There's No Place Like The O.Z.

Tin Man has played out now. At least Sci-Fi channel showed one (1) episode per night. If I had to wait three (3) weeks, I'd have been pissed. For the most part I liked it. Since I'm being a critic now I guess I'm supposed to find something wrong, so I'll just say it could have been 2 episodes since some things felt like padding to flesh things out. With that said there is a lot to like. The characters tend to run through cliched dialog at times but then a perfect gem is uttered and it renews my faith in the series. I'll be buying this on DVD, if for no other reason than to see it in better definition than 480i. Having been a fan of Doctor Who I should be used to great acting with sometimes horrible special effects, but with so much good actually going on in the story, the bad effects stand out even worse. Maybe if they had another million dollars or so.

My last blog I was listing differences and mistakenly thought the Wicked Witch O' The West was Azkadellia but it turns out... SPOILER ALERT ...I was sort of right. WWOTW's spirit was sealed in a cave and through some accidents when DG and Az were kids she possesed Az. So I was right and wrong and the same time, and Toto finally showed up. There were enough interesting ideas they could have just done their own thing and not needed to use the Wizard Of OZ franchise. The weakest of the three sadly is the last episode and I felt the writers were wimping out when using magic meant holding hands while the FX guys took care of the rest. I liked everything but the ending. Too abrupt and it felt forced. SPOILER END.

I finished reading Frankenstein which is an absorbing novel, since it was written around 1816-1817. This isn't for everyone since it is mostly written in first person (Victor Frankenstein of course) Victorian. So, I'll save everyone the trouble and briefly explain the novel. The title is for Victor (not a Doctor but a college student) Frankentein and his insanity and becoming God and succeeding, but not being prepared for the consequences. The monster, that has no name, is more of a super-human intelligent zombie. Several chapters are dedicated to him and his mis-adventures. SPOILER ALERT AGAIN: A ship is moving through the frozen water of the arctic when the ship encounters a mis-shapen humanoid riding on a dog sled heading farther north. Then another sled is found chasing after the first with Victor Frankenstein, who is the worse for wear and needs help. Once brought aboard he tells the ship's master his life story leading up to this moment. Victor was born to a rich family in Geneva, took an interest in science and alchemy, betrothed at a young age to his adopted cousin, and accepted to college in another country. At college he is taught that he wasted time learning alchemy but he still believes in the dreams of immortality promised by the ancient "masters" and applies his new understanding of the sciences to "making" a new life. Without a lot of explanation it works. Victor becomes terrified of his creation and goes to bed while the "monster" runs out and hides in the woods. From this point on Victor is mentally unhinged and becomes bed ridden with a fever every time he's reminded of the "monster." It takes a couple years to recover and he heads back home to Geneva, when he sees the "monster" in the outskirts of town. Victor arrives home to find his youngest bro murdered and his adopted younger sister to blame. Vic is sure the "monster" did it to punish VF (he is quite self absorbed in the book) for creating him. Afraid the townsfolk will think him insane he says nothing about the "monster" and they law hangs the girl.

Filled with grief, Victor heads out of town to climb a mountain and commune with nature when he comes face to face with his creation. Vic goes nuts and threatens to kill it but the "monster" reminds him he's an eight-foot tall killing machine. Then the "monster," trying to reconcile with his creator/father, invites him to a secluded cabin to hear his story, and then they can kill each other. VF agrees. the "monster" ran out of Vic's lab and hid in the woods, attacked by villagers, hid under an inhabited cottage, learned to read and speak, scared more people, ran off to other woods, saved a little girl, pissed of more villagers, found "the creator's" village, killed VF's younger brother and framed a little girl. The "monster" began as a good entity but everyone treated him like crap so he decides to take his revenge on Victor, the one who refuses to even name his creation. The "monster" is lonely because nothing else is like him and requests Victor to make him a bride and then they will both disappear from the world of man (in South America). Vic agrees and heads to Scotland, with his best friend, to make another. He comes to his senses and refuses after half constructing a new one. The "monster" becomes enraged and kills Vic's companion and frames him for the murder. VF spends the next year ill and in prison until his father shows up and takes him back to Geneva. The "monster" promises to be there for Vic on their wedding day.

Vic goes home and marries his fiancee, the adopted cousin Elizabeth, and stays awake all night waiting to be killed. But the "monster" instead kills his new wife. His father becomes ill and gives up the will to live and VF finally decides to hunt the "monster" like a Terminator. The "monster" then makes a game out of it by staying just ahead of Vic on his way to the Arctic, and leaving clues and food behind, just enough to keep VF alive. This is when Victor ends up on the ship in the arctic. After telling the tale, he becomes ill and never rises. The "monster" quietly boards the ship to murder VF but finds he already past in his bed. It then decides its reason for living is gone and it will never be accepted jumps out a window into the icy water and dies. THE END. Now I saved you $4.95 and 198 pages of reading. Next up I'm reading Journey To The Center Of The Earth.

That angry British guy who hates video games did his review of Assassin's Creed. Oddly he likes it and so do the guys at Penny Arcade. Much is being made over the low score game reviews. I think this game is good for all the reasons "real" people and not reviewers play games. I also watched the trailer for Twisted Metal on PS2. This begs the question, why the F are games still being made for this system. I like the PS2 like everyone else but I've moved on. This game just looks embarrassing and reminds me why I play the next gen games. Maybe Sony and all the other developers should leave the PS2 be and work on making a good library for the PS3. On the handheld market I was this video review of Contra 4 for DS. All the classic Arcade, 8bit, and 16bit love is there without the 3D failures of the PlayStation versions. I would buy this game just for the extras but there is all sorts of gameplay too. I wonder if the 30-man "code" is still there. There is also some new thing in Japan for the DS that reads a memory card you put in a special cartridge, and lets you watch downloadable anime. Or something like that. See you next broadcast.

'Tis Better To Play Silent Hill And Be Thought A Fool

Near the end of the year all sorts of Top 10, 50 and 100 lists start popping up. One of the more interesting ones comes from Wizard Magazine, the Top 50 fictional weapons of all time. A definitive geek list of must have side arms, melee weapons and magic devices from movies to comics to games. Some of them even have props made that you can buy, so it also makes a decent list of props. It's interesting to note that #8 is missing. I guess the weapons invisible and can't be spoken of. Lightsabers are so cool they made the list twice, as did Star Trek with the Phaser and a Sniper Rifle that fires rounds that beam in and out of people's rooms. Why the X-Ray gun from Perfect Dark didn't make I'll never know but it could fire through walls and the scope could pick out people instantly. Between the Star Trek Rifle and Eraser's Rail Gun I guess this weapon became redundant. A couple great classic sci-fi weapons appear, including the TRON's disc and the homing bullets from that chromed-out gun used in Runaway, that other sci-fi movie with Kirstie Alley. The movie was kind of a poor man's Blade Runner, surprisingly written and directed by Michael Crichton. It's a decent enough story but looks like a product of the 80's. Not quite an early Crichton classic like Andromeda Strain or West World. Maybe if the Terminator hadn't come out at the same time we'd remember this movie more. I have the movie poster of Runaway somewhere with Tom Selleck holding the special gun and it always bothered me that it was the bad guy's weapon and Mr. Selleck never fires it. BTW I "heart" 80s Spider Robots.

IGN also has top 100. Of course it's about video games and they are posting the list 10 at time for the rest of the month, damn them. I've only looked at the bottom 20 but I'd like to add my thoughts on their.. uhh... thoughts. 100 thru 98 I never played so I'll jump to number 97: Silent Hill 2. This game belongs higher on the list. I bought it for Xbox a number of years ago and it is everything the first game was and more. The story is more personal and the creatures are even scarier. Maybe its the next gen graphics (since the first game was on PSX) but almost every creature encounter was creepy. The game made you feel uneasy throughout and hit you like a wet brick when the Pyramid Head guy appeared. I almost crapped myself in the movie when Pyramid guy showed up, thanks to this game. He's not to be taken lightly. I never beat it but I left off near the end with some crazy cockroach things eating me or something. I hate the undead and look forward to killing a lot of the during the Zombie Apocalypse if it ever happens thanks to this game. I don't even like nurses anymore, or mannequins, or armless zombies, or little children, or dogs, or static-playing radios, or undead pterodactyls, or my crazy ex-wife in a wheel-chair. No, wait, that was the first game, sorry. I still have issues from that one. And now I hear there's to be a Silent Hill 5?

#96 is Wave Race 64. As a release title it was the other reason to own an N64 back in the day. Water physics were never prettier before the N64 and Wave Race had it in spades. I bought the game during the waning years of the system, but that doesn't diminish the game play. When ever someone plays a game and there's a water fountain or a lake, invariably they try to "play" in it. I'm guilty of this and I can even remember the first time water "wow-ed" me in games. Super Mario 64 had incredible water surface reaction that was just fun to run around in and Ico's water was so reflective and beautiful it made the game even more realistic. But this was just a mild distraction to those games, in Wave Race 64 it was the whole point. You raced on wave runners and had to time your movements with the currents. Brilliant stuff. It actually added strategy to a racing title without the need for "Kart"-racing style offense/defense item collection. There was even stunt mode mini games to add playability, and it had enough reasons to keep playing it until a larger library formed for the N64. It's hard to find a game this good today and it's even available for download on the Wii.

#95 is Bionic Commando. Games used to have gimmicks that totally worked for them because the technology could really only let you do one good thing at a time. This gimmick was the bionic arm that let you move, collect and kill. The arcade was the most fun for me (I'm an old-schooler) but I rented the NES version back in the day and enjoyed it just as much. I don't ever remember being really good at it, but like Ghost & Goblins or Rush 'n' Attack, it was loads of fun. A new version of this now has gone beyond the rumor phase. Now its a serious game where the main character is so badass that his arm is shipped separately from himself. I know how he feels. I wasn't allowed to have Vera when I flew to and from Kuwait. For those that don't know Vera is my Army issue M-16/M-203 grenade launcher. Think Arnold's weapon of choice in the beginning of Predator. That thing's like something out of Aliens.

I never played #94-93 (Ultima VII) but I did play Ultima Exodus for NES which furthered my desire for RPGs on Consoles. Luckily I'm not the only one who loves turn based sword fights. #92 is Wip3Out or WipeOut 3 or W3p3O3t 3 or something with "three" in it. Defining racer for the PSX and showed high-speed polygon "Kart" racing at its finest. I say "Kart" because there were items to collect during the race to even the odds you fall behind. The AI was always a challenge, except on the slowest speeds, and learning to turn/drift/maneuver was half the fun/difficulty. The music perfectly fit as well. This franchise was so well done it has become a defining graphic powerhouse on new Sony systems, like WipeOut Fusion for PS2 and WipeOut Pure for PSP. I found the PSP version a little hard to control but it just takes getting used to. Where's the PS3 version? In the works, but PSP is waiting patiently for WipeOut Pulse next month. BTW nice Euro techno soundtrack.

I also never played 91 so you're just going to have to go to the website to see what I passed by. I did come across a reference to a new Street Fighter game in the works, creatively titles Street Fighter IV. It should probably be Street Fighter LXXVIII but who's counting. The visuals of the trailer are stunning but I wonder how much of that is game play. It sounds to be a 2D fighter but you've got my vote if they keep the visuals in the "Okami" style. Here's this weeks viral video called Italian Spiderman. Tomorrow I will talk of 90 thru 81. See you next broadcast.

How You Doing, You Old Pirate?

Years ago I had a job I would equate to Kevin Smith's "Clerks." Everyone should have one of these jobs. My "Clerks" job was at an Arcade. And not just any job wandering the isles trading cash for tokens but a real high-end specialty. I helped run (and then manage) the Laser-Tag inspired game of Q-Zar. At this job I met and worked with a variety of people that meant a lot to me. Some of these people I still stay in contact with even though we haven't worked together in over a decade. These people I worked with helped me move up the working ladder until I am where I am, today. And I helped them when I could. Q-Zar might have been a "Clerks" job, but the people there became a sort of family and many of us are still looking out for each other. I've gone on to do a lot of different things since then, including some active duty time with the Army, but I had the opportunity to get together with an old friend this weekend and party like it was 1999. Geek style 1999, that is.

My buddy, who shall be known as EmpTass, introduced me to Guitar Hero III. As I've written before I've been worried this is a franchise I need to spend some dough on just to find out I suck at it. After playing two (2) songs (on easy I should add) I was hooked. We moved on to hard, then super-ultra-hard, and I still felt compelled to keep trying. We both decided that the hardest setting should just tell you to plug a real Electric Guitar in to your console. I have no idea what I was worried about, this game is great, and I didn't feel stupid playing air-guitar. As many a reviewer has pointed out the music selection is excellent. It's the actual songs and not a coverband or anything. If a soundtrack ever comes out for GH3 it will be mine.

We used to play many a CCG (Collectible Card Game) from Magic to Star Wars (the best), and a handful of lesser titles, that never made it big, in between. As I've mentioned before, World Of Warcraft's lineage started as a PC game and bloomed from there to many different aspects; novels, RPGs, comics, CCG, and MMORPG. WOW is the best selling aspect of Warcraft, probably since the original RTS. It also is probably the most successful online game since EverQuest. I just can't push myself the extra yard to start a new videogame addiction, because I know it will chew me up and spit me out and in the end. I'll have the greatest female elf character in the history of the internet, but I'll be broke, jobless, car-less, house-less, Xbox-less and by this point mind-less. However I'm willing to stick my big toe in the water and try other parts of the franchise. And I stuck my big toe in the CCG.

Many CCGs try emulating Magic for its resource generating aspects but never seem to get out of its shadow to become something unique. Usually I, and my friends, would describe a game as "just like Magic except..." This is the first CCG (I know the box says TCG, I just like CCG) I've played in a long time that starts like Magic but becomes its own entity pretty quickly after the first couple rounds. I think this is a huge accomplishment since the field is glutted with Pokemons and Yugiohs and strange hybrids that didn't last a month. First off, the starter comes in a big clamshell box that could hold a Betamax tape with plenty of room for your cards, not to mention great artwork. The rules themselves are easy to learn but it takes some time to master. There have been a couple expansions to WOW and a new way to play that seems more like an RPG than a CCG. This is known as a Raid. The Raid Master controls an epically large creature of some sort and the rest of the players (3 to 5 are recommended) face the RM. This now begs the question, at least in my mind, could the WOW paper & pen RPG also retain aspects of the card game to make them both playable.

Halo has made an interesting transition from FPS of the year to tabletop figure game. EmpTass and I tested the game's robustness and here is what we learned. You need dice to play. The box says it comes with dice. There were no dice in the two boxes I bought. We ended up using dice from a Disney board game. They were happy dice not in the vein of hyperactive Halo Slayer tabletop simulation. We read the rules on the fly as we played and some things made sense; putting down spawn points first, no fighting first round, line of site rules, grenades can hurt everybody. Other things were a little off; re-spawning dead characters, missing with grenades, upgrading figures to "swap weapons", the turn in general. It seems easy at first. You put five (5) figures on your side, spawned from a point, worth 400 total points or less, but no single figure can be over 150 points, which are the rare figures. How the hell am I supposed to play with them if their not on the field. You can only re-spawn the dead. WTF? During your turn you can upgrade (or add 25 points to the value of) a figure in play, until it matches the value of the figure in "reserve", then swap them in play keeping track of any damage. I couldn't pin down a reference during your turn but I think you are supposed to move one person at a time (or re-spawn or "weapon swap") then its the next persons turn. This became a little tedious as I had to remember who I already moved, but overall it worked. You play on a collectible grid map that comes with each set. I have two (2) now and they look exactly the same. With a little rules tweaking, this game could be loads of fun. Maybe I just misunderstood stuff. BTW this game is part of the Clix line of gaming figures, so one can imagine the possibilities of mixing Halo with AvP (my personal favorite teamup idea) or Marvel Superheros against the Halo's Covenant.

Playing Magic after so many years feels like putting on a comfortable pair of sneakers. Well, maybe if your sneakers had new abilities you never heard of like Flash and Deathtouch. Its been a long time since I played, and with new terms for new card abilities I thought WOTC defined terms on the card. EmpTass and I were left scratching our heads at some terms and just decided to ignore what we couldn't figure out. The Lorwyn set is like any other "Starter" expansion of Magic, it can be played alone or mixed with all the other sets. The only groundbreaking idea in Lorwyn is the Plainwalker. I don't have one so we could playtest one, I just like the idea. It creates a second persona on your side that fights with you, has special abilities that influence the game, and is different from the usual summoned monsters and magic. I can't wait to get one. It's like the character card you get in the WOW CCG. Weirdest idea of the set has to be "changelings," an ability that makes any creature all creature types at once. This could radically change deck creation. I need more cards to test out these things.

Much gaming was had over pizza and soda. It really felt like my old college days. I would like to learn more about the Clix line of figure games and mix and match different franchises (Hellboy and Master Chief vs. Aliens and The Flood) just to make new plots. I would like to see better maps though. Now I want a game that combines guitar playing with an online mode, while moving figures on a board and playing cards, all in one. See you next broadcast.