Books!
Having picked up War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust for my History 331 course, I decided to take a shot at it before reading XXX chapters became compulsory. The book has thus allayed my fears that I am 1. mildly dyslexic or 2. just hate reading.
On the other hand, reading this book has confirmed that I still have delayed sleep phase syndrome. Reading it in the afternoon knocked me out cold for a couple of hours, and yet I stayed up until 2am reading the book, refusing to put it down.
Anyhoo, it’s a completely fascinating read. It might be just my longtime interest in WWII that’s talking, but there you go.
Rant
Remind me to never again attempt rational discussion with people below my age (minus Julia) in the future. It’s an excruciating waste of time and effort.
ETA: Just because I don’t SQUEEE and hug it to pieces doesn’t mean I hate it and it should die in a fire. Whatever happened to balance? I love POTC, but I’m aware of its faults as well. So what? Why is it you morons just want to focus on the pretty flowers and animals on God’s Green Earth? When did the word ‘balance’ become non-existent? Why do people assume that if I don’t like it, I must hate it? What happened to a motherfucking SPECTRUM?
Secondly, remind me never to comment on LJ again. That just brings more and more migraines.
Also, FUCK YOU, LEE BEE YANN. GO BACK TO CRESCENT, AND STOP FUCKING UP SAJC.
The Little Mermaid on Broadway
Having watched a boot of the Little Mermaid on Broadway, I managed to catch about 10 minutes of it before the audio syncing issues really got to me and I stopped. I’m sorry, but judging from those first 10 minutes (and intermittent glimpses of other scenes) I can’t help but feel like we’ve been shortchanged by having this nonsense on stage in place of Beauty and the Beast.
The first scene that I managed to get through was, quite predictably, ‘Fathoms Below’. You have an enormous, cheesy looking ship with blue chiffon at the bottom which are supposed to be waves. It felt like watching a bunch of high school kids doing a musical with a larger than average budget. I think they tried to make Eric look handsome by giving him a baggy shirt that shows off his chest every once in a while, but not with that hair (they gave Eric long hair, and in an attempt to keep some resemblance to the animated version, they decided to curl his fringe. He just looked hilarious).
Anyway, after the song, there’s dialogue. Eric talks of wanting to meet the girl of his dreams, the princely life is not for him, etc etc. His friends dissuade him, etc etc. Ariel’s disjointed voice then echoes from the speakers.
Then Eric goes, and I quote: “Follow that voice; to the ends of the earth if you have to!”
I burst out laughing when I heard that. Yeah, face treacherous waters, get shipwrecked, and have all your men drown because of a funny sounding voice you heard 5 seconds ago? Not happening.
I remember reading an article somewhere about TLM wanting to be more Italian(?) Opera-ish in terms of design and costuming. I’m not sure when that got kicked in the head, because the costumes look awful. Everything’s a shiny mess of sequins and satin, Ariel’s tail sticks out of her butt and looks like it was constructed for the Ghost Lantern Festival, Ursula’s tentacles are wires for an oversized wedding dress, and I’m not sure what they did with poor Sebastian. I think my eyes may have tricked me, but I think they gave Sebastian a Persian hat with eyeballs sticking out of it.
As usual, the singers do a brilliant job, which isn’t surprising, seeing as this is a Broadway musical and Disney’s loaded with cash to hire said brilliant singers. What I was disappointed though, was the orchestrations for ‘Her Voice’ (the only song which I played through, next to ‘Fathoms Below’). Maybe I’ve been too used to the Concept Cast Recording, but the full orchestra took the mystic and romance away somewhat. It became just another loud, bombastic, kitschy song about love. There’s nothing ethereal about it anymore, and that aspect was something which I greatly loved about that song. I thought if they’d just keep it to that simple piano melody and throw in a couple of violins it’ll do just fine. It’s a minimalistic song, not a ‘Kiss the Girl’ remake!
Of course, take this at face value, given that I am a huge Beauty and the Beast fan, and TLM might have bittered my view somewhat. Also, I probably watched this about a month ago, so my memory will definitely play tricks on me. But whatever. I thought I should get this out.
ETA: Apparently the NY Times didn’t like it either.
OH MY GOD
I PULLED A FUCKING MUSCLE PLAYING LAIR.
FUCK THIS.
Quotes
Ken: D’you want the duck’s head?
Lisa: No, that’s gross! You eat it! You’re a fatass.
Ken: Shut up, Lisa, or I’ll stuff it down your throat.
Lisa: DO IT.
Ken: I’ll do it when you’re asleep. You ever watch The Godfather?
Renee: Why are we all taking pictures here?
Lisa: Dad wanted a picture of the 2008 calander.
Ken: Y’know Dad, it’s a digital picture. There’s the date on it.
Uncle: Huh, then what I did was kinda stupid, wasn’t it?
Me: ????? (Another testament to how bad my Chinese is. I meant to write ‘Merry Christmas’, but I wound up writing ‘happy lay egg!’ instead).
Mom: *can’t stop laughing*
Me: I liked the bit about Adam and Eve in the Bible. Not bad la… can read la.
Julia: xD What, you’re turning the Bible into a book review? ‘A+++ WILL READ AGAIN’.
Me: ‘NOT BAD NOT BAD!’ xD
Julia: xDDD
Me: So… what was that book you were reading again? War and Peace, right? Shit, that book is so long.
Julia: Uh, actu-
Me: Christ, I hate reading long books, and look at you. That’s like the book of all books.
Julia: It’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, not War and Peace!
Me: Potato, potahto.
Lair: First Impressions
Save for the fact that my cousins got me this game, everything else about it is crap, at least for the first 5 missions, because that was where I stopped. Lair is set in a fantasy-medieval era, where the Uruk-hai, sorry, Mokai are at war with the Asylians because of some volcano that blew up both their homelands and they decided to blame each other for it. You control Rohn, an elite member of the Asylian Sky Guard, which basically means that you sit on a dragon and let your pet do the fighting for you.
Factor 5 attempted to shoehorn the SixAxis’s motion sensor function by making the entire game control that way. In order to navigate your dragon around, the controller has to physically tilt left/right or up/down. It feels like they were rejected for developing the game for the Wii and they decided to project it onto the PS3 instead, with disastrous results. The controls are extremely sensitive, yet horrendously inaccurate. A brief tilt downwards would send my dragon diving to the bottom, and at one point, when I tilted my controller left, the dragon wound up going right. Maybe the up/down function messed with the left/right controls or something, so I suppose my controller was pointing UP while I was tilting LEFT, which probably made the dragon very confused, and decided to go RIGHT instead.
The whole ‘wrist-flick’ maneuvers were horrendous as well. Apparently if you want to make a 180 degree turn, you have to flick the controller… upwards? Not that the odd directional positioning mattered, at any rate. I was never able to flick my controller fast enough, and sometimes the dragon would make a speed dash instead, which put me even further away from where I was supposed to be.
I won’t gripe about the believability of the wide turns, but in essence, it’s a horrendous thing to navigate with when you’re in battle. There’s a dragon on your right! Okay, tuuuuurn… take your time, whatever. By that time you’ve actually lined that enemy up in your sight, he’s firebombed you and disappeared. The wide turns got even more annoying at the end of the last mission I played, which was killing off enemies on a straight, tiny bridge. Doing turns on that bridge was a nightmare.
It was incredibly hard to do accurate navigation, as a result. On one occasion I had to navigate my way through an arch, and apparently I didn’t dip low enough or a wing wasn’t in range of the hole or whatever, so I wound up bouncing off the damned architecture and had to circle my way around it instead. I was subsequently accosted by the wide turn problem again, where I had to fly off into the distance in order to properly position myself and come back facing the right direction.
After I had firebombed the dragon quota, they sent in a bunch of ‘Tauros’ on the bridge, and I was supposed to wipe them out. This was where the fault of the lock-on system came into play. I could not get a proper lock on any of the tiny Tauros on the bridge. The computer did the locking-on for me, and half the time I would swoop near a Tauros only to realize the computer had targeted a nearby catapult instead, and I would be faced with a big brick wall while the camera tried to get back into place. Other times had me attempting to target the Dark dragons, and having hit the ‘dive’ button, I would suddenly swoop 50 miles away from the bridge to target some shitty ice dragon. I then had to do the laborious wide turn and then fly all the way back, while my allies were shouting at what a moron I was for leaving the battleground.
The bugs in this game are of mention, seeing as bugs don’t bother me most of the time (I had freezing issues like everyone else on Assassin’s Creed, but unlike the other anal fanbois, I just reset the game and tried again) and I don’t actively try to break the game. These bugs were bad. I had some incredible screen tearing on the fourth mission that I couldn’t see where I was going (not like I knew where I was anyway), and the clincher came in the fifth mission.
I was flying under said archway when this dragon decided to attack me from behind. Apparently the game wasn’t prepared for that, because all of a sudden, I was stuck under the arch. After giving my controller a good shake my dragon broke free, but the camera wasn’t. I was still looking through the archway while my dragon flew off and merged with a bunch of other equally similar looking dragons in the distance. Whenever I tilted the controller left or right the camera would do the same, and I found myself staring at castle walls, or the camera would bypass the wall entirely and I’d be looking at the interior of the castle, which was a black screen. Soon after, for some inexplicable reason, I was reunited with Rohn and co. again. As usual, I was 50 miles off to sea after this shenanigan and everyone was yelling at me for being an idiot. The game then abruptly ended because I didn’t maul enough dragons on time or something (yeah, being stuck under a fucking archway would do that).
Speaking of which, there should have been some counter to note how many targets are left before you advance to the next level. I couldn’t see the Tauros at all, and I had to make a couple of passes on the bridge (coupled with horrendous navigation, wide turns, squinting and getting motion sickness) before I actually nailed every last one. The game congratulated me by having the enemy drop Rhinos on the bridge. They were dispatched in exactly the same way as the Tauros, except now you had to shake your controller up and down like you were having a seizure before the dragon finally picked him up and threw him into the sea.
Since this game was touted Blu-ray and supposedly plays fantastic on 1080i resolution, that automatically meant it would look like crap on my 14 inch TV screen. Everything is supposedly rendered in ‘gorgeous detail’, but the little soldiers on the ground just looked like shimmering dots on my screen. I had to adjust the damn screen size, and even the options menu seemed to insult me for it - they titled it ‘adjust frame size’, which I felt was a completely moronic choice of words. I scrolled up and down the options menu looking desperately for ’screen’, ‘resolution’ or ‘widescreen?’ and by luck I decided to try this frame size thing out. I didn’t have any display problems with Assassin’s Creed (save for the tiny font), so I’m just going to chalk it up to Lair being stupid.
I suppose my ‘first impressions’ has gotten way out of hand, so I’ll just stop here. Overall, I don’t like Lair. Nothing is good about it; not even the aesthetic side of it. The voice actors all sound gruff in varying degrees of deepness, the soundtrack sounds like Troy’s (complete with Incoherent Female Wailer), and the story is pretty much ‘we’re at war, go beat the bad guys’. I suppose if you like playing with a retarded version of the Wii you just might enjoy Lair.
