Author: Jason

The Longshots

Reviews

7 out of 13 nots.
for being exactly what I expected, and not more

The Longshots is based on the true story of Jasmine Plummer, who at age 11 became the first girl to play Pop Warner tournament football.

It wasn’t a bad movie, not at all, but it was predictable, even without knowing any of the true story behind the film.  In a way, its like The Bad News Bears for football, only more kid/family friendly and less exciting.

It didn’t suck, but I wouldn’t want to pay full price for this, and probably wouldn’t pay matinee or morning prices either.

Blog Banter: Does Everything Need to be AAA?

Gaming

Welcome, welcome to the 7th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

Topic: Does every game need to be a grade-A blockbuster title?  Would you be willing to play more average games or should every game shoot for the 10.0 rating?

The problem with aiming a game for a rating is that ratings are subjective.  What one person, or one group, considers to be a 10 out of 10, another person, or group, might consider to be only a 7, or worse.  As huge of a success that World of Warcraft is, there are in fact people who don’t play it.  There are *gasp* people who don’t like WoW.

The main issue I think that shooting for “WoW numbers” causes is that it fails to properly manage expecations.  (If you read my blog long enough, you’ll see that managing expectations is a common theme in most things I talk about.)  If you have a game that is set in a genre that even given the “best” game it could possibly be is likely to only attract 200,000 users, if you spend money like its going to clear a million or more, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Personally, I like seeing a variety of games come to market rather than seeing one game or game style dominate.  As Richard Bartle infamously said, “I’d close WoW.” or something to that effect.  The question of this month’s topic is misleading.  Would I be willing to play “more average games”?  Who decides what is more average?  I just want to play more games, to have more options.  If companies dump all their cash into less games seeking WoW or GTA numbers, then no matter how “good” those games may be, I think the industry and gamers on the whole will suffer.

So, no, I don’t think every game needs to be a “top of the line” title.  I think they need to approach each game as unique and manage accordingly, so that variety can flourish, because variety is better than dominance and stagnation.

Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Silvercublogger, Crazy Kinux, Gamer-Unit, Unfettered Blather, MasterKitty, Game Couch, XboxOZ360, Omnivangelist, Lou Chou Loves You.

The Rocker

Reviews

11 out of 13 nots
for making me want to start a rock band

The Rocker is the story of Robert ‘Fish’ Fishman.  He was the drummer in a rock band named Vesuvius, until he was kicked out.  Twenty years later, his nephew’s band needs a drummer to play their prom gig.  From there we follow Fish as he is once again in a band on the rise.

When I first heard about this movie, I was worried it was going to be ninety minutes of “the old guy” being crazy and gross before ending with some sort of heart warming ending.  Thankfully, while there are some crazy gross old guy moments they are few, and the movie is genuinely funny.

I really enjoyed it alot, and I suppose it helps that I am already a fan of Teddy Geiger, so I liked the music quite a bit.

Definitely worth seeing.

Going back to Azeroth…

Gaming

… nah, I don’t think so.

There are many reasons I stopped playing WoW.  The first and foremost was that there were so many blasted servers that after the initial scatter, and then several re-homes, of all my previous-MMO friends, I ended up being invested too much in a server where few of them played, and I didn’t want to start over again, again.  Then the friends I did have on the server I was on stopped playing, or did move servers and started over.  I tried making new friends and joining new guilds, but frankly everywhere I ended up was full of one of two kinds of people, 1) hardcore, you must play now, fanatics who wanted everyone to be on all the time and either farming or raiding, or 2) people who were so casual that the guild was little more than a chat channel while everyone played alone together, soloing their way to glory.  Then when Battleground turned into nothing by a grinding gear-fest, I lost my last reason to play.  I wanted to PvP, but I didn’t want to spend the time, effort, or money required to gear up enough to be able to last more than a few seconds.  And the game supports no method by which you can PvP against only similarly geared people.

Despite my distaste for how things ended, World of Warcraft has remained installed on my PC even though my account is cancelled.  But not anymore.  I’m just removed it and I’m never going back.

For one, I’m going to be picking up Warhammer Online, and I’ve put myself in with a fairly organized group of people who don’t seem to be hardcore slave-driving raid-mongers nor solo-only chatoholics.  For another reason, you need only see the direction WoW has decided to continue heading… and by that I mean into silliness.  With the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard is putting motorcycles into the game.  WoW has always been a pun filled humorous type game.  Even back in its origins at an RTS game, humor was embedding in the voices of the units (if you kept clicking the same unit over and over again they eventually got upset with you and demanded you stop touching them), but WoW has always been a step further.  Mostly, the things in game could be easily ignored, or avoided.  Or, most importantly, they were things you sought out, saw, and then went back to not seeing them.  Funny names and odd sites are great fun when they pop up from time to time.  But this is different… how often do you see people on mounts?  Your answer is probably like mine, “All the time.”  So now, we are going to have motorcycles riding around all over the place.  Not being a flying mount, they will probably be unrestricted, meaning you can ride them around the old world.

If they really wanted to put motorcycles in the game, have them be funny, but not have them be ubiquitous, they could have put in a gnome somewhere, with a motorcycle, who will help you build one.  It would be a series of quests that would give out a couple rewards, but ultimately give out a motorcycle mount, limited uses (10 or 20), non-repeatable.  Of course, people would cry about not being able to keep the mount, but a few people crying is better than unleashing the World of Motorcyclecraft, in my opinion.

With that, I’m done.  And I’m never going back.

Listening versus Waiting To Talk

Random Thoughts

Have you ever been talking with someone, regaling a story, and when you finish they immediately respond with a story of their own?  One that somehow makes your story insignificant?  Have you ever told someone something to which they respond that they disagree, but the reasons they give are completely out of line with everything you just said?

I have.  When it happens, I try to notice, because most people who do this become obvious in their patterns.  They are not really listening to you, they are waiting for their turn to talk.

The Internet is full of people with this problem, especially when it comes to game design.  Take this thread for example.  Where I linked to should be a post of someone saying that the upcoming Star Trek Online game should avoid being a DIKU clone like so many other games.  He goes into a pretty elaborate tale of how things might work.  The second reply following him is a post saying his idea would fail as a DIKU.

Ummm… duh?  And the guy even quoted the entire original post, including the parts where the original poster said explicitly that it wasn’t a DIKU idea.

This is the sort of thing that makes conversation hard on the Internet.  Some people know what they want to say, they are just waiting for an opportunity to say it.  They don’t join a conversation so much as they look for an opening (no matter how ill fitting) and step in to criticize and spew their opinion.  I mean, if a few people are talking about how to make great soups, what is the point of walking in and stating that, while their soups might be okay for people who like soup, a steak would be a better meal.  It was a thread by people who like soup about soup… what the hell does steak have to do with it?

Sometimes people need to realize that if you can’t contribute to the topic at hand, then perhaps the best course of action is just to listen instead of trying to turn the conversation to something you’d rather talk about.  It really makes message boards less enjoyable, especially when the same person keeps trying to hammer his point of view into thread where they don’t belong.  If no one is talking about what you want to talk about… start a new thread, or at least propose that the thread steer another direction, don’t go hijacking.

Hellboy: Emerald Hell

Reviews

It is not often that you can read the same character portrayed in more than one way.  If you read all the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler, they all pretty much read the same.  Not to say they aren’t good reads, but a Dirk Pitt book is a Dirk Pitt book.  In the realms of Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, sometimes you can find a character who is written by several authors, and those authors can be very distinct in their styles.  Conan, for example, has been written by dozens of authors, and if you read enough of them, while Conan himself remains relatively the same throughout, his surroundings and the tales in which he is enmeshed change.

Hellboy falls in here also.  Many of the Hellboy books I’ve read and reviewed here are akin to superhero novels.  Hellboy and his band of misfits saving the world from one monstrosity or another.  Emerald Hell on the other hand is a much more sedate book by comparison.  More brooding.  More searching.

Within the pages we find Hellboy on his own, and after hearing some tales about the six silent daughters of Bliss Nail and the little Georgia swamp town of Enigma, he decides to check them out and see if something sinister is afoot.  Of course there is, but its not the potential world ending calamities of the other books.  Instead its about a pregnant girl who needs protecting from a misguided undead minister who murdered the girl’s mother.  More so than the other books, this one is all about mood and sorrow.

I don’t think I’d put this book at the top of my Hellboy pile, but I enjoyed it just the same.

Name This Blog

Site News

For a long time now I have been content with calling this place “weblog.probablynot.com” and leaving it at that.  But while I begin considering expanding my empire, I figured it was time to give this blog a name of its own.

In all likelihood, I will ignore every single suggestion made here… but I may not.

So, keeping in mind that I ultimately plan to spin the movie reviews (and perhaps the book reviews) off into their own corner of my domain, what name would you suggest for this blog?

If you want more info about me to go on, just ask questions and I’ll answer them as best as I can…

Henry Poole is Here

Random Thoughts

9 out of 13 nots.
for being about faith without being preachy

Technically, this movie opened yesterday, and I should have put up the review then.  But I already had two reviews set to go up, and three posts in one day seemed a tad crowded to me.  Besides, I don’t think many people are going to rush off and see Henry Poole is Here on a Friday night.  It is more of a lazy Sunday morning movie.

Henry Poole is dying.  Although, we never learn from what, he does say he won’t be around long.  But he’s gone back to his childhood home… or at least he tried.  Instead, he bought the house down the street.  He has a Hispanic neighbor who used to date the man who previously owned the house (who died of a heart attack in the kitchen).  He also has a neighbor whose husband ran out on her and their child, a daughter who hasn’t spoken in a year.  And he’s got a water stain in the shape of Jesus in his stucco.

Its that last thing that causes the most problems.

Henry Poole is Here is a movie about faith, about belief in something greater, but at no point does it come out and shove any particular religion down your throat.  It also never says anything remotely close to people who don’t believe going to Hell or anything.  It is more a message of, “Having hope is better than having no hope.”

I enjoyed it.  Not the greatest film ever made, but far from the worst.  I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Reviews

9 out of 13 nots.
for great animation but a not so great story

If I were a fanboy of all things Star Wars, I might be inclined to proclaim that this movie, The Clone Wars, is the best thing since sliced bread.  Since I am not, however, I maintain that when you consider it, sliced bread is in fact still pretty awesome.  If you know you, you might have heard me say some form of that before, and basically it means that I feel the movie was a great attempt, but that it missed greatness.

The Clone Wars is set during… the Clone Wars.  It happens between episodes II and III of the Star Wars Saga.  Someone has kidnapped Jabba the Hut’s son, and since the Republic needs use of the outer rim space travel lanes to move troops, the Jedis agree to help find and rescue him.  Of course, nothing is ever simple, and lots of things go awry.

The biggest problems I have with the film stem from the same place that the problems I had with the new trilogy came from: George Lucas is just making shit up.  And I don’t mean that in a “he’s a creative genius” way… I mean that in a “he doesn’t even read his own work for consistency” way.  So, despite it never being mentioned, not once in the three original films, or in the third new film (the most logical place for it to have appeared), Anakin gets his own paduan.  Which despite its complete out-of-left-field nature, makes perfect sense given Lucas’ (and others) incessant need to manufacture adolescent characters for kids movies, because they clearly would never be interested in any movie that didn’t have a kid in it.  (Note: The original trilogy of Star Wars films, which was wildly successful, contained no children, not even pre-teens.)  The character of Ahsoka feels completely shoe-horned in.  Dialog between her and other characters smacks of the “Oh yeah!  Well, I may be young, but I’m no kid!” attitude Hollywood loves.  Its just… annoying.  And every time I hear the word “youngling” I want to punch George Lucas in the face.

Outside of issues with the characters and story, the film itself is beautiful.  It sits in a place that I can only describe as a blend of computer graphics and painting.  The textures and shading used adds a unique element to the film that lifts it from being an ordinary CGI affair.

I will say, though, if you go to see an animated movie this weekend, see this instead of Fly Me to the Moon.

Fly Me to the Moon

Reviews

4 out of 13 nots.
for wasting 3D on a film not worth seeing

I went an saw Beowulf in 3D and I liked it.  I saw Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D and I loved it.  In Fly Me to the Moon they went for the gusto and used the absolute most 3D they could possibly cram into every single scene and I hated it.  There were so many things going on on so many levels that it physically hurt my eyes to watch some scenes.

If that weren’t enough, the movie itself was boring, the plot had giant holes you could launch the Space Shuttle through, and it wasn’t even very funny.  Unlike other kid’s movies, like those from Pixar, there is nothing in Fly Me to the Moon to appeal to the adults who go see the film with their kids.  In fact, most adults will probably be bothered, like I was, by the inane story and aforementioned plot holes.

The entire film seemed like a bunch of ideas thrown together to use 3D and mesmerize toddlers with pretty colors.  But don’t think just because the movie is aimed at kids that your kids will love it.  If you go see it in a 3D enabled theater, your kids will need to wear the glasses for the whole 84 minutes, and if the population of my theater is any indication, half of kids will “ooh” and “aah” and laugh at the funny flies, while the other half cry at all the things coming at them from the screen.

All in all, I really, honestly, can’t recommend this film to anyone.