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Ghostbusters (PG-13)



There's not much I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said (i.e. that it rocks), but I love how every time I watch this movie, I understand more and more of it. The first time I watched it ages ago, all I could remember was the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. The second time I caught such classic lines as "Yes, it's true, this man has no dick." This time I finally caught on to what "Keymaster" and "Gatekeeper" meant, and why Zuul and Vince Clortho had to possess Weaver and Moranis, only to turn back into dogs anyway.

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The Dragon and the George (Gordon R. Dickson)

So another series, another scene setter. The Dragon and the George follows Jim Eckert, a college... graduate, I think? seeking a teaching job who then, because of a fellow graduate's science project, ends up in the body of the dragon Gorbash in some parallel fantasy universe to save his fiancee and ends up having to save both his and the fantasy dimensions with the help of a ragtag team of adventurers including a knight, a wizard, Gorbash's dragon uncle, a talking wolf, a smaller dragon, a thief, and a master bowman. Pretty standard fantasy fare, I guess.

Now, a "George" is what dragons call humans, but I don't know if it refers to Jim's knight buddy Sir Brian, or Jim himself with the titular "dragon" being Gorbash. The ending also seemed a little muddy. First, they journey to the tower of ultimate evil but never actually enter it - they just meet up with a team of bad guys on the front lawn and settle the feud there. I also would have liked to have seen better reasoning for Jim deciding to stay in the fantasy dimension other than "we wouldn't have much of a series here if he'd gone back."

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The Muppet Show: Season 3 (DVDs)



I'm having a bit of trouble writing this, actually. By the third set the Muppets aren't quite having the same impact on me as the first set, but they're still consistently creative and entertaining. Although this was the first time I noticed a rather glaring goof in the series. In one episode of Pigs in Space, the ship lands on the planet Kuzbane (I think that's what it's called, anyway), and at one point when Link Heartthrob turns to the door you can see the actor's elbow sticking out of the puppet's arms. And while the muppets are generally so good at taking on their own lives that even when I could see the sticks on their arms I'd still completely forget they're puppets with people's hands up their bums, there was one skit with the guest start singing and dancing with a camel muppet, and for some reason I could not see it as a camel - I kept seeing it as two guys in a camel costume.

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Tyrian 2000 (PC)



For being Freeware, Tyrian was a pretty strong game. It's well designed, very pretty, the music's cool, and you really owe it to yourself to read the data cubes - there's actually some pretty amusing stuff in there.

The 2000 version has two episodes not in the original game, but they're really kinda worthless. It's like they weren't even designed by the same team. All the levels are rehashes of the planets from the first three episodes, with you having to go through several incredibly short Ixcumane levels in a row and Gyges turned from a Gigerian planet full of Gigerian aliens to a purple mechanical base with body parts flying around. Also, halfway through episode four I'd gotten a high enough score to buy and max out the best weapons, and I'd gotten this thick laser weapon that cut through barriers in a bonus level, so the rest of the game was just one big snooze.

But hey, you can get it for free just for sigining up at GOG.com. Just don't try to play it with a control pad plugged in (that causes the ship to drift into the bottom right corner for some reason. Other people on the GOG forum have had this problem).

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Halo 2 (Xbox, M)



Levels are a little less repetetive and it's a little longer than the first game (i.e. it actually took me three days to finish instead of two. Four if you count the day I didn't play at all because I had a headache and shoulder pain), but it's pretty much more of the same crap - mediocre alien shooting and vehicles that control like ass (and twice the game pulls this crap where it puts you in the Warthog to fight to avoid rolling over every time you go over a light bump in the road and crushing you, your driver, or your gunner and then after putting up with *that* for a few minutes dumps you into the Scorpion which is an absolute bore to drive. I also noticed Bungie fixed a mistake from the last game, where the Banshee wasn't an absolute bitch to pilot) in bland, uninspired environments. The main difference from Halo 1 is three levels have you playing as an Elite, but aside from being able to turn invisible instead of having a flashlight he plays exactly like Master Chief. Also, while Halo lacked anything resembling a final boss at least it had an ending - Halo 2 has something that I guess is supposed to be a final boss, then cuts the game short and basically tells the folks of 2004 to wait for Halo 3.

Halo 2 is also rather glitchy. Many movies had texture issues, where a character would start out looking like something out of Killer7 for a half second before their details loaded. The first time I killed all the aliens in the last room of the first level, the game didn't advance me and I ran around for several minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. After reloading my save and killing everyone again, the game finally let me continue. And one time I was plodding around some ruins with the Scorpion when the thing suddenly went flying into the sky, spinning wildly, then it blew up and dumped Master Chief about a hundred feet to his death (I think it had to do with some barrier generators I was probably sitting on). I laughed hysterically at that last one, but it still reenforces the notion that this game was rushed out.

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Dwarfs!? (PC, E)



Although I make it a point to only review games I finish, there really isn't an ending to this game. You start it up, pick the difficulty setting and time you want to play for, and play until you either run out of time or lose your town hall to water, lava, or enemies. I did get all the achievements except for the one for opening 2,000 caves, and the one for getting 500,000 points on the hardest difficulty setting. One is a grind-fest, the other drove me batty trying to get, and in any case, only 0.6% of the game's players have gotten that one (but then, the most commonly earned achievement is the only you get just for playing the Carnival minigame, and only 40% of the players have it).

Yeah, sorry for not reviewing it, but as I just said, there really isn't much to this. It's more a digital ant farm than an actual game.

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