Is anyone else who uses Bloglines noticing an odd problem with items being kept new despite not having appeared before?
I’ve noticed that, on the Digg feed in particular, as I scroll through several items out of the hundreds have already been marked as “keep new” despite me having never seen them before. Is this a known bug?
I have signed up to Twitter, partly prompted by Matt‘s invite, and partly because it seems like a good place to dump those really short thoughts that I think about blogging but then feel guilty about passing them off as real material here. I’ll integrate it into the sidebar at some point (sometime 2008 at this point), but for now if you want to see it you can find me at http://twitter.com/garyfleming, as cunning a name as you might imagine.
If you read this/know me, and already have Twitter, please do add me; I’m already subscribed to a friends feed.
A new year, a new film fight. As always, this is an aid so I can pick the best film of the year from the monthly winners. Despite the usual weak start to the year, there are 5 films this month.
White Noise 2: The Light is the sequel to a film I haven’t seen and to which it bears no apparent connection, by all accounts. It’s a fairly cliched story about predicting how people will die and the consequences of interfering. There are some interesting ideas here, but it’s carried off poorly. The story suffers from a hugely rushed establishing sequence, and veers between too many plot strands to be effective in any. Not awful, but not particularly worthwhile.
On the comedy front, Night at the Museum is surprisingly funny. While it’s aimed at a slightly younger audience, there’s plenty here for those who are older: the constant fighting between Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan, Dick Van Dyke as an elderly guard, and, of course, Ben Stiller pulls out some great lines. It’s a predictable (all conflicts are resolved by the final act) but light-hearted film.
Not in quite some time have we seen such a blatant attempt to rip-off the fast cut, edgy dialogue, and offbeat characters of Tarantino as we have here in Smokin’ Aces. Although the producers have obviously peeked at Quentin’s notes and ticked all the checkboxes, they’ve missed the point. Instead of finding a perfect balance between untouchable style, tongue in cheek over the top characters, and savage violence, we have a massive cast of paper thin characters, none of whom get enough screen time to be worthwhile, and a plot twists that are obvious from the go. Pretty awful, not even the great Jeremy Piven turns this one around.
One of the best horror films in a long time has arrived in the form of Them!. Rather than following the trend of an outlandish killer/demon/monster or some kind of curse, we have here a couple in their country house who, one night, wake up to hear intruders outside. As their unseen assailants move around the house, we see a queasy see-sawing between hunter and hunted. The key here is that we don’t see the attackers much until the final scenes, allowing the natural fear of the dark and creaks of the house overwhelm reason. A masterclass in modern horror, though that isn’t saying much.
Finally, Darren Aronofsky triumps again with The Fountain: a film told by 3 interconnecting, not necessarily literal storylines, each of which repeats the same key message about life, love and death. Beautifully shot, with an excellent score and cast, this film deserves to be seen by everyone. While the ending was overlong and hammered home its message repeatedly, the film still stands as a graceful and tormented challenge.
The January winner is, of course, The Fountain.
After another mishap with my last Archos (to do with the power supply), I got a new Archos 504. It’s a nice piece of kit but I do have a few gripes.
First, the move to a proprietary USB cable from previously standard mini USB is almost a deal-breaker. I like being able to carry data around on my Archos and pass anything on to people who ask for it. I do not like having to always carry around the supplied cable to do this. I can understand that someone probably thought this would help make money through supplying more of their own cables but they’re obviously ridiculously short-sighted: who is actually going to buy one of these since they come packaged? A few people will undoubtedly lose their cable, but I seriously doubt that number would justify designing, manufacturing, storing and distributing a proprietary component. Very annoying.
Also, while the physical interface is more obvious for first time users (old users have to make some small but ultimately good adjustments), it has flaws. Each of the buttons on the side is actually a double-button i.e. each side of the button has a different function and so has to be tilted in the appropriate direction. This is a little odd but becomes second natured pretty quickly. The real problem here, though, is that it interacts with the supplied leather case quite badly. Unless you spent some time stretching the elastic at the side, it is too tight and presses the buttons for you, commonly resulting in pausing, track skipping and volume changes, all functions on the right side of the interface.
Most annoyingly for the new user is that the TV dock, which was bundled as standard with previous models, is now an extra cost. However, this is somewhat mitigated by the new design which has reverted to being a proper dock (the AV500 series was little more than an infrared port) with a slew of AV ports to link up all of your devices.
Other pluses include a much nicer UI (aliased text, video thumbnails, better library for audio), an expanded hard disk (my model is now 80Gb), and expanded format handling (some are only available through paid-for plugins — nasty). Given that this was an upgrade due to a fault (because of Christmas pricing, I actually made money), I can’t complain too much. It is better than previous models, but the shift towards proprietary interfaces is a worrying and silly move.
Having recently purchased an Xbox 360, I want to talk about a few aspects of the system that are doing interesting things for gaming as a whole.
First up, the idea of achievements is inspired: push the abilities of gamers by offering up challenges and awarding badges that basically say “I managed to do this”. The reality is, however, a little different. Many games miss the point of the achievements and hand them out for simply playing through the game, the awards becoming little more than milestones. The interesting games get you to go outside the realms of the normal game: Dead Rising gets you to put novelty masks on a number of zombies, Geometry Wars gives you an award for not firing for the first minute (making for a hectic start). This is an excellent way of extending play. I remember doing similar things when I was younger i.e. playing through Street Fighter 2 without using any special moves etc. To have this style of gameplay recognised is pretty good. The flip-side of achievements is the gamerscore: points you get for having gained achievements. This measure is completely worthless. Given that points aren’t (and can’t be) standardised, higher scores are achievable simply by playing the easiest games with the weakest achievements. No fair comparisons can be drawn.
Secondly, Xbox Live Arcade. I was a doubter. How could a series of essentially cut down games be worthwhile? While there is a lot of crap on the service, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is a killer app. It’s a perfect blend of twitch gaming and synaesthesia, an addictively flowing game where the interface melts away and there is only neon light. You get into the zone incredibly quickly with this game, and immediately want to get back to it if you die. Incredible stuff.
Lastly, Dead Rising. I love zombie films, and I like playing games. Take the best setting from the former (a mall), put it in the latter, and add a mix of comic book humour, a massive home-made armoury, and an innovative game structure to produce something that I will waste far too much time on. While the difficulty curve can be rather steep at times, any frustration can be seen off by simply grabbing a nearby item and taking it out on one of the thousands of zombies nearby.
All that said, if you know me and have a 360 yourself, my gamertag is VKPS. See you on Live.