Deadlands board game! Deadlands board game!
Earlier this month, Twilight Creations announced that they're making a Deadlands board game, due sometime in '09. (Hopefully demo-able at Origins, please?) This is a great fit, as Twilight's top product is the perennially popular Zombies!!! board game... so the Weird West is right in their wheelhouse. Plus, Twilight co-founder Kerry Breitenstein is one of the original Doomtown champs, with her own character card(s) and everything.Is it too much to hope that they could find a way to tie their board game in with the Doomtown cast and setting?
This was Get Caught Up With Pixar Week.
We watched Incredibles and Cars on ABC Family (in HD, which was sweet), and received Wall-e on blu-ray as an awesome Christmas gift. Of course, I'm no Pixar superfan, but they do make very watchable movies.Incredibles annoys me for the same reason that Heroes annoys me: it takes long established comic super hero elements, waters them down for the mass market, and then gets full credit for being innovative and clever. Imagine if Arena League Football was more popular in America than the NFL. That's what seeing this faux-comics stuff is like for me. The retired heroes, the McCarthy-style government crackdown, the hero costumer, the metatextual analysis of capes and villain monologuing... I've seen it all before.
Cars loses points for veering too far into that cloying Boy, Rural America Sure Is Better Than Them City Folks nonsense. It's not. And you knew right off that Lightning McQueen was going to magically stop being a jerk by movie's end. But it wins points for being consistently interesting to look at (I like the silly car windshield eyeballs; and you can thank several old Disney cartoons for inventing that), as the animators found method after method to present a world that makes logical sense. For once, Pixar managed to do an entire universe of characters, instead of relying on showing how Character Subset B gets along in the face of Character Subset A (which is usually humans). Although they fell to type anyway by making the subsets divide into city/country classes.
Wall-e was really, really nice. I liked the slightly darker theme (although really, they barely got into the notion of Earth being covered in trash... the characters talked around it more than they talked about it.) The robots were all great and I laughed at every Mac joke. However, I thought using real actors was unnecessary and distracting. And the ending seriously could have used some more explanation, other than "Oh yeah, he's okay now."
Old LEGO habits die hard.
It's been a long time since I put together a LEGO set, but Clark got a LEGO Batman set for Christmas so I had to get back in the game. Funny how the old dysfunctions are still in place... after I dump the baggies and start fishing for pieces, I am always convinced that I'm missing a piece. And I never am.I am also morally against the cheap practice of putting stickers on LEGO bricks. If they want designs on these pieces, they can damn well silkscreen the plastic back at the factory.
Video Games Live can't tell video games fiction from video games reality.
We're blowing through our Pepsi reward points because they're scuttling the entire project at the end of the year... mostly on MP3 downloads from Amazon.com. I picked up the entirety of Video Games Live, the famed orchestra tour of video game soundtracks. Some of my favorites are in evidence - Kingdom Hearts, God of War, Tetris - and a couple that I've never heard of but I'll give them a pass, like Advent Rising and Halo. But Tron? Who the fuck included Tron on the playlist? Hey, why not Last Starfighter, that was about video games too.
Speed Racer for Wii is about what you'd expect.
Obviously a rushed, slapdash title. The game reuses character artwork like it's going out of style, and - and this should be a cardinal sin for any and all racing games - it only has five tracks. There's an attempt to duplicate the crazy attack-racing style of the movie, but it's only an attempt.
For the true confession file.
Whatever we were watching had a dozen commercials for the DVD release of Mamma Mia, and I remarked to Rhonda that I would probably watch that movie solely on the basis of being an Abba fan. I said something akin to "Because I like Abba songs." Clark quickly jumped in "I like applesauce too."
I'd have to agree with you regarding the Lego issue of stickers versus silk-screened bricks. I recall helping friends dig through their vast bins of bricks just to find assorted silk-screened control panels to complete their newest, best creation to date.
Sometime between then and now companies got cheap. They stopped silk-screening items in favour of using paper stickers (not even vinyl stickers with transparency or even solid vinyl stickers). They stopped putting a full-length manual in the computer game box in favour of putting a quick start tutorial with the troubleshooting section being nearly as long as the actual manual part of the manual. Then they stopped putting a paper manual in the game box and put in just a quick start card and some PDFs on the disk--if you wanted a manual you had to print it and take it to Kinkos to ring-bind it out despite paying the $50+ for the game. Gone were manuals like the classic Maxis manuals with loads of attractive, easy to read typesetting, lovely artwork, trivia related to the game's theme, and the off-beat Maxis sense of humour. Stuff like this really made if feel worthwhile and collector-like to own an original, physical copy of the game. Now you only get close to that by buying the limited, special edition of the game that includes the special metal box (which is usually pretty thin metal), in-expensive t-shirt, proper manual, and maybe bonus disc--if you're lucky--for another $15+.
It's of note that I have a similar issue with the sales tactics of "boxed set" anime where you can't just buy the entire boxed set, but must purchase each DVD separately and pay an extra $5-10 for the first DVD just because it comes with the actual cardboard box and extremely thin t-shirt. The only time I figured the 1st DVD and box with t-shirt actually warranted the extra $10 was when it actually included a 4" resin figurine for you to assemble (those can cost a good amount imported).