GameDAILY BIZ, Top stories Monday, May 23, 2005

GameDAILY BIZ, Top stories Monday, May 23, 2005

TOO HUMAN is back! I was lucky enough to work on this title a few years back when it was still on the original Playstation and it's going to be brilliant. The gameplay is already set, the story is great and it looked as good as anything on the original PSX. Now that it'll have the power of the XB 360 behind it, I can't wait. The guys at SK are great, and they showed me a blurb in EGM about the game when I bumped into them at E3.

Revenge of the Sith - (SPOILERS)

So Star Wars Episode 3 is out now, and I went to see it over the weekend. I've talked to few people about it and the consensus seems to be that it's better than the last two, but probably not anyone's favorite SW film. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it's a pretty dark film and it's pretty hard to be upbeat about it. But here's some of my thoughts anyway.

BAD

• Too much CG is too much CG

I know people got a big kick out of watching the little green guy zip around like a hornet in Ep.2, but seriously, does Yoda HAVE to have super-hyper-acrobatic abilities just because he's CG now? And why does he become a cripple again when he's not fighting? I think it would have been much more contextual to have him be slow, but just be GOOD. I mean, if you go back to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (which is suppsed to be be some of the inspiration for the earlier films although I don't really see it), samurai movies typically have a structure to how people fight. There's always the young new guy who gets excited and over extends, goes off balance, and then the master kicks his butt. We see this in Highlander, we see it in Kill Bill, and in almost every great samurai movie. Hell, we even see it in the Matrix, which arguably has been *the* force pushing CG at people in the mast 10 years. But I don't think it works for Star Wars, esp. with the very Zen philosophy being spouted by the Jedi knights.

• Time flies when you're having fun

Obi-Wan goes off back to Tatooine to wait and watch over Luke. At most he's maybe 40. But 16 years go by and suddenly he's 70? Did I miss something? Is this that "new math" stuff?

• Dark side=better?

One thing I wondered is about how quickly people gain the Dark Side powers. It seems like almost any Sith gets to shoot cool lighting bolts at people. But on the Jedi side, only Yoda can absorb it into a little ball. Basically, the only REALLY powerful Jedi is Yoda, who took 600 years to learn everything, while it seems like anyone can master some nifty dark powers in like 3 days with a study-at-home course. So how did the Sith lose in the first place anyway?

Maybe I'll follow this up with some things I liked in the movie. But I'm neglecting some work right now, so I'll leave off here.

And so it begins...

This blog is mostly an experiment. I tend to be a fairly quick reader and find all sorts of weird and interesting things in the course of my daily browsing. I email lots of these things out to different people, and my sent mail folder is getting ridiculous. So I thought I'd try this instead - maybe if I post things here rather than emailing them separately, people will start looking here to see what's up, and that will be easier.

Or not.

It's also a bit of an excuse to just play around with more tech tools. I was looking at all the different plugins available for Firefox, including MANY for blogging, and figured why not?