Category: Review

Last weekend we picked up Mario Kart for the Wii for a fiver after trading in two games that we neither liked nor played (Wabbit Wampage? Cars?) and I must say it was the best fun I’ve had since I bought the device (over a year ago) and discovered Wii Sports.

The game isn’t as ‘fast’ or ‘frenetic’ as playing the game in the Arcades (which was also a lot blurrier and more confusing) but it’s hard to beat for playability especially when the other racers are friends of yours (or friends of friends).

In addition to the single player ‘Win the Cups, unlock the racers’ game, you can have up to 4 players on one Wii (as long as you have enough controllers) and you can also play on the WFC network getting up to 8 human racers either from your friends list (requiring the sharing of a Kart friend code) or playing against the multitudes of people out there in the real world.

Races, battles and coin collecting games were all good fun. I’d played half a dozen games at the weekend which meant I wasn’t totally unprepared for the game and Paul showed me some tricks (like the jump boosts, firing backwards etc) while we waited for Lee to plug his Wii into his projector at home. Once in, selection of games was very easy and there was little or no latency in the service.

Last night I hooked up with Paul, Lee and Tanya to play Wii Karting. Lee and Tanya were at home in London on Lee’s Wii showing that two people can play online from one Wii. Two people or more playing on one 32″ TV is not the best experience and can be somewhat confusing so I applaud Lee’s idea of hooking up to a projector. It would make a difference. Paul and I were online from home – him in Mallusk, me in Bangor.

The ‘signpost’ communication method isn’t the best however with only a limited number of phrases available so it’s not taking advantage of the social vibe that the ‘Mii’ avatars could provide. Maybe at some point in the future they’ll provide voice chat but that’s in the future and not right now. I’m told tales that some enterprising folk are using their XBox systems as voice chat relays so they can play Mario Kart and laugh at each other. We were all Mac people so we fired up iChat (voice) and regaled each other with insults and guffaws as we dumped turtle shells, bombs and banana skins on the other racers. I reckon Skype voice would work just as well.

As for racing itself – it seems slow when watching someone playing but it gets very quick when in the race and you know you’re half a lap behind and every corner counts. The game balance is helped by the use of “weapons” like the banana skins I mentioned and homing turtle shells and other methods of wiping out other people. Every time you get hit, or stunned, or squashed or shrunken it slows you down and the sound effects are excellent.

The tracks also, range from odd to excellent and in fact none of them are bad in any way. There’s a lot of colour and some people may feel seasick with it (luckily I don’t suffer from that), there’s enough variety and obstacles to keep it from being a dry race and it seems to push the Wii in terms of what it is capable of.

Is it worth getting the wheel? I don’t know. I’ve played it with the wheel and with a third party half wheel and I think that it might be worthwhile not getting the wheel unless you want the whole experience.

All in all, it’s an excellent game and my interest in it is magnified by the potential for playing online against friends.

The alternative ending to “I am Legend” was posted on FirstShowing.net.

Ironically, it restores the meaning of I Am Legend though Neville’s ending is different.

It would have made a better movie ending for sure.

I’ve read the book and watched both Omega Man and the recent Will Smith adaptation. I am looking forward to the March 18th release of the DVD, if only for the alternative ending.

Both deviate from the novel wildly but the later adaptation actually annoys me more. In the epilogue narration, the words “and this is his legend” are used which implies that “I Am Legend” refers to Will Smith’s last minute finding of the cure.

Wikipedia sets the story straight.

as he dies he reflects on how the new society regards him as a monster. Just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the still-living while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, hence the title.

See? That’s about a million times more poignant than Will Smith clutching a grenade and the hit and miss massacre that can cause.

Good movie? I’d have to say yes.

I think it has everything to do with being a parent.

I’ve never been a fan of Godzilla movies but I do like action/horror/disaster movies as a whole. Cloverfield is excellently executed and it left my head filled with “what would I do” thoughts (which all good horror/disaster movies do). As a parent you worry about more than just yourself and that’s what M. Night Shyamalan touched on with Signs. When you’re a parent, it’s more than just you in the horror.

The presentation of camcorder footage worked for Blair Witch and, to be honest, works even better for Cloverfield though the cameraman obviously has some sort of disorder because most people would ditch the camera early on. Even if recording it from the point of view of seeing “how it all went down”.

I can’t tell you much about the content itself without introducing too many spoilers. The shaky handheld footage does get irritating at times when you just want to get a bloody good look at something.

To be honest, if you’re old enough, go and see this movie. I don’t know if it needs to be seen in a cinema at all – I’m pretty hacked off with the bullshit about the “cinema experience”. Watching cinema in Northern Ireland consists of listening to slightly muffled sound, watching a screen that proudly displays the human detritus of heavy petting sessions in the projection room and listening to the beeps of mobile phones, the rustling of packets, the slurping of smoothies, having to uproot yourself because some idiot can’t get to his seat “from the other side” and sitting in a seat that is solely designed to stop you falling asleep.

Despite all of that, Cloverfield is a great film. It makes me shiver in anticipation for J.J.Abrams version of Star Trek (now delayed for a Summer 2009 release) and look forward to a possible sequel to Cloverfield.

Interestingly, most people don’t stay to the end of the credits. They miss out.

From IMDB:

A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them.

I enjoyed this movie. Hayden Christensen was pretty good though I think they could have kept Max Thieriot as the protagonist even though it might have made the film either more kiddie-friendly or perhaps more dark, who knows.

There were a lot of loose ends, lots of things that went unexplained – like how this is all a secret when there are 5 year olds teleporting around – Marvel went with the puberty thing because, let’s face it, teens undergoing puberty are already alienated from society.

One tiresome detail though was the war that has been raging for centuries. Of course, now Jumpers are the REAL reason for the Crusades, the witch hunts, the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto, the reason for concentration camps, Stalin’s purges, the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Great Fire of London. I’m exaggerating here but if you ignore the “paladins” thing and just assume they’re just the next logical extension of HomeLand Security, things go a lot better.

The real “deal killer” for me was sadly Samuel L. Jackson. He’s gone the way of Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro and every other Hollywood actor who now completely believes his own hype. Apart from the ridiculous hair dye job, he’s a crazy insane preacher who uses a signature hunting knife to viscerally gut people. And this is a 12A? Load of bollocks really. They should have made more use of Diane Lane rather than a few cameo pieces. I think she’d make an excellent head honcho and an even better foil for our hero.

That said, deal-killer or not, it’s not a bad film. I think they have expended a lot of their juice in the first film and if it were me I’d already have Jumper 2 ready for casting.

I recently read James Herbert’s ’48 which is a post-World War II version of a few post-apocalyptic stories. It was essentially “28 Days Later” or “Night of the Comet” but with Nazis. It read like a muh shorter ‘lite’ version of Stephen King’s “The Stand”. It’s Dawn of the Dead with a swastika.

Sure – there’s some good plot points, some not so good and some decent characterisation. It leaves the ending a little flat but it’s an easy read and not a long book so most people should be able to find their way through it easily enough. Two sex scenes, both where the author gingerly describes genitalia without using real words. Some interesting characters were killed off and the hero – well – I found it very hard to identify with him and his constant internal monologue.

So is this a mashup like we find in so many online apps and also in roleplaying games? Who knows. I liked the book, enough to finish it which hasn’t happened with every book I’ve bought in the last few years.

Along the lines of rehashing plots, new movie The Invasion seems to be just a rendition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Everything old is new again…

I was doing my six-monthly browse through the stacks at Replay in Bangor and as usual found myself not wanting to leave without parting with some cash. It wasn’t due to the intrusion of the proprietor who helpfully inquired if there was something he could help me with (wow, it was kinda irritating), but because I like to support my local game store. The plight of game stores is legend.

So this is why I find myself with a copy of the main book from White Wolf’s latest line: Scion

Scion Hero is about people finding out they are the sons and daughters of gods long past. To their credit they include a good description of the pantheons they think would be fashionable (Norse, Japanese, Aztec, Egyptian, Voodoo, Greek) and if the company’s past is anything to go by there will be new pantheon splatbooks out in the next few months as well as some net-pantheons created by rabid fans.

It’s not a bad book, ideal for the generation of low powered heroes along the lines of Hercules, Perseus and other offspring of the gods. Of course I’ll never get around to playing it having neither the players nor the GMs available even though it’s a low level superhero game.

Scion Hero is the first of a series of books which continues in June this year with Scion DemiGod which will be covering the more powerful scions – I suppose it might be the equivalent of the D&D Expert or Master set if Scion Hero is to be considered the Basic set.

I’m not mad struck on the layout but then this is the first WW game I’ve bought in a long time. The art ranges from very good to “uh, what is that meant to be” which isn’t to say any of it is bad.

It’s a lot of fun to read too.

The Guardian has a book review on De viribus quantitatis (On the Powers of Numbers) penned by Luca Paciola, a man who was a personal friend of Leonardo da Vinci and who is considered not only the father of modern (double entry) accounting but also one of the leaders in magic tricks. The book covers mathematical puzzles, tricks, proverbs and verses and codes.

Don’t try this at home…

Last night’s effort consisted of a rather fun 3D game of Connect 4 called Gizeh. And then we played the Zombies!!! boardgame.

Gizeh really is quite brain tiring as it’s a race to win all the 4s and you keep score of them, unlike Connect 4 where you spend all your time trying to link a single 4. We ended up with scores in the 20s each.

Zombies!!! likewise is tiring but only because it leaves itself ripe for gut-splitting laughs as you quickly move from a game where you’d push someone out of the way to get ahead to the point where you’d push them, knock them over, spit on them, kick them in the ribs and give their mum the finger just for a single bullet counter.

Excellent.