Cleopatra: Riddle of the Tomb (PC game)

Cleopatra: Riddle of the Tomb was really mediocre. Unlike Egyptian Prophecy, which I really enjoyed, Cleopatra just isn’t entertaining. It cannot be due to the graphics since many of the visual elements are stolen skins and all from Egyptian Prophecy. It cannot be due to the movement/camera angles because those are exactly like Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern.

I think Cleopatra isn’t fun because the puzzles are not right. The puzzles are insanely tedious.

Like:
• Identify 8 unknown potion ingredients by following alchemical formulas. The formulas are given, but it requires 3 clicks to get to the document and 2 clicks to get back. The process requires combining 2, 3, 4, 5 ingredients in varying quantities. That is a lot of back and forth even if you’re doing it exactly right. With any flailing (and it’s honestly not clear which formula should be followed for identifying the particular ingredient, there are at least 5 variants) you could be there clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking for several evenings. Personally I found a walkthrough and alt-tab switched to look at the specific directions since that was easier and less repetitive.
• There were two spelling contest puzzles. The alphabet used was the Greek one, which I found odd and somewhat disconcerting. But the problem with the first puzzle is that without the hint which arrived much later, it was “Spell the names of 24 constellations using this rotating stone ring.” And it turns out that the puzzle was about spelling 3 particular constellations in order consecutively. But the puzzle resets if there is a single error. When the second spelling puzzle appeared, I quickly tabbed to the walkthrough and ignored the discovery phase.

Many of the puzzles are obvious, like when you see the catapult, you’re probably going to have to shoot it. But there’s no indication within the game that this is the next step. For other areas of the game, there isn’t a giant pink elephant in the room and it’s all wandering around guessing what might be useful.

Which brings me to one of my cardinal sins in linear “grab-every-object” games, objects appear in areas you have already transversed, through no action of your own, because the plot needs them but if you had gotten those objects earlier you might have been confused (oh noes! not like the whole game isn’t random anyway) or some of the “secret” might have been exposed. My problem is, in the beginning of the game, you see a statue of an archer without its arrow. So when people start shooting arrows at you, I looked around to see if I could pick one up. No dice. Now I’m wondering how I go about building an arrow from my inventory of found objects. It never occurred to me to go back and let people shoot at me again because now the game thinks I need an arrow. That’s just stupid.

Another deal-breaker, had I known about it before purchasing, the CD must be in the drive while starting the game.

Plusses to the game, there is very little “find the pixel” business. The game itself occurs largely outside, so it’s actually bright enough to not need gamma boosting (which is good because it’s not available.) The game launcher is pretty (though extraordinarily confusing when trying to load save games or adjust volume settings) and adds something to the atmosphere of the game. The game itself does a tolerable job with atmospheric things in the beginning. (The dialogue gets slovenly toward the end.) And it makes a good attempt to stay true to the roots of the place and time.

Minuses are definitely the camera angle tracking the mouse cursor because that makes me motion-sick, the overall “this is supposed to be educational” feeling, the sheer tedium of the puzzles, the randomness of what to do next when the game is completely linear, the voice acting (you don’t hire someone who sounds like a drunken 70 year old man to play a teenage boy in Ancient Egypt and you don’t hire some bimbo to be the voice of the second most powerful astrologer in Alexandria), the character animation (which isn’t a big deal because you don’t interact with people much and they are largely stationary… but when they do move, it’s horrible), and the constant nag warning about managing your inventory appropriately. Another minus would be the splash screen volume, the Kheops logo is accompanied by sound so loud it hurts my ears before I put the headphones on— it’s probably dangerously loud.

There are better games. Cleopatra wasn’t much fun. It was kind of pretty and the puzzles were kind of interesting, but so many of them were so frustratingly tedious that it wasn’t worth actually playing.

If you’re looking for something better: Keepsake (though annoyingly tedious because of character movement) is very pretty and interesting and the puzzles are appropriate; Nibiru (though it has one really egregious forced activity) was fun and a good implementation of the “grab-everything” kind of game; and Egyptian Prophecy (though I thought it was very short) was atmospheric and less irritating. Skip this Cleopatra thing and the Echo game.

If I can’t get rid of the SecureRom residue on my computer, I will no doubtedly complain more here.

A Time To Kill

A Time To Kill
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 7/10

I really enjoyed this movie. I thought there were a lot of great elements and some of the things I thought could have used more attention might have been included in the theatrical or DVD versions since movies are savaged when they are shown on TV.

I loved how there was a love interest in this movie and how that worked out with all the relationships. I saw a biography of Cary Grant (who had always gotten the girl, even when he was 60 and the girls were 17 in the movies… so in his final movie someone else gets the girl because he insisted. But there was still that love interest even so. And that opened my eyes to how the expected love interest angle was played in everything.)

I completely missed that this was set in the approximately now that the movie was made. They’re talking about American Death Eaters, (and I’m not even going to reference them here by their abbreviation, but we all know that evil lurks under full-face hoods, whether they be black or white.) So I assumed it was horse and carriage times. That went with the lack of air conditioning shown in the movie by hosing down the actors before putting them on screen. But apparently they were talking 1995 or so. If that is what The South is like, then no one who lives there should be allowed to vote in elections for the rest of the country and no one from the rest of the country should go there. The whole region should be under quarantine lest the nutjobs contaminate the rest of us. I hope it was exaggerated, but suspect not since there are still cross burnings in this century.

The plot of this movie was good, but I didn’t need all the violence. I think this would have been an interesting movie without it being focused upon the blockbuster “set it on fire!” faction winning so many points.

The actors in this were pretty good. Sandra Bullock was mediocre, but better than sometimes. The leading guy, Matthew McConaughey, was practically perfect. Most of the supporting roles were excellently done. I really like Oliver Platt in many of his parts. Donald Sutherland was good. The guy who was The Prisoner was in this; that was cool. Ashley Judd got her name in the summary but she was barely in this and was not convincing. Samuel L. Jackson was so good in this that I wouldn’t have thought he was acting had I not just had the Jumper movie to compare him to.

Well done story story, good pacing, good acting, and something that was worth watching overall. If you can watch it with someone who can translate the bizarre Southern customs, that might really help. I got really annoyed by how everyone was called by two names. I got really annoyed that the really adept woman was shunted aside verbally and by being ignored whenever possible. It could have used subtitles because some of the accents are thick.

But it was a nicely done movie.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s — Truman Capote

Breakfast At Tiffany’s
a book by Truman Capote
Wiki | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 and -2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Many times in the course of my life, glaring omissions in my knowledge of the world appear, realizing recently that there was a book (novella) version of the famous movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s was one of those things. I have had the movie in my Netflix queue for ages, but just about anything sounds better and it doesn’t move up. Truman Capote arises on Jeopardy! fairly frequently. He’s supposed to be really famous for being a great writer too. My knowledge of Truman Capote was, “Isn’t he some dead writer dude?” So I was completely shocked that he’d written something I’d heard of.

Now, let us get into the book itself. I was very very interested by the beginning, where the narrator of the book sounds a lot like I imagine Capote himself would have sounded. It was that kind of book, where enough facts coincide and it looks like the author’s fantasy life spilled onto a public page. But the narrator starts out saying that it never occurred to him to tell the story of this everyday experience/life he had even though it’s clearly what he really knows. Modern advice-for-writers pounds that idea so heavily that creativity can have its edge blunted. Some other modern advice is to “show, not tell”, but this is very terse narration with bits of really dramatic scenes. Pretty much all the advice I have ever seen for authors is tossed out the window with Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And yet, the writing in this is stunning. I found myself wanting to go back and read portions again.

The quality of writing and the degree of control in this book and by this author is enormous. The flashbacks aren’t tightly reined, but I followed along without error. The characters live in my imagination despite my not knowing anyone like any of those people. The world described is something I can see in my mind’s eye. You see? It’s brilliant. Hands down, utterly brilliant.

And it’s all fucking wasted on the most loser story in the history of the planet.

Flighty useless woman lives in New York City, has a flighty useless life, gets lots of men panting after her, continues being flighty and useless, book ends.

In a recent post about Arabian Nights, I said, “To my mind, there should be a penalty for doing a mediocre job with a great idea, thus wasting the idea.” I wish we could have combined some of the really amazing story ideas out there with the writing efforts of Truman Capote.

I will be pulling the movie from my queue. I can’t imagine a way that the movie would be anything less than disappointing since the only thing I liked from the book was Capote’s work.

I read one of the following short stories and again found the writing very elegant (sparse alternating with glorious detail to keep the reader’s attention focused) but again the story was so horrible (not gory or sad necessarily, or even badly written, just why would you ever want to read that?) that I felt physically ill.

Truman Capote was really extraordinarily talented and wasted it writing depressing stories wrapped in frivolity about nothing. If he could have taken that ability to capture the essence of a scene and used it to document history, I think generations of schoolchildren would stop thinking history was for the dead. If Capote could have actually used his imagination and gone for the kinds of world-building we see in Tolkien, Peter Jackson would have been too busy to do Lord of the Rings.

So the writing in Breakfast At Tiffany’s is about as close to godlike as I have seen, but the story was flat-out nauseatingly bad.

Dr. Horrible

I watched that Dr. Horrible web show (I’d link to it, but they’re going to pull it in about 8 hours, so there isn’t a lot of point. drhorrible.com )

It was better than I expected since it was a Joss Whedon thing and starring that Wesley Crusher wannabe. I know there are a lot of people who like Joss Whedon, but his projects really spiraled out of control when he takes his eye off the ball. Buffy disintegrated into a morass of ridiculousness when he started up Angel. And both of them tanked when he started Firefly preparations. I tend to think it doesn’t matter if I like something Whedon does, he’ll let it destroy itself through his distraction and greed. I ended up liking Dr. Horrible though. Maybe a one-hour thing is within Whedon’s preschool attention span.

The singing was pretty good. I especially liked the duet.

I loved the story idea. Where there is a supervillain origin. That’s very creative. And it demonstrated one of my current theories that we are conditioned to believe the story centers on the hero and sympathize with the focal character regardless of factual evidence. Many stories fail completely if you break free from that assumption, so having the standard story inverted and focusing on the villain was really interesting and effective.

Worth watching despite my expectations.

Dragonlance

Dragonlance
an animated movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

I enjoyed the Dragonlance cartoon movie. I found it campy and fun, very much akin to a Scooby Doo cartoon from the 1960s. The plot was fairly complicated considering, and there were a ton of characters. Most of the characters were extraneous and frequently they were similarly dressed.

The animation style is frankly pathetic. Nothing had depth or shading. There was a limited palette of colors, like someone bought the animators a 24-pack of markers and they couldn’t use anything else or combine colors.

The movie did not make a lot of sense if you are not already a fan of the books. That was too bad, but I am a huge X-Men fan and I loved the first X-Men movie while people who are not fans were left cold and I was really peeved that they kept panning the movie instead of watching it two or three times and getting with the program. So I am probably bending too far backwards giving the Dragonlance people the benefit of the doubt. I could sum up with, “The characters all act completely randomly throughout the movie, but there are glimmers where other characters reference things we never saw which promise that the characters actions would make sense, if we knew them better.”

The voice acting in Dragonlance was flat out horrible. There were some really big names, Kiefer Sutherland, Lucy (Xena) Lawless, that Baby Buffy girl who also played Harriet the Spy, and some other recognizable people. But the Scooby Doo effect of the animation and the really lousy script probably hampered their efforts and it is unfair to lay the blame at the actors’ feet entirely.

In the end, it’s an animated movie with dragons and magic and there was an actual story. So I kind of liked it. If those things don’t float your boat, you should definitely take a pass. If you’re a fan of Dragonlance and happen to be reading this blog post without having seen the movie, it’s worth Netflixing.

It could have been so much better, but it’s hard to tell whether the improvements I wanted would have destroyed the campy vibe that kept me amused throughout.

Batman: Gotham Knight

Batman: Gotham Knight
an animated movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 3/10

Batman: Gotham Knight is the “Clone Wars” of the Batman universe. It is a series of animated shorts which are supposed to bridge the time between Batman Begins and Dark Knight.

Unfortunately, there is no story here. It was like watching animator auditions. “Hey we’re making an animated Batman movie, send us a 15 minute film and we’ll consider you.” There was very little story. It was a lot like waiting 7 months for a graphic novel to come out and realizing the summary blurb has more story than the whole book because they wasted all that space on pictures that take several dozen times as long to draw as it would to write descriptive text. Also the animation style changes severely between shorts.

All of these favor the modern anime style animation where everything moves fast and is underlit and unidentifiable and gritty. They definitely favor the modern style anime where the vast majority of the story is only shown in the viewer’s imagination, so anyone who does not have a strong affinity with the Batman franchise is going to be left cold.

The first short in this is the most worthless and offensive bit of tripe you’ve ever seen too. Three kids talking about their day where they each saw Batman. Pandering crap.

I did not think it was worth watching. This is really bad.

Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Arabian Nights is a much more classical version of the story than my previous exposure. But the movie was uneven. I should say that this was flagged as television, and it definitely smacks of “made for TV”.

There were three stories told inside a framework of reality. The first story was really good, the Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves one. The second story was supposed to be funny but I am not so good with humor and tend to be rather appalled. The third story was the Aladdin one and really managed to be both dull and rather offensive. The framework story, of a sultan who thinks he should kill his wife before she kills him because all women are monstrous… that started to get interesting toward the end and I really enjoyed its conclusion. It seemed like fantasy and reality were competing in this and as reality developed texture and color beyond paranoia, the fantasy started to lose strength.

The acting in this is bad. It’s comical and done in the style of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. It’s supposed to look a bit jarring and off-kilter because the audience is supposed to think the actors don’t take this seriously. It’s supposed to add a dimension by breaking the fourth wall. To me it always looks unprofessional and childish.

So, there’s a made-for-TV movie, with that kind of production values and budget, which used great source material and dumbed it down so it fits between commercial breaks. There were some modern references that I found really disruptive. Genie of the Ring says, “You wouldn’t hit a man wearing whatever these are, right?” he points to his face where he’s wearing glasses. That’s not funny, it causes my suspension of disbelief to completely falter.

There were no subtitles. I enjoyed this, but not as much as I would have if the people involved in making it had actually done their jobs. Given how much I enjoyed the reality framework story and the Ali Baba story, it seems like this could have been a 10/10 movie. To my mind, there should be a penalty for doing a mediocre job with a great idea, thus wasting the idea.

Appleseed Ex Machina

Appleseed Ex Machina
an anime movie
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4/10

Normally I have a strong opinion about a movie I’ve watched, even if it is a strong “Meh.” type feeling where I don’t care. Appleseed Ex Machina was a really strange viewing experience since I’ve seen the previous one (Appleseed) and had been told over and over that it was great and profound until by the time I actually watched it, I had convinced myself I liked it a lot. So when I watched the new one, I was expecting to like it a lot and have no opinion positive or negative.

On the whole, I think this was a more interesting story, but so little of the story made it onto the screen that it was hard to notice. That was the problem with the previous movie too. What I hate about anime is how they leave out 80% of the story and just show glimpses that might indicate that the characters have actual motivation behind their actions and what those motivations are is left up to the viewer. It means the story is as rich and textured as the viewer’s imagination and if an anime movie seems to suck, there is a strong implication that the viewer is somehow at fault. You get out of watching anime what you put into it.

The idea in this series is there is non-nuclear armageddon and the world chooses to start a special city where the population is part cyborg or android and does not get angry or feel strong emotions. That way all the citizens live in peace and harmony. It supposedly gives hope to the entire world that there is something to strive toward. But what they show on the screen is the population of that special world gets angry and feels strong emotion and there sure seems to be a lot of violence and cheating. So I don’t understand.

In this instance, the government of the special Appleseed city is trying to convince the world that they should have control over all surveillance satellites because the rest of the world is irresponsible. Emperor Palpatine anyone?

The side plot is how the characters who fell in love in the previous movies are being separated by their boss at work.

I guess I didn’t bring my imagination because I don’t care. I don’t believe in the Appleseed project, I think it’s ridiculous to take people who are inhuman and say they represent hope for humanity. I think it’s ridiculous to expect emotionless people to strive toward anything more than monotony— there would certainly not be the level of innovation which would be needed to sustain some sort of seed project. I was surprised that anyone who had lived through armageddon would trust their government at all.

The reviews all say the animation in this was incredible. I thought it was mediocre and they spent way too much time on stuff that was hard and too little time on everything else. The integration between the characters and the CG backgrounds is vastly improved, they no longer look like Colorforms™ who merely float atop their environment. But there were a lot of hair close-ups and not much face-to-face dialogue.

I think I might like this movie, or these movies, more if I could actually see the whole story. Maybe there’s a book version that uses its words to explain the backstory and why things are important.

I did not really like this movie, but I wanted to and I expect if you are an anime fan, that you would have a lot of joy in seeing this, but I’m not sure since there was a love interest and not so much gory fighting with fancy laser blasters.

Jumper

Jumper
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 8/10

The book by Steven Gould was one of my favorites. I had not heard anything about the movie until it was in theaters and being derided by critics. I am not really sure what their problem was. It’s an action movie starring a troubled superpowered teen. But I guess the critics gave similar reviews to X-Men, Spiderman, and just about every other superhero type movie.

Overall I thought the action was good. I thought the filming and directing and editing of the movie was good… considering it’s a movie about people who can jump instantly from one place to the next, I was expecting something closer to a music video played back double-time. I don’t remember the book accurately enough to know if it was well-adapted, but I enjoyed the story portrayed. I thought the story had a good plot with some unexpected twists, which is pretty amazing for an action film since those are usually low-brow, though it could have been a bit more shocking.

The actors in this were not very good. I thought the Jamie Bell role, Griffin, was decent because all it needed was rough and angry. Plus it was comparatively short. I thought Samuel L. Jackson was good because I hated his character. The father, who was the main villain in the book as far as I remember, wasn’t scary at all, that could have been played up a lot more to my mind. David Rice, played by Hayden Christiansen, was awful. Keanu Reeves’s stereotype has nothing on this guy. He’s dark and broody and gets a double-handful of people killed because he chose a girl at seeming-random from his past? The movie indicates that he’s loved her for a long time, but there is no emotion there. There’s nothing to show why he ruins his whole life for that girl. The girl herself is standard cardboard screechy teen girl who demands answers while people are shooting at them. All I was left with about their relationship was wondering whether David Rice regretted going back for her.

I really enjoyed the aspect of the story that was introduced in the movie, about the Paladins who kill Jumpers. I loved how the evil people went around spouting that they were doing “God’s Work”. I was ecstatic about how they killed Jumpers while saying “Only God should have that power!” but I wonder sometimes if other people see the irony. I expect there are a lot of people who honestly believe that to be the case, that special people detract from “the all-mighty” and it is right to kill them so they do not profane by their very existence. It would explain why smart children are derided and then bullied and then beaten to a pulp in public schools. Anyway, it’s a movie that indicates the inherent hypocrisy of Christianity where they kill people while saying “Only God can judge.” So I liked that.

I think it’s too bad they hired a bad actor to star in the movie. There are a number of other talented actors who deserved a shot and we’ve seen Anakin Skywalker supposedly so in love that he destroyed the known universe but looking like a pyjama model mannequin at Sears.

Rocket Science

Rocket Science
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

This was supposed to be “outcast boy makes good in intellectual competition”. It was “loser boy, from loser parents who shouldn’t have bred, screws up his life more with help from an evil bitch-girl, intellect be damned”.

The acting is terrible. The situation is badly written, so the “trick” of switching who the good guy is seems like an obvious technique that was telegraphed from the beginning. The supporting roles are horrible horrible characters, so bad that they must be caricatures or someone should have called Child Welfare.

There is an element of what debate is supposed to be about, but when the story starts with the end of the previous year’s debate, we see a student fail. Then we hear he dropped out of high school and now works at a dry cleaners because of it. That’s almost a mockery of “people taking things seriously”. So it manages to look like debate is an activity for snooty people and everyone else should just stay home. Maybe it really is like that and it’s not about ability. Certainly joining a high school sports team requires more than athletic ability.

I didn’t like how intellect was not honored in this story. It really might have been a movie about loser boy getting conned into joining the track team instead since it was a movie about how outcasts are kept out.

We’re told to feel sorry for the main character, because he stutters and it keeps him from doing anything fun in life. We see him struggling to make progress when the school’s idea of “help” is a guy who studied pallative treatments for ADD and has no idea what to do in terms of speech therapy. But I can find 10 ideas on how to deal with stuttering, just online. Most of them are free— free advice and the advice doesn’t cost anything to implement. So it’s a case where he doesn’t even try to do anything to help himself.

There was a lot to really loathe in this movie and the resolution was not particularly pleasant.

It’s not uplifting, it’s not well told, it’s not about real people trying their best, it’s a movie showing that horrible people keep doing horrible things and they seem to like it that way.