My colleagues have already shared their thoughts and opinions so I’ll avoid direct comparison to the 2003 version.

The Incredible Hulk is a fine summer movie in that it has some nice action sequences, a decent story, but it is generally pretty generic and not particularly memorable. Edward Norton does a nice job as Bruce Banner, but I feel like putting him in a summer super hero movie is kind of a waste of his talents. The actions and chases scenes work ok for your standard summer action movie, though I thought the chase scenes with Bruce Banner were more interesting than watching CGI Hulk smashing things. I appreciated that they heavily condensed the origin story but they still chose to include a variety of scenes that feel awkward: Michael K. William’s (The Wire) has a cameo so brief I’m not really sure why it was included. Stan Lee’s appearance is distracting and I’m starting to get tired of the requirement that he appear in all of the Marvel movies especially in that it no longer seems enough to leave him in the background of a crowd shot. Robert Downey Jr. makes a brief appearance as Tony Stark that I think would have been better placed after the credits as the current location of the scene feels awkward at best.

Unfortunately I’m just not as interested in the Hulk as I am in say Batman or Spiderman. I thought Iron Man really worked well in that I had no prior interest in Iron Man but was inspired to seek out the comics after seeing the movie. (Note that Jeremy has told me there isn’t any great collection of Iron Man comics he can recommend and the new Ultimate Iron Man is somewhat disappointing. Spoiler: They made Ultimate Iron Man a mutant.)

In short, the Incredible Hulk is an ok movie but I could have just as soon waited to see it on DVD.

This was the first cake I ever made from scratch. As a novice cake maker creating my own frosting and using parchment paper were both new experiences for me. Other novice cake makers may be as excited as I was to use a recipe that call for Guinness, you may also wish to note that the recipe calls for an amount that does not divide equally into the amount per bottle so you will have to drink some Guinness. The cake was for coworkers at work and was well positively received though there were mixed opinions on how strong the Guinness flavor was. Worth noting that this uses a lot of chocolate and results in a very large cake, I may try doing it half size next time round.

I am unclear whether this heralds in a new era of cake reviews for Doombot, we will see.

Recipe and links to photos behind the cut.

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(11 old generation games left.) I hope you like jungles, lots and lots of jungles intermixed with long loading times. Far Cry looks rather nice; they clearly spent a lot of time developing the tools to render such impressive scenery (jungle, beaches, a few caves, rain forest, cliffs, swampy jungle etc.) but the gameplay is incredibly repetitive and I feel like some of the levels could have been designed by a program rather than a person. I can not remember the last time I was so aware of how boring the level design of game was, which is striking to me because the levels look gorgeous for a game of this era: they just aren’t interesting in how they are put together.

I can encapsulate the Far Cry experience as such: you sneak through the jungle, you reach a clearing with some manner of mercenary encampment, you can choose to attack or sneak around or just run through really fast, it doesn’t matter there because is another encampment a 5 minute walk away, repeat until you get to a boss fight! They include an assortment of vehicles which is kind of fun but at times feels more like a design decision to let you skips huge chunks of the uninteresting levels. Later in the game you get “feral powers” which apparently was added to the XBOX port and wasn’t in the original PC version of Far Cry. The feral powers make combat a little but more interesting, you can kill people with your bare hands (bear hands?), and see at night and such. In comparison the PC version must have been pretty dull and just a straightforward FPS without them. So a neat mechanic, but I tended to just use the “run very fast power” to skip past areas that were particularly dull.

I couldn’t beat the final boss after a dozen or so tries, but I am sufficiently bored of the game that I have moved it off the “to finish pile.” Usually I wouldn’t bother writing a review for a game I’m so “meh” about but I figure I’d write about these last few last-generation games I have. I had thought about trying to beat all of these before picking up a 360 but given that I have 11 to go and there is at least one 30 hour RPG. (I think my game completion rate since starting grad school is about 4 per year…) Then I thought I should just finish the XBOX games (only 2 remaining in the pile) and then I can unplug that and pack it away, but a recent time sensitive special deal I saw for GTA4 with an XBOX 360 might defeat even that idea.

(12 old generation games left, though Gun was also available for the 360.) Basically Grand Theft Auto in the Old West (”Grand Theft Horse” if you will.) The story of revenge, betrayal, and surprise parentage was pretty good as far as a story for a sand box style video game goes. I enjoyed the visual depiction of the wide open expanses (scaled down to be traversable in video game time) but the town areas felt empty and completely un-populated in way that just seemed lazy from a game design/system resources. Towns are simply places where you can go to accept new mission or hang around outside 3D models of buildings you can’t enter with occasional people you can’t actually interact with. My brother pointed out the somewhat disappointing game mechanic that all the horses are the same and there is no horse that is really “yours” and is faster, better, etc. Every time you start a mission or such you just grab (or “jack”) the nearest horse and away you go.

When Gun first came out there was controversy over the depiction of Native Americans, effectively the issue is that there are several levels where you just kill countless droves of them because people who design games feel that killing many people is the necessary appropriate action one must take before you can accomplish tasks such as crossing a bridge or going to the next town. Using this same kind of logic they later become your friends after you kill droves of ex-Confederate soldiers. (Remember only crazy ex-Confederate soldiers led by an evil villain were disrespectful to native peoples.) Basically the same kind of general disregard for issues of race/culture/class/gender you’d find in most video games. I played this the same week the new and controversial trailer for Resident Evil 5 came out so Gun felt almost quaint in comparison to that…

In short as far as game play goes Gun was generally fun and sufficiently engaging enough that I played the story mode all the way through, but I’m left wanting a bit more; perhaps I need to go watch some more Deadwood or play a game of Deadlands (Jason?).

Hitman was actually much better than I expected based on the wide range of negative reviews I saw when it was in theaters. I would even go so far as to say this is one of the better video game adaptations I have seen and that many of the criticisms of the movie would apply directly to the source material as well.

I have played through and generally enjoyed all of the Hitman games, but the plots of the games frequently don’t quite make sense and do have you following an emotionless cloned assassin. This translates to a movie that has some plot holes and weird turns with a main character who is emotionless and somewhat uninteresting. That said I think Timothy Olyphant does a good job and was a pretty good fit for the stern and introverted Agent 47. The plot fits with the plots of several of the games: 47 assassinates someone, it turns out he has been set up by a conspiracy there is a conspiracy that is now out to eliminate him, 47 must kills more people and the assassins sent to dispatch him to resolve things. I enjoy how the movie kind of fits with the different ways a person might choose to play through the games: sometimes 47 eliminates people with stealth and subtlety, sometimes he mows them down in elaborate gun fights. I thought this was nice in reflecting the different aspects of the game, but in a movie it basically makes the character feel inconsistent and poorly developed.

Overall not nearly as bad as I had expected and pretty good as far as video game adaptations go.

I’m willing to give vampire/zombie movies a lot of slack, but 30 Days of Night was pretty lame. The premise of the original comic is maintained but many new characters and plot points are added. The pacing frequently feels awkward with the introduction of minor characters to see them killed off soon after. Any zombie/vampire movie will have the requisite scene in which one of the good guys is forced to “save” a friend by executing them before they completely transform into a monster. 30 Days of Night has 3-4 of these scenes except the good guy finds it necessary to decapitate his friends with an axe, usually requiring multiple swings to finish the job, instead of a the more traditional sympathy bullet to the head. (Note to friends: should it ever be necessary to stop my transformation into a creature of the night I would much prefer a shot to the head over being bludgeoned to death with an axe…) The comic included an interesting sub plot with in-fighting between the vampires with regard to the safety of such a wide scale attack on humans, that is removed altogether in the movie and the vampires lack really any character. They do occasionally exchange quips in subtitled “vampire language” but mainly they just shriek at each other which is more annoying than frightening. The final fight is relatively anticlimactic which was rather disappointing. Last but not least for a movie that is supposed to take place at night a lot of the exterior shots are pretty bright and well lit.

All together an awkwardly put together movie that is missing a lot of the polish and many of the points of interest present in the graphic novel.

(Still working my way through a backlog of cheap xbox games.)

After getting continually stuck in Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth (the next save point seems to corrupt my save file and the save point after that is too far away), I decided to try out TimeSplitters Future Perfect, the third game in the TimeSeries series.

After playing so many game that require careful use of stealth, or at least cover, to eliminate hostile forces it felt strange to play a game where your character is capable of mowing down endless series of henchmen with no regard for your personal safety. The gameplay was very reminiscent of the N64’s GoldenEye 007, so it was not too big a surprise when I discovered that the developers, Free Radical, were primarily former programmers from that game. As such the gameplay (kill henchmen over and over) can be a bit repetitive, but the settings for the gameplay (locations throughout time) add some novelty to that experience. TimeSplitters greatest strength over other FPSs would be its use of humor and the joy of a game that features time loops and other time travel silliness. I was more or less sold on the game when upon encountering a locked door a future version of my self yells to me from a grate in the ceiling and passes me the key, a situation for which you must act out the other side of later in the level. Also one of the later levels has steampunk robots!

A fun game in general; folks with current generation consoles might wish to keep an eye on the new titles Free Radical has launching soon: Haze and TimeSplitters 4.

Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series has been one of my favorite comics of recent years. The story of a Canadian slacker who must battle the league of ex-boyfriends of his true love is packed with so much joy, zannieness, and oddball video game references that each volume has been a treat to read.

Today’s news from the Hollywood Reporter (via Jeremy) is that a movie based on the series is moving forward with Edgar Wright (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) attached to direct and Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno) to pay the title character.

Seem like a fun match up, though it will be interesting to see how much of Brian Lee O’Malley’s story will make the transition to movie and to something marketable to mainstream audiences. In the meantime fans of Michael Cera should make sure to check out his web series Clark and Michael.

(No specific plot related spoilers.)

The Wire has been my favorite show of recent, and though the last season has felt somewhat rushed and some of the newer characters less believable, I have still thoroughly enjoyed it up to the end. I read a review of the last episode on CNN.com in which the reviewers were disappointed with the ending but I think it the ending is appropriate and is very consistent with the message that David Simon is trying to send throughout the 5 seasons. Some characters stories feel more concluded than others, and some are more “just” than others, but the overall message is that life continues, Baltimore will still be Baltimore, and the institutions that make up our world will stay on their respective courses.

Despite efforts to the contrary I am still trapped in the “last generation” of hardware console games and have taken some free time to play games for the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2 that were purchased long ago but never fully explored.

Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth (original Xbox or PC) is a fun and interesting game that was, as far as I can tell, a commercial flop. Basically what they have done is grafted an adventure game into the a first person shooter engine, with some survival horror elements. The game is a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s Shadows Over Innsmouth, perhaps my favorite of all Lovecraft’s stories, and I would consider it a highly successful adaptation of a short story to the video game format (though I don’t have much to compare it to.) The story is well implemented, with appropriate considerations for building a spooky experience through great use of audio and ok graphics (given when the game was made.) The “interface” is one most striking elements of the game; where as most first person shooters would present a “Heads Up Display” to show weapon/health related status, Dark Corners of the Earth presents all such information in not-entirely-quantifiable adjustments to the visuals. The game tracks both health and sanity(!) and indicates the status of these by blurring vision, slowing the game down, and using the controller to simulate frantic heart rate (I thought this would be stupid but it is well done.) These way of controlling the experience combined with the exploration of nicely rendered Lovecraftian environments (ruins, old mansions, collapsed townships etc.) work well togehter. I don’t think I have been this successfully creeped out by the experience of playing a game since exploring a haunted mine in “Thief: the Dark Project” (circa 1999.)

The best part of the game (to me) is that it is a first person shooter in which one does not actually engage in much combat for about the first 6 hours of the game. I am huge fan of the adventure game genre so it is interesting to me to see how that type of gameplay can merged with the more popular genres such as a shooter. You explore a decaying town, solve light puzzles, engage in some “stealth action” style scenarios and such, all of which I think work well to present the environment for a “horror” game more successfully than simply advancing through rooms shooting adversaries. I am about 10 hours in at this point and now have a collection of handguns and the requisite shot gun with which I must now dispatch the good folk of Innsmouth, but the game seems to slow down and not really feel any different from any other shooter once the combat stage is reached. The story is interesting (more so than most FPSs) so I am compelled to play more but defeating zombies can only hold you for so long.

If you are looking for a short list of old Xbox games to check out I would probably put this on it. Though the graphics are dated this game stands out to me as being part of small set of games for the xbox that did particularly original things insofar as the gameplay/story experience. Other original xbox games I am particularly fond of that I don’t think got around much include Republic Commando, Psychonauts, and Chronicles of Riddick (don’t laugh).