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I'm fortunate enough to still be at work, but my movie viewing has still had a major uptick since quarantine started. Here are few of the films I've seen with my wife in the past two months or so.
Westworld and Futureworld - I haven't read the novel or seen the recent tv show, but I quite enjoyed this duology from the 1970s, which centers on amusement parks for rich adults where robots play npcs in real life. Both of these films hold up quite well and to this day are recommended by many as sci-fi classics.
Pacific Rim - Yes, I'm a massive Kaiju fan, but I couldn't care less for American Kaiju productions in general. It was my wife who convinced me to watch this movie and I thought it was pretty darned good. Pacific Rim succeeds where the American Godzilla film from 2014 failed: it leans into the action and doesn't hide its main attraction, the monsters and mechs. I wish I had watched this movie sooner. It's the best western interpretation of a giant monster movie that I have ever seen.
Continue reading Quarantine Cinema
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Wreck-It Ralph was a wonderful movie that took the concept of Toy Story and applied it to game characters in a small town arcade. In the most Pixar way possible, it was well-written, uniquely respectful of the source material, and had a story underneath it all with so much heart that you genuinely cared for the main characters. There was even a small number of real life Fix-It Felix Jr. arcade machines that were made to promote the film. They're pretty rare to find in person, but the game can be played on Disney's website here.
It's been six years since our feels were charmed by Ralph, Vanellope, Felix, and Calhoun, and as the title suggests, the sequel leaves Litwak's humble arcade behind to focus on the entirety of the interwebs. Does the new film manage to keep the personal feel while expanding the adventure? Read on, my friends, for the latest episode of RF Cinema.
Continue reading RF Cinema: Ralph Breaks the Internet
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I read Ernest Cline's dystopian, reference-laden young adult novel Ready Player One in 2015 after it was recommended to me by my wife. Though I enjoyed the book, I felt that the reliance on references of 80's pop-culture was a little overwhelming. When I heard that the book was going to be adapted into a film, I was intrigued. What would it be like to have the many intellectual properties referred to in the novel seen on the big screen together? Even with Steven Spielberg at the helm, and the original author contributing to the screenplay, could a coherent story be told with all the pop-culture overlaying the action? I recently checked out the film with my wife, and here are some quick, spoiler-free thoughts.
Continue reading RF Cinema: Ready Player One
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Final Fantasy VII was released over 20 years ago, but to many it's still heralded as one of the greatest RPGs of all time. Personally, I feel the sacred status some have heaped upon it is a bit overblown, but I won't deny having a big ole soft spot for it. For its time, it was an incredible experience and Square Enix (then Squaresoft) exploited its popularity with spin-off games and merchandise. And despite nearly bankrupting itself with the unmitigated disaster that was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the Japanese developer saw fit to make another movie, this time based in the world of Midgar and featuring Cloud Strife, and everyone's favorite villian with an absurdly, impractically long sword. So how does Advent Children hold up? Let's find out together.
Continue reading RF Cinema: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
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Happy Super Bowl Sunday, and welcome to another edition of RF Cinema! This month we're looking at our first documentary, Indie Game: The Movie, from 2012. This wasn't the first documentary about video games, but it was one of the first that gained huge popularity by focusing on three of the most well-received independent games at the time, Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Fez. Just as indie games were starting to become more noticed by the mainstream media and their quality was starting to improve, it was an insightful look into what it takes to make a video game with a small team.
This is a movie that really doesn't have any spoilers. Most gamers are familiar with these games, their developers, and the success they achieved, so there's really nothing to spoil. But I figured I'd mention it all the same.
Continue reading RF Cinema: Indie Game: The Movie
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April's Together Retro game club pick at http://Racketboy.com was Deja Vu, a classic adventure game that goes back to the early Mac gaming days, and found a bit of a cult-following on the NES. It was later ported to the Game Boy Color, which is arguably the best version of the game out there. Not only are the graphics bright and the command interface refined, but the cartridge also features the lesser-known sequel as well.
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As a fan of adventure games, I was really looking forward to playing my way through this one. The game borrows heavily from film noire, as you a hard boiled detective who wakes up in a bathroom stall with amnesia. And you don't know that you're a detective, but you feel like you've been drugged. It's up to you to piece this case together and figure out who you are. Sounds like fun, right? Well, not so much.
The problem is the utterly frustrating puzzle element of the game. Much of the puzzle solving in this game is completely infuriatingly unfair. So while the game isn't actually incredibly long, it can last much longer because you'll often need to start over due to some game-breaking situation. For instance in my first playthrough I was going from location to location via taxi cab. Each trip cost me 3 of my 20 coins. Eventually I got to a point where I was out of coins and couldn't leave the location I was at. I was stuck and irritated by the time a fellow forum member told me I could get more coins by gambing in the casino (back in the building I had started in). With this new knowledge I restarted my game. I went to the casino and gambled away all 20 of my coins in a slot machine. Turns out the slot machine on the left is a winner, but the one on the right is a loser. So I had to restart my game again.
So how much trial and error is too much? For me, Deja Vu was far too brutal. Too demanding. Too unfair. I think it's easy to write this off as a matter of "games were just harder back then," but I don't think that's the case. I tend to think that making the game so unfair was an attemt at making it last longer. I've played my way through some excellent adventure games like The Secret Of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, and although I may have found myself stumped at times, I never thought that the solution was completely arbitrary either.
But sadly I couldn't even finish Deja Vu, a relatively short game even when I used a FAQ. You see at the very end of the game you must ditch all of your incriminating evidence in a sewer before bringing your proof of innocense to the police department. But the computer wouldn't let me dispose of my gun. After days of trial and error and scouring the internet it came down to the fact that I had never shot open a certain cabinet. I had collected all of the proof I was supposed to, but I couldn't complete this game without shooting open a stupid cabinet. How exactly would anyone be expected to figure this out? Had they made it as far as I had, and seemed to have solved all of the amnesiac puzzles, how would they know they missed a cabinet that had to be shot open?
I was so disgusted that I just stopped playing. I didn't even care if I beat the game or not. And I was certainly not motivated to start up the second.
 We all know about E.T., the infamously bad Atari 2600 game. But did you know that Atari buried thousands of unsold copies of the game in a Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill in September of 1983?
Many have doubted this event's authenticity, however a team of four enterprising Auburn University students have decided to team up and make E.T.'s March, a documentary about them trying to locate the landfill where Atari buried all these games. Together, the four students will travel from Auburn, Alabama to El Paso, Texas, which is where the Atari plant was located. From there, they will travel from El Paso to the landfill in Alamogordo, recreating the path that the semitrucks took, while in the meantime taking in the video game culture of the United States.
Judging by the website, they seem very determined to locate this goldmine of video gaming history, and the documentary should prove to be a very interesting watch. Now, I haven't seen King of Kong, the other video game documentary that's been making waves lately, but I can imagine that E.T.'s March must have been inspired by it and the critical acclaim it has been receiving.
The filming of the documentary will take place from March 15-23 and will be released over the internet sometime this summer. There are no plans for a theatrical or DVD release stated on the website, but I assume that they would be willing to do something like that if the right distributor steps in and funds them.
While you're waiting for the film to be released, here's a great, well-researched site all about the E.T. burial story: http://atari.digital-madman.com/
E.T.'s March Official Website
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