AT&T Sucks

I don't know if they're able to see all the content that passes through their DSL lines, but I don't care. Their flaky internet service the past few days is infuriating. Big Shattered Dream Pie to AT&T.

Playing For Keeps Day

The Playing For Keeps Amazon Rush was a success! Read on at http://murverse.com/2008/08/25/playing-for-keeps-launch-day-results/

Playing For Keeps: Two more days!

http://murverse.com/2008/08/01/playing-for-keeps-promo/

Movie Review: Star Wars - The Clone Wars (2008)

I just got back from seeing the newest offering from George Lucas's film empire. No, not the Galactic Empire, but Lucasfilm. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was immediately struck by the number of kid-oriented advertisements and trailers they showed in the "pre-show entertainment." For whatever reason, I honestly did not expect it to be geared toward a younger audience.

Even before the opening scene of the movie, I noticed some glaring differences between this film and the intro scenes of the previous six. There was no 20th Century Fox Fanfare; as a matter of fact, no Fox at all, it seems. Instead, the intro sequence sported a big WB logo, followed by the customary Luasfilm logo that I can best describe as a "left-to-right chrome sweep." Go watch any recent version of a Star Wars movie if you don't know what I'm talking about. Then of course, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!

But then the opening note of the Star Wars theme sounded different. They changed the tempo of the theme song, and instead of the usual grand minutes-long text scroll setting the scene, a big Star Wars: The Clone Wars logo simply appeared and faded to the background. The text intro was replaced by a narrator who sounded like a radio newscaster, overlaying a montage of battle footage from all around the galaxy.

After seeing all that, I knew that it would be a different kind of movie than what I was used to. That's not such a bad thing though. I understand that it was not as big-budget as the original six so I knew to expect at least a few things to be different.

Basically, The Clone Wars is typical Star Wars fare. At least in terms of the prequel trilogy. Since the movie is entirely CG (computer generated animation), anyone critical of the overuse of CG in the live-action prequel trilogy would either be really disappointed or would have to suspend their disbelief. I'm not in that camp, and I got what I expected. The animation was very smooth, detailed, and interesting to watch. I've been thinking since I saw its first trailer that the characters look like those in the Dreamworks movie Antz. After seeing The Clone Wars, my opinion has not changed.

Well, if you're going to go all CG, there's no point in getting all the original actors to play their parts, since they would probably be too expensive. Well, except Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Christopher Lee (Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus), and Samuel L. Jackson (Shaft). Oops, I mean Mace Windu. The rest of the voice actors did a superb job. Ian Abercrombie (not Ian McDiarmid but probably older) played Palpatine/Darth Sidious. James Arnold Taylor, who has dozens of other voice credits to his name, including Wooldor Sockbat from "Drawn Together" and Tidus from "Final Fantasy X," voiced Obi-Wan Kenobi. Want more useless knowledge? Taylor also did Obi-Wan's voice in the 2005 Clone Wars cartoon miniseries, the Star Wars Episode III video game, and in the best-selling Star Wars game of all time, Star Wars Battlefront II.

A guy named Matt Lanter did the voice for Anakin Skywalker, and he was pretty spot-on, as was Tom Kane as Yoda.

The story, as mentioned above, is pretty straightforward and standard prequel trilogy fare. I am not a big fan of the prequel movies, but I went in with the expectation that nothing will top the original trilogy. Basically, a certain vile gangster's son is kidnapped and the Jedi are called upon to rescue him. But the captors are not who we think they are. Anakin gets a padawan learner and we get to see how he fares as a teacher. Space battles, clone vs droid battles, and lightsaber duels ensue.

Compared to the prequels, The Clone Wars was pretty good. Words and actions didn't seem as "forced" (no pun intended) as they were in the prequels. Jedi acrobatics and other stunts seemed a lot more natural. The story was easy to follow. Sometimes a little more complexity in the storyline can help a movie, but I didn't think the straightforwardness of The Clone Wars hurt it in any way.

There was a certain little infant in the movie that probably put off certain older viewers, but I'm kind of a sucker for stuff like that. Yeah... so cute! But I liked it anyway. Couldn't get enough of that.

I had two gripes about the movie. And minor spoilers follow, though I'm not going to reveal anything that wasn't already in screenshots or trailers you've probably seen. My first complaint is about Anakin's new Padawan learner, Ahsoka Tano. She's described as a "youngling," which I would assume means that she's either in her early teens or preteens. She's what you'd call spunky, energetic, rebellious, or in the words of Yoda, wreckless. Now, I understand that this is a different galaxy we're talking about, but I've never met anyone in her age group that acts like her or is as smart with battle tactics or is as good at fighting as she is. Force-attuned or not, I just don't find it believable that a kid can be as strong or as clever as she is. I may not be in the target demographic for that character, but I am in the target demographic for Star Wars, and I don't really care for her. Oh, and the problem with adding a new character in between Episode II and Episode III (technically, between Episode II and the 2005 Clone Wars cartoons, if you've seen those) is that she's never mentioned again. I'm guessing the forthcoming cartoon series might shed some light on it?

Still, she's not as useless as Jar-Jar.

The other problem I have is the dialogue. The exchanges between Ahsoka and Anakin were amazingly cheesy and out-of-place, and the action during those scenes just barely saved those scenes. Again, I know she's a kid, but you gotta get serious some time. Every time one of those stupid Battle Droids opened his metallic trap I cringed, because about 95% of their dialogue was over-the-top cheese, and they acted like 5-year olds rather than programmed killing machines. Thank goodness for the Super Battle Droids and the Destroyers, who just keep their mouths shut and fight. Many times when someone tried to be funny, it just sounded juvenile.

Again, it seems they were targeting kids, so I guess the dialogue was fine in that respect: all the kids in the theater where I went were enjoying themselves.

Overall, despite the two issues I had with the movie, I still found it an enjoyable Saturday Sunday morning show with plenty of action and lightsaber fighting to go around. It's definitely more family-oriented than Episode III, which can be good or bad, depending on who you are. I would recommend Star Wars: The Clone Wars for fans or non-fans, but it may be more enjoyable for non-fans than, say, the most hardcore fanatics. If you're somewhere in between, you'll probably like it. I give it a score of 6.5/10.

Oh, and it made me want to go home and play Star Wars Battlefront II, but I had to write this review instead.

*******

Trailers I saw with the movie that caught my eye were Bolt, a CG Disney movie about a movie superhero dog, and City of Ember, about a post-apocalyptic town.

Video games lead to real-world violence!

Yeah, right. That notion is a pile of BS. Here's an excellent essay I just read:

http://thegameheroes.com/Blogs/VideoGameViolence/VGViolence.html

I'm Famous!

Well, not really, but I was featured on the GamerCast Network Video Game Show. It's a podcast that talks about all kinds of games. Okay, so it wasn't really OmniGeno that was featured, but rather my review of their show that I posted on iTunes. Still, awesome to receive a Ham Sandwich from them.

If you want to listen, download it here (click on the mp3 link). Skip ahead to the 26:00 point if you don't want to hear the whole show. Sweet!

iPod Touch Review, Part 1

I meant to write this a long time ago, and I had planned to write a massive, massive post about my experience with my new toy, but I haven't mustered up the will to do such great planning and thinking, so I've decided to take a more piecemeal approach.

Where to start? Well, a while back, I wrote a post about the iPhone 3G unveiling. Since then, I've had a lot of time to play with what feels like a new toy: my ten-month old, 16GB iPod Touch.

First, the basics. If you've ever seen the iPhone, you can sort of imagine what the Touch looks like: exactly the same, except thinner and without the receiver (since it's not a phone). It has a mobile version of the Safari internet browser, called, not-so-surprisingly, Safari. You connect to the internet via wi-fi, much like your laptop computer. The music player is similar to the other iPods out there.

And of course, you use a touch screen to control it. Web pages and lists of songs alike are scrolled by swiping your finger up or down on the screen. The interface is very smooth and elegant, and very different from other digital music players today. It plays anything that iTunes can play, which means you can put your MP3s, AACs, WAVs, AIFFs, Apple Lossless audio, and a few other audio formats, as well as MOV and MP4 video encoded in h.264, the codec used to produce high-def video. As for the screen, they say it's "widescreen" but it's actually a 1.5:1 ratio, meaning it's not quite the relative width of real widescreen displays (16:9), but not the width of standard displays either (4:3). There is an option when viewing videos to see the full width and have thin black bars on the top and bottom, or cut off just a tiny bit on the right and left. I've found that either option is acceptable.

Originally, the iPod Touch included the basics: a music player, a video player, Safari, a calculator, a world clock, an address book, and a photo viewing app. The address book was none too useful without phone capabilities or an e-mail program. In January, Apple released a $20 update containing applications for Stocks, Weather, Notes, Maps, and E-mail. I skipped that update but I was able to get those apps recently, as they came as part of the new 2.0 software.

What else came with the 2.0 software? Again, the ability to get the App Store apps.

That was an overview. We'll get into the details next time.

Facebook importing

When I first started this blog, I originally intended for it to be a real replacement for Facebook Notes. But limiting myself to Blogger gives me fewer readers. True, this blog is first and foremost for myself, but I also want it to be available to anyone else interested in reading. Most people I know don't check personal blogs very often, but they do check Facebook. I probably made an error i thinking that anyone who was interested in reading my blog would actually spend the time to visit omnigeno.blogspot.com on their own. But everyone goes on facebook and no one goes here. Or maybe they do, but without leaving comments I have no idea, and there are no site statistics on this thing.

So from now on, all posts I make here on my blog will automatically be imported to Facebook as notes, in order for those who aren't good about following links to anything besides Facebook to see what I write.

Edit: By the way, the animated GIF in the previous post will not animate on Facebook.. unless you click on the GIF to load it in a new window. Just one advantage of viewing it in its original state.

Playing For Keeps Redux

I mentioned a while back that Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps will be released in print on August 25, 2008. Mur has posted an audio promo for it. Take a little time to check it out here.

To view my original post, click here.

I will continue my review of the iPod Touch later. Please stay tuned.