[Games] Zuma's Revenge

When Flash-based games get popular enough, they actually warrant sequels whether this is just for the free version online or for the paid versions one can download. And thus many gaming franchises have been born online and now we are all familiar with Bejeweled and Diner Dash in all their incarnations.

Then you get those games that geeks like us love but then they never seem to pick up on them and return to add on to them. Or so we think, at least.

I always loved Zuma and once thought that the game couldn't get any better, and thus the reason nothing was ever added to it. The concept was simple - a frog rotates around a dais and shoots different colored balls in order to make patterns of at least 3 balls of one color. Sure, it's not that logical in a real-world sense, but it is fairly simple.

This is one of those times I'm happy I was proven wrong.

Zuma's Revenge is the long-awaited sequel of that classic arcade game. Yes, you're still a frog but this time there are new stage concepts, new game modes, new special shots and a whole lot of fun. They certainly found many ways to expand the gameplay in order to warrant a $20 price tag.



There are some key things about the new version that I like the most:

Boss Battles - You now have to defeat different tiki guardians in major stages that require you to both form the usual Zuma patterns but also to shoot between the gaps between balls (Zuma players know these as Gap Shots) in order to hit the bosses under different conditions. It's a unique kind of stage that adds a healthy amount of difficulty to the game.

New Shots - Of course we expected them to add new shots to the player's arsenal beyond just the slow and reverse shots. Now you have shots that let you destroy one ball at a time (in order to trigger combos), or destroy all balls of a single color or even a tri-shot that fires once like a shot gun in order to clear several lanes of balls.

Alternative Game Stage Designs - In he original Zuma, you were always trapped in one part of the screen and left to deal with the balls rotating around you. In Revenge, you'll find yourself at the bottom of the screen scrolling left to right or in stages that have two dais for you to position yourself given there's a wall divides the stage into two partitions.

There's a lot more than just this that makes the game fun and it will certainly warrant hours and hours of gameplay. It's not for the faint of heart given the stages do get insanely difficult at times even during your first run through and naturally hardcore gamers are bound to aim to "Ace" each stage for more points.

Zuma's Revenge is a great sequel to a gaming classic and gets 4 evil Tiki guardians out of a possible 5.

[Movies] Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2009)

While I did learn to eventually appreciate Batman because my mom was into the comics, I never really saw the appeal of Superman. He felt like too much of an idealistic figure that lacked balance and was just too strong for his own good. He wasn't a very skilled fighter but really more of a brute force person, which is obviously not my cup of tea as a hardcore geek.

So when a friend of mine shared the first story arc of Superman/Batman back in the day, I wasn't all that excited. However given I trusted his comic book tastes, I gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. The "World's Finest" storyline was pretty epic in scale even if the art was not to my liking but more importantly the way the characters were paralleled and handled was really interesting.

Jeph Loeb made sure to point out all those points that made the two characters similar while at the same time highlighting what made them so different. It was certainly a good read and I don't regret venturing into the Superman world.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is the official direct-to-video of that same story arc. The animated movie is the sixth original release from the DC Universe Original Animated Movies line through Warner Brothers. Like all previous Dc Universe movies, the cartoon is not a 100% accurate depiction of the comic book storyline, but it manages to get the major details in.

Lex Luthor, longtime nemesis of Superman, is now President of the United States. There's no evidence that he tampered with the election and thus no one can challenge his authority or his right to the presidency. When the Earth gets threatened by a asteroid made entirely of Kryptonite, Luthor proposes to blast the threat with missiles in order to break it apart while refusing superhero assistance.

Superman and Batman start working together to try and find an alternative solution to this threat when Luthor manages to frame Superman for murder, thus ordering for his arrest. This forces many of the superheroes loyal to the government to fight their former comrade along with every other super villain on the planet trying to get a piece of the reward money offered for his capture. Thus sets the stage for an interesting series of match-ups and battles with Lex Luthor pulling all the strings in the background.

Both the comic book and the cartoon have somewhat unusual art styles for their genres and not quite the kind of look and feel I'd have liked for the story. It just doesn't feel right on both ends with the animated movie having a lot of characters who look too much alike. Plus there's an odd switch between hand-drawn and CGI animation that makes you think the creative teams behind the movie were somewhat remote from one another and didn't talk much.

There were many changes to the story that made this movie end up as being more of a rock'em, sock'em smashfest sometimes with some of the finer points or strategies of the original story lost. This doesn't make this movie too bad on its own, it just makes it very campy in some points and clearly dumbs it down for a younger target audience. Previous DC Universe movies did a great job of balancing the teen focus with items of adult interest and I'm surprised it didn't carry as well this time around.

Overall, it's a decent translation and not quite as bad as the host of direct-to-video releases that give the distribution strategy such a bad rap. It's certainly entertaining and worth the viewing if you're a fan of either superhero. If anything, it does make me want to watch the entire run of JLA and JLA Unlimited again, haha.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies gets 3.5 Kryptonite asteroids out of a possible 5.

[Philippines] Typhoon Ondoy Relief Efforts

The Philippines is no stranger to storms and typhoons - we're pretty much directly in the path of many of them and dealing with such weather phenomenons has shaped our culture and way of living. It's probably helped drive our strong sense of fatalism when it comes to such things along with the rise of the Catholic Church in this country.

That doesn't mean that the storms don't hit us hard or that we're immune to them. Each typhoon is unique in its effects whether it lasts for days on end or perhaps it brings fierce winds. This weekend the country was hit by what is locally known as Typhoon Ondoy and it brought the equivalent of a month's worth of rain within the span of 24 hours. Thus there was massive flooding all over the city and other parts of the country that has cost people their homes, their belongings and even their lives.

Google has set up a great page for information about the typhoon, where you can help out and where you can send relief goods and money. You can view that page here: Help for Typhoon Ondoy Victims in the Philippines.

If you're in the country, please make the effort to help out some how. There are many relief centers based in major schools, government offices or other such locations as mentioned in the aforementioned link. You can send your donations there or you can try checking with your local school or your office and ask about how you can help.

If you're not the country, help coordinate relief efforts or send donations using the links mentioned in the link above. Even celebrities like Neil Gaiman are asking for aid and support via Twitter and other such sites, which has been quite heartwarming in these troubled times.

I'm thankful for the strength of the human spirit and how amazing it is in terms of how the country has pulled together to help out. At the same time, my thoughts go out to all those in need and more so to those who lost their lives in this tragedy.

[Movies] Surrogates (2009)

When I write my reviews, I have two main principles. The first is to never post spoilers, since I personally hate it when a review needs to resort to spoilers to discuss a film. The point of a review is to encourage (or discourage) someone to watch a movie and you can't resort to spoilers to do that since you ruin the experience for them. The second rule is to focus on the actual media format itself and try to avoid judging it based on the original source material. This is the case for the many adaptations such as books becoming movies or TV shows becoming comic books, etc.

I manage to pull this off fairly well for the most part but every now and then I find movies that really make things difficult for me and I find myself bending (or outright breaking) one rule or another. This is especially the case when I feel very strongly about the source material and it becomes very hard to avoid making references or completely judging a piece based on its source material.

Thus it was unfortunate that I really loved the original comic book series for The Surrogates.

Surrogates is the adaptation of the 2005-2006 comic book series of the same name. I reviewed the graphic novel earlier in the year and pretty much gave it a five-star review. But that was the comic book.

Image by swanksalot via Flickr

Surrogates is set in 2017 (instead of 2054) following the same basic premise - people no longer interact with the "real" world directly anymore since they have come to rely on robot facsimiles called surrogates. These robots are capable of transmitting everything they see, hear, feel or even taste back to their operators who continue to live their entire lives from the safety of their homes. This means no more risk of harm for law enforcement representatives. This means people being able to choose exactly who they want to be. While the technology was originally designed to give handicap people a way to operate as normal people in the world, the lures of offering this product commercially in an alternative fashion was too hard to resist.

Things start to change when operators start getting killed through the destruction of their surrogates somehow and it falls upon the shoulders of FBI Agent Greer (Bruce Willis) to determine how exactly this became possible and who was the mastermind behind the entire operation.

Now, I need to let the comic book fan boy in me get a little press time despite my usual efforts to avoid doing just that. The movie just took too many deviations away from the core story that just bothered me to no end. The biggest beef I have with the movie is the fact that they changed the whole nature of the attacks - in the comic books the mysterious "killer" was only destroying surrogates but not harming their operators in order to send a message to all users that they needed to return to living "real" lives. In the movie they decided to kill the operators, thus fuzzing the lines between the core message of the killings and what it was actually accomplishing. It just felt so wrong. There were many other inconsistencies and changes that I'll never truly understand why they did it, but that's not all too important right now.

Going back to the movie itself, it felt a bit awkward in many places in the movie that it was hard to put my finger on it. When I try to evaluate the movie plot on its own while trying to separate my knowledge of the original comic book series, I can see the average viewer getting confused by the story concept, weirded out by how they chose to develop the plot and at many times lost given many things that just didn't make sense in a logical world. The role of The Prophet (Ving Rhames) was underdeveloped. Greer's wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) seemed to have been made into a big character with one-dimensional motivations. The list goes on and on.

A lot if it seems to do with how much of the story was made to revolve around Greer / Willis and perhaps provide him more emphasis that how he was originally portrayed in the comics. It feels like one of those moments when either the producers decided that Bruce needed more screen time or perhaps Willis himself asked for rewriters and greater emphasis of the other possibilities of his acting range. And thus instead of a hard-hitting science fiction story with a strong message about the need to live our lives to the fullest, we end up with a confused and sometimes preachy film with a lot of Bruce Willis screen time focused on him being all dramatic, brooding or emoting one feeling or another.

The one thing I liked about the movie was the weird Photoshopped-feel all the surrogates had, as if the actors had been air brushed during post production in order to give them that softer, smoother, artificial look that matched the concept of the Surrogates. Sure, we saw none of the more extreme possibilities of having surrogates that were a lot more than their original forms, but what they did manage was pretty decent and nonetheless impressive.

Still, the movie definitely felt like an original story at its core that got warped and twisted in so many ways that it ended up being a hodgepodge piece that lacked sufficient coherence to carry a story with the same strength of the original comic book even if they choose to change things and provide a slightly different message.

Surrogates gets 3.5 facial analysis robots out of 5.

[Movies] Spirited Away / Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (2001)

As kids, there were many things that scared us. This could be pretty much anything - the dark, noises in the middle of the night or ominous shadows crafted by clouds against the moon. Whatever it is, there's just something about the imagination of children that can turn any ordinary object into something potentially fearsome, magical or wonderful.

I was always afraid of getting lost in the mall, personally speaking. I don't know why, but I had this irrational fear that amidst the crowds of people off shopping, I could potentially disappear at any moment.

I feel that one of the greatest strengths of Hayao Miyazaki is his abilty to tap into the way children think. The world of a child is one of whimsy, wonder and magic, which can ultimately be good or bad. It's something we see in his movies time and time again but each time it remains new, fresh and interesting.

Spirited Away / Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi was the second film to receive the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and the first Japanese anime film to win an Oscar, and with good reason. This film is just brilliant in how it was brought together even though the child in me found the whole experience quite disturbing.

Image via Wikipedia

The story revolves around 10 year old Chihiro, who is moving to a new home with her parents. They happen to get lost along the way and eventually wander into this seemingly deserted town with mounds and mounds of food just sitting there. Her parents sit down to sample the food while Chihiro looks around and stumbles into a boy named Haku, who warns her to leave at once with her parents. Of course it's too late and Chihiro returns to find her parents have turned into pigs and spirits have started to enter the town. Thus she's now isolated from her parents, stuck in a realm of ghosts, spirits and gods and needs to find a way to escape, turn her parents back into humans but ultimately to stay alive.

I have to admit that the movie felt very, very disturbing to me in the beginning, especially given I've been playing a Changeling game with my partner and some friends. The way that White Wolf has managed the Changeling game experience felt all too similar to how this movie portrayed the fickle-mindedness of the deities coupled with the vast power made available to them. It's a rather lethal combination that is sure to scare anyone, quite frankly.

In many other Ghibli movies, there's tends to be a portion when things seem to settle into a rather idyllic peace of sorts similar to what one would feel in the provinces or the countryside. This one felts highly stressful for most of the movie given the constant danger Chihiro was potentially in while she was in this realm.

It really is a very striking movie and I can understand why it won so many awards. It remains to be the kind of story that everyone can someone draw connections with but at the same time still present a new face to the world that is not at all familiar but is more along the lines of the magical and the fantastic.

This is not just another cartoon and definitely not just meant for children. If you really want to see a thought-provoking piece that operates on many different levels of thought, then you definitely need to make time to see this movie.

Spirited Away gets 5 bath tokens out of a possible 5.

[Movies] Sydney White (2007)

It's interesting to note that as much as we complain about remakes and reimaginations of popular TV and movie franchises, every now and then there are those adaptations of classic pieces of literature that make for some pretty good movies that people rave about. Whether it's more accurate translations like those for Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, there are those more alternative spins on things like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You. The latter brand of movies seek to not just bring classic stories to the big screen, but they also try to adapt them to more modern audiences in order to get them to better appreciate the essence of classic stories.

Personally, I loved Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You even though they initially came across as being largely shallow and overly childish given their target audience of teenagers. There have been other attempts since then that have met with mixed results but I still appreciate the effort to adapt these stories to a more modern setting in order to see how strong these stories can survive given current standards.

One such movie is Sydney White, which is actually an adaptation of the classic fairytale Snow White and the 7 Dwarves. This time around, the story involves Sydney White (Amanda Bynes), a young girl who has been mostly raised by her plumber father (John Schneider) and the construction crews that he works with given the passing of her mother many years ago. Now she's off to college and determined to get into Kappa Phi Nu, which was her mother's sorority.

The Kappas are lead by the rather petty and spiteful Rachel Witchburn (Sara Paxton) and instantly Rachel dislikes Sydney not just for her unladylike behaviors (given her time among construction workers) but also since her ex-boyfriend Tyler Prince (Matt Long) seems to have taken an interest in her from the very start. Thus as Sydney deals with life as a pledge, she finds more and more connection with Lenny (Jack Carpenter), one of 7 dorks who have no refuge but to live in he dilapidated house known as the Vortex.

It's interesting how they tried to capture as many of the aspects that made Snow White so memorable yet without making it feel too forced or out of place in a modern setting. For example, instead of a magic mirror Rachel (our Evil Queen) has her nice shiny computer from which she checks the college's Hot or Not ranking daily to make sure she's still the fairest of them all. Plus with all the dorks taking the place of geeks, it was amusing to see the classic dwarf personalities translated into real life. Grumpy is now Gurkin (Danny Strong), your typical angry blogger type who does nothing but complain about the world on his website. Sleepy is now Embele (Donté Bonner), a Nigerian foreign exchange student who has never managed to adapt to his initial jet lag from flying over. and the aforementioned Lenny was actually Sneezy, who is pretty much allergic to everything and is pretty much a hypochondriac.

Image via Wikipedia

Sure, the story remains a tad shallow and when you have a movie involving Amanda Bynes, you know she's going to act pretty much the same way she has in all of her earlier movies all the way back to her time on Nickelodeon's All That. But that's not necessarily a bad thing and her tom boy behavior really did fit this story in order to present her as not being quite like the Kappas and a lot more like your average students and the dorks.

Sure, as a nerd and a geek I tend to take some offense at the stereotypes that the dorks had to personify, plus the fact that most of them were rather short. Still, I guess it can't be helped since it was meant as a teen movie and thus it pays to make the character archetypes as exaggerated and recognizable as possible.

Matt Long as decently cute, but nothing amazing. I didn't even remember him from his stint as a young Johnny Blaze in that horrible Ghost Rider movie - but then again I do my best to blank that memory out completely. He just didn't seem all that charming, which is really the archetype he was trying to portray, but then I guess the producers had to deal with what they could get for their budget.

Sydney White is a fun, light modern adaptation of a classic fairy tale and Amanda Bynes remains not quite as annoying as some of the other young female actresses around today. This movie gets 3.5 campaign posters out of a possible 5.

[Theater] Spring Awakening (Atlantis Productions)

Atlantis Productions has been bringing major Broadway productions to the local stage for ten years now, and theater fans like myself remain highly thankful and grateful that they continue to do so. Sure, it'll cost a lot to import any show and it's an even greater challenge to try and recapture the same level of intensity seen with the original cast and production crew, but they do fairly well. We've been following Atlantis Productions since they first brought RENT here and it's been an interesting ride since then.

Let's face it - no matter how many time one listens to the official Broadway soundtracks or reads reviews, synopses and even Wikipedia articles about the plays, it never truly captures the true essence of the performance. This applies even for those with highly vivid imaginations. Even if the story makes sense to you more or less, there's nothing like that defining moment when you sit down in that theater, the curtain goes up and the show begins and them BAM! - it hits you! It's only then that you'll truly understand and appreciate what the show is all about.

The Manila production of Spring Awakening follows the original story of young students in 1891 Germany dealing with the usual hormonal changes of puberty, the pressures of school life and the urge to challenge all forms of authority and question all knowledge given to them. Luckily, my friend was able to get tickets for me and my partner to watch the preview performance ahead of everyone else. Sweet!

At the center of the story are three of the kids - Wendla (Kelly Lati), a young girl frustrated that her mother refuses to tell her everything there is to know about life and growing up - pretty much the birds and the bees story. Then there's Moritz (Nicco Manalo), a struggling student at a private boy's school who find himself distracted with dreams and visions of women's legs and then some. His classmate and friend is Melchior (Joaquin Valdes), who eventually becomes Wendla's love interest. Melchior is quite the intellectual rebel and his views are very different from the rest of his hormone-driven classmates and he goes on to try and educate his fellows along with Moritz.

Image via Wikipedia

The music was composed by Duncan Sheik so it of course it was very strong. The singing in the local production was pretty good from a technical perspective and even for those moments of high energy, the voices were not overpowered by the music being played by the band, which I've seen happen from time to time in local productions. Also, the lighting sequences certainly were well planned and they came up with some great images once executed. For the preview night, execution was the challenge though and there were many instances when the lights were a tad late or came from odd angles that formed unusual shadows (watch out for the hanging lampshades!)

In general though, there was a bit of a lack of energy, passion and drive in many of the Act I numbers, even for dynamic songs like The Bitch of Living. The sang the right notes and did the right steps but they didn't quite consistently capture the right emotions or even convey the frustrations and anguish that the stomping was all about. This may be attributed to this being one of their first performances in front of a relatively large audience and the whole sense of nervousness that comes with such productions. It's not a show-stopping deficiency - they had clearly recovered by Act II with Totally Fucked as their climax piece. One can hope that in the weeks to come they'll shake things off and pull off much more powerful performances in the weeks to come. It may take a bit more time, but they'll get there, that much I believe.

Of course, I'm required to warn you parents out there that this IS a coming-of-age story, which means sexual themes, suggestive conversation and potentially Joaquin Valdes' butt, depending on where you sit in the theater (go for Orchestra Right if you're interested). This is definitely not meant for kids to watch alone and some talking will be needed after the show.

Overall, it's a great production and certainly worth seeing. You can contact a ticket seller directly based on the official list or you can try your luck over at Ticket World for the limited shows that they handle.

The Manila production of Spring Awakening gets 4 multi-purpose benches out of a possible 5.

[Gaming] Moo Moo Generation X

In this post-DotA world, it's hard to gain attention as an independent map maker. Sure, the WarCraft 3 user community is pretty big so there's a lot of chances for anyone but at the same time it can get tricky to get noticed. Still, there are just cases when you find yourself in the right time and place and you stumble upon some pretty interesting maps.

I'm a big tower defense kind of guy - again something I can positively attribute to my current partner. There's just something about Tower Defense style games that appeals to me and the whole defending against the mighty hordes concept will never get too old for me. Maybe it's because of my fantasy-inspired love for epic battles or something. Whatever.

Moo Moo Generation X is yet another custom map for WarCraft III. Similar to Defense of the Ancients, it utilizes the heroes in an alternative manner in order to give them greater prominence and of course more powerful abilities. However instead of fighting against an opposing team while defending your base, this time it's a strictly cooperative game where you defend Thunderbluff (our "Moo Moo") from wave after wave of enemies.

You still get to level up your hero, buy and customize items and all that in order to boost your character's chances of defeating the hordes that threaten to kill your Moo Moo. There's no opportunity to run out and destroy the enemy base or anything since there isn't one - the enemies just keep swarming in at regular intervals and that's that.

If you manage to survive the waves of attackers, the game switches into a sort of mission mode where you need to accomplish several quests around the map in order to finish the game. This also results in more powerful legendary items and the like.

The game isn't much fun when played alone and I'd strongly advise you only try this as a multiplayer map. The heroes are generally similar to some of the key DotA characters but there are differences. The same goes for items and expect the formulas to be rather different, although this interface is a lot friendlier in terms of telling you where to find the ingredients for higher level items. It clearly names the shops where you can purchase the prerequisites, thus making the whole experience a lot simpler.

If you like tower defense games, this becomes a nice modification to the WarCraft III gaming experience. If this is not your cup of tea, then you might fight it boring given the number of waves you need to survive and thus might be better of trying the other custom maps or just go back to DotA.

I like it since it's a game that lets you focus on more cooperative play and the feeling of mowing through so any enemies just feels pretty good at the end of the day, haha.

Moo Moo Generation X gets 4 children running around the map carrying items out of 5.

[Comics] The Authority Vol. 4 - Transfer of Power

The end of a story arc is one thing; the end of the run of a particular writer is another The abrupt departure of an artist can be madness.

The end of the first volume of The Authority had all these problems and more. Sadly, things just didn't seem to be going in the right direction for the comic given all these complications. Ultimately this became a story that could have been resolved in a few issues but instead lasted for 8 issues over the course of nearly two years. Seriously.

That's a lousy way to go for such a great comic, but what can you do, eh?

The Authority: Transfer of Power collects the last 8 issues of the first volume of the comic book series, namely issues 22-29. Given how proactive the Authority has become in interfering in what would typically known as internal matters for various countries, they've certainly started to make enemies amongst the governments of the world. They continue to operate as an independent group with no direct authority of their own to report to. Naturally this has made people nervous.

Cover of Transfer of Power (Authority)

Thus the G7, which you should know to be the most economically powerful nations of the world, hired or created this creature known only as Seth, who is essentially a stereotypical red neck given super powers on a very significant scale. He manages to single-handedly defeat all members of the Authority in order to allow their replacements to come in - a hand-picked group of 7 super humans representing each of the G7 nations.

Originally, Transfer of Power was meant to be a 4-issue story arc. However when Frank Quitely left the team to work with Marvel for New X-Men, this left Wildstorm with a story that still needed to be drawn. So what happened instead was that a 4-issue filler was created to fill in the gap while other artists took over Quitely's work in order to try and finish the original story. The 4-issue filler just covered the new G7 Authority and all the mischief they get into across the multiverse. As a fan, you know that the real Authority isn't dead and it's just a question of how they're possibly going to come back.

The awkwardness of the politics behind the scenes, I felt this book had some very strong potential. The concept was right for a comic like Authority but the overall execution ended up feeling sloppy and misguided. Too many elements got away from them, thus leaving us with a story that will never feel perfectly correct.

This has nothing to do with how annoying the "new" Authority ended up being. That was the point of that particular team, right? They had to be the kinds of characters we wouldn't fall in love with given how thin the line is being being the "good" Authority versus the "bad" one. The joys of morally ambiguous super teams.

At last now we can read it in a single sitting and not have to feel the agonizing wait of months turning into years like those who originally followed the comic prior to 2001. Still, there were certainly much better ways for the comic book to end and it remains highly unfortunate that an alternative path was not found in time.

The Authority: Transfer of Power gets 3.5 refugees out of 5.

[Comics] Death: The Time of Your Life

When you manage to create a fictional universe as rich and unique as that of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and The Endless, then naturally the draw to revisit this realm over and over again is inevitable. Whether for creative reasons or commercial ones, the lure is too hard to ignore for long.

The Sandman comic books have resulted in numerous spin-offs of varying quality and complexity but it'll never be quite the same, I think. That's a natural reaction since these are independent additions to the original universe that weren't necessarily as deliberately planned as the other issues were but remains an addition with some value to the series.

Beyond the popularity of Dream himself, it seems that one of the more frequently revisited characters of the Sandman universe remains to be Death. Let's face it - goth girls are cool, hahaha.

But I jest.

Death: The Time of Your Life is centered around some of the characters we originally met in The Sandman: A Game of You, namely Foxglove / Donna Cavanagh and Hazel McNamara. The limited 3-issue series is a bit tricky to understand initially, but it comes along in time.

By now, Foxglove has become a bit of a rising star in the music world and is constantly on tour in order to promote her album. In the name of her career, she's kept her being a lesbian a secret for now but constantly discusses when she can come out with her manager. Back at home, Hazel is focused on trying to raise her son Alvie, who is the product of a prior heterosexual affair (her first and last). The story comes to a head when Alvie accidentally dies and Hazel is faced with Death herself. She manages to work out a deal as a sort of temporary reprieve for Alvie, and this decision inevitably draws Foxglove home to help resolve things.

The story isn't as mind-boggling or expansive as most other stories of The Endless. It has a bit of a slow start, which isn't bad in itself were it not for the loss of time to resolve things well enough in the end. You can't help shake that feeling that this was meant to be a slightly longer series, perhaps just 4 issues long but because it was cut down to 3 issues, the story suffered. The slow burn start doesn't become as satisfying since the ending tends to just rush up and grab you.

The art was nice, that much I'll have to say. Kudos to Chris Bachalo and Mark Buckingham for their work on this title. I feel they did a whole lot better than the final arc of The Sandman stories where the art came out too cartoon-ish. It certainly helped carry the story along and kept the tone not so heavy despite the seriousness of some of the discussions.

There's a good story at the core of this title but it didn't come out very well, and I can't quite place my finger on it why. There's just so much going for the book and then it starts dropping things and just ends abruptly. It didn't feel all that satisfying and even felt like it attempted to have a sort of a moral at the end or something. Maybe it's just me.

It's a decent read but not necessarily an all-important one that requires a die hard fan to go out of his way to catch. If you love The Endless and never read this title, I'm pretty sure you'll still survive.

Death: The Time of Your Life gets 3 unusual male underwear ads out of 5.

[TV] Favorite Emmy Moments 2009

Image via Wikipedia

The Emmys may not necessarily as "big" as the Oscars every year, but it doesn't make it any less important. Celebrating the successes of the small screen (figuratively speaking) is always a great reason to gather and the Emmys have always found interesting ways of celebrating their brightest moments.

This year, a lot of buzz went around Neil Patrick Harris hosting the event given the inevitable cameo of his online sing-along blog character, Dr. Horrible. Instead of just him appearing alone, he had the entire cast with him discussing the end of television and the rise of internet-based entertainment:


#2 - Dr Horrible on the Emmys

But I have to admit what I really enjoyed more was this tribute featured on the Daytime Emmys this year celebrating 40 years of everyone's favorite children's program, Sesame St.

Yes folks, it's actually been 40 years. WOW.


Daytime Emmys Sesame Street Tribute 8/30/09

Oh yes, television will always be amazing in its own right and here's to hoping for even better shows in the years to come!

[Movies] The Spirit (2008)

We all know that adaptations have widely mixed results when it comes to movies. Some come out surprisingly good while others end up really, really bad. It's not necessarily because of how popular or bankable a particular character or franchise is but it's all about the actual execution. The vision of the director becomes a lot more important than just the vision presented by the original comic book writers and artists. After all, when it comes to the film medium, the director is king.

People need to remember that we need to play to our strengths instead of crossing genres all the time. Book writers aren't necessarily good screenwriters. TV directors don't necessarily make good comic book editors. Movie directors don't necessarily make good book adaptation writers. And so on and so forth. Sure, there are those rare few who are able to successfully master more than one medium, but it doesn't mean it's advisable for all.

It's sad when studios put the wrong people in the role if only because they were successful in another media format. Sure, you want to play to the fans and all that but you should only go so far. Such lapses in judgment result in lackluster movies here and there.

The Spirit is an adaptation of the 1940's newspaper comic strip of the same name. It was directed by visionary comic book writer-artist Frank Miller, who had previously shared directorial credits with Robert Rodriguez for the adaptation of his landmark comic book Sin City. No, he didn't write The Spirit - that credit goes to Will Eisner. However he was entrusted with the series to do with as he saw fit and this resulted in many Miller-esque touches throughout the film.

The movie tells the story of Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht) who came back from the dead and became the costumed vigilante The Spirit. He gets a tip about an important heist that may involve his arch-nemesis, The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Both of them prove to be very hard to kill and can take a significant beating, even involving a toilet and of course *gasps* the kitchen sink. The story becomes more complicated when it seems that Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), his childhood sweetheart, may be involved in the whole affair but the Spirit doesn't immediately know why.

Image via Wikipedia

The movie flows along two paths - on the one hand it has a lot of light comic banter which is a signature of the 1940's comics and it certainly makes the movie enjoyable. There's a more than a healthy amount of banter between the heroes and the villains that would put most wordsmiths to shame, not matter how bad the puns can get. On the other hand, it has some very dark and gritty moments that are very serious and the tone seems to be closer to a suspense piece of some sort.

Ultimately this is what kills the movie - the lack of focus and a unified voice in terms of how it presents itself. You're constantly struggling try to balance the shallow humor with the heavy toned moments and thus the whole thing just feels wrong on so many levels. Either angle would have been a nice one to explore but it would have to do so in a clear and concise manner as opposed to the mixed-message manner it ended up with.

Don't get me wrong - I loved the key visuals which have become signature of Miller's comic book style of influencing movies. There are many parts of the movie that would make great posters with the action caught in freeze frame in stark black and white tones with sharp accents of crimson. Of course a movie is more than freeze frame moments and this is seem in many sloppy shots where you wonder how that made it to print.

Acting was decent - the need to talk in a deeper, huskier voice made a lot more sense given the slight 1940's homage going on as opposed to the odd way Christian Bale talk in The Dark Knight. However no real performances really stand out since things just sort of came out rather meh. What really dragged it down was the overall execution of the piece, and proud credit of that has to fall on the lap of the director. While Miller clearly knows his comic books, that didn't necessarily translate into movie directing genius or anything like that.

Special credit goes to Gabriel Macht for being especially hot in this movie both physically and in terms of how me presented himself all suave and charming and such. My partner and I tried skimming his photos from other movies and they just weren't of the same level of hotness as in this movie for some reason. Oh well, his shirtless scenes alone warrant a 0.5 star rating right there, no matter how brief they were. Maybe it's the mask that made all the difference...

Overall, the movie was just okay and nothing spectacular. I can understand why it was panned by critics and it didn't manage to generate the kind of box office numbers the studios were probably expecting. I doubt we'll see a sequel and I further doubt that this will be the last time we'll see Frank Miller in the director's chair.

The Spirit gets 3 fedoras out of a possible 5.

[Movies] Unbreakable (2000)

The movies of M. Night Shyamalan are known of their unique twists at the end ever since The Sixth Sense became such a box office hit. Sure, it's a storytelling device that is a bit cliche in some ways and often ridiculed (especially by Robot Chicken writers), but it's as much his signature as the Brian de Palma Effect (as my grandmother used to call it) when the bad guy always comes back at the end for one last scare.

I'm not really what you can call a M. Night fan given his movies have gotten progressively strange over the years. His ability to craft a story that always has to have a unique twist at the end hasn't been all that constant, but we know he tries.

This movie was one of his earlier works and what many argue to be one of his best considering the rest of them. The premise was interesting enough and was certainly not quite what I expected one my partner got around to making me watch it.

Unbreakable is an odd movie that reunited Bruce Willis and M. Night for another project. This time around, Willis plays security guard David Dunn who gets into a horrible train accident. The odd thing here is that David is the only survivor and managed to escape without a single cut, scratch or broken bone. He initially dismisses this as nothing until he is approached by a man known as Elijah Prince (Samuel L. Jackson), who was born with a condition that makes his bones extremely brittle. Because of his condition, he became obsessed with trying to prove that if a man as vulnerable to harm could exist, then the reverse must also be true - a man can be born to be practically invulnerable. This obsession was fueled by his love of comic books all his life and thus this search is the equivalent of him looking for an actual superhero.

The movie is interesting since for the most part, you're never quite entirely sure whether or not David actually has superhuman abilities. His son is convinced of the notion while his estranged rice is going through mixed emotions given she's relieved he's alive but still determined to go through with their divorce. All the while, Elijah continues to badger David in order to find a way to convince him of his abilities and ultimately map out what will become his destiny. Despite my own tendency to guess the ending of movies and such, I was left guessing for most of the film in terms of the truth behind his powers, which was a nice feeling.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The movie felt like a very realistic and modern take on the superhero story. Sure, there's no flashy costumes or psychotic villains with kooky quirks in terms of how they full of their crimes. There's no dramatic origin story and there's no personal tragedy that drives the hero out of his safe zone. It's really just a simpler story of a man who discovers he's not quite like the others and is uncertain what to do now once he comes to terms with his identity. Plus the camera shots used were definitely creative and made sure to make the viewer feel like they were one of the characters in the scene, thus quite literally putting one in the shoes of that persona.

Now the twist at the end was nicely appropriate but not that unexpected. M. Night's foreshadowing in this movie was not quite as sublte as in The Sixth Sense and so given the nature of the characters involved, it just made sense in terms of the ending. Not a dramatic surprise, just a comforting feeling that things remained logical and sensible all the way to the end.

Unbreakable gets 4 comic book art posters out of a possible 5.

[TV] Battlestar Galactica: Season 1

With the success of the pilot miniseries, it was inevitable that Battlestar Galactica was all set to become a full-fledged TV series. The two-part miniseries had become one of the most-watched shows on SciFi for its time and that kind of viewership can really push a show into the future.

It was such a revolution in writing - a reimagination / remake that had actually worked. Sure, there had been many other shows that had gone through the reboot process with varying degrees of success but few managed to be as compelling as this show. Thus the writers had their act cut out of them when the took the plunge in terms of developing this show into a full series - and they certainly didn't disappoint.

The first season of Battlestar Galactica picked up immediately after where the miniseries left off. The civilian fleet under the protection of the Battlestar Galactica under the command of Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos) is on the run from the pursuing Cylon forces and struggles with keeping alive despite numerous attacks. Plus they have all the other challenges of a colonial fleet on the move including supplies of food and water and the need to ensure the continued growth of the population. Thus this show was never meant to be an all-out space warfare kind of show since they simply don't have the resources for it. Of course the Cylons do.

At the same time the story has to address several plot threads laid out for us. We know there's tension between Commander Adama, his son Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber) and their top Viper pilot Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Katee Sackhoff). There's Dr. Baltar (James Callis) and his continued internal dialogs with the Cylon model known as Number Six (Tricia Helfer) and Sharon "Boomer" Valerii (Grace Park) trying to come to terms with her growing suspicions that she's a Cylon. And of course there's the fledgling colonial government under the leadership of Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) who is trying to reestablish order while trying to deal with the overwhelming power wielded by the military in terms of the fleet and of course her own visions for where the fleet should go. Plus there are many other side stories, character plots and red herrings left for us to try and assemble into a recognizable pattern.

The show feels like a good science fiction novel - epic in scale yet able to play close attention to the minute details of the individual characters. The emotions tend to run pretty high in the fleet given the high-stress environment of being constantly on the run in such cramped confines and the actors manage to present this in a highly believable manner. Plus the way these characters were written is just phenomenal and you're constantly left guessing in terms of who's really the "good" guys or who might be yet another Cylon clone. At the start of the series we only know the identity of two of the Cylon models thanks to the miniseries by the identity of the 10 others is something that we'll spend the rest of the series understanding.

Everything from the actors, the production team, the special effects and most especially the music just made this an amazing experience for me. Seriously, I don't think I've seen a show utilize drum tracks so effectively in terms of driving particular emotions. Good job.

The first season of Battlestar Galactica gets a full 5 Cylon basestars out of a possible 5.

[Metro] 30th Manila Book Fair 2009

Today marks the first day of the 30th Manila Book Fair 2009. The annual event is a great place to celebrate a love of books, writing and all things literary. Plus you can definitely expect many exhibitors selling their books with varying discounts, including big names like National Book Store and Power Books.

The Manila Book Fair runs from September 16-20 and will be open from 10:00am - 08:00pm at everyone's favorite event venue these days - the SMX Convention center at SM Mall of Asia. Beyond just the books, one can expect many events, lectures and even games so it's definitely worth checking out. In fact, the Fandom Live! folks will be covering Scholastic's Hunger Games LARP on Sunday at 01:00pm - 05:00pm.

See you geeks there!

[Games] Treasure Seekers: Visions of Gold

Image via Wikipedia

The casual gaming market has certainly come a long way than just the idle games we played on early incarnations of Yahoo! Games and MSN Games. Beyond the free game angle that initially hooks people, full-featured versions that can be purchased online have become quite the revenue generator in its own right. Sure, it feels like only a few steps away from the micro-payment environment, it's still better than nothing.

Of course you get the big names like PopCap Games (Bejeweled) as having strong recall and other major players have memorable products like PlayFirst (Diner Dash) all getting their cut of the pie.

Personally, I'm pretty big on mystery, puzzle and strategy games and not just the arcade-style action games, and so I end up wandering into strange areas of the gaming world. This next game was actually introduced to me by my partner and I have to admit I'm hooked, and in a pretty good way too.

Teasure Seekers: Visions of Gold is another adventure-puzzle casual game created by Big Fish Games, the same folks who created games like Feeding Frenzy and other puzzle games like Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, which I also liked. The concept around these brands of mystery games is simple - you're given a rich photo environment and particular items that you need to locate on the page like the scene below:



So given a photo environment like this, finding particular objects can be tricky but not totally impossible. The entire experience is tied together by a loose storyline involving two kids who are trying to prove that their grandmother used to be a pirate. Yeah, it sounds a bit odd, but it's still a premise that hold some amount of water. To break the monotony of the image-hunting aspect of the game, the transitions between locations involve alternative style puzzles for the gamer to play.

Don't expect this game to totally make you obsessed or require you invest hours and hours of time trying to figure out complex puzzles. This is still positioned as a puzzle game and thus it's not meant to be highly complex or anything of that sort. It's the kind of game that one can visit after working on reports for a few hours, drain your brain and solve a puzzle or two then go back to work. You don't even need to closely follow the story either - it's just something incidental for the kiddies so to some degree the game still makes sense. When you do try taking a closer look at what the story's about, what you'll end up with are thoughts about child endangerment, apathetic parents who don't know where their kids are and child labor by not-so-mad scientists. Seriously, you're safer trying to ignore the story.

Treasure Seekers is a nice evolutionary step for this kind of casual adventure-puzzle game but it's nothing game-changing in terms of the market. It's nice to pick up if you're really into Big Fish Games' brand of mystery games but I'm not sure if I'd recommend this for everyone to go out of their way in order to have to pay for it. It's fun but not necessarily for everyone given the risk of the game becoming somewhat repetitive.

Treasure Seekers: Visions of Gold gets 3.5 pirate maps out of a possible 5.

[Comics] The Authority Vol. 3 - Earth Inferno and Other Stories

When you define your comic book characters to be the types that deal with threats to the planet on a multi-dimensional scale, are willing to go extremes to get the job done and are very strong-willed and defiant of authority, the pressure to create more and more epic villains and storylines fitting of the characters will always be there.

Such is the case with The Authority the longer the comic book went on. With the departure of Warren Ellis, now Mark Millar had the primary responsibility (and challenge) to bring The Authority to new heights, present appropriate adversaries and of course keeping the fun and humorous tone the team is also known for.

No tall order, eh?

The Authority: Earth Inferno and Other Stories is the third collection of the comic book series covering issues 17-20 and the Summer Special one-shot. The main story arc of interest here is the Earth Inferno story covering issues 17-18, which most of the other issues covering independent stories.

Earth Inferno involves a series of catastrophic incidents around the world that are all eventually linked to the planet itself, trying to lash out against humanity. Think of it as The Happening on steroids and then some. The Authority come into play trying to save as many people as possible while The Doctor, who has the most appropriate powers to deal with the planet's attack on such a scale, happens to be incapacitated due to an accidental drug overdose.

As this is happening, Midnighter tries to find out on his own what's going on and this brings him to cross paths with a former holder of the Doctor mantle. The only difference is that when this man took on the magical abilities of the Doctor, he proceed to kill off entire populations for no apparent reason.

The story was pretty interesting and I have to give credit to Millar for the kind of widespread destruction he planned for in this story. It's one thing for plants to subtle release pheromones to drive people nuts but to instead command massive weather shifts, tectonic upheavals and swarms of locusts and other insects, well, that's just darn cool.

Image via Wikipedia

The other stories were just okay - one involved the revived corpses of the same black ops Stormwatch team that Apollo and Midnighter were a part of. Others were just the usual one-shots that are done to push character development.

This volume of The Authority remains to be just okay for me but nothing spectacular. The storytelling here wasn't as epic despite the whole planet attacking humanity aspect and it just seemed to lack something. Millar does try to make up for things in the next volume, but that needs to be saved for another review.

The Authority: Earth Inferno and Other Stories gets 3 undead Stormwatch members out of 5.

[Comics] The Authority Vol. 2 - Under New Management

All good things must come to an end, and endings can come in many forms. While we usually lament the end of TV shows and comic book lines but sometimes we don't immediately notice when there's a changing of the guard behind the scenes - when the creative time moves on or new writers are given a chance to play around with an existing franchise. That happens to all comic books and that happened to The Authority as well.

The Authority was pretty much a Warren Ellis creation ad it provided a venue for him to continue to play with certain characters he had introduced in other books he had written such as Stormwatch. Then again, the comic book industry is the kind of environment that supports multiple creative efforts and writers are known to dip their hands into more than one project. When the other projects become more interesting or perhaps the leadership decides that things should be shaken up a bit more, then we get creative changes.

This next volume we're about to review sort of stands on the very border of this transition point and documents how one moves to the other.

The Authority: Under New Management collates issues 9-16 of the series and covers two main story arcs. The Outer Dark is the last Warren Ellis story arc and the remaining issues introduce us to a slightly different Authority under the guidance of Mark Millar.

The Outer Dark covers several major items - one is the fact that the centurey is nearing its end and thus becomes the question of what does Spirit of the 20th Century Jenny Sparks do at the end of her "term"? The other aspect of this story pretty much involves the Authority facing off against God. Or something very close to it.

The second half of this volume covers the beginning of the Mark Millar run for the Authority and it does it in a rather grand style. With Jenny Sparks gone, the Authority is left to operate on its own with Jack Hawksmoor taking on more of a leadership role. At the same time, other forces are set in motion to challenge their rule and put them in their place in the form of a rival superhuman team. Given we've always seen the parallels between The Authority and DC's JLA, the team they end up fighting has obvious parallels with Marvel's Avengers, and thus it makes for an interesting match-up.

Image via Wikipedia

I'll definitely miss the writing style of Ellis and the kind of art that Bryan Hitch brought to the series. Seriously, as a big finish the man decided to pit the team against "God. Top that! They really helped define the look and feel of the Authority and made sure that the story followed a tight vision. Millar came along and shook things up significantly by really pushing the limits of the Authority's mandate and making them get more involved in disrupting the status quo of things in cases when they felt people were being taken advantage of or were in danger. This definition of their moral compass certainly pushed things into interesting territory.

Character development has been steady and we can certainly see the group become more comfortable with their teammates and with their individual powers an abilities. The challenges they end up facing forces them to truly reconsider how to use their abilities as best as possible and ultimately results in some pretty creative (and often violent) solutions.

There wasn't really much of an actual transition between the two creative teams. One story arc ended with Ellis and the next picked up with Millar, which is typical of the comic book industry. While I would have liked to see more of an explanation for the changes in their behavior and the "morality" of their decisions, it wasn't exactly a bad thing and was done to ensure that readership didn't drop given the changes. Millar certainly has a rather hard edge to his ideas for stories and we consistently see this in his various projects around the industry.

The Authority: Under New Management gets 4 lab-spawned superheroes out of 5.

[Movies] Gamer (2009)

Computer gaming culture is pretty much part of our day-to-day lives by now. Whether it's just the seemingly harmless educational games we allow younger children to play or the highly involving MMORPGs that unite players across the planet, at one point or another everyone games. Of course the challenge posed to every game maker is to create an experience that is as authentic as possible in order to really put the player into the game. With the steady advances of technology in related fields, we've seen better graphics, more realistic sound effects and alternative means to portray the gaming world to make it as real as possible.

Of course concepts like virtual reality and other such highly involving simulation environments have long become the cannon fodder of science fiction writers and movie makers for some time now and even evolving entire sub-branches of science fiction like cyberpunk. Computers are amazing tools and naturally their power is easily used as a plot device to somehow play the role of the villain.

So it was only a matter of time before someone made a movie that tried to address some of the finer nuances of modern gaming at this time.

Gamer is an action-packed science fiction piece set in the not-so-distant future, a setting that is also becoming more and more popular in movies these days. Here, seemingly red neck computer genius Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) is the richest man in the world because of his creation of "game" known as Society where people can control other people / actors as their avatars, very similar to games like Second Life today. Of course building on that success, Castle then created a second gaming environment known as Slayers where convicts on death row can get a second chance at life if they volunteer to play as the avatars in this game very much like our own first person shooters like Counterstrike. If the player surives 30 matches, then they are set free.

Image via Wikipedia

Thus we get to the central character of our story, the top Slayer known as Kable (Gerard Butler) who is controlled by the seventeen year old gaming genius Simon (Logan Lerman). Of course not everyone is enthralled by these gaming environments where people sign up to become the virtual puppets of others and one such group is a band of hackers known as Humanz who are actively trying to stop Castle. Somehow Kable plays a key role in their plans and this is pretty much was pushes the game along.

Now its more than appropriate to give credit where credit is due and the scenes when they're showcasing these gaming environments with their living avatars are pretty good. The opening Slayers sequence really feels like a live-action FPS including those annoying civilian characters who serve no purpose other than to get killed in crossfires. What was even more impressive was how Society was presented since that really was a sad look at what people tend to get into in virtual worlds like Second Life. Despite the disturbing implications of such sequences, they were pretty impressive all the same.

Gerard Butler still has the acting prowess for action movies and hadn't overly softened up yet given all the romantic comedies he seems to be getting into as of late. His character is certainly a mean killing machine and his plight as a person trapped in this game is felt well enough. Simon, his controller, was a little more lackluster and didn't really contribute all that much in the end.

There were a surprising number of fairly well-known actors in this movie and most of them also had really lousy one-dimensional or insubstantial roles. Kyra Sedgwick played Gina Parker Smith, some top talk show host that tried to have a bigger role in things but failed at that. John Leguizamo got to be the disturbing inmate Freak who pretty much just showcased the same kind of acting range we saw when Leguizamo played Clown in the Spawn movie. Ludacris was here too playing a not so believable smart member of Humanz and Milo Ventimiglia had an odd cameo involving a black latex outfit. Ugh.

The movie had an interesting premise and some great action sequences, which is to be expected from the writing / directing team that brought us movies like Crank but failed on the storytelling side all throughout. The movie ends on a rather awkward note that leaves you wondering what the heck happened or simply asking "That was it?" Clearly they ran out of ideas in terms of how to end this story and just sort of fumbled with that part.

Gamer could have been a lot better but as it stands remains to be a movie that is only good if you're into gory violence and seeing people exploited in a variety of ways - in other words you're a hardcore gamer with no social life.

Gamer gets 3 save points out of a possible 5.