Thursday, March 27, 2008

Review Day

Professor Layton and the Curious Village: This DS game is a hybrid of brain teasers and old fashion point-and-click adventure. The adventure portion is absolutely horrible, with too much dialogue and too many cutscenes. In addition, the game has the bad habit of recapping everything that's happened whenever you turn it on -- particularly annoying if you only play in short bursts of ten or fifteen minutes. The puzzles are more fun -- they're a mix of over one hundred logic puzzles, riddles, spatial reasoning puzzles, and trick questions. This game would have been much better with an option to just do the puzzles and ignore the story. A partial solution is implemented (if you skip over puzzles during any chapter, you can visit a single room to play them all) but it's not enough. Music is charming during hour one, grating during hour two, and manually turned off after that.
Final Grade: B, must love puzzles

Super Smash Brothers Brawl: The long-awaited fighting game on the Wii pits every known and unknown Nintendo character against each other in silly battles, with new characters included like Sonic the Hedgehog. I tried out the Wii-based control schemes but ended up returning to the classic GameCube controller for the "tighest handling" of the characters. Sound and graphics are excellent, and the single-player modes are boring, as expected. This series really shines when you get four guys playing at the same time, and I haven't had time to play a game with more than 2 people yet.
Initial Grade: B

Dan in Real Life: A romantic comedy starring Steve Carell as a widower who unwittingly falls for his brother's girlfriend (who looks eerily like a young version of the French woman on LOST). This movie has an unsympathetic main character, no real romantic-comedy-sparks, and an insanely 1950s family that's even more ridiculous than the one in Family Stone. Some scenes are just awkwardly uncomfortable, like most of Meet the Parents.
Initial Grade: C-

Atonement: This movie was not as good as everyone said it would be. Keira Knightley is the two-dimensional main character (literally -- she needs to eat something) but the story of her and her lover are really the supporting pillars for her sister's story. The first half of the story rambles on like Gosford Park and the second half channels a little Saving Private Ryan but without Matt Damon. There is one war scene on the beach that's technically amazing, since the same camera and shot are used for three or four minutes, winding around and through the chaos, but it seemed more like a neat trick than a compelling plot device. The musical score is interesting, sometimes taking sound effects from the immediate scene and weaving them into the orchestration of later scenes. The movie is a downer but not a tear-jerker.
Initial Grade: B-

Donkey takes final bow in ballet troupe
L.A. Times apologizes for Diddy-Tupac story
DB Cooper's parachute possibly found

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