Now Playing: 24 Season 3

I decided to move 24: Season 3 up in the queue recently because the ending of season 2 was such a cliff-hanger I had to know how the story continued. The producers took the easy way out, unfortunately, by picking up three years later with little more than a "oh, everything is fine now" throw-away comment. Considering how bloody good season 2 was (sans the Kim storyline) I had high hopes for season 3, especially how the Kate Warner-Jack Bauer situation is resolved literally in the first 15 minutes of the premier.

It's a shame then that the show feels like it's treading on water for practically the entire season run. The threat is just as serious, maybe moreso, than the nuke-in-LA threat in season 2 but for some reason it feels like everyone is just spinning their wheels.

The show wouldn't be 24 without at least one utterly ridiculous and show-stopping sub-plot. Last season that belonged to Kim Bauer and everything she did was useless. This season, that sub-plot is unfortunately given to President David Palmer and his Chief of Staff. Palmer is easily the coolest character after Jack Bauer himself and watching how he's sucked into a fairly stupid story involving his brother Wayne, Wayne's affair with the awful Gina Torres (who plays the wife of a major Palmer campaign backer), and Palmer's ex-wife Sherri just drags the show to a screeching halt everytime the focus shifts to it. The lone high point is how it all ends in the final two episodes, but it is a major beating to get there.

So are there any high points along the way? The way the show twists and turns this season remain pretty slick and unexpected, and I love how the initial threat is never the major one. Heck, the main villains of the first half of the season are dealt with by episode 12 and the major villain doesn't reveal himself until around episodes 15 or 16. Also, the biggest thorn in Jack's side is finally, and brutally, dealt with in a scene that I must have replayed a half dozen times. Kiefer Sutherland plays the character so perfectly that when he finally gets his long-in-coming revenge, you want to stand up and cheer.

I can see why Sutherland wants to stay with 24 as long as possible. The storylines may stretch credibility, but even when it veers towards the overtly ridiculous (as it does frequently in season 3) there are gems aplenty to appreciate. The way Bauer never lets anything affect him personally crashes on his head in the final minutes of the last episode and Sutherland sells it for all he's worth. He gives another magnificent performance as someone who willingly puts himself through the ringer time and again because he bleeds red, white, and blue.

While this certainly isn't the best that 24 has to offer, especially coming off the phenomenal season 2, it still has plenty of high points. I just hope future seasons pick up the tempo while refraining from the stupid.

Now Playing: Love Actually

Talk about a "chick magnet" film. My Fair Lady, myself, and a small crew saw this when it first hit theaters and haven't watched it since. We threw it in the queue recently and screened it again this weekend. I find it endlessly amusing how the British film community seems to appear entirely (well, if you exclude Maggie Smith) at some point in this movie. Between this and the Harry Potter series, I'm convinced the British film community is composed of only 20 actors who intermingle across all film genres.

Love Actually is a series of vignettes whose collective point is that love is all around us. With anything like this, some stories are better than others and the majority of my enjoyment came from watching Liam Neeson's recent widower bond with his new step-son. One of the deleted scenes in the extras actually makes their relationship all the more poignant while still being absolutely hilarious. The kid's reactions to falling in love at the age of 10 are funny, but it's the chance to see Neeson (a notorious stiff) actually cut loose and enjoy himself. The two of them have so much fun bouncing off each other that I would have been perfectly happy had the film focused entirely on these two.

Hugh Grant's story finds him as the newly elected prime minister and his comedic relationship with his new assistant. Grant is both funny and charming without resorting to any of his normal ticks, and his character is better off for it. After he loses his assistant and tries to find her on "the world's longest street" the sequence becomes one long sustained belly laugh. The more doors he knocks on the more frustrated he gets, and it's to the writers' credit that they have a unique surprise behind every door.

The Alan Rickman-Emma Thompson story of a marriage that's fallen into the abyss of commonality strikes the harshest emotional chords with Thompson, as usual, at the top of her game. Her personal breakdown late in the film is extremely tough to watch because she allows herself only a few minutes to completely shatter before she has to be back together for her childrens' school play. It's a devastating moment that Thompson absolutely nails. She also belongs to the best of the deleted scenes which involves her son, her school's administrators, and her son's Christmas wish. I shall say no more other than I completely lost it when she had a word with her son about what he'd written.

The rest of the stories circle around these primary three and the best of the rest involves Martin Freeman and Joanna Page as stand-ins for a porn film, and Colin Firth and Sienna Guillory as a cuckold and his Portugese housekeeper. There is a solid intimacy between these two couples as we see their relationships on a sort of highlight reel as they meet, talk, get to know one another, then fall in love. If you're looking for a solid date movie that wears its heart(s) on its sleeve, then this is definitely a good choice.

Oh, and this film was my introduction to the great Bill Nighy who brilliantly plays aging rock star Billy Mack. To say any more about his story would be a disservice to its hilarity. Cheers.

Now Playing: Ray

Ray is one of those films where the central performance is the reason you see the movie. End of discussion. Jamie Foxx deserved every accolade thrown his way during awards season because he doesn't mimic Ray Charles Robinson. He literally becomes him, and that's the caliber of acting which elevates a solid biopic to the level of greatness.

It's a shame that Ray remains a thoroughly average and overlong, though entertaining, film about a music legend.

I blame director Taylor Hackford, to be honest. The film jumps back and forth between Ray's present day and his early years as a kid throughout the entire run of the film. There are heartbreaking moments of sadness and joy in the flashbacks, but we get the point early enough to where most of the rest are extraneous. Yes, Ray's mother was tough on him regarding his blindness but she was right. With a little tough love, Ray proved himself stronger than either he or his mother thought he was. The way his hearing compensated for his blindness borders on mythic in the film, but the movie gets enough of the small details right to allow for some "fudging."

The thing that bothers me about modern biopics is how they try to cover too much ground when they should have kept things more focused. The key is finding a singular event, even if it spans a few years, that defined a person. Patton was brilliant in this regard because it focused specifically on General George S. Patton's involvement in World War II. That film is the benchmark against which all other biopics should be measured, in my opinion, because it gets everything right and doesn't stretch itself thin by turning itself into a highlight reel.

Jamie Foxx is actually so good as Ray that he forces everyone around him to bring their A-Game. For example, Regina King delivers a career-best performance as one of Ray's many flames and when they square off in Ray's hotel room (the result of which is the song "Hit the Road Jack") the energy just explodes off the screen. Far too frequently King relies on the "louder is better" approach to acting, but here she's nuanced, vibrant, and passionate without being overbearing.

Oh yeah, the soundtrack is amazing. The aforementioned duet of "Hit the Road Jack" goes from the hotel room to the ballroom and the performance is staggering. I read a perfect description of the entertainment industry somewhere that if a performer of any type was lucky then he/she would eventually conquer their personal demons, but if we were lucky as an audience they wouldn't. Ray's great demons consumed him for years, and the result was the sort of music that will be held as great art 200 years from now. Unfortunately, the movie frequently revels in Ray's personal demons to the point where the audience is bludgeoned over the head with "heroin bad! lost little brother bad!" The film ends on a true high note though when we finally glimpse Ray's eyes (in a dream, mind you) and despite his handicap he finally learns how to see with his mother's eyes. It's a terrific moment in an otherwise average movie anchored by a star-making performance from Jamie Foxx.

I'll agree this is a fairly schizophrenic review, but watching a film that leaps all over the place and changes tone faster than Ray Charles can play the piano will do that to a person. It remains something worth seeing if only for the soundtrack and Foxx's performance, but it falls short of being a great biopic of a modern legend.

Now Playing: Final Fantasy Advent Children

This is one of those films I watched a few months back then never got around to reviewing. Funny enough, I think it most closely resembles The Matrix films in terms of pure anime rush. The flip side to that is that The Matrix series encompassed both the best and the worst elements of anime, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is no different.

The movie is a direct follow-up to the mega-ton selling PlayStation game Final Fantasy VII which, if you've never played it, was one of the most beloved games ever. I honestly couldn't tell you why because having played through the whole thing the bad far outweighed the good. The story was crippled by entirely too much metaphysical emotional baggage, the overwrought "big character death" happened to the most annoying character in the game (hence it puzzles me when people say they still get teary-eyed thinking about it), and the only way to get the ultimate weapon in the game was to sink roughly 50 hours into breeding giant birds.

I'll say that last again: The ONLY way you pick up the ultimate weapon in the game is to spend 50 FRICKIN' HOURS OR MORE breeding giant birds. When you finally breed one with a certain ability, you can ride him to a certain island, pick up the weapon, and then go kick the villain's butt inside of 15 minutes. Whoo-hoo, sounds like fun!

Thus it strikes me as absurd that this game is the basis for SquareEnix to make a franchise out of, but they've given it the ol' college try with Advent Children. If you're familiar with the source material then you should be able to jump right in, but if you're someone like my mother who's never heard of it then don't even bother. The film assumes you know who the major players are, the backstory of the world they inhabit, and what the personal stakes are.

As for me, I just couldn't get over how much cooler the game would have been were the characters able to fly like they can in the movie. There must be no gravity whatsoever in this world because characters can leap tall buildings in a single bound all while shooting at one another. It would be undeniably silly, moreso than it already is, if the animation were anything less than dazzling. SquareEnix has crafted a magnificently detailed, jaw-droppingly beautiful world with characters that border on photorealistic. Many times you'll just sit back and stare at how beautiful everything is and there are dozens of instances where the artistry on display is nothing short of overwhelming.

Once the action truly kicks in about three quarters of the way through, Advent Children becomes an anime John Woo movie. Up to that point, the focus was on two main characters from the game, Cloud and Tifa, and their struggle to figure out why the children of the world have grown increasingly ill since they defeated the arch-villain Sephiroth. It seems that Sephiroth wasn't the only clone born of a government experiment, and the three nuts on the loose want his power for themselves regardless of the consequences. They go so far as to unleash a dragon on the main city, and that's when all the secondary characters from the game show up and throw down.

The resulting action is, in a word, mind-blowing. The camera moves so fast through the city that you'll have trouble breathing. It all leads up to Cloud going mano-a-mano with a reborn Sephiroth and all manner of insanity results.

It's tough to actually judge this as a film all by itself because in no way does it stand on its own. It draws from and relies entirely on viewers' experience with the game, so even hardened anime buffs unfamiliar with the source will be lost. There's a feature on the disc that gives people a quick run-through of the game's highlights, but even then I felt I was missing some details. Advent Children remains gorgeous to look at and doesn't skimp on the action, but it is unfairly weighted down by the overstuffed plot from the game. This isn't to say the movie isn't worth your time, but if you're expecting balls-to-the-wall anime action then just skip to the one hour mark and kick back for a heck of a ride.

That's a Lotta Buns for the Moolah

My Fair Lady and I signed up for a Costco membership this past week and actually started shopping this weekend. Primarily because the particular vintage(s) of wine My Fair Lady enjoys so much were something close to half off compared to the local Centennial. Her eyes bugged out when she saw the Costco prices in much the same way mine would were I to find an Xbox 360 for about $150.

And people say that men and women are different. Pfft.

One thing that caught my eye was in the bakery. We came across hot dog buns and I noticed they were priced at $2.39. "That's comparable to Tom thumb, wouldn't you say? I asked MFL.

"Yeah, that's... wait. Look at the amount," she replied.

I scanned them quickly, then noticed what she was pointing to.

"Holy crap! That's $2.39 for 24 buns instead of eight? How have I missed this my entire life?"

In short, I'm going after Costco's buns from this point forward.

Now Playing: Idiocracy

This was the second comedy I saw this weekend and it couldn't be more different than Beerfest if it tried. Fox dropped this on seven cities across North America with zero publicity so we can expect it on DVD roughly three Tuesdays from now. Writer-Director Mike Judge was similarly shafted when Office Space came out to no fanfare in February, so one can see how he might be a little angry at history repeating itself. I can't say it's a travesty comparable to someone shelving Gone With The Wind, but the film made me laugh more times than not and was surprisingly intelligent considering its "stupid" subject matter.

Luke Wilson plays an average guy frozen in a military experiment along with a prostitute played by Mya Rudolph. They wake up 500 years later to find the world has gone stupid which is hilariously explained early in the film as rednecks breeding faster than educated people. I died laughing watching the "family tree" graphic as it swelled exponentially on one side.

The laughs build from there and the primary reason behind the jokes being as funny as they are is courtesy of the narrator. He sounds exactly like the voice of those old NFL Films highlight movies we all grew up with as kids, and it frankly wouldn't surprise me if that's who Judge used. It makes sense in context to have that exact voice narrate and his deadpan delivery of certain lines, particularly how the locals view Wilson's manner of speech, laid me right out in hysterical laughter.

There are a few missteps though, and a big one is Dax Shephard as Wilson's attorney. People can claim he's funny until they are blue in the face, but to me he comes off as a less shrill version of Will Ferrell. In short, he sucks. Quite a lot in fact. But as a counter-point to his lameness, Judge created President Camacho who is one of the greatest supporting characters I've seen in a long time. A former wrestler turned President of the America, Camacho is hysterically over the top and it cracked me up how he could turn from friendly to hostile and back to friendly all in the span of about four seconds.

Since it'll be on DVD soon enough, check it out the second it does. There are so many countless background sight gags that multiple viewings aren't so much required as demanded. It's relatively easy to get past the jokes that don't work, because somewhere in the background are three that do. It's a shame Fox didn't appreciate it more, but frankly I'm not surprised. If you're in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles or Toronto then hunt this film down and see it in the theater. For everyone else, it'll be on disc soon enough.

Now Playing: Beerfest

Comedy is probably the oddest element known to humankind. What makes one person laugh until tears stream forth can make another person hurl in the theater aisle. It's all a matter of personal tastes and a little perspective, and there are not two more disparate comedies than the ones I saw this Labor Day weekend. So let's start off with Beerfest, the latest and arguably greatest from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe. This is the group who came up with perennial college dorm room favorite Super Troopers and the less well received, but infinitely superior, slasher comedy Club Dredd.

Beerfest opens at the funeral of the head of the Von Wolfhausens. Two of the Broken Lizard guys normally relegated to background status are front and center as the two grandsons who must take their grandfather's ashes to Germany and spread them at the famliy resting place. Once they arrive in Deutschland, they run into Oktoberfest in full swing and the riot which ensues is one long sustained belly laugh. The scene just builds and builds and I was on the floor laughing. They were sent to meet a certain man and when he picks them up he takes them to an underground beer drinking ceremony called Beerfest and all hell breaks loose. It turns out their grandfather stole a beer recipe, and fled to America as an exhile. The guys are beaten down and shipped back to the States in humilation.

Once back on American soil they decide to form a squad to return as conquerors to the next year's Beerfest. That's also all you need to know about the movie other than Broken Lizard goes out of its way to pull laughter from you. A lot of it is pretty dang gross, bordering on nasty, but I laughed more times than not and it's hard to argue with that. By contrast, My Fair Lady didn't seem to find it half as funny as I did. But I freely admit to being a sucker for Americans shamelessly mocking bad German accents and everytime the German team started speaking I started laughing.

Speaking of which, the Germans are led by none other than Jurgen Prochnow who proves to be as fearless at comedy as he is at drama. There's one long running gag referencing his most famous film, but the thing that got me was another joke aimed at that same film which Prochnow sort of tosses off as an aside. I just howled when he said it.

Kevin Heffernan, though, has consistently proven himself the MVP of the troupe as the go-to guy who can get it done. Here he plays Landfill, a compulsive eater and all around screw-up who sees this tournament as his shot at redemption. The places he takes the character are priceless and I was laughing pretty much every time he was on screen. Cloris Leachman though was hit-or-miss as Great Gam Gam, the great-grandmother who lords over the main family. She's in full on Young Frankenstein over-the-top mode and while some of what she says is funny, a lot more just isn't.

But overall the hit-to-miss quotient immensely favors the hits so if you're looking for pure, unadulterated, albeit very strange, comedy then Beerfest is a pretty solid flick.

GUN a AAA Title? Hahahahahaha!

I picked up GUN this weekend which, as noted below, hosed my plan of dropping below 10 games in my console backlog. The good news is that the game looks pretty short even factoring in all the side quests. I'm north of 60 percent finished already and I've played it for two days. What impresses me most is the voice cast which is uniformly stellar. I don't know how I managed to completely miss a game starring Thomas Jane with a father played by Kris Kristofferson and challenged by villains played by Lance Henrickson and Brad Dourif. That's the kind of voice work that demands attention especially when all of them get into their roles. Henrickson in particular rips stuff up as the most ruthless SOB the War Between the States ever produced.

What stuns me though is how this game was marketed last year as a AAA title by Activision. I have to laugh heartily at this because I picked it up for $20 in accrued store credit at EB and that was the right price point for it. There's no way in Hades I'd pay the full $50 (or $60 for the 360 version) that was originally charged. It's fun, but not fun enough to warrant multiple play throughs. Once I'm finished this thing goes up on the trade block.

One thing that stuck in my head which I wasn't able to figure out were the animations. In short, they're junk. You stand in front of a badly done model and watch them gesticulate wildly even after they stop talking. I knew I'd seen those somewhere else but couldn't place it. I knew they looked ugly as hell in that other place too, and it stumped me that anyone would use them in the first place let alone twice. Lightning struck this morning.

The same animations were used in the half-ass Pirates of the Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow. I ought to go back into my review and knock 10 points off it for reusing such poor animations. I thought the game was sloppy to begin with but now I consider it even more of a disaster than I originally did.

In so far as Gun is concerned, it's not bad but it's far from great. It's very much a GTAIII-lite set in the Old West which is a setting sadly ignored by almost everyone. With every company in the world pushing a WWII shooter of some sort almost no one (to my knowledge) is working on a Wild West shooter. Outlaws is considered one of the finest games in the entire FPS genre for good reason.

It got it right.

Playing through that back in college was akin to starring in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and it was glorious to experience. Everyone involved not only knew what the cliches were, but reveled in them with an infectious energy.

Gun is missing that same energy but as far as time wasters go it's not a bad one. But it's a B-title at best that doesn't come close to the AAA status Activision said it was.

And Still 10 To Go

Beat the latest game I've been working on tonight but I picked up Gun yesterday while My Fair Lady and I were at the mall.

Nuts.

And Then There Were 10...

The title refers to the number of uncompleted console-oriented games I have sitting on my shelf. For any gamer, having the console backlog down to just 10 is nothing short of amazing. I'm not trying to blow my own horn here, just saying that a combination of perserverance and budgetary limitations can result in good things. When I lived in my old condo, I bought some shelves from Target for my DVD library. The bottom shelf was for my game collection (the difference between "collection" and "library" will be discussed at a later date) and that is where it's remained despite both continuing to grow.

My DVD library in particular has overwhelmed my shelves so I'm planting the new arrivals and the "Now Playing" titles in front of the others. This hardly masks the problem that I have a very real addiction to the format. If anything, it reinforces it with every new addition. My game collection though I figured out how to separate what I've played from what I need to burn through.

I divide the games by console then alphabetize accordingly. On the left are the PS2 games and on the right are the Xbox games. In front of that one row are two stacks of games, both for their respective consoles. The two stacks are my "on deck" stacks and those are the ones I have not finished. There are a few in the "completed" row that I haven't finished either, but in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds I'd rather not waste another second on them. This week I've already yanked and traded in several titles I knew I'd never spend another second on, and Chaos Bleeds needs to go away as well. But the Buffy fan in me insists on hanging onto it despite it being little more than awful fan-fiction in digital form.

Focusing on the front stacks gives me 10 titles to power through, and that could be down to nine as soon as tomorrow evening. My Fair Lady didn't get home until 10:30 p.m. last night due to insanity at work being reinforced by people who don't know how to communicate worth a flip.

Ironic considering these are attorneys.

What that has meant for me this week is lots of alone time at Casa de Skim which lets me focus on burning off these remaining titles. This won't be completed by next week though because two of them are Jade Empire and Dark Cloud 2, neither of which are considered short RPGs. Fortunately, none of the Final Fantasy series is in there because that by itself would be a 50+ hour timesink and that I just can't do anymore. I tried it with Dragon Quest VIII and while the game was certainly charming for a while, it just dragged on to the point where I would have to power level all four party members by another five levels at least.

All for the sake of beating a single boss not quite halfway through the game. This is when I realized I can't devote 100+ continuous hours of my life to gaming anymore, which is why the goal of completing my backlog is so dear to my heart. If I can absolutely finish off the fabled backlog completely then I might actually be able to enjoy gaming again. As it stands, I've been in a funk lately because Titan Quest is the only good game I've played in months and even that was nothing more than Diablo III in Ancient Greece/Egypt/Babylon.

Oh, and September I'm essentially taking a break from gaming and the internet for the most part. I've been playing around with one particular screenplay for a while now and I'm actually ready to sit down and grind it out. The trouble is I keep distracting myself so for all of next month I'm removing said distractions. No games, no extraneous activities. Only movies and writing about them are allowed as distractions. I'll still be around on the web, and hopefully blogging away in the meantime, but for the most part I'm going to be focused on the 120 pages I want completed by the end of the month.

Finally, I have a goal worth completing. After that, October is Casa Repair Month with every weekend devoted to replacing tile and carpet and finishing off the backyard so My Fair Lady and I can sell the place in the spring. This leads up to the biggest gaming months of the year in November and December when literally everything that can be pushed out the door will hit store shelves. At which point the backlog will swell up again.

It's a vicious cycle, but someone's gotta do it.

CNN: Compassionate Guys Apply Within

Ahh, the joys of technical gaffes. News Busters.com put up this story about CNN anchor Kyra Phillips pulling a Naked Gun during President Bush's remarks in New Orleans. Apparently she went to the bathroom with her mic on and the following is some of what was said:

Phillips: "Yeah, I'm very lucky in that regard with my husband. My husband is handsome and he is genuinely a loving, you know, no ego--you know what I'm saying. Just a really passionate, compassionate great, great human being. And they exist. They do exist. They're hard to find. Yup. But they are out there."

Bravo, Kyra, bravo. Gems like this is what keep all of us tuned in to the news these days. Funny stuff.

I'm Turning Whiter

Found another white hair on my head just now. I've found them in ever increasing numbers lately so joy upon joys. The upside is that I still have my hair and the same hairline as I had in college. I think my hair skipped right past the grey stage and went straight to white. Not sure what that's about but by the time I'm 40 the last of the brown should be gone from my head.

Of course I'm prognosticating a decade down the road on an internet blog so let me get you a salt shaker with that. Just call me Nostradumbass.

Oblivion Overhauled

This is a game-related post so if you have no interest in gaming whatsoever, I have plenty of other non-gaming stories to choose from so enjoy.

I haven't commented on Oblivion before now in any depth because Bethesda to me is what EA is to a lot of folks. They're a big dog that makes games with a lot of promise but wraps them in a blanket of stupid that's so thick it makes enjoyment difficult. I found a lot to love about Morrowind but you were either not powerful enough or supremely powerful with literally nothing in between, the loot was non-existent, and the storyline was convoluted enough that it screamed "bad anime!"

Where it excelled was in the editor, which allowed the mod community to add in all the missing fun, and Oblivion is no different.

The world is vast and so densely detailed it blows your mind. The screenshots sure as hell did it no justice though because the original game fresh out of the box looked nothing like what we had all seen during the previous months. That's because the PC version was ported straight from the Xbox 360 version and anyone who tells you different, Bethesda included, is outright lying. Everything from the menu screens to the background textures to the way the camera zooms up someone's nose when you talk to them screams console. After installing and playing for a grand total of 15 minutes I couldn't take it anymore.

So I spent the next four hours grabbing texture mods and making graphical adjustments to the game. Now it looks dazzling and runs just fine on my machine. I immediately turned off the light bloom and shadow effects because not only do those automatically kill system performance but I think they detract from the immersion. If you want to see how light bloom can be righteously abused check out Fable. I'm good going without.

After I fixed the graphics, the menus (DarkUI is an absolute must), and the zooming in, I actually started playing the game. This is when I realized just how bloody small and inconsequential you feel at the start of the game. The world is absolutely huge, you will stumble onto at least five sub-quests just walking from Point A to Point B, and all of it feels unique. But the problems with the gameplay don't appear until you level up a few times. By then you're feeling pretty confident that you can take out some rogue bandits and certainly those low-level goblins in that cave you passed by. Not so fast there, hombre.

Apparently everything in the game world levels alongside you. The result is you start out swimming against the current and the situation never improves. That full suit of glass armor you earned? Yeah, the bandits in that cave over there are all equipped with it now to match your skillset. WTF? This is an absolute game killer to me, regardless of any good it may accomplish in other areas. Combine that with Bethesda's staunch refusal to put quality loot in any chest ANY WHERE and us loot whores are out of luck. By comparison, I picked up Titan Quest a few weeks later and haven't put it down since. Not only do I feel like I'm accomplishing things by improving in skills, but I have more loot than I can shake a staff at.

This is all a long way of saying that Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul 1.3 is finally out and I can't wait to dive into it. You can check it out right here and the release notes can be found at this link. There are so many additions and changes in this mod it borders on a total conversion, and I'm fine with that. Oblivion had a lot wrong with it from the start and again it's taken the mod community to fix everything Bethesda should have done right the first time. OOO 1.3 adds thousands of new items, tons of new quests, restricts levels, and ups the challenge significantly. People may point at it and say, "Why would you like this? If anything the mod makes the game a hell of a lot harder!"

Exactly. The point the mod makes is that it makes the game harder by balancing things as they should have been to begin with. I don't expect to be able to take on a minotaur right off the bat, but by level 45 I should be able to wipe the floor with him and anything else coming out of the Oblivion gates. With the default version of Oblivion, that level 15 minotaur I saw at the beginning would increase in strength and power over time so much so that when I'm level 45 he's still several levels higher than me. That's an example of the ridiculous line of thinking Bethesda had when they brainstormed the game. It's the GOTY only in so far as ambition is concerned. The world they created feels like a living, breathing one and you physically can't play for 10 minutes at a time. Fire it up and kiss three to four hours of your day good-bye, even if you curse Bethesda's name in the meantime.

But when you combine OOO 1.3 with a handful of other mods (like I said, DarkUI is a must for the menus before you even start it up once) and Oblivion could well be the terrific RPG everyone claims it was right out of the box. Either I have different standards, or everyone else is in thrall of Bethesda's achievement. Maybe it took getting beaten down by the raging suck that was Titanic for me to refuse to give anyone an automatic pass based on the size of the project attempted versus the end result. I can appreciate what Bethesda accomplished, but now I can enjoy what they should have finished with.

When Your 360 Explodes...

Check out this post at the AVS Forums and you'll see that some people have actually managed to decipher the Xbox 360 error lights. Whenever the consoles go belly up, the green light around the power button turns an angry red and blinks. Several enterprising, not to mention astute, members of AVS figured out how to reset the console and figure out what the blinking lights translate to. For example:

Turn on your "dead" xbox. Wait for the 3 red lights. Once you get them hold the "Synch button and the eject button down simultaniously. All four lights flash. (0) Press the eject button again and only one light (1) press again and all four light up (0) press again and two lights (2). Error code is 0102. compare this code to the table below to find out what is wrong with your X360. Is it overheating? Power Cord? Hardware?

The Code I got is 0102 which means the computer does not know the problem as it is not hardware or heating or anything like that. Could be dust, loose solder or static! I use a can of compressed air and my X360 IS BACK!!!!!! I do not know for how long but I played last night for several hours and had not one Hiccup. This after a whole week of the dreaded RINGS OF DEATH!!

I can't begin to describe how helpful this is, people. As more codes are unlocked, they'll continue updating the list. I'm not surprised that Microsoft never released this info, but I hope they do come out with an official list soon. If you have an Xbox 360 and are reading this blog, then chances are you're at least somewhat technically proficient. If we can repair our own machines without going through the hassle of sending it off to have dust blown out of it then bully for us.

Now Playing: March of the Penguins

This may as well have been titled National Geographic Presents Cuties On Ice. My Fair Lady and I watched it the other night and were thoroughly entranced by the march of the emperor penguins across miles of open, and frequently shifting, ice to their breeding ground where they will pair up with a mate to produce a single egg that may or may not live to see the end of the winter. The lives of these birds is incredibly harsh, but watching them waddle their way across the ice all for the sake of their annual mating ritual was oddly endearing.

Of course, Morgan Freeman's earthy narration maintains a steady course en route to the happy ending. Along the way, there is heartbreak, joy, death, life, and regurgitation. If you're a fan of snow then this is absolutely the film for you because never will you see weather this cold. Even after watching the behind the scenes documentaries, which aren't the usual useless EPK crap, we see just how blasted cold the Antarctic becomes in the dead of winter. Watching those birds cluster together for heat is incredible, as is seeing dozens of birds essentially stuck in a crevice courtesy of the shifting ice mass. Mother Nature is a cruel mistress, and it's to the film makers' credit that they never once try to interfere.

Some real fun comes from watching the penguins with cameras strapped to their backs underwater. It's literally mind blowing to see how they hunt for ice fish. You see them shoot down into the black abyss, only to rocket back up towards the ice and peg a small fish hiding in the ice above. How they do it remains a mystery, even more so after watching it in action. Overall, this is a wonderful documentary from National Geographic and highly entertaining to boot. Plus, those emperor penguins are just as cute as they can be.

Weather Issues

You never really miss rainfall until you're put in a situation where you go without it for roughly three months. Meanwhile, the sky is bright blue, sunny, and cloudless. Oh, and the temperature averages 103 degrees.

My Fair Lady, my parents and I went to Planet Hou-ston this weekend to visit my relatives and it rained there non-stop. It also looked like it had been raining for the last year because everywhere we looked the vegetation was a lush verdant green. Amidst endless complaints (from both of us) regarding our frizzed-out hair, we had a very fun time. My Fair Lady though failed to heed my (endless) warnings of how my family loves everything cold and to dress appropriately. The four hour drive down resulted in My Fair Lady wearing my dress coat because the vent in the front of the suburban was pointed right at her.

My former roommate and his wife love reminding me of how much I hate the cold, yet they've been unaware of the specific nature of my dislike for it. It's not that I outright hate cold weather by itself, it's that I don't like to be unprepared for it. In Texas we have hot weather followed by six weeks or so of cool to cold weather, then the barometer soars back up to hot again. I'm fine with that as it means there's only six weeks or so of the year when I'm uncomfortable. But the flip side to that is we don't stock up on cold weather clothes here since they are largely unnecessary. Were I to live in Quebec or Chicago then I would have the appropriate wardrobe and attitude since cold there is expected.

Where my hatred was born though was in my mother's household. If it's 105 outside, it's at least 68 in her house. If it was 73 outside, it was between 65 and 68 in the house. Every. Damn. Day. My aunt's house in Planet Hou-ston was exactly the same this weekend, and the suburban we rode in was frozen out too. Grow up in a household like that with a natural aversion to cold and see how you feel once you get out of there. My Fair Lady asked recently why we never covered up in blankets, to which I casually asked her to point out how many blankets she saw in the house. She thought about it for a second, then noticed there were none. I nodded and said, "Exactly my point."

Obviously that was a heck of a digression away from the much needed rain currently soaking DFW courtesy of a storm system that hit Sunday as we drove back to town. Along the way we hit a patch where the temperature was 107 out. By the time we again stood on our doorstep it said 77. Any more of this and we'll have to stock up on wood and hot chocolate. But at least the ground is getting soaked, and the entirety of Dallas is no longer a fire hazard. At least until the heat returns, which should be around Wednesday.

Now with 75% Less Flavor

I don't eat cereal as much as a I used to but I'm an ardant fan of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I have been for a long time, as a matter of fact. Since marrying My Fair Lady, she has tried to convince me that eating healthy at least some of the time is a good thing. Apparently she believes in me a "future investment" so it's only a matter of time before I'm traded on the market in Chicago. I can mentally picture investors getting squeamish when they hear I knocked back Jack in the Box for lunch yesterday.

"Sell! Sell! Sell!"

At any rate, we were in Tom Thumb a while ago and came across a box of the aforementioned cereal. The top of the box heralded how it held 75% less sugar and was therefore healthier. I warily eyed it but decided it couldn't hurt. Just for good measure we picked up a second box because they had a two-for-one sale going.

That should of registered as a warning.

I tried some the next morning and could barely swallow the first bite. My Fair Lady looked at me concerned.

"It's like eating fiber straight from the source," I said.

"You mean you don't like it?" she asked.

"Let me put it this way. I may make it through this bowl, I may not. But regardless of that, there will never be a second bowl poured in Casa de Skim so long as I draw breath."

We went to Lowe's last weekend to look at carpet samples because October is overhauling the house month. We're re-doing the tiles downstairs, and putting down new carpet upstairs in addition to painting everything. The intent is to sell the place next spring and buy a house somewhere. While looking at the carpet samples though I spied one in particular. I poked it, prodded it, and paid close attention to it. Then I licked it.

"What the hell are you doing?" asked an incredulous My Fair Lady.

"Taste testing," I said. "This one tastes better than that damn cereal, too."

"Very good sweetie, but I remain dubious on whether Lowe's grants discounts for licked merchandise."

Cheaters and Lawn Care

For those who haven't heard, Texas is in the middle of one of the worst droughts in its history. Actually, that's only partly true. Far West Texas (the El Paso area and such) have received more rain than they normally do and the result is massive flooding. Basically the state weather patterns are backasswards this summer. One thing that has remained constant in the DFW area is the color of everyone's lawns.

Yellow. Or a slight shade of brown.

If your lawn is not one of these colors and even has so much as a hint of green in it then you are definitely cheating on the water restrictions. I'm looking at the Park Cities in particular, but I don't believe they actually have restrictions. They have fountains, and I retain the right to mock them because that's where I was raised.

My Fair Lady and I were talking about what sort of lawns we'd like in any future homes we buy and I would love the lush green and verdant French-style gardens of Louisiana and plantation lands. I would not, however, want to pay the exorbitant costs associated with the required premium landscaping only to see it burned up in a month-long 100-degree heat wave. So we're content to pay over our small backyard with sand and paver stones and call it a day.

This is what happens when both of you have four black thumbs between you. See green grass. Kill green grass through no fault of your own. Pave over it and call it a parking lot.

PS3 as #1? Uh, Not So Much

Analysts have proven yet again that none of them were at E3 this year. 1Up has this story that discusses findings by The Yankee Group where they speculate that the PS3 will be numero uno this generation, with the Xbox 360 right behind it, and the Wii a distant third.

Pardon me while I snicker. Loudly. With great enthusiasm.

Anyone that was at the final E3 knows Sony had a disasterous showing. It was an absolute disgrace bordering on the level of Biblical regarding how epic a failure it was for them as a company and for the PS3 as a piece of hardware. This generation will set dividing lines among console gamers moreso than it will establish which brand will reign universally supreme.

Japan is Sony country pure and simple. I think the PS3 will absolutely kick butt in Japan, followed closely by the Wii. Microsoft may as well not even try to get into Japan anymore because no one there cares about the Xbox brand, period. My intuition regarding the shortages once the 360 was released was due in part to resources being diverted to the Japan launch because Microsoft actually believed it still had a chance there.

Uh, not really chief. But thank you for playing.

As I've said in the past, this next generation is going to see Microsoft take over the North American market and most of Europe, which will actually be shared with Nintendo's resurgence. Nintendo will absolutely be second at the very least in Japan and if they hit a sub-$200 price point on release, they could well be number one in the US as well as Europe. Every single person that has played with the Wii is sold on it. Absolutely everyone I know that has heard anything about it wants to play with it right this second. The 360 is a close second among them as to which console they want sharing shelf space with the Wii.

I hope to God that Nintendo doesn't take as long as it usually does between first-generation releases as it normally does, but even if that remains the case at least I'll be able to download N64 games on back and buy GameCube titles I missed. Every single Zelda game, Eternal Darkness, the Mario games, and the Metroid series are insta-buys for me. That's several games right there, and I haven't even touched the original Wii content.

Sony as the first place? Not even close. Take the projected Sony and Nintendo numbers and reverse them and you have how this generation will close out. Not the other way around.

Now Playing: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

What is it about Shane Black comedies that makes them "almost ran's" in my book? The first Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout both have moments where they truly work, but for the most part come off as grab-bag cliche-filled explosion-fests where the heroes are screwed up but somehow figure out how to beat the bad guys in the end. The only work of Black's I've ever loved was his contribution to Predator, the success of which I attribute more to it being shot in the jungle far removed from studio interference. The less said about Last Action Hero the better.

So imagine my surprise when I watched Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang this past weekend and spent almost the entire time laughing my head off. This is Shane Black Unfiltered and the result is a film utterly unhinged that gleefully mocks the entire Los Angeles experience. Even when the film turns deadly serious towards the end, it quickly counters with a one-two punch of inspired comedy that do not cheapen the shocks. Instead, the comedy further proves just how out of his league the main character, Harry Lockheart, really is.

Lockheart isn't played by Robert Downey, Jr. so much as lived by Downey. Lockheart is a motor-mouthed petty thief from New York who stumbles into an audtion following a bungled robbery. He's convincing (hilariously so) enough that the producer (a vile Larry Miller) immediately sends him to Hollywood for a screen test. Lockheart gets partnered with a gay private investigator named Gay Perry (an equally inspired Val Kilmer) since the role is for a detective story. Shortly after arriving they become embroiled in a real life murder mystery involving Lockheart's childhood dream girl, played by delicious newcomer Michelle Monaghan.

Both Lockheart and his dreamgirl grew up as fans of hardened detective novellas so that's where they pull ideas from as bodies continue piling up around them. Lockheart's narration is priceless because he frequently breaks the fourth wall, so to speak, by sometimes interrupting his own thoughts during flashbacks with tangents and even telling people to get out of the shot. Black must have had a field day writing the script because the industry spoofs are as spot-on as those in Entourage. Imagine Ari Gold with gun and you have a good idea of the type of guy Lockheart is. You can tell that Black could have gone either way with the ending and he even admits as much via Lockheart's voice over at the end. Overall, the movie is a hugely entertaining, violent, pulpy, and raucously funny noir comedy.