Entries Tagged 'Disappointment' ↓

This past Sunday I saw Latter Days. It has 7.6/10 on IMDB, 77% RT community rating, and has won three indie film festival awards. It is the pinnacle of gay cinema.

But it is still awful.

The movie begins with an introduction to Christian, a wannabe actor in L.A. working as a waiter. Sound cliché yet? Also he’s gay, and an absolute slut. A group of Mormons move in next door to him and his coworkers bet him $50 that he can’t manage to sleep with one of them — a bet which he takes, but later regrets when he falls in love with one of the Mormons.

Latter Days is 90 seconds of soft-core porn wrapped in 106 minutes of eye-roll-inducing garbage. The only emotion it evoked in me was pity for the guy who highly recommended the movie to a room full of us who were so obviously hating it.

I imagine that the target audience is not people who want to enjoy a quality film, but those who want to be reassured that the too-pretty guy who cheated on them with eleven other people will some day learn what it is like to be in love, and chase after them at the airport.

I rate Latter Days 1 out of 5 homophobic Joseph Gordon-Levitts.

Tonight John, Emory, Tony, and I played Starcraft: The Board Game for the first time ever. I wish I could say it was fantastic fun, but it wasn’t. For the benefit of the makers of the game who may or may not be reading my blog, I have divided up my complaints into a few major points below:

STBG is too convoluted.
So, you have your planets, one of which is your starting planet and upon which you place your starting base — in one of the 2-4 “areas.” Then you have your order tokens, SPECIAL order tokens, base tokens, worker tokens, transport tokens, module/upgrade tokens, building tokens, dozens of plastic figures for units, resource cards, technology card deck, combat card deck, and your faction sheet. On top of those things you need to keep track of your conquest points (which, in the Starcraft environment don’t seem to make any sense.) There simply is too much going on, and too many fucking tokens to keep track of it all. I still have no idea what the cryptic symbols on my upgrade token meant. K.I.S.S.

STBG is SLOW.
Setting up the board and distributing / setting up our respective piles of tokens and cards took an hour. Sixty minutes. Granted, it was our first time ever and likely will only take 20 minutes next time, but it still has a substantial learning curve simply to get everything started. Each turn then comprised of three phases — planning, execution, and regrouping. During the planning phase you set up your order tokens in little stacks on whatever planets you want to build units on / invade / etc. This is a fairly quick process. Execution, on the other hand, sucks. People play their orders — initiating combat (more on that later), shuffling through cards to research technologies, building workers / units / bases / structures, and move units around the board. This involves a lot of waiting around, unless you take that time to study your own cards and potentially miss an important development.

Combat in STBG sucks.
The process itself involves aligning units against each other in formation and drawing, then playing combat cards. This takes a while. If you have four units attacking four other units, you have four completely separate skirmishes set up which all resolve individually and may result in a situation where a sole surviving zealot causes three hydralisks and a zergling to flee in terror. Stupid. Units themselves do not have any base stats (despite the seemingly useless listing of “average stats” for units on a quick reference card) so it is entirely possible to have an ültralisk lose to a firebat if you happen to place or draw a shitty card for it. That is retarded. Instead, units should utilize some form of base stats, and build off of it with the combat/technology cards. Or, simply scrap combat cards altogether. Assuming you lose a battle, the losses are catastrophic. Not only do you lose the units, you potentially can lose your base (and consequently, the ability to gather resources from the planet), and all workers which were harvesting from it. When you start with seven workers, losing four sets you back one to two turns. When the game lasts only three turns, … well … that’s just poor design.

Suddenly, it’s over.
At the end of our third turn — over three hours after we began — we drew two event cards which ended the game. Just like that. In a game which takes so long to set up, which takes multiple turns to make any reasonable progress, it is absolutely ridiculous to have the game simply end at the snap of fingers. Perhaps they were trying to emulate the experience of everyone but one person going linkdead. In the three hours we played none of us progressed past the second tech tier with any of our buildings, meaning we had perhaps three different types of units altogether.

In conclusion..
I think STBG could be a fun game but will most certainly require some user-modifications to the rules to speed things up and make combat less shitty. With D&D Minis this was easily accomplished by lowering the point and unit limits. I’m not entirely certain yet what we will need to do to fix STBG up next time. I wouldn’t spend the $80 for it yet (unless you really want some purple and green Hydralisk minis) but if you are considering spending three hours playing a Starcraft-themed board game, you probably have nothing to lose by trying it out if a friend of yours already owns it.

So, yesterday the firmware 1.1.3 jailbreak for the iPhone was released. After work I sped home as fast as the bus would allow, and went about turning my iPhone into a brick.

First, I updated via iTunes to 1.1.3 to upgrade the baseband to the latest version so that I would be able to use the Google MyLocation goodness. Then, I downgraded to 1.1.1 and jailbroke it. Unfortunately, at this point I received a message saying my sim was unrecognized / couldn’t be activated. I updated to the 1.1.3 hacked firmware, and my sim was still fucked up. So, I had a jailbroken 1.1.3 phone with no phone service. Fairly useless to me.

I downgraded and upgraded a few times, in an attempt to get back to a jailbroken 1.1.1 state with phone service, to no avail, as my attempts to downgrade the baseband failed. I just resorted to restoring to a pristine 1.1.3 — non-jailbroken — for now, just to restore my phone service.

So, I have jiggly icons now, and Google LocateMe, and phone service, but no Installer.app.

Edit: Yet.

Two posts in one day! I feel myself getting burned-out already.

I saw the movie Everything is Illuminated tonight, thanks to Netflix. I give it 3.5 out of 5 tired stares.

It started so well.. it was amusing, yet a little touching. You were drawn in fairly quickly by the various neurosis of the main characters. From “Alex”, the wig– uh, Ukranian Hip-Hop aficionado / translator and his physically abusive dysfunctional family to the obsessive-compulsive collector “Jonathan” played by the fabulously-gay hobbit Elijah Wood.

Half way through, however, it falls flat. Alex’s translations to and from Jonathan to various other characters no longer amuse and, in fact, hurt the movie. While sometimes he repeats verbatim what a character says — hearing lines twice is always a blast — often in the last quarter of the movie he completely fails to translate anything of meaning at all. Several paragraphs are reduced to three word sentence fragments. And yet, somehow, Jonathan intuits what is said. Magical.

And now, the part which will make people hate me.

I grow tired of the holocaust movies. I cannot name all of the ones I have seen, and though they all attempt to shamelessly tug at the sadness-strings to cheaply wring some tears out of you, every one of them evokes the same response from me. Anger. What the hell was ANYONE involved thinking? 1) Hey, herding people into train cars and making them drink urine sounds like fun. Oh wait, no, that NEVER sounds like fun. That sounds like twisted sadistic shit. 2) Hey, being herded into train cars and being forced to drink urine sounds like fun. Oh wait, no, there is no fucking way I should be forced to do this and perhaps I should fight back. 3) Hey, sitting back and watching people being herde– NO IT REALLY ISN’T FUN, DO SOMETHING TO STOP IT.

Passive resistance be damned — if you are herded into train cars and forced to drink urine you and the dozens, hundreds, thousands around you need to jump the nearest guard, take his weapon, and right the horrible wrongs occurring around you. Yes, the jews (and others) were victimized by the Nazis. Yes, that’s awful. No, it should never happen again. No, we should not herd every non-jew into a traincar of guilt and force them to drink their own pride. Pride is what we all need to avoid this ever happening again — not guilt or shame or sadness. I cannot fathom how much of ones own humanity the have to lose in order to allow themselves to be turned into sacrificial animals. I just don’t get it. How utterly oppressed by society, by government, by government, by government, even by friends and family must you be in order to lose that tiny part of you that whispers in your head.. “hey, being herded like an animal and forced to drink my own urine is wrong, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore?” I guess that movie came out after WWII, but I imagine that at least some people still thought it. That level of oppression and mind-manipulation scares the hell out of me.

For once I want to see a holocaust-related movie where there is a hero, not just victims and escapees. I don’t know if that is possible while still remaining true to history.