Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

riday night, Malaya wanted to go out to eat, and was willing to treat me to dinner at Chili's, providing that I looked good enough to accompany her in her cute tight t-shirt. So I put on some jeans and a nice long sleeved button up slightly-iridescent black/gray shirt, and off we went.  It's official: I'm arm candy for a more financially-successful woman.  She even gave me scrumptious back and thigh rub later on, since I was sore from jogging on Wednesday and again Friday.

You know, life as a himbo isn't so bad, once you get used to it.

A new reader mailed in her entry to the "my first time" page yesterday, and it's now been added to that page. Unfortunately, I had about 8 months worth of other mails to that page, all of which were lost in the big email client crash last month, so there's a break from last May until this March.

If you sent in a first time mail that's not on the page now, please resend or rewrite it, and I'll post it ASAP.  And if you've never sent in one at all, now is a great time to do so; I'm always interested in hearing how people first encountered my site and what they thought about it.

Harry the Knowles reviews the first public screening anywhere of Kill Bill 2, and the news is very promising.  His review isn't as unreadable as usual, at least once you skim over the opening 8 paragraphs about how busy he was that day and the latest health problem related to his being grotesquely overweight that forced him to attend the movie screening in a wheelchair, and he doesn't drop any big spoilers, so it's safe to read.  More or less.  A couple of quotes.

As Quentin took his seat and the theater went dark… a hushed buzz went through the crowd. This was clearly an audience that “wanted” to see KILL BILL VOLUME 2.

The end result? As the final Q&U hit the screen and the projector turned off, the audience rose to its collective feet, turned to face Quentin and went on to applaud for 5 minutes. It was so overwhelming that Harvey did not have the Research Firm conducting the screening pass out cards, clearly… Their work here was done.

The film is perfect as I could have ever hoped for.

...

From others, I heard about 9 other “favorite moments.” In fact, I didn’t hear the same one twice. This is that sort of film. If you were turned off by the gore of the first film and found yourself wanting more of the ‘verbal” Tarantino dialogue… well, this is the film for you. It is a masterpiece. I’ve been reporting on test screenings for going on 8 years now, I’ve never heard of one with a standing ovation – it was overwhelming – like something you hear about, but never see. The film was that good.

In KB1, I wasn't turned off by the gore.  I enjoyed it, mildly.  I was just bored with the endless, endless fight scene in the nightclub at the end, and there weren't any of the great, quotable, enjoyable QT moments that so populated Pulp Fiction.  I only saw Kill Bill the one time, and haven't really thought about it at all since then.  If I had the DVD in front of me I'd probably watch it, but it's not really calling to me, even as a memory refresher before KB2 appears in April.  I'm interested in seeing part 2, but mostly to hope that it's a vast improvement on the disappointing part 1.

Also in the review, Harry reports Quentin saying that it's a rough cut of the movie, unfinished in many ways, and that they're working feverishly to finish it in time. I find that pretty surprising, given that all of the filming was finished what, a year ago? The initial word was that they'd make one three hour movie and release it last year, but they ended up putting out just volume 1 then, and had plans for volume 2 in February of this year.  A month ago, basically.

And now they're just almost finished with the editing of the second one?  So are they running way behind schedule or did QT spend a bunch of time redoing stuff for the KB1 DVD release (which I assume is going to occur just before KB2 hits the theaters) or did they take the extra time to totally redo the second movie, based on fixing what so many viewers didn't like about the action-only first one?

On the other extreme of geek fan reaction, we've got the new Will Smith vehicle, I Robot. The trailer was just released, it's pretty mediocre, and the fan boys on AICN are in a fever of disgust at the bad CGI on the robots, and Will Smith's insipid smirking and giggling.

That was perhaps the most depressing trailer I've ever seen.....
Will Smith has CLEARLY fucked this movie in the ass. "Its a can opener for God's sake!" THAT is only one fuckin line that couldn't have been in the script before he got involved. And fuck me, if those Robots looked any shittier, CGI would have to be outlawed. This movie is going to be even gasher than Van Helsing. And I never thought that was possible.

Wild Wild Robot
Yes, this will be one of the biggest flops of the Summer. What a disappointing turnout for an Asimov story to get "sugared up" by a pathetic Will Smith. This lame-looking movie will never sell. Why do they always make Sci-Fi movies within our lifetime? 2035 is too soon. Kiss your career goodbye Will Smith...you are now box-office poison.

I can picture the Will Smith music video right now. Legions of I-ROBOTS dancing behind him. Will doing the robot rap dance. Oh how excitingly cheesy
I got an advance copy of the will smith song - "We got the I-ROBOTS. They're bustin loose! It started a war! We tried to call a truce, but no go, I-ROBOT's in control O! Chorus - I-ROBOTS in control dance all over the wall, I-ROBOTS in control dance all over the floor, I-ROBOTS in control dance all over the, uh oh! call security! I-ROBOTS wanna scary you!

This movie is all wrong...
Having read I, Robot a couple of times I was really looking forward this film. I, Robot is not an action-packed explosion/fight-fest. It's a much calmer, thought-provoking set of stories - more akin to an old fashioned detective tale than a Men In Black sequel. I had hoped this would have turned into this years 'Bladerunner'. From the trailer though it appears to have no air of mystery, intrigue, danger and surprise. I've nothing against comedy in films, but if you mix comedy with killer robots, along with a B-rate actor you're likely to end up with an abortion of a movie. Another science fiction movie falls by the wayside due to cheap, quick-thrills, effects laden, poor storytelling! It's a real shame money talks louder than talent.

It goes on and on, post after post, by the hundreds.

But seriously, what did they expect? I mean it's Will Smith.  Apparently he did some real acting in Ali, but no one saw it and no one cares.  In every other movie he made since he became a star he's been Will Smith playing Will Smith.  Sort of the black Tom Cruise, back before Cruise started actually acting, when he was just a pretty, tooth-gleaming, smirking himbo.  Thank god Cruise never thought he was a rapper or dancer, at least.

In better new trailer news, a new full-length Shrek 2 trailer is out, and it's... well... it doesn't immediately shatter your hopes that this sequel might not entirely suck ass.  It's also got a heap of plot and funny scene spoilers, so watch it or don't watch it depending on how curious you are, how much you want to avoid spoilers, and how sure you are that you're going to see the movie anyway.

I like Shrek, Malaya loves it, so given what we know of Hollywood and sequels, we're looking forward to Shrek 2 with extreme trepidation.  After all, can it possibly have a decent story? Can what's basically a kid's movie stay funny and fresh and satirical and subversive and entertaining for adults?  Or were the characters played out in one movie, the whole fractured fairy tale thing beaten to death, leaving this one doomed to be 90 minutes of pretty colors and flat jokes to the dying dirge of Mike Myers as the green Fat Bastard?

But first... Dynomite!

One of the many fine-looking but sporadically-buggy Pop Cap games, Dynomite has been my occasional addiction for several months.  It's a blatant rip off of the old arcade game Bust a Move, a game in which you controlled two little dragon things that shot colored bubbles up at an ever-descending wall of many-colored bubbles, in the head to head mode, which was great fun.  There was also a puzzle mode with 20 levels of various layouts and roughly-increasing difficulty, and you had to clear those by popping every bubble on the screen before the continually dropping board crushed you. This was also fun, but the head to head mode was far more popular in the arcade I used to frequent.

The Pop Cap game is identical to the arcade game, with a few tiny differences.

• The motif is now dinosaurs and dinosaur eggs that you fire with a sling shot, rather than colored bubbles that two dragons fire with pump-controlled compressed air. This is a purely cosmetic change.
   
• The puzzle mode has different puzzles than the arcade game. More on those below.
    
• In both Bust a Move and Dynomite, you only get the colors of bubbles/eggs that you have on the screen.  Dynomite is a bit tougher about this, with the upcoming eggs determined 3 in advance (you can only see the next one in your preview) so you'll often blow up or drop the last blue (for example), with a green shot and a red on deck.  You'll shoot the red with a yellow on deck, and then when the yellow is in the slingshot, suddenly there's a blue in the on deck spot, when you'd thought you were permanently rid of them.
    
• In the arcade game you scored big bonuses by building up a huge cluster of bubbles, and then breaking the stem at the top of it, dropping the whole thing at once. This is a bonus in Dynomite, but not a giant one, and the puzzle mode is so much harder than the arcade one was that playing for a high score isn't really a priority.  You're playing to beat the levels.
  

• You get bonuses in Dynomite by breaking something with multiple consecutive shots, up to 9 of them in a row, at which point you get a Dynomite combo, and something special happens to your next shot.  I'd say what but it's pretty cool when you finally manage to get a combo that long and see it for yourself.

  (Hint, go for bonus combos after you have a round all but beaten, using the last 2 colors, with a formation something like this.)
    

• Firing a bubble below the death line in Bust a Move was instant death.  In Dynomite it's part of the game, and you've got about a second after an egg goes under that line to break it, or break something above and drop it off, before the "mama dinosaur" stomps you flat and kills you.  This adds a lot of strategy and dimension to the game board, once you learn to think fast rather than panicking at the strident alarm tone.  You can get off about 6 shots once you go past the line, giving you a good chance to throw away enough eggs to get to a color that will save your ass.

Playing the perpetual dropping wall mode solo seems pretty pointless to me, so I've spent my quarters (so to speak) on the puzzle mode. There are three difficulty levels, sort of.  In actually there are just 19 puzzle levels (if you finish them all it just starts over again) and easy starts at level 1, medium starts at lvl 8, and hard starts at level 13. This is actually pretty useful, since 11 of the first 12 levels are very easy, and if you had to play through all of them every single time to get to the challenging ones in the teens, it would be damn tedious.

If anyone plays the game already or starts playing it and mails to ask for some tips on the harder levels, I'll post about it again, but for now I'm just going to talk about the last few levels, and big one, #18, that's really the back breaker.

This is level 17, or the 5th level you get if you start on hard. It's the first really difficult one, at least initially, when it's maddening.  It's a very easy level to look at, but the dinosaur foot moves down another click every 4 shots, which is far faster than any other level.  I died and cursed in frustration and annoyance the first half dozen times I got to this one, since it seems so cheesy. You battle though these huge puzzles with strategy, working patiently and burning off bad color eggs until you get a good one to make progress with, and then you get this piece of shit gimmick level that crushes you flat in about 15 seconds if you don't shoot very wisely.

The good news is that once I got used to the speed and figured a strategy (go for the yellow, and try to bridge a green from the side to the middle) I started passing it 50% of the time, and now I'd say I'm up around 80%, with at least another 15% times I could/should have passed it, but screwed up a shot or misread something in the blaring alarm panic time. Sometimes though, you just get shit colors and die with like 7 straight blues when you need a green or yellow to live.

This is your reward for passing the cheesy super quick level 17.  It's level 18, the 6th one if you start on hard, and it's a bitch. Difficult, and literally impossible at least oh... 60% of the time.  Possibly more like 75% of the time, since I don't count my failures that closely. 

The problem with #18 is that you have about 10 crappy colors on the top of the board, which means that you might get eggs of any of those colors (you can only get eggs of the colors that exist on the screen) and have no where at all to put them.  This level is so hard since you always start off with several useful colors (orange, orange, pink, blue, gray gray) but then it goes random.  You can, and must, clear out the left spot, as you see in the shot below this one, but if you never get a green, or get a green but then never get a red to drop the whole block corner down, you die.

The level doesn't move down quickly, but when you get stripes, black, blue, merlin hat, orange, bug in pink, etc, and have nothing to match them to and nowhere to dump them, you just get crushed the second time the foot moves down.  In all of the times I've done this level (at least 50, but like I said above, I haven't been counting exactly), I've gotten both sides of the bottom cleared off about five times, and the middle broken (just need black and merlin hat eggs on a bank shot) and cleared about thrice.

I usually get one side cleared off, most often the left, and have a chance to dump balls in there, and often I can get the middle broken also, but this level is all about failure, and failure that's out of your hands, since if you never get the green and then the red to break the lower sides off... you die.

It takes about 8 minutes to get to this level and die on it, on hard, if you play fast.  I've done that a lot of times.

My triumph came, at last, a couple of days ago.  I got a good start on 18, got the left cleared almost immediately, got the middle cleared with good bank shots while I was dumping crap in the top left, and by keeping the lower right entirely clear of anything, I finally got a green and then a red with the blocks still two rows up.  By far the quickest I'd ever managed that, and yes, it's entirely due to me playing this level enough times to finally get a sequence of colors good enough to make upward progress in time. Even with that great start I still barely, barely made it, and had to clear the yellows out of those top inside corners with very sharp bank shots and the upper inverted V of blocks down one space from the bottom.

As I broke the last egg, succeeding after months of trying and failing dozens and dozens and dozens of times, I just sat back in my chair with my fists thrust skyward in triumph for a good 30 seconds. It was like a perfect reminder of why gaming is fun, and especially why difficult games are good; when you do finally beat them, it's just so goddamned sweet.

After the incredible struggle of level 18, I was prepared for two more nearly-impossible levels, and was entertaining thoughts of the game being unbeatable. After all, I'd had at least 40 or 50 tries at level 18 when I knew how the level worked and what I had to do to beat it, and on just 2 or 3 of those did I get pieces that gave me any chance of winning. What if 19 and 20 (as I was assuming there would be 20 levels as in the arcade version) were each as hard as 18?  What were the odds of me ever getting that incredibly elusive "Goldilocks game" 3 times in a row?

Unfortunately, level 19 is the last level, and it's what you see here. A big screen, but not even as hard as #14.  I passed it very easily, while playing super cautiously, and was bitterly disappointed when level 20 came up, and it was just level 1 all over again.  They don't even seem to change so the foot moves down faster, or you get more colors, or anything.   It's just identical, so in theory you could go through all the way back to the virtually impossible level 18 again, with almost no trouble.

I went for multiple dynomite combos on the first couple of levels, setting up huge walls of the last 2 colors when I had the levels almost finished, until I finished with a dynomite and crashed the program (as usually happens), bored with doing the same levels over again.

I wouldn't say that Dynomite is a great example of how a game should be hard, since that goddamned level 18 is almost impossibly hard, and it's entirely out of your hands.  It reminds me of why I loathe slot machines so much; it's all luck and if you don't get good colored eggs, or a good spin on the slot machine, you lose. A really good, hard, game is all about skill.  Sure you might need some luck or a good break to beat something really hard, but if you play brilliantly, and with a good strategy, you should have a decent chance to win, eventually.

It also reminded me of why I got sick of arcade games in the late 90s.  So many of them were no longer much about skill, but just about playing for a few minutes per quarter until the impossible nature of the game claimed you again, and you had to stick in more money to continue.  A great player could get through on a lot less money than a bad player, but there was still no way on earth to do most games without continuing multiple times.

I grew up playing the earliest arcade games, and was a big fan of them for years after that. Galaxian, Defender, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, Gauntlet, Super Mario Bros, 1943, Street Fighter 2, 720º, etc.  In those games, if you were good, you could play as long as you could stay alive.  The earliest games had no end, they just went on and on forever. After a while manufacturers figured that a set ending would keep wizards from clogging up their games all day, so they put in a fixed objective or ending, but made it very hard, and made it take a very long time to reach.  For old school players like myself (god that's an absurd phrase) "continuing" was a mark of shame and failure.  You played the game from the start, and found ways to beat it, or you didn't beat it at all.  If you had to continue (not that the early games had any such option) you were weak and amateurish, and we built our skills through endless repetition and mastered the early levels before moving on.

Of course it helped that we were kids with hours of free time per day, games only cost a quarter or a token, and we had the patience of the young to repeat the same early areas endlessly as we mastered the game. Plus there was no Internet back then, home games were pretty low quality, and mostly lacking in the head to head/communal fun of a busy arcade.  Even a decade or more later, I still hold the times when I won 20 or 30 or 50 games in a row against all comers on Bust a Move, or Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition, or  Puzzle Fighter 2, as my favorite moments of gaming. 

That was then.  Now, arcade games now are almost entirely cheesy quarter-suckers, where you need to put in more money each quarter/period/inning in various sports games, or the action is just so impossible that no one can live for long and you must continue to keep the mission going. Plus most of them are 2 or 3 or 4 quarters just to get started, which feels like a rip off to me, since I'm poor.  I'd imagine the kids today all play their home computers online for the hours I spent in arcades or Pizza Hut gamerooms, and that's what I'd be doing today if I were 10 or 14 or 17 and into gaming.  Why go spend $1 for 10 minutes in an arcade when you can play on the computer your parents got for your school work, playing a game you got for your birthday, and playing it all day, online, head to head, for free on your parent's ISP? Plus you can cheat and power game with bots and then sell your l33t items on eBay and double your allowance.

God, if I could have earned money playing Track and Field and NBA Jam and Cyberball, I'd never have gone home.

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