Filed by matt on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Kind of funny that Richard and I finish Half-Life 2 within a week of each other considering it’s been out since November. Unlike Richard I never played it on the PC so it was all new to me and I quite enjoyed it.

The game is structured so that it has no cutscenes – everything is learned through playing the game and interacting with people in the environment. Maybe I don’t play enough games but I think that’s still a pretty unique choice.

The presence of walk-throughs on the intertubes presents one with the option of having every step laid in front of them if they want. By and large I like to play the game and experienceit  as I go but I admit there are times where I’m stuck and I’ll gladly look something up. If the choice is between 2 hours trying to figure something out or cheating with a walk-through, well in this case my saved 2 hours of time more than offsets my ethical slide.

The best part about finishing the game was clicking over to Half-Life 2 Episode 1 immediately afterward. That Orange Box is the finest video game value in the history of man.

Filed by matt on Sunday, January 27, 2008 at 4:29 pm

Just watched Silverado, a film that is now 23 years old. I don’t want to give a lot of time to it as I’m mainly doing this post as an image test. I can’t remember how it was received but the name actors in it are plentiful: Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, Kevin Costner, Kevin Kline, Brian Dennehy, Brion James, Patricia Arquette and Jeff Fahey (does anyone else remember his show The Marshall? Pretty good actually).

I’m struck by how un-subtle it was. If you were to make a list of standard western cliches you’d find them all in there. My favorite is 4 riders on horseback perfectly spaced and framed in multiple money shots. Really though it’s the score pounding it in at every opportunity. Makes me appreciate the incredible score of There Will Be Blood even more.

Filed by Richard on Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 8:19 pm

Finally played through Half-Life 2 on Xbox360. I had previously played the game on the PC when it was first released back in, was it 2004? At the time I thought it was the greatest game ever; Though time marches on, Half-Life 2 still deserves the title.

It’s amazing how much depth there is to this FPS. The game has about 9 or 10 major sections; any two which would constitute a typical game. One section might focus on driving skills, one might focus on sniping; others might be more team focused. It’s just an incredibly deep game.

I was struck by how much easier the game was on the Xbox than the PC. I think a lot has to do with the very forgiving targeting system. Though there was plenty of action, I played through entire hours of the game without dying or even risking dying.

I don’t know how much time I spent playing the first go-round, but it was certainly at least 40 hours. It was and is the most time I’ve ever committed to a single FPS campaign. This go round I clocked in at about 14 hours.

Half-Life 2 has the all-time greatest weapon moment in all of games; when your gravity gun becomes energized and allows you to grab humans and fling them with abandon. I remember the first time it happened I was so excited I wanted to get on the phone and call someone. It’s not quite as exciting the second go-round, but it was still incredibly fun nonetheless.

Half-life 2 had so many innovations: the Gravity Gun, a believable partner character (Alyx Vance), a style of play that eliminates “easy,” “heroic,” and “legendary” types of challenges, a unified and truly compelling storyline, etc. Now that Bioshock has come out and set a new bar for First Person Shooters with compelling storylines, Half-Life 2 is ever so slightly dated. But evaluated against what had come before it, Half-Life 2 is still the best FPS ever.

Filed by Richard on Friday, January 25, 2008 at 7:46 pm

Sylvester Stallone has achieved a remarkable thing with Rambo; he’s taken the most jingoistic and uber-80s of film series (the Rambo films), and cut out almost every single element that dates those films. He’s made a lean and incredibly mean Rambo film for our modern age. Whether its a good film is a different question.

This hook of this film is it’s depiction of brutal violence. Waves upon waves of Burmese soldiers are shredded like so much grated cheese by Stallone’s 50 caliber machine gun. In it’s own way it is much more brutal than the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan; if not nearly as artful.

Stallone’s Cinematographer uses a similar 45 degree shutter to achieve a staccato strobe effect to the blood and meat flying from former heads and limbs. This film is thoroughly informed by the ghoulish video sites that show all manner of Iraqi, Chechen, Russian, and Iranian citizens die close up, in dreadful ways.

It’s to Stallone’s credit as a filmmaker that he rarely dwells on any spectacular effects shot. Each death runs quickly into the next. If this film is to be successful; it will be entirely due to the heretofore unknown levels of realistic violence. Rambo as a brand means literally nothing these days; but as an especially violent counterpoint to the current de facto kings of cinematic violence, 300 and its brethren, Rambo may just find a audience.

One element that Stallone does bring whole cloth from his previous outings is the outrageously evil army that he’s fighting. In this Rambo, he fights the Burmese military, who’s blood lust for raping, torturing, and killing peasants knows know bounds. They began to remind me of the pig-faced superNazis in the dream sequence of American Werewolf in London; evil squared.

So Rambo isn’t a great film; but it is remarkably effective at accomplishing what it set out to do. It’s an action movie in it’s purest form and it probably the most brutally violent movie to date.

Filed by Richard on Friday, January 25, 2008 at 12:21 am

George Lucas. Peter Jackson. Robert Zemeckis. Three film visionaries who bet the farm on untested technologies for film production; bets that led to the creation of some of the world’s most successful film production and effects houses. But have you heard of Steven Lisberger? How about Kerry Conran? Both of these filmmakers were almost entirely untested by Hollywood. Both of them helmed freshman productions costing tens of millions of dollars using entirely new, completely unproven techniques. And both of them failed spectacularly—or were perceived to have failed; never to make another film since.

Steven Lisberger was the force behind Tron, and Kerry Conran created Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Had each of these films succeeded, it’s certain that the production houses built to create them would be major forces today in Hollywood. Had either of these directors succeeded, perhaps they’d be the household Hollywood names that Lucas, Jackson, and Zemeckis have become. But they didn’t succeed. Nevertheless, they deserve to be praised for their vision and the risks they took. Read on…
read more »

Filed by matt on Sunday, January 20, 2008 at 7:46 pm

That’s right, I watched what is clearly a horrible movie from a few years ago for no good reason. When I got back from Cloverfield, my hand-held camera nausea allowed a very limited time playing Call of Duty 4 so I watched Stealth on TNT HD. Actually I do have a valid justification for watching it – it was written by W.D. Richter who directed Buckaroo Banzai and wrote Big Trouble in Little China, two of my favorite movies.

It was bad. Reeeeeal bad. There was no flavor of the fun that I enjoyed so much in the other films. (Actually the last line was pretty funny – I’ll give it that.) Josh Lucas wasn’t bad but in a month I won’t be able to tell you it was him in the role. Jessica Biel was also fine but in the third act when her pressure suit has magically transformed into skintight gear you think maaaaaybe she was hired because she is smoking hot. Jamie Foxx, who I think won the oscar for Ray when this was filming, was clearly just slumming it. But it’s hard to blame the actors when there’s nothing interesting or unique for them to do.

The three actors are all in a super duper fighter squadron blah blah blah, a computer-powered jet joins the team and hilarity ensues. Why does the computer-controlled jet have a cockpit and seat again? For maintenance purposes? That’s so stupid even a studio executive should have pointed that one out as beyond the pale. Who would you think the bad guys are? Terrorists? Check. Former Russian republic? Check. North Koreans? Check. Lame clone of HAL? Check.

I should say something nice – the effects were well-done. The future jets looked real enough and the Navy helped them film on an aircraft carrier which looked nice.

Back to bitching – the robot jet has its tech support team set up on the hangar deck, taking up a ridiculous amount of space in an environment where space it at a premium. Maybe the rest of the air wing was off bombing dirty hippies or something. Part of the third act takes place as a character is trying to cross from North Korea to South Korea across the DMZ. With magical building rubble that serves as cover and my favorite – no land mines at all. I guess Joe Public might not know they’re there but I do and it bugged the hell out of me. Something highly annoying TNT does is run the credits to one thing on one side of the screen while it starts the next thing on the right. When they repeat something it kind of backfires. Guess how awesome it is to see the ending to a movie as you’re watching it begin? Not awesome at all.

So despite being written by someone I quite like I would have been better served watching one of the Bill Moyer’s Journals on my dvr. There’s bad but fun, like Armageddon, and then there’s just bad. This was the latter.

Filed by Richard on Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 9:16 am

In this edition of the award-winning Mustardayonnaise podcast, Matt and Richard discuss random stuff. I’m sure they talk about Cloverfield somewhere in here…

 

 Mustardayonnaise 66 [63:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed by matt on Friday, January 18, 2008 at 8:26 pm

Saw Cloverfield after work today. First of all paying 9.50 for a 4:20 show? Are you kidding me? In a smallish screen with no stadium seating?I enjoyed the movie – it delivers exactly as advertised – it’s a monster movie that’s scary. The shooting style is all hand held camcorder – much like the Blair Witch Project, only I don’t remember actually feeling like I might vomit in that one. The feeling calmed down after a bit but I just don’t need the verite that badly. If you’ve seen a commercial or the trailer you already know the plot – monster appears and starts causing havok in Manhattan – attractive young people try to get the hell out of the way.

I’m still processing my thoughts but I liked it. More than anything else I felt like it was approached in a real enough manner that I bought the concept. As the main characters (no-name actors who do a great job) make their way through the city you see glimpses of other action always going on without focusing on it. The way this ancillary action is handled and integrated into the film sells it for me. It would have been very easy to focus on this or that but you only catch fleeting glimpses as the main characters careen through the situations. And what’s there feels accurate with the exception that it seems like the military was on scene and firing weaponry awfully damn fast – how close are actual tank depots to Manhattan?

As I was watching the opening scenes I kept thinking that this was enough and we can get things rolling now. In retrospect I think it was fine – it must have been very difficult trying to figure out how much setup was needed to hook you into the characters before setting them into the crucible to see what happened to them. When the hook of your movie is monster stomping around the urge to get to the stomping bit must be awfully strong.

I thought the monster itself was fine though as Jeffrey Wells had pointed out it would have been a very interesting experiment to have never seen the monster at all. While I agree that would have been cool, I’m fine with how this was handled.

The movie is somewhat short but I didn’t feel cheated at the end or that the pacing was off leading me to wish it was shorter or longer. I thought I knew how it ended, based on one of the shots in the trailer (and man do I hate when that happens) but it went in a different direction that I was okay with though again it finds itself following Blair Witch. It left me feeling like I need to get on the ball with a family disaster plan. You know, in case something crawls out of the Puget Sound and starts laying waste to the suburbs.

I enjoyed it, with a qualified bit of nausea thanks to the camerawork. Gettin old I guess.

Filed by Richard on Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 6:43 am

Is this a surprise to anyone? EVERY child in a recent UK study indicated that they didn’t like clowns. You wonder what compels parents to drag their kids to the Ringling Bros. circus; I mean this isn’t a new phenomenon… WE hated clowns as kids; why would we think our children are any different?

Source: Don’t Send in the Clowns Reuters via MSNBC

Filed by Richard on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 11:41 pm

Matt and I were both, suffice it to say, blown away by There Will Be Blood. I’m STILL thinking about the damn thing, two weeks on. But we both agreed that it might have a middling future partially because of it’s particularly bleak and quite shocking ending (doing my best to be spoiler-free here).

So will it play in Kansas? Fortunately I have two perfect test subjects: Chuck Huffman and Mitch Huffman, my dad and my uncle, both Kansas born and bred. They both, generally, have pretty mainstream and decidedly low-brow tastes. (I still vividly recall leaving a Saturday screening of the Tony Danza-Danny DeVito-Random Orangutans epic “Goin’ Ape!” with my dad; he loved it, and my 12-year-old mind understood for the first time ever that that my dad’s opinions might be somewhat more pedestrian than mine).

So what my dad and uncle think of There Will Be Blood? They loved it, of course. They weren’t at all put away by the non-traditional narrative arc, and they loved the ending. LOVED it. Even told some of their buddies to see the film.

Another positive sign was recently exposed on Sirius Satellite’s Howard Stern Show. Stern’s sidekick Artie Lange has a screener copy of it, and slowly it’s making the rounds of the various cast members. Each day another one reports in; Artie, Robin Quivers, Stern… they all loved it and loved the ending. And they’re about at non-elite America as you can get.

I can only hope as the critical consensus wraps around this work of pure genius that folks like myself, Matt, Jeff Wells, and other with STFU about our concerns about how the ending will play and give middle America some credit. They’re gonna love it!

Bonus Trivia: My Uncle Mitch mentioned to me that Upton Sinclair, the famous socialist whose novel Oil! serves as the basis for much of There Will Be Blood, was the person who signed off on my Uncle’s Reading merit badge for the boy scouts in Los Angeles circa 1950. Given my uncle’s politics, clearly Sinclair did not rub off on him in any way… but how cool would it be to have Upton Sinclair be the person who approved your merit badge?

Filed by Richard on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 7:20 pm

Dear Leader Steve Jobs delivered another masterful keynote address today… really is there anyone better at this kind of thing? The products line he went over was great, if a bit niche in their appeal.

The big news is the expected release of the Macbook Air, which the stellar Apple marketing is selling as “the world’s thinnest notebook.” It really is a beauty to behold, though there was more than a bit of taking clear disadvantages and selling them as virtues (a technique mastered by Volkswagen in the 50s and 60s and perfected by Steve Jobs). In this case its the lack of an optical drive for the machine. Jobs argument is that you can now rent movies easily through iTunes, you don’t need a drive for backup because of their new off-computer backup technologies, and you can use other computers wirelessly to “borrow” their drive to install software.

So broken down, forget about your extensive DVD collection, buy those films again to watch on your fancy new computer, or better yet, rent them for the right to watch them once. Also, buy our new combi-Airport and Backup hardrive for your backups. And while your at it, don’t even think about using this as your only computer; by default it’s going to be a secondary computer because you will never be able to load software otherwise. Oh, and all of this for the low price of $1799 (unless you factor in the 4 grand or so for another computer, a new airport-hard disk backup solution, and the replication of your DVD collection). read more »

Filed by matt on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 7:45 pm

Tomorrow at work I’ll be hitting refresh obsessively on Engadget to follow along with the Steve Jobs Macworld keynote. Most people are expecting an ultra-portable MacBook, probably called the MacBook Air (thanks again Engadget!), details on the next version of the iPhone and probably iTunes movie rentals. I have no use for an ultra-portable laptop and my next phone will probably be an iPhone though I’m not sure when. I have zero interest in digital movie rentals unless they’re super cheap so that doesn’t do it for me either. 

But regardless of the fact that there probably won’t be anything aimed right at me tomorrow I got to thinking about how consistently impressive Apple has been about generating interest, press coverage, and when you drill down to it, products that people clamor to own. As many have pointed out the iPhone doesn’t really do anything super unique – Windows Mobile and open source solutions do a lot of the same things, but the iPhone puts it all together in such a brilliantly comprehensive fashion that you just don’t care that it’s not honestly new and it’s pretty damn expensive. By and large they deliver on the promise of “it just works”. You can complain about all the press and attention Apple gets whenever they do anything but they set a bar that most don’t clear but all should to pay attention to.

Filed by Richard on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 3:28 pm

On this edition of Mustardayonnaise, Matt and Richard talk about the WGA strike, the upcoming Macworld Keynote, the 17 movies Richard saw last night, and lots more.

 

 Mustardayonnaise 65 [74:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed by Richard on Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 6:19 pm

80 whole points better. I had forgotten, but Matt’s post reminded me of that fact too.

Filed by matt on Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 5:50 pm

So recently Richard finished Halo 3 on heroic and apparently exceeded my Halo gamerscore. He seemed pretty happy with that to which I say huzzah sir, huzzah. Yet he knows I am no longer an achievement whore. The XBox Live gamerscore system is powerful stuff – appealing to the collector gene present in every male. Make 10 of something, number them 1 through 10 and men will want to collect them all. Doesn’t matter what it is; comics, baseball cards, 1000 available achievement points in a game, whatever. Yes I’m generalizing but meh.

I know the exact moment when I stopped caring about achievements. I had finished Bioshock but had missed a weapon upgrade station somewhere. A check of the tubes told me where, I loaded a save point, clomped to the location, and tried to access the appropriate location. I spent an hour trying to push the button that would open the door, attack the door in various ways and otherwise try to get in the area but there was a bug that wouldn’t let the door open. I finally had to admit it wasn’t going to happen and I had just pissed an hour away. I could have been doing something productive; working on my house, learning a new skill, reading a book or more likely playing another game. And suddenly the desire to collect points and achievements was drastically reduced and it was revealed as a gigantic time sink that wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t excise the collecting gene completely but I overcame it enough that I now only seek them out if they’re along the way to finishing the game or would take maybe 5 extra minutes.

Assassin’s Creed was a great case in point. The three cities and kingdom each featured a number of flags that could be collected – I’m sure worth achievements. But my experience with a similar hunt on Crackdown proved that even with a map I would never get them all – just spend hours in a futile search for that last one or two. It’s just not worth it to me. Clearly Richard is also getting a charge out of not only getting achievements, but in getting more than me. Can I just cede the overarching contest now and declare him the winner?