Stuff.


Friday, December 20, 2002
The one toy
Wandering around a toy store so close to christmas only reinforces my thoughts about the garbage which riddles the toy industry. Who the hell want's this junk?

Having agreed to drive someone to a toy store to pick up a last moment gift, I was faced with something which, I would imagine, looked pretty much like the sacking of Rome by the germanic hordes. The store we visited was decimated at this late stage, assistants marking down unsold stock as quickly as they could reset their pricing guns.

Acres of unsold crap, while the display areas of "reliable's", such as the pink monstrosity, Mattel's amazing money making machine Barbie, AOL Time/Warner's "super synergized" marketing tie-in Harry Potter, as well as the angular world view of Lego, were in ruins.

What wasn't sold appeared to have been crushed under volume consumer foot traffic. Ground into the dirt so deeply that even the most frantic last minute shopper would turn their noise up at it.

Meanwhile, the latest generation of 'Furby class' toys were wearing bundles of On sale stickers like medals on a war veteran. I saw one expensive Aibo knock-off (Sony's robotic dog, star of a Janet Jackson video & Sony's TV & MiniDisc player ads), marked down by more than 50%. The last thing I'd want is a co-dependent synthetic pet, but if you want one now's the time to buy.

Once over dinner, I had a discussion with the spouse of an acquaintance who happened to be a toy buyer for the British toy shop Hamleys of Regent Street. I mentioned to her how cool I believed her job to be 'You get to test toys, all the time.' and was met with a quizzical stare.

'The people in my profession live every year in a state of perpetual terror. We all know what the proven sellers are, but every christmas a mega-seller swoops in under the radar, something new, a fad that the kids just create from nothing. It's my job to try and divine what this fad is going to be, months before it actually appears. We get it right and we'll put millions extra into the tills, we get it wrong and we'll have a warehouse filled with thousands of pounds of stock we may never be able to sell.'

Now that's pressure.


Thursday, December 19, 2002
T3: Rise of the Machines trailer
Why am I completely underwhelmed by this?


Wednesday, December 18, 2002
The Two Towers
The Two Towers was always going to be a difficult movie to make, as it represents the middle act of the story it's based on. It's entire point, is to be a bridge to the critical third act, or in this case a third movie.

It does this rather well, picking you right up from where it left off (Less than three days have passed in Middle-Earth from where Jackson leaves us in Fellowship and returns to us in Towers), but due to the sheer volume of material I can't recommend this movie to anyone who has not seen Fellowship. It moves too quickly and makes no attempt to fill you in on the backstory, the film hits the ground running and has no time, nor inclination to look back.

The sheer technical magnitude of this film, even when you forget the fact he shot all three back to back over the space of two years, is immense. The set's are massive, the effects are massive, the entire movie just chews up the screen in a way all good epic movies should. And even when it does all that, it never for a second overwhelms the audience. It's so tightly directed that even as all hell is breaking loose, a quick cut away to the other members of the now scattered fellowship, or their adversaries, does not interrupt to overall flow of the film.

There is no real closure in this film, you are half way along, the journey continues and things happen along the way. It would have been very easy for a lesser director to blow it, to bore the pants off you until the movies final big showpiece, but The Two Towers is injected with just enough interest, to keep the audiences eye on the prize. Tolkien purists will probably rant that the role of the Hobbits has been significantly reduced here, and well...it has, but it really needed to be in order to make a film worth watching.

To sum up by paraphrasing the person I saw it with, 'I'd stay here, and watch the next one if I could'.
That is pretty much is what The Two Towers is all about, when it's over you kind of wish they'd just change the reels and Return of the King would appear on the screen in front of you.


Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Nintendo doesn't need to grow up
It’s factually inaccurate…
(Radarscope was not a “clone” of Pacman, in the same way Das Boot was not a “clone” of Alien. Nor are the Pikmin carrots, they are plants.)

…it listens too much to Nintendo’s competitors, such as ex-XBox evangelist Seamus Blackley, the man who created what was voted the worst game of 1998, Trespasser: The Lost World.

And let’s also not forget complainer extraordinaire Lorne Lanning, a developer prized for the use of cut scenes and his initial inability to move from 2D to 3D. A guy whom after a clutch of whinging about the PS2, sold up to Microsoft. Lanning’s now XBox exclusive “Oddworld” titles (Which I’ve always found to be pretty generic) became a much crowed about launch title, and…no one bought it. It sales numbers weren’t even a blip. A tip of the hat to Lanning, he made more money by doing laps of the PR circuit as a Playstation defector than his game was ever going to make.

But in some places it does capture some of my personal sentiments about videogames.

-Not every game has to be morally questionable.
Some people need a seedy edge to gaming, Grand Theft Auto for example, to enjoy themselves. I however don’t. If I want grime and the dregs of life, I can turn on the Six O Clock news.

-Games are not cinema.
Games should stop trying to be movies. It’s an analogy that know nothing developers and publishers, such as Blackley, use to try and pigeon hole the medium. The only thing games & cinema should have in common is the use of moving images & sound.

Film is a broad canvas which takes you on a journey, you follow it. Games should help facilitate an interesting journey for you. You are not a spectator you are part of, if not the story.

The experience is not the same, and they never will be no matter how many talentless idiots use the ‘games as movies’ idea as a cheap sound bite.


Monday, December 16, 2002
Nemesis tanks
Star Trek: Nemesis, the tenth feature in the lingering Star Trek franchise was beaten out of the top spot this opening weekend…by the dire Jennifer Lopez vehicle "Maid in Manhattan."

After receiving poor reviews from all but a few US film critic’s, the majority of cinema goers stayed home this weekend, instead planning for a mid-week trip to the cinema for the opening of New Lines money-in-the-bank blockbuster Lord of the Rings; The Two Towers. Adjusting for inflation, Nemesis was the poorest box office opening of any Star Trek movie to date, being easily beaten by the woeful Star Trek: Insurrection, and the underfunded laughfest Star Trek: The Final Frontier.

Attached to each US reel of Nemesis is a 40 second promo for “Star Trek: Enterprise”, the current addition to the Star Trek pantheon. Though not really bad, in the sense Voyager was bad, it can be described as mediocre & uninspired television viewing at best.

It’s ratings on the other hand could only be described as a train wreck.
The show painfully dragged itself across the critical November sweeps finish line in last position, and has acquired a clutch of D as well some of the kiss of death F ratings from media critics and analysts alike. UPN, a component of the Viacom-CBS media combine, is currently the lowest ranking network available on US television, and Enterprise is it’s highest rated non-wrestling show, so I don’t believe they’ll cancel it anytime soon.

In a way, it does show how far Star Trek has fallen out of favour with the viewing public. The current standard bearer for a multi-decade spanning show is relegated to the prime-time slot at a bottom of the barrel network. A network so far behind the competition that they signed on for another season of the Enterprise lead in show, “The Twilight Zone” (Presented by Forrest Whitaker, and watched by all of three people.), as they didn’t have anything else to take it’s place.

Star Trek, pretty much everything about it these days, is second rate.
The final word should go to Roger Ebert, cranky film critic and the still living half of the Siskel & Ebert reviewing duo.

"...and gradually it occurs to me that "Star Trek" is over for me. I've been looking at these stories for half a lifetime, and, let's face it, they're out of gas. ...I think it is time for "Star Trek" to make a mighty leap forward another 1,000 years into the future, to a time when starships do not look like rides in a 1970s amusement arcade, when aliens do not look like humans with funny foreheads, and when wonder, astonishment and literacy are permitted back into the series. Star Trek was kind of terrific once, but now it is a copy of a copy of a copy."