Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2010

Lost Planet 2: So Awesome I Wish I Liked It More

I'm typically willing to put up with a lot of design flaws, or poor design decisions in a video game, if there's enough there that's really entertaining. Lost Planet 2 is an example of a game that is simply phenomenal in many ways, but because of one design decision, I can't keep playing it. In Lost Planet 2 you play a snow pirate, who wanders around a desolate, frozen, alien world, scavenging weapons and equipment, while killing the local fauna to harvest thermal energy and keep from freezing to death. For the most part, it plays like your average third person shooter, you can carry up to two weapons, and one flavor of grenade. One of the things that is exceptional about it is the variety of things you'll be shooting at. You have other humans, of course, as well as the myriad alien life forms, all of which are hostile. You've got delicate flying guys, that come at you in swarms, and die by the dozen, you've got spider things the size of large bears that

Black Swan: The Best Psycho Body Horror Ballerina Movie I've Seen In My Entire Life!!

What can I say about this movie? It was good, and it was absolutely worth watching. Natalie Portman (playing Nina) looks like a ballerina, and plays perfectly into the role of the socially awkward perfectionist with an extremely repressed passionate side. Mila Kunis (playing Lily) also did a great job as her more carefree rival in the company. I thought Winona Ryder was an inspired choice for the older dancer forced into retirement, and I was sad that she was featured so little. Okay, I've got that out of the way, what can I tell you about the plot that won't give anything away? So, it's about a ballet company, whose star dancer has just retired (forcefully) and they're now going to move on to a new show, featuring a new dancer from the ranks moving to prominence. The show that they are going to perfom is Swan Lake , (please follow that link if you want know anything about it, because I'm only working on what I learned from the movie) But! They're going

No Ordinary Family is an awful show, and I kind of like it.

I finally decided to give this show a shot, and the quick verdict is total guilty pleasure. The premise is that an "ordinary family" mysteriously gets super powers. The initial problem is that this is not an ordinary family. Mom is a brilliant researcher, who can afford to put her family in a beautiful mansion of a house, and take the entire family on business trips to Brazil. Michael Chiklis is a completely emasculated police sketch artist, slash mr. mom. The children are remarkably normal, in that they're ungrateful brats, that you'd be tempted to drown in the river if they weren't your own children. One of the basic themes of the show is that when they get their superpowers, they each get powers that allow them to achieve what's been missing in their lives. Mom's a workaholic, and doesn't have enough time for her job and her family, so she gets super speed. Son's a moron, so he becomes a super brain. I'm not sure exactly what the dea