Review: Don’t Bother Seeing Scott Pilgrim
The game, err movie is just pandering to video game players. Why? Simple. The story might even stand on its own without it. It just adds a distracting layer so a significant portion of the audience can exclaim “HEY THEY LIKE THAT THING THAT I LIKE!” And no, you can’t excuse their pandering just because it happens to pander to something you like. That’s not “not pandering”. That’s pandering working.
And listen, it’s not like video games are a cult phenomenon any more. Anyone under the age of 40ish grew up playing video games and probably still does. So it’s not some big in-joke. It’s just a ploy to make you like an otherwise uninteresting movie.
The fighting was alright the first time. The rest of the battles (aside from the botb 5&6) were just more of the same. The movie was repetitive in that respect. I understand that the filmmaker’s hands were pretty tied in that respect; the comic is about 7 evil exes and cutting several out would have made you comic nerds howl. The movie spent too much time on the Scott-Knives story. I think she would have been fine with a text blurb like the rest of the cast is introduced and the film started when he met Ramona.
Ramona. Aside from being pretty, she has no redeeming qualities as a character. She’s just there, taking up space and being a walking (seldom) talking macguffin. The audience gets no compelling reason whatsoever to like her. Even at the end of the movie I couldn’t bring myself to give a tiny squirt of a shit about what ultimately ends up happening to her, and I have diarrhea all the damn time. She, as a character, manages to make Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim seem interesting.
As for Michael Cera, well, I can’t really blame him. See, I’ve reflected on this and I can’t actually blame him as a bad actor. Because he’s not an actor. To be an actor you have to pretend to be someone else; to act. Michael Cera has only 1 character and that’s Michael Cera. By god I hope that’s an act, but I fear it isn’t.
Now, there’s plenty of people like that. One such fellow is Chris Rock. In every movie he’s in he is essentially Chris Rock. That’s fine if you like him. I do. It’s torture if you don’t. Michael Cera is just awkward and unfunny. Oh, and he doesn’t have any other skills. Rock is at least a comedian too.
Pilgrim, like Ramona, gives us little in terms of character arc. You can’t just write on the screen video-game HUD style that Scott learned self-esteem. That’s lazy cheating.
What did I like? The Culkin brother was pretty funny. The supporting cast in general is top notch. The chick from parks & rec was great. And sure, Cera pulls off a few good funny moments here and there. But not enough to warrant a rewatch and certainly not enough to warrant a full-price theater viewing.
Use Manual Settings for Testing your Android App
Here’s a quick tip for an issue I see asked all the time.
If you’re developing an android application and want to try it on your phone but you’ve been running it in an emulator (or vice versa) it’s a head-scratcher on how to get the app to be sent to your phone instead of the emulator you have running.
When you click the run button eclipse automatically figures out which emulator or device to run your app on. If you’ve got a few running emulators and/or devices plugged in, it just picks one. Probably the first. You want eclipse to ask you instead of guessing.
- Click the down arrow next to the run button. Then click on “Run Configurations…”
- Click on the Target tab.
- Click Manual.
- Finally, hit Apply then Close to save your changes.
Once you’ve done that eclipse will ask you which device you want to run your app on when you hit the run button. Sure, it adds another click to the process, but it allows you to have multiple emulators up or devices plugged in without confusion.
06.15.10Weigh In
I’m working on a weight-tracking app for android.
You can play with what I have so far by downloading the apk file here and installing it:
Scan with your phone's barcode scanner
So far you just enter how much you weigh. It keeps track of when you weigh yourself and computes a running average. This way you can weigh yourself as often (or not often) as you like and it will produce a nice stable representation of your weight without the daily ups and downs. More features to come.
04.22.10Fantasy Fantasy Sports League
Quick product idea:
A fantasy-fantasy sports league, aka meta fantasy sports. The idea is that instead of drafting guys who play sports, you draft guys who play fantasy sports. So if your buddies are always doing fantasy football, fantasy baseball, and fantasy curling, you can draft them for your fantasy fantasy league. They do well, you do well. They suck, you trade ‘em away.
qqrr.it POC
I cobbled together a POC for my QR-code generating site.
To use it, make an image url like so:
http://qqrr.it/<whatever you want goes here>
e.g.
http://qqrr.it/http://bellybuttonporn.com
Splat!
TODO:
- Talk about security. What sort of escaping do I need to do? How likely is this to be abused?
- an actual index for the site. It’ll have some cute examples and google ads. Lots of google ads.
- make it so you don’t have to use the /q/ in the url.
- add other features as 1-letter subdirectories, e.g. /b/ would make a “big” splat.
- Make the sizing smart. e.g. guess based on the length of the supplied string how big to make the splat.
Update March 22nd: Fixed a couple things. Added the home page. Try it out: http://qqrr.it/
03.15.10Back To Ames
Went up to Ames for the weekend. It was pretty good despite some bad news.
Though I make a habit of getting back up there to play games and hang out with friends, it’s been a few weeks since I’d been. That, and I think the flutterings of spring, made it feel somehow more vibrant than normal. Oh, and I’m moving back up there too.
Aside: It’s interesting how people use words like up and down to describe travel on a map. It’s not up, it’s north. But we all say it and we all understand what it means.
So as most of you know I’ve had some issues with my current roommates in Des Moines. For the few of you who don’t I’m sorry; I’ll have to fill the bloud (that’s a new word for blog crowd. Okay, whatever, I tried) in later once the move is complete. I packed up a carload and brought it with me. In this first installment went my gaming supplies (natch) and some excess kitchen stuff that I never really unpacked.
I met Pete, Rezza, and Steve at Tas’s/my former/future place. Tas wasn’t there because of the bad news: The night prior he had lost his grandmother. They were close. He’ll be out of town for a while and I wish him well. I lost my maternal grandmother when I was a teenager. We were also close, and it was tough to deal with.
After dinner the four of us played Dungeon Lords. I think the consensus is that we all like the game but need more practice. We’ve given it a provisional nickname of “I am such a retard” due to several exclamations during play.
Scan me with your Android Phone
We finished the night off with three games of Dominion. Though I only won one of them, it was the finale and a landslide, so I felt a bit redeemed. Man Dominion is all kinds of fun. Especially when it’s easy to come up with kingdom card layouts.
I’d been dying to try out Dominion Shuffle, an Android app to generate kingdom card layouts. It did not disappoint. Point your Android Phone to the sneeze on the right to try the App out yourself.
Sunday I lunched with Pete at Thai Kitchen then played D&D with Pete, Jed, Chris, and Steve. I’ll spare you the gory details for now but we had a few hours of fun before I had to go.
Back to Des Moines, for a little while.
| Posted in Uncategorized | View Comments
Review: Dungeon Lords
Box art
Been looking forward to this since I heard about it. Dungeon Lords is a worker-placement board game where the players are competing evil dungeon lords who each have to dig out tunnels, build rooms, buy traps, and hire monsters for their dungeons. Every year some hapless adventurers come to conquer your dungeon. Obviously that ain’t gonna happen.
Game Contents
So far this is the bitsiest game I own. And it’s the bitsiest game I’ve played. Now, I know you may be ready to argue this point, but hear me out. Sure something like Arkham Horror may have more bits in total, but they are easily categorized and not a pain to deal with. The array of baubles, cardboard, and chits contained in this box are a nightmare of special cases. In other words, awesome.
Some highlights: The first thing you notice are the imps. They’re very well detailed, each about 1cm tall and cast in orange plastic. Very cute looking. The art overall is top-notch. While it makes the game boards look a little busy, the intricate and humorous background art really sets the mood.
Some lowlights: As I said before the boards are a bit busy and there’s a lot of setup to get all of those bits into their appropriate piles and places. Since each player has their own board and there’s 3 (three!) central boards we’re talking a full banquet table for the 4-player game. In one session we managed to squeeze it onto a card table, but there was a lot of stuff sitting precariously close to the edge of the table.
Dungeon Lords tamed via tackle box
I’ve recently become a convert to the fishing tackle box method of game storage. The local Walmart had a plano tackle box that fit just right in there. The customizable compartments made it pretty easy to get all the various cards and chits to behave.
Gameplay
It’s very similar to Agricola and Stone Age. The players take turns placing their minion figures (minions, imps, monsters, and ghosts are all separate things) from their own boards onto a central board indicating which actions they will take. This is all done by a roborally-type of order placement where you have to choose which options you’re going to do up front and can’t react as your opponents place their minions. Over all I really like these mechanics together. It cuts down on the analysis paralysis since everything has to be chosen up front. And since there’s 3 slots for each action there’s little chance you’ll get totally screwed out of performing your action (not like that damn sow fields action in Agricola).
So basically you do this 4 times (once per season), digging rooms, recruiting imps, mining for gold, buying food, hiring monsters, etc. After the first year you’re attacked by some adventurers. I really like how this feels like two games in one. First you’ve got the dungeon building part, then the good guy killing part. The adventurers follow predetermined rules for what they’re going to do so there’s a lot of strategy in choosing which monsters to use and how those monsters are going to attack. The big downside is it’s really easy to be totally unprepared for the adventurers; in each game I’ve played so far there was at least one new player who got totally rocked by the adventurers.
After your 4 seasons then attack cycle you do it again. In the second year there’s a few minor differences, chiefly that the adventurers and monsters are tougher. That’s it. You only get to play two years. Now, I know it’ll sound silly saying this about a 2 hour game, but it really feels like the game should take longer. Maybe 3 years? After everyone knows how to play the game really speeds up, at least.
Oh, one last mechanic I like: The evilometer. As you progress throughout the game your current reputation is tracked on a ladder with the rest of the players. If you get too evil a paladin (a super strong adventurer who can do everything) will come to your dungeon with the adventurers to kick some evil ass (yours). There’s several points in the game where the evilometer matters; when assigning adventurers (the most evil gets the strongest) and so on.
Scoring / Wrapup
The end of the game works very similar to Agricola, carcassonne, and lots of “Euro” type games. Everyone plays to the end and the winner is determined by an exciting round of math. You get points based on how big your dungeon is, how much remains unconquered, and you get penalized for conquered rooms and failure to pay taxes. Bonuses are handed out based on a trophy system; the evilest player is the “Lord of the Dark Deeds”, et cetera. Gretyl, a fellow Central Iowa Board Gamer Anonymous member, suggested making victory point chits to hand out during the game to alleviate the pain of last-minute math. I like that idea. Despite the utter bitsiness of the game there is room in the box for more stuff once a tackle box is shoehorned in there to wrangle the bits and cards. The idea of making tangible trophies is also intriguing. I’m thinking of the same scale as the D&D figures.
I really like this game. It’s got a very fun theme that permeates the whole play. I enjoy all of the little fiddly bits and there’s a great deal of satisfaction in moving all of your little guys around to do things. As I said before, scoring is an opportunity that I look forward to fixing. The game time is a bit long, especially for a game night where more people might show up mid-game. But at the same time I keep wishing it were longer. In the end, you have no choice. If you’re a regular of our game nights I’m going to make you play this. Often.
02.25.10Hello world!
Yeah, I’m using wordpress now.
But the wiki is still there. In fact, I added a thingie so I can make wiki-links straight from wordpress. Like this:
Here we go.