Avatar: Holy Shit

In L.A. for work and just went to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood to (finally) see Avatar in 3D.

Damn, dude. Just... damn.

DVD Extras You Must See

Very cool list of some of the best/most innovative/actually worth watching DVD extras around (including some Easter Eggs I'm guessing you'd never know about otherwise). Courtesy of Empire online.

E3: Left 4 Dead 2 Walkthrough

Following up on Brian's post below, here's a look at the first part of the Developer's Walkthrough for Left 4 Dead 2 from E3. Seems to be an improvement on the original in just about every way so far... bigger story? New multiplayer modes? Incendiary ammo? Melee weapons? I'm in!

It's an Exciting Time

As posted by Tyler, E3 kicked off today and I've only just had time to watch a few trailers for the big games we have to look forward to this year. My favorite surprise so far is that we'll get Left4Dead 2 in November. Take a look at the teaser (be warned, it's zombie-bloody) and see if you can't help smiling by the end like I did.

I'm sure there's plenty more awesome out there that I haven't watched yet.

Today is also the day that boxes from Newegg started arriving. I'm building a new computer completely from factory-new parts, something I've never done before. I'll post if anything awful happens. The rig it's replacing is over six years old, which is like 90 in human years. Sit quietly for a moment and you'll hear it wheezing.

On top of all that, Sears is coming on Thursday and Friday to completely redo our kitchen. I'm taking both days off to stay home in case anything comes up. Nothing will, of course -- they know what they're doing, I know. But two days off! With my new (ideally, functional) computer! I'm giddy.

I <3 Eddie J

Tomorrow it will have been one week since the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

I think I'm finally able to talk about it.

Seriously, it's been kind of a rough week. It feels like my older, hotter girlfriend broke up with me because she graduated and left for college while I'm still a sophomore. I knew it was coming, and it had to end when it did, but it's still sad.

BSG has been the best thing I've ever seen on television, hands down. I don't think it was followed by many people in my social circle, but I hope to be able to convert a few people on that front with liberal loaning of DVD collections. I believe the thing that held the show back (at least from my non-watching friends) was a certain perceived geekiness threshold. Hear me well: this notion you have of Star Trek-level sci-fi -- glossy heroes in spiffy future-wear working together to come up with complex scientific solutions to alien puzzles, then explaining said solutions by way of a simple analogy ("Like putting too much air into a balloon!") -- is false. The reimagined BSG was a dark and frequently tragic telling of an epic story, utterly lacking in camp and robotic dogs. The heroes are anti-heroes half the time, and most are deeply flawed yet undeniably sympathetic characters.

The cast as an ensemble is second-to-none. Edward James Olmos' Admiral Adama literally brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion with a speech. I'll be the first to admit that I can be moved to tears by big movie moments (perhaps because I am stoically unmoved by events in real life), but this man could do it to me on a practically weekly basis. James Callis' Dr. Gaius Baltar is one of the most surprising and entertaining characters of all time. Katee Sackhoff's Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is portrayed with such consistent hard-edged bravado that when you finally catch a glimpse of her genuinely smiling, it's breathtaking.

I could go on. I will, as a matter of fact, in my next post, which will be about the BSG board game.

So if you haven't seen any of it, rent and watch the pilot, really. It's an investment of a couple hours and you'll know at that point if it's for you. There are only four seasons of the show so there's no need to worry about getting endlessly caught up in yet another TV series. If it grabs you the way it grabbed us you'll tear through the whole story in a few weekends.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Wow. So... where to begin...

After years of waiting, I finally saw the Watchmen movie today. And I'm surprised to report that I honestly have no idea whether or not this movie worked as a movie. 

Seriously. This is the first time that something I'm so familiar with has been put up on the big screen, and I have to say that I'm apparently way too close to the source material to know whether it worked or made sense or seemed cool to anyone else in the theater. I walked in knowing every plot point and nuance along the way, and ended up watching it with a very different and completely unexpected mindset: one that was almost worried about what I was about to see. It was almost like hearing a friend's band do a cover version of a song I grew up with; there was an equal mix of "Oh, cool... they're doing that with it," and "Oh, no... what if nobody likes it?"

It was stressful! Each time a key scene was ready to unfold, I was anxious about how they were going to pull it off. There were times when that feeling stuck with me longer than I would have liked, and other times when I found myself smiling like a little kid. The montage/recap during Rorschach's visit to the cemetery, for example (which remains one of my favorite parts of the book), was a lot of fun to watch and a really well played moment.

I can tell you that fans of the book will be thrilled with the look of the film; the attention to detail was nothing short of amazing. Sets, costumes and casting were pulled right off the page. I was particularly impressed watching the cover art from each issue sneak seamlessly by... a nice nod to the people in the know that didn't feel obvious and heavy-handed to everyone else. Visually, I really couldn't be happier with how faithfully the story was brought to life.

But there were definitely a few things that rubbed me the wrong way as a fan. In a few key instances, they traded smarts and subtlety for blood and gore, which was a huge disappointment. I won't spoil anything for the uninitiated, but he end of Rorschach's origin story in particular was a real let down. They took one of the more chilling and original moments in the novel and sold it short in favor of shock value (which is ironic, because the written version is actually twice as shocking and stayed with me for a long time after I'd read it). Of course, no one who hasn't read the book will notice, but it will definitely piss off a few folks who have.

Also missing for me was any real sense of impact at the story's Surprise Ending. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the movie wasn't able to spend any time with any of the more incidental characters along the way... the book fleshed out a lot more of the surrounding cast, so when Things Happened that effected all of them, there was a lot more weight to the proceedings. This was probably always going to be problem for the film; with such a dense story, some details simply had to be left out in order to keep the running time under five hours. But in keeping the stories of the main characters intact (which really was an impressive feat in and of itself), we lost some of the context for the consequences of their actions. It left me feeling like we'd watched events unfold from far away, which is a tough trade off.

But for all of the good and bad and things that I liked or didn't, I'm surprised to say that I'm too close to this thing to know if it worked for anyone else! We saw a lunchtime showing on opening day, and there were only about thirty people in the theater. So aside from the dude behind me saying "damn!" every time a bone was snapped (and fair warning; it happened quite a few times), I really couldn't tell how it went over with the audience. Maybe it's brilliant. Maybe it's confusing and longer than it needs to be. Maybe it's a landmark event, or maybe it's a disappointment. All I know is that I'm really happy it finally got made by a director who gives a damn, and I'm probably going to have to see it again to get my head around it.

What did you think?

Portal Re-entered

A Portal-themed evite recently inspired me to go back for a brief fling with what I thought might have been the best game of 2007. I can't readily think of any other game that so skillfully conveys both real creepiness and genuinely entertaining humor in basically the same breath. Combine that with mind-bending spacial puzzles and science and you've got an obvious, hands-down winner. End the game with a song sung by the game's antagonist and you've got a lot of delicious gravy. Or icing, I guess, in this case.

No one will ever be able to end a game that way again without people remembering Portal. The designers have earned their immortality.

There's also a fan-made Flash version of the game here that's only 2D but is still a great puzzler and time-waster. If you don't know a thing about Portal you should at least take a look at this, but it would be best if you just picked up the real thing for the 360 or PC. If you can't do either of those things, come over and play it. I'll provide food and drinks. It's important.

And yes, I'm bucking the trend of doing a "Best of 2008" revue and talking about my favorite game of 2007. Eat it.

Aliens vs Predator: Everybody Loses

As a fan of the first two pics in the Alien series, I always cringe a bit when I see a new installment on the way... progress peaked for me in 1986, and it's been a slow but steady decline ever since.

It isn't that I had high hopes for Alien vs Predator - Reqiuem going in... I saw that the movie was coming on in HD and I grabbled it on my DVR for whenever... no biggie. So I wasn't surprised that I was disappointed... but I was surprised at why I was disappointed.

Turns out the directors pretty much abandoned any higher aspirations and made a slasher flick, straight up. And I'm not a big fan of slasher flicks. There was no rhyme or reason to who was going to die or when, and no suspense in the build up to those deaths at all. The asshole jock who probably has it coming? Just as expendable as the nice girl at the pizza shop who had a bad day. Characters we kinda wanna care about? Unimportant when the ultimate goal is a body count. No lessons learned, and no reason or redemption. Yippe!

The first two movies weren't exactly milk-fed, but at least they were classy. Even at their most unsettling, they were never gratuitous. Unrelenting, maybe, but I think they knew where the line was... they showed you just enough awful to get the point across and then let that linger in your mind while the folks on screen tried to stay alive (and boy did it linger...).

But not this time! A precocious little kid on a hunting trip with dad comes across a crashed ship in the woods that's crawling with facehuggers. This ain't my first rodeo... I know bad stuff's gonna happen. But is it really necessary to see the little guy's chest ripped open? Wasn't that sort of implied when it happened to dad just a few seconds earlier? Or what about the hospital at the center of town? You know, the one without an empty bed in the maternity ward? Do we need to see a room full of expectant moms strung up and screaming while babies that clearly aren't theirs burst from their bellies? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that we don't. I'm pretty sure Ridley Scott and James Cameron would have passed that exit and kept on driving.

If you're a gaming fan, it stands to reason that you might be an Alien fan as well (see also: Brian's cat names). So let me save you the trouble on this one: don't bother. It's not fun, it's not funny and it's definitely not worth your time. They might as well have called it Freddy vs Jason and set the bar where it belongs.

(Extra credit: Check out the pic of the directors on IMDB - straight out of central casting. And yes, they released it on Christmas. Nice touch.)

An Even Greater Endorsement for Zombies

Marjorie is just about as not-a-gamer as a person can be, so it's definitely worth stating that when I showed her Left 4 Dead last night she actually sat and watched me play through a whole movie. That never happens. It's just that good.

Incidentally, it was also the first time I actually survived the "Blood Harvest" campaign, so it was extra-special to have a spectator there. I had died many times during the finale over the past few weeks, a few times within a yard or less of the rescue vehicle. In practically any other game I would probably have gotten pretty frustrated to get so close to victory only to have it cruelly snatched away, but when it happens in L4D it's awesome just about every time. Seeing the story end terribly and tragically is in keeping with the genre of film they've so skillfully brought to life on the console. So while I'm screaming in anguish as a monstrous infected hulk squashes me into paste beneath the skid of the evac helicopter, at the same time I'm cheering. It's a mean and perfect conclusion.

I <3 Fast Zombies

I'm glad that zombies have finally evolved. I could never take the slow ones seriously, even when I was a little kid and they were something I was supposed to be afraid of. I do recall a time around age five or six when I developed a fear of skeletons though. An older kid had advised me to carry a stick with me when I was outside at night, in case one should attack me; something in his tone convinced me that such occurrences were not uncommon. Were I to be confronted by a hostile skeleton, the stick was to be used to poke through an empty eye socket and into the brain. See, that's how you kill a skeleton.

I've really been enjoying Left 4 Dead, though not in the way one might expect. What you've got are four characters -- a biker, a Vietnam vet, an office manager, and a college girl -- making their way from one place to another (ostensibly a safer one, but it hardly ever seems to work out that way) through hordes of screaming infected locals. The thing that really sets the game apart from others is its revolutionary "AI Director" -- essentially a computer program that generates the enemies in the game based on how well you play, ensuring a challenge for players of any skill level. What you end up with is really an interactive modern zombie-flick that turns out differently every time you play. In case you haven't realized, that is awesome.

As exciting as the zombie-shooting is, the game is unmistakably designed to be taken on with friends working together as the four survivors. I find myself having a fine time on my own but what really gets me psyched is imagining how the scenarios I've found myself in will play out with live companions. Tyler picked the game up today so I anticipate getting to try it out online with him within the week. I expect we'll both have stories to tell afterward.

It's funny that I'm having more fun with how I believe the game will change when played with others than I am with the game itself. And really, who doesn't occasionally fantasize about living in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world? You're smart, you could survive, and you wouldn't have to deal with your stupid job or jerks on the Metro anymore.

Yeah, I'm pretty tired of my job.