So last night, I was lucky enough to see the Prince of Persia movie… not that I’m saying it was good… or bad… I have not even gotten to that part of the review yet.  I AM saying that I was lucky to see that instead of seeing the “other movie” that was playing that night.  That “other movie” that my wife and the wife of my friend went to see whilst we weaseled our way into a viewing of a different story.  One with decidedly less open toed, sling back wearing harpies.

I’m just sayin…

So the Prince.  I’m going to start by saying the movie was actually quite good.  It had everything I was hoping for in a Prince of Persia movie.  Action, Humor, Running on the walls…. ugh…. sand… the Prince.  But in all seriousness the Action was really quite good.  Great slow mo moments and the Prince leaping to what would doubtlessly be a lesser man’s doom.  Sword fights and Bandits and freaking crazy ass Hassasins!  Where the movie does fall flat is the exposition.  Every time a piece of plot needed to be explained I groaned… Which included the ending.  I think they could have gone with a subtler, darker ending in which the releasing of the sands of time in such a huge torrent damaged the prince, leaving a subtle scarring that only the princess notices, possibly setting up the dark prince for a future movie… but nope… no such luck.  Speaking of the princess, that was the other downfall of this movie.  Not the actress, but the severe lack of chemistry between the two characters… I felt like every “love interest” moment was forced and completely unnecessary.

Anyway like I said at the beginning of the review, the movie is actually pretty good.  If you want to see something with some pretty good action, go see this movie.  At worst you’ll likely leave the theater thanking yourself for coming up with an excuse not to accompany the wife to… that “other movie”

Rawb

So if you haven’t experienced the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta then one of two thing is likely going on. One: you don’t have access to a Halo ODST disc, or Two: you don’t care about Halo at all.

For a long time I was one of those latter people. Halo was some raging, incoherent beast screaming profanity from every one of it’s hundreds of needled toothed maws… I guess it still is. The reality of Halo’s multiplayer is that there is quite a bit of strategy involved in the gameplay. Knowing precisely how many shots with the battle rifle will set up a kill from an indirect grenade hit, goading someone into following you around a corner where you lie in wait to deliver a instant death dealing backsmack, dropping a banshee right out of the air with a well placed plasma pistol overcharge shot… it all comes down to game knowledge and how to use it to your advantage. Now Halo comes with a hefty bad side as well. The majority of one on one encounters boil down to what I refer to as “idiot jousting.” Two Spartans running directly at each other emptying an entire clip into an enemy and the first person to connect with a well timed melee wins… over and over and over. Sure you can mix the formula up with some zig-zaging and the Halo favorite… leaping around like a frog with ADHD. I expected Halo Reach to be more of the same… but at this point I had spent a decent amount of time learning how to survive these encounters, and hell… the beta’s free right?

Little did I expect that Bungie would mix things up so much with such a tiny modification to the game mechanics. Armor abilities have got to be the single best thing to ever be introduced to the halo multiplayer universe! The four new abilities are offered up on a spawn by spawn basis, allowing you to mix and match your team’s loadout on the fly. The jetpack has featured prominently in many reviews of the game, but I really feel like the other three abilities are super useful as well. The Stalker loadout allows you to go invisible for a short amount of time which on its own is not a huge advantage when squaring off against the other abilities, but if you pair up with a teammate with any of the other armor abilities makes you death on swift wings. Picking off an opponent who is not paying attention to you or landing a critical shot that lowers the shields of a member of the opposite team occupied by a frantic battle with one of your teammates is surprisingly satisfying. The Armor lock’s invulnerability is nice, but the real power with that loadout comes from the EMP pulse you send out when the shield finally overloads that drops the shields of every enemy it hits, allowing for potential one shots from your buddies lurking just outside its range. And finally, the sprint ability, seemingly the least useful ability, is one of the most fun to play with. Running up and delivering two quick melee strikes to a player who likes to strafe around you, firing from a distance is an often unexpected tactic, and running around with the gravity hammer has resulted in me racking up more then a couple of Extermination medals.

These little tweaks have made game types like capture the flag my favorite thing to do in halo. The multiple uses for each loadout allow people to cooperate as a team in so many ways, it really makes me excited to see what play will be like a month or two into the final release this fall. The bottom line is that if you’re a Halo fan, you’re gonna like the game. If you used to like Halo, but got bored of it, you’ll probably like the game, and if you’ve been curious about Halo and just never got around to playing… this year’s vintage is a great place to start.

Sorry guys, but it seems like the streams that I recorded are not accessible from the ustream servers. I don’t know what happened, just that I can’t view them, download them or anything…. sorry…. Looks like I’m gonna have to go back to doing tutorials the old fashioned way, by recording them locally.

Rawb

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m getting older, or maybe I’m just becoming more cynical… or perhaps the two are not mutually exclusive…. but I find myself feeling like it’s about time that the iGeneration takes over the reigns.

I don’t think that anyone can truly say that they haven’t felt like older people who hold a position of authority over them haven’t treated you with the proverbial kid gloves. And to clarify, this is not coming from the angst ridden mind of a teen, I’m almost thirty for god sakes! It really does feel like we are due our moment behind the wheel. Unfortunately it seems a lot harder to pry those gnarled old claws from the controls then it should. If you don’t want us to drive, then you shouldn’t have given us lessons.

Just a thought…

Rawb

So I have been musing on the idea of devising some monstrous device for forcefully removing time from others so that I might use the hours for more constructive pursuits than might be otherwise endeavoured by the victim er ugh… Subject… Yes it seems that I have a not too uncommon condition, which I have decided to bestow with the name “creative diarrhoea.” True, the name itself is not very flattering nor does it seem like something you would like to be afflicted with. But as a descriptions of symptoms go, the term is… Adequate. Yes it seems like my brain seems to continuously spout out half baked (runny) ideas and intense desires to try my hand at new and more interesting projects. The only problem is that every time a new project begins it further compresses the time available for existing projects. Like I said I doubt that I am the only one with this problem but I have become increasingly aware of the condition. Thus my desire to construct the time sucker… They did it in the “princess bride” right? Anyway many of these projects that I have wanted to start seem to be ongoing projects like this very webcomic, or require me to invest vast amounts of time learning new skills like flash ActionScript programming. Sigh, maybe if someone could get cracking on that technology in the matrix where you could upload an entire encyclopedic knowledge of any given subject. Forget Kung Fu Neo, give me C++ and Adobe Flex lessons straight to the cerebral cortex please!
Any other sufferers out there? Maybe we can form a support group…

Rawb