Monthly Archives: March 2006

Minerva: Metastasis 2

To my substantial surprise, the Minerva project released another level. On the bright side, this means I got to play a little more Half-Life thingy, with the lovely headcrabs and all. On the less bright side, I’m reduced to recording fleeting thoughts on someone’s homebuilt game level. It’s like if I owned a Vespa. Sure, it’s well made and intriguing and all, but I still feel kind of ridiculous, you know?

It picks up right where the last level left off: exploring the unlikelily large underground Combine facility. Learning about the nasty headcrab soldier experimentation that’s been going on is plenty enough reason to annihilate the place, if only it was possible to discover a reactor or a spare nuclear device or something. Oh, well, maybe next level. (I had the impression that Metastasis as title implied ongoing title changes following a cancerous theme. The simple numbering instead has me split between maintaining this guess and expecting a very large game and revising the guess to expect that the title will ultimately be unsatisfying, just an authorial choice of cool word. It remains to be seen!)

16 Blocks

Obligatory action movie time! Except, 16 Blocks wasn’t quite as action-oriented as I thought, which was mostly good and slightly bad. Sure, there’s gunplay and chases and car crashes and whatnot, but with neither explosions nor fountains of blood. It’s mostly a talking movie, between Bruce Willis and his fellow cops, Willis and his somewhat crooked grand jury witness, Willis and his estranged family. Mostly, they talk about right and wrong and redemption, and about the line between any two of the three. It wasn’t especially trite, but it was definitely a retread. On the bright side, it had heart.

That said, I’m not sure about Willis’s career these days. ‘Cause, seriously, who can remember the last time he didn’t play a sad-eyed cop trying to protect a person or people from a corrupt system? (Okay, sure, that one time he was a sad-eyed psychiatrist instead.) I know for a fact that he was once funny. Can’t we have that guy, every now and then? This is an unreasonable complaint, though, because I am in no way dismissing his sad-eyed talent. That man can carry the weight of the world on his shoulders at the drop of a hat, and I believe it every time. I bet it’s because he has a kid named Rumor. That would wear on anyone.

The Swarm War

So, I got around to finishing that Dark Nest trilogy, wherein the spectre of a permanent galactic civil war is faced. This would be bad, because if everyone in the Star Wars galaxy died, a stable of some dozen or two authors would be out of jobs, and some of them are pretty good at this. Without meaning to make a spoiler out of it, let’s say that I’m going to presume that the presses have not been stopped as a result of the events in The Swarm War.

The good: the ongoing coolness of someone getting a pirated copy of Revenge of the Sith into Luke Skywalker’s hands, so he can finally get a handle on his roots, and pretty much anytime Chiss are both on the page and speaking rather than being battle fodder. Oh, and all the Jedi Council scenes, especially the characterization parts of them. I’m grooving on Jacen Solo, in ways I will elaborate below the cut. The bad: a lack of Luke using any force lightning like I was promised by the cover, and anything with insect hive mind stuff, because I’m just as unsatisfied with the consequences now as I was when the trilogy started. By and large, it reminds me of the Black Fleet trilogy from a long time ago. Bits and pieces of really cool stuff interspersed with generic uninteresting war. But this time, as I’ve hinted, the characters were a lot more interesting than then.

And, the spoilers:
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