Dispatches from the Internet
Okay, so I did in fact go to see Prince of Persia the other night, mostly because I desperately needed the distraction, and also because I’d heard that it was the best video game to movie adaptation made… which isn’t hard to do, given the competition. Still, I wanted to go see it, and so I did. I fully expected to see something on par with Doom, only with sand and painful comic-relief characters.
I was completely wrong. The film’s not a masterpiece, and I don’t think I’ll really be trying to see it again (maybe it is good for a rental when it releases), but it was a solid adventure flick and really, that’s all it had to be. It included just enough of the game’s mechanics to relate in some way to the game, and that was it. That was also enough, because (and I think I might have mentioned this before) you cannot tell a game story the same way you tell a movie story. Pretty sure I’ve mentioned that before. The Prince of Persia guys got it right, and the only thing that keeps the movie from being really good is… well, is that it’s a predictable adventure story with a twist that you see coming a mile away (plus if you’ve seen the end of the game, you have a pretty good idea of how the movie is going to end).
I would really, really like to have seen more time jumping—oh, and that whole ‘this magic wasn’t meant for humans!’ line would have been more effective if we saw some kind of negative effects from overuse along the lines of Warrior Within’s monster thing. Then again, do we really need to see a sequel to this one? Probably not. I didn’t stick around for the credits, because the guys out here are not big credit-watchers (plus the song playing over the credits made me want to curl up and die), so I don’t know if they stuck a sting in the end to imply that shit was going down and would have to be dealt with, but really you don’t need that sort of shit. The only other problem was that people kept telling Jake Gyllenhall ‘SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE PRINCE OF PERSIA,’ or ‘TRULY YOU ARE A PRINCE OF PERSIA’ or some variation thereupon, all the while winking at the camera as if to say ‘See? We keep saying the title of the movie!’
Anyway… I’m in a new place, living-quarters wise, and work on the dissertation is in full swing; 5000 words have already been committed to paper and it remains to be seen whether or not I will keep any of them, but that’s progress. Other changes include running more and actually having to see off people I didn’t want to see go. This isn’t what you come here for though, so I’ll keep that crap to a minimum.
There has apparently been a games conference or something going on, which is cool I guess if you are into that sort of thing. I’m intrigued by what Nintendo is doing this year: apparently they have decided to make some fucking video games, which has my full support. Other stuff looks pretty damned good as well, but if Microsoft and Sony jack off any harder over their movement based peripherals I am seriously going to flip the fuck out hard.
Homestuck continues to rock the fuck out, both figuratively and literally, which is the sort of thing that warms the cockles of my heart, because I am always glad to see that my faith in Andrew Hussie is not misplaced. Certainly I will have to do an awful lot of writing on that particular little delicacy (as well as get back to playing Fallout, it is now officially research material so I’ll have to keep notes and shit on particular bits that jump out at me… dear lord, but it’s a lot of work when I actually sit down and think about it and it almost makes me want to throw up a little on account of nerves.
I have nothing else to say, and I’m too lazy to hunt down some links of interest for you ingrates. Go listen to the Homestuck music team’s jams, it works better if you’ve actually read from the beginning (and honestly at this point if you haven’t, I need desperately to know what your half-assed excuse is for not reading one of the best things going on the internet or off it), especially in the case of volume five, which is both a collection of some of the music from the flashes in act four and a sort of experimental soundtracking of everything that came before, which is ballin’ to the nth degree. Good, good stuff. Can’t stress this enough. You owe it to yourself to take the time to read this thing.
Go read it! If you have already read it and know what I’m talking about, then don’t worry—we’re cool.
