Entertainment & Sports: June 2008 Archives
Two very different online flight simulators.
- This (nameless?) app from Electric Oyster lets you cruise over a beautiful snowy mountain range.
- Goggles is a simple flight sim that let's you fly over a Google Map location and shoot stuff.
If you liked Super Mario Brothers, you'll hate The Unfair Platformer.
(HT: Andy.)
I haven't yet actually seen such a thing, but The Onion imagines a game in which you control a character who plays World of Warcraft. 'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft':
I suppose that most sports video games could be considered meta-games in this same vein, but since the construction is foundational to the genre I'm not sure they count.
So I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this afternoon... eh. There were some good parts, and a few solid laughs, but....
- The bad guys weren't very convincing.
- The origin of the "crystal skulls" didn't bother me as much as it did my wife, but I never had the sense of epic adventure that filled Raiders and Last Crusade.
- Harrison Ford is old, but at least the movie didn't pretend otherwise.
- Marian Ravenwood's reappearance was mostly annoying.
- Shia LaBeouf was mostly ok.
- I hate commies as much as the next guy, but the Nazi characters in the earlier movies had more depth.
- Some of the actions sequences were quite good, especially the jungle chase scene.
- I liked the 1930s setting better than the 1950s.
- The adventures Indy reminisces about (that never got made into movies) sound more exciting than the adventure he was actually on at the moment.
If there were ten Indiana Jones movies and this had been number seven, instead of being the last of four, I would have been perfectly content. Not the best, but not terrible. However, bringing Indy back after 20 years for this was anticlimactic. It's a real shame that there weren't more Indy movies made over the past decades, and the inadequacies of Crystal Skull make that shame more acute.
