Category Archives: Impressions

Impressions of games and stuff that I managed to spend some time with.

More on Sith

As a quick addendum to last night’s Star Wars impression, I just want to add another thing that I really didn’t like – midi-fucking-chlorians. I’ll admit that it could have been worse, as when Palpatine started talking about Sith being able to manipulate midichlorians to create life I was half-expecting another “I am your father” moment, but wouldn’t it have been better just to leave them out?

Maybe it was intended as a sly joke to the knowing fans like when you find out in Attack of the Clones that Jar Jar Binks, probably the most hated character in the whole thing, is responsible for the whole Empire, as it was partly Palpatine’s ruminations on midichlorians that started Anakin down his slipperly slope, but I still think that we would still have been better off without it.

Revenge of the Sith Impressions

Well, I’m back from seeing Revenge of the Sith and…wasn’t that impressed. It was an improvement on the last two prequels to be sure, and the last twenty minutes or so was mostly what I’d been hoping the whole thing would be like, but the quality was patchy and I still wouldn’t mention it in the same sentence as the OT. If I had to give it a review score right now it would be a two, maybe a high three if I was feeling generous (that’s out of five, to clarify).

Anakin Skywalker turns to the dark side

For anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it I’m going to block out anything that I’d consider to be a spoiler (highlight them to read), but these are my main complaints with it:

  • The dialogue in the love scenes. Some of it wouldn’t fly on a crappy soap opera.
  • Anakin’s motives for turning to the dark side – he kills Mace Windu, cries “what have I done!?”, and then acts like it’s nothing when Palpatine orders him to go and kill more Jedi. Did I miss something there?
  • Padme’s destiny – we all know that she had to die, but what kind of explanation was that she’s medically fine but was losing the will to live? Wouldn’t it have been easier to have Anakin’s spousal abuse mortally wound her?
  • The stuff with the wookies was a blatant nudge and wink to the fans and wouldn’t have been missed if it had been excised completely. They starred in a superfluous battle (complete with Chewbacca’s battle cry from Jedi) that could have been cut out with no great loss and then you get Chewie mentioned by Yoda as a little name drop when he leaves. Wouldn’t it have been better to leave Chewie’s introduction until A New Hope?
  • I was really into the end, but then they spoil the winning run by giving Vader possible the crappiest line in the whole thing. His over-theatrical “NOOOOOOOO!” coupled with that little Frankenstein walk just made everyone laugh in what should have been an emotionally significant scene.

The saving grace was the last twenty minutes – it was (mostly) what I’d wanted the Star Wars prequels to be like with only the above couple of issues to detract from it. I was also pleased to see that Lucas didn’t feel the need to tone most of it down to make it a straight kids’ movie, especially in the last scenes involving Anakin. The rest of it had its moments (the Jedi purges were great), but ranged in quality from good to painful to watch.

The best thing about it was the Chronicles of Narnia trailer at the beginning.

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Impressions

First of all, I have a confession to make: I’ve never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. I’ve read the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but that’s only because it was free with The Observer a couple of weeks ago. I know a lot of the gags that have made their way into popular culture – 42, the improbability drive, babel fish, etc – and I’ve played a lot of the old text adventure, but the books themselves have somehow slipped through my net. So basically I, like most people in all probability, sat down in the cinema with little in the way of expectations.

Robot arm repairs?

The random jokes hit more than they miss and there are some great running gags (Marvin the Paranoid Android is usually very funny). It was the improbability drive which provided the most laughs for me every time it was used, ranging from turning characters into sofas and woolen versions of themselves (mmm…woolen vomit) to turning thermonuclear weapons into bowls of petunias and existentialist sperm whales.

I’d been reading reviews for this and they seem to be divided – either very positive or very negative (most notably negative in the review from Douglas Adams’ biographer). This led me to suspect that it would be much like the buzz for the Lord of the Rings films in that the fanboys would be indignant about the inevitable changes from the source but everyone else would find it to be a very enjoyable introduction, and on the whole it seems like I was right. My friends who had read the books enjoyed it but found some of the changes galling, and I found most of it to be very entertaining and eccentric way to spend a couple of hours.

Revenge of the Sith Soundtrack Impressions

As I begin to suffer from that frequent disease that relapses every time a Star Wars movie comes out which makes me buy every product in sight, I came home from work yesterday with a copy of the Revenge of the Sith soundtrack in tow. When it comes to Star Wars produce the soundtrack is always one of the least regrettable purchases simply because John Williams’ superb compositions are one of the few things that has been reliably good across the whole saga. As much as I disliked Attack of the Clones, I still find Across The Stars to be a wonderful piece of music.

Like the film itself, this soundtrack is the one that has to tie everything together. You have the love themes and the hinted return of the Imperial March carried over from AOTC, and then you have the first appearances of A New Hope’s themes for Luke and Darth Vader. Even the victory theme from the end of A New Hope makes an appearance. Of course, in addition to this there’s a lot of new and suitably-dark overtures for the well-known battles that are set to take place and one of them, Battle of the Heroes, which you can hear a sample of here (requires iTunes), is simply one of the best pieces of music I’ve heard in a while.

I don’t know if the themes from this one will ever be as iconic as the likes of the Imperial March, but nonetheless this one remains an excellent show from John Williams as probably the best original composer working in Hollywood today.

As an extra incentive, the CD comes bundled with a bonus DVD entitled “Star Wars: A Musical Journey”. Running at around 70 minutes (including introductions to the various pieces; an hour without) and available for your listening pleasure in Dolby Digital 5.1 or uncompressed PCM stereo, it’s basically the story condensed into an hour and told almost entirely through music with very little dialogue – probably a good thing with the prequels. It’s not as pretentious and arty-fartsy as it sounds; it’s just an interesting way to listen to a lot of the music from all six movies condensed in such a way that you can sit down for an hour and watch/listen to it.

If you’re a fan of these scores and for some reason you aren’t picking up a copy yourself, the bonus DVD is a great addition to the package. It’s only like £9.99 online (I’ve seen it for as little as £11.99 on the high street), so you don’t have an excuse not to pick it up.

OS X Tiger First Impressions

I’ve had a few hours to play with Tiger now and so far I’m very impressed. The first thing to note is that Apple have taken what was a very fast operating system and have improved the performance to a noticeable degree. There have been reports about this appearing over the last few weeks (this one came out today), but it’s to an extent that you really do notice – everyday tasks are snappier, web pages render faster in both Firefox and Safari, programs open faster, and 3D performance is up in a possible forerunner to Apple’s rumoured game division.

The most hyped feature was Spotlight, the new metadata search that can instantly find any file on your hard drive whether you’re searching for the actual name or a part of the contents. No trailing through the whole drive every time – the OS makes an index that can be queried on-the-fly as you type your search terms. Everything from Word documents to PDF files and the contents of text layers in PSD files can be searched. This is one feature that I didn’t seem myself using much but it’s actually fast enough that it’s quicker to open Spotlight and type “holiday photos” than it is to navigate to it in the Finder. I find it useful with only around 30GB of files, so I’d imagine that it’s indispensible to someone with a ton of Word documents and images.

Dashboard may be a shameless ripoff of Konfabulator, but it’s integrated into the OS and, as a first-party app, is going to be supported far more. There are already something like 40 widgets on release day and you can bet that far more are on the way as people realise the potential of the tiny apps. Automator is a very nice way to make tedious tasks very quick without having to learn AppleScript which will get limited use from me but will be very useful on the odd occasion that I need to resize and compress a dozen images or something like that. Half an hour’s Photoshopping can be reduced to a couple of clicks.

Quicktime 7 and its new H.264 codec made its debut with Tiger and, having checked out some high-definition videos in it, it really is stunning. The 1080p Batman Begins one is gorgeous, plays smoothly on my 1.2GHz iBook G4, and isn’t excessively huge. I can’t wait for all trailers to be shown in it.

I’ll be playing around with this for a while to see if anything else comes to light, but it seems like it’s well worth the £50 it cost me. Longhorn has a lot to live up to, especially when it’s got mostly the same stuff over a year later.

How To Make a Good Kids’ Game

I’ve honestly lost count of the number of times that an insipid and distinctly average 3D platformer with a crappy anthropomorphic mascot has tried to excuse itself based on the fact that “it’s a kids’ game”. It’s as if they think kids are too vacuous to play anything that could actually be considered decent and so think it’s better to patronise them with some half-baked tat that only the most moronic would enjoy than to make something that is actually a good game (in that you don’t have to be on Valium enjoy it) but is accessible enough for kids to play.

Arguably Nintendo are the masters of doing that but, once in a while, someone else will manage to press all the right buttons and come out with something fun for all ages. Lego Star Wars is one of those games.

Lego Star Wars

It’s a fairly gimmicky concept and it can spoil much of Revenge of the Sith for you, but the developers haven’t made the mistake of taking themselves too seriously – characters fall into pieces of Lego brick when you kill them and some artistic licence has been taken with certain events to good comic effect, and the simple controls combined with wealth of playable characters with their own attacks and special abilities manage to be simple enough for young children but provide enough variety for the Star Wars buffs who won’t be able to resist it to enjoy. The characters fall into basic categories within which they all control similarly (with the notable exception of Yoda I defy you to spot the differences between the Jedi) but each one has its own animations and idiosyncrasies, and the forced (no pun intended) interaction with different types of character keep things interesting.

The game isn’t long by any means but in an effort to keep players coming back it has the obligatory collectables to encourage replays (unlocking characters and parts of larger Star Wars Lego kits, for example). I can’t really see it bringing most people back far beyond the time it takes to go through the main game but when the game is probably a lot better than the main movie tie-in will be and they’ve infused it with this much charm it’s hard not to like. They’ve put it out for a cheaper price than normal (£29.99) and if you’re looking for some simple fun or something to entertain the kids you can’t go wrong with it.