Review-o-Rama

I actually considered making something different today, but then I thought “meh… too much work and I’m a lazy bastard anyway, so maybe next time”, so I’ll just pummel you with lots of short reviews:

Movies:

Saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest some time now, here are my thoughts:
Entertaining but not much else, the first half of the movie is completely pointless regarding plot, being used mostly to throw back (which is probably a good description of what they do) together the characters and rehash all the jokes from the first one and making a few new ones. The second half has a little more substance but has a sort of glued together feel, Davy Jones and his crew had lots of potential which wasn’t properly used.
A great increase in body count, mostly due to this Kraken guy (but deep inside, he just wants to be loved).
Acting wise: Mr. Bloom sucked big time, but that might be mostly because of how lame the character becomes in this movie, all the others were about par, but overall they were worst than in the first movie.
The ending has a nice surprise and an overacted one. As you probably already know, it is open-ended so they can make the sequel.

In other movie news, I finally saw the Batman movie (Tim Burton’s first one).
The atmosphere was a nicely dark one, but it felt too artificial (partly excused by the time the movie was made, but even so…), the plot was… inexistent, you got good guy (Batman), bad guy (Joker) and the girl. Joker himself not even has a great master plan! He mostly hangs around trying to kill people.
The movie has its moments, but what it mostly has is a lot of unused potential.

Games:

Today we’re going to talk about some classics!
First off: Diablo

Diablo is the kind of game that deserves its classic statute. It’s the kind of game where a five minute play easily becomes five hours.
Plotwise, it’s properly nice and dark, but the best part is that since the quests are also randomly attributed (with a few exceptions) even the story varies slightly every time you play. Adding to this, the tomes (three, I believe) spread across the game telling the backstory have variations which means that you’ll need to play the game several times if you want to get the whole story (and in this game, that is actually a pro). Personally I prefer the atmosphere of this one to the sequel.
The most critical part of this game however is gameplay. Although the game is not very long (in fact the whole game is shorter than the first act from Diablo II) this is compensate by the fact that the game is actually harder. A casual player will soon find himself being completely slaughtered. To this several factors contribute: there are three character classes, but unlike the sequel each only has a specific skill and it is possible (in theory) to learn all the spells in the game with any one. Problem is that they also have some specific bonus and limitations and unless you play each character the way they’re supposed to be played you’ll probably find yourself being slaughtered later on.
Oh! And by the way, NO RUNNING! What’s that? You’re being chased by a horde of black knights and you’re running pretty low on health? Though luck, you should have thought of that sooner.
It’s a great game, but I wouldn’t recommend it for the weak.

I also got to re-play Sonic & Knuckles the other day for my Mega Drive (aka: Sega Genesis). Being more of an expansion to Sonic 3 than a sequel (If you play the lock-on version, you’ll start the S&K levels after finishing the ones from Sonic 3) it is definitely the highest point of Sonic’s career. It is insanely fun, the levels are really nice and with several routes through the level. It expands on it’s re-playability due to the fact that both characters play quite differently (Hint: the game is harder with Knuckles, especially with Sonic 3, but it’s also slightly shorter) and more astonishing, this one actually has a sort of plot *gasp*.
It’s true, while most of the previous sonic games were mostly a succession of random zones and the plot consisted on: Dr. Robotnik wants the chaos emeralds and kidnapped Sonic’s friends, starting with Sonic 3 (and therefore expanding to S&K) you add to this the fact that Dr. Robotnik convinced Knuckles that Sonic was the enemy, while at the same time he tries to steal a super emerald and still needs to fix his Death egg zone.
Best game EVER!

Literature:

Err… Go read MacHall! Gone with the Blastwave is cool too.