probably be the show's last. No one wants to put an old dog down, but this one just looks so damn tired, especially having cheated death twice before. At least it went out with its head held high in a classic heartstring-tugging episode.

New Super Mario Bros. 2

Bottom line, this game just wasn't all that different from the first New Super Mario Bros. on DS, nor from New Super Mario Bros. Wii. And I can't imagine it's much different from New Super Mario Bros. U or that game's spinoff, New Super Luigi U, either. I can't complain about the overall state of Super Mario games; Galaxy was fantastic, and I imagine its sequel - still in my backlog - was too. And I greatly enjoyed Super Mario 3D Land and expect to love 3D World as well. No, it's not that the Mario frnachise has grown lazy, but it does seem like Nintendo is all too willing to keep on revisiting this "New" strain every year or two.

There was nothing wrong with this game at all. It was super quick, but plenty enjoyable. Still, if you're looking for some Super Mario on the 3DS, under every single possible circumstance you should check out 3D Land first.

Admittedly, the gimmick here - coins, coins, coins! - was pretty easy to enjoy. I had fifty-four lives before I died for the first time. I'll likely keep poking away at this one for a little while, trying all the levels I can unlock without worrying about 100% completion or anything.

Archer: Season 4

Archer rarely disappoints, but here in its fourth season it did begin to show the slightest signs of age. Not because the show had gotten lazy by any stretch, but instead because after fifty episodes there just isn't much new ground left to cover for a workplace sitcom moonlighting as a spy thriller parody. This fourth season began and ended with nods to other animated shows; the premiere retconned all of Bob's Burgers into a summer Archer spent as a fry cook with amnesia, and the two-part finale sent the ISIS crew down to Sealab - yes, the one from creator Adam Reed's early 2000s masterpiece Sealab 2021 - in search of a nuclear weapon. In between those two expeditions, episodes were set in Vermont, Montreal, Turkmenistan, Morocco, the Vatican, the Texas-Mexico border, and a fictional Anthony Bourdain five-star restaurant. (Again, nothing here felt lazy!)

Fortunately, Adam Reed seemed to sense a bit of stagnation, too, and utterly revamped the show for the fifth season. They're still the same old characters and the show uses the same old humor, but now instead of covert special agents they're all just drug smugglers. It's been pretty good so far!

True Blood: Season 5

I didn't have much to offer in my last True Blood post, and that season was worlds better than this one. This wasn't my first trip through Season 5, but I'm impressed all over again by how absurd and shitty it was - even by True Blood's own very lax standards. The show is attempting to serve like thirteen different characters at this point, and rather than have them run around in the same circles it just threw them in pairs at completely unrelated stories that didn't seem to add anything at all to the mythology or overall narrative of True Blood. This show has never been "good" by any stretch but at least it used to be fun. Yuck.

The Sopranos: Season Four

I had originally set up this post in the middle of last December as I was closing in on the end of season four of The Sopranos. It was a solid season- not the best in the show's run, but definitely a return to form after a merely decent season three. With an episode and a half left, I figured I would be able to post about it before the end of the year. But then my HBO Go app stated acting... funny. It suddenly stopped playing any video at all on my Xbox 360. I deleted the app and re-installed it several times, with system restarts and everything, and each time the app would let me log in and browse shows, only to refuse to play any of them. What the heck was going on? Well, I still don't know. I haven't called up Xbox support yet, although I'm planning to this week. I watched the last 1.5 episodes on my girlfriend's iPad, and they were great. But HBO Go's malfunctioning has cast a dark shadow on this season, one which will hopefully be gone in time for what I'm sure will be a bright and sunny fourth season of The Wire. I'm sure that will be a barrel of laughs!

Jurassic Park

When I first bought my PS3 in 2007, it was solely for the purpose of watching blu-rays. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that surround sound systems existed with 7.1 channels rather than 5.1 to deliver "lossless audio." From that moment on, I had a dream to get one of those systems and watch Jurassic Park. I can't think of a better movie to test the system out with. Anyway, my dream finally came to be reality this morning. And it did not disappoint. Every room-shaking T-REX stomp transported me back to the summer of 1993 when I got to see this movie for the first (and second) time.

Sometimes I have a hard time really communicating why I like this movie so much and why it is my favorite movie of all time. More than any other movie, this movie reminds me of childhood. I am just so damn happy when I watch it. The characters are amazing (though not necessarily subtle) and the setting is incredible. I think my favorite character is John Hammond, the billionaire dinosaur lover who had to see his dream of a dinosaur park come to be.

But more than that, this movie changed the way I look at things. It has defined the way I envision dinosaurs in my head, and I would imagine it has defined the way you see dinosaurs in yours. I often find myself staring at birds and thinking "wow, they really do move like dinosaurs." Then, I have the realization that I have no idea how dinosaurs actually move and that the people behind the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park based them on the birds and not the other way around. Anyway, this was really the first time anyone has presented a realistic depiction of them in action on screen (not just still image depictions). It's just so incredible to think that this movie was made 21 years ago and the special effects still stand up (granted, the CGI dinosaurs in the daytime are a bit lame at this point). Anyway, this movie was a revelation in it's depiction of dinosaurs, it's use of CGI and my young life. This is the single movie that caused my love of movies and I don't think it will ever be topped in my mind.

Man, I fucking love this movie.