lordmyk | Recent Entries

Hello everyone (or whoever has access to this, I'm still not 100% how this site works) but after several months of continually forgetting about Dreamwidth and having a lot going on with just about everything I'm trying to get to a place where I can get back to things and just sort of reboot, y'know? So I'm going to be trying to continue the movie and video game things I was doing, and I'm rebooting my comic Zorgnox's Depository of Earth Sundries and I intend to continue Hankbert.

I've decided to serialize some of my short stories on my website and the Fictosphere. Same post, just two different places, because that's not confusing at all. Here's the first part of Rat Trap, featuring Hank Kielson.It's a fun little story and you can go to my webpage to read it.

I've been playing Sonic Superstars and while I enjoyed it I must say that the final bosses were extremely frustrating. The final boss of the story mode was, as in most Sonic games, Eggman/Robotnik and while there were bits which seemed impossible at first eventually I was able to learn the patterns and all that and defeat him.

This unlocked "Trip's Story" which was a hard mode in which you could only use Trip who's new and a lizard. On the whole, a nice way to play the game again, until the final boss who is Nack the Weasel/Fang the Sniper or whatever they're calling him these days and he has a bunch of moves which will automatically kill Trip, including one where he launches her at the screen and she smacks against it which just seemed like it was adding insult to injury. And once you've done enough damage to him he pulls out this move which destroys 90% of the ground. Yet, after a while, I was able to figure something out the best way to get out of everything's way and finally best him.

Finishing this unlocked "The Last Story" in which Super Sonic has to fight a massive dragon, and it's a fight whose only real difficulty is getting enough rings to maintain the Super Sonic form because without it you die. And you lose a ring every second and while there's rings floating around, you're entirely at the mercy of what the game wants to give you and there were several times when one of Sonic's allies were about to come give him some rings when the dragon would take over the screen and all those rings would just be lost. Also, there's only certain times you can damage the dragon so a lot of the time you're just flying around trying desperately to grab as many rings as you can while you wait to attack. I managed to get to the second part of the fight (all three boss fights have multiple parts and if you die during any point you have to start over which certainly isn't a surprise but makes each attempt a marathon) with 80 rings one time and still lost because I ran out during what I hope was the dragon's final attack. Eventually I just said, "No more!" and decided that the dragon can do whatever it's trying to do if the game isn't going to give me the necessary tools to defeat it. Perhaps someday I'll try again.

All in all, Sonic Superstars is a good game with some extremely frustrating final bosses. At least it gives you unlimited lives, which definitely takes a little sting out of it.

Welcome to the third round of the first bracket of Lord Myk's Movie Kombat, called so because I'm pitting my DVD collection against itself to see what my favorite movie is! Movies at the store are already getting wind of it, ejecting themselves off the shelves to attack me or hide! One one side, we have the sequel to The Abominable Dr. Phibes!

Dr. Phibes Rises Again, which takes place three years after the first movie but was released only a year later, sees Dr. Phibes (still played by Vincent Price) attempting to take his dead wife Victoria to Egypt in order to find a mystical River of Life which will restore her and grant them both eternal life. Vulvania is also there, her fate in the previous movie ignored and her origins largely unexplored. Instead of using murder as a means towards revenge, Phibes is instead using it to remove all the obstacles which get in his way. He's still as charmingly theatrical as ever, already having a hidden lair set up in Egypt and having all sorts of tools to show those fools why they shouldn't get in his way. Inspector Trout's also back from the first movie, chasing Phibes with his boss and offering comic relief.

The major obstacle is a man named Biederbeck who also seeks the River of Life in order to elongate his own unnatural existence, as it's revealed throughout the film that Biederbeck is hundreds of years old and has been using an elixir to keep himself going. The man is so driven by his quest that he ignores all the other people in his life, such as his girlfriend Diana, and Phibes takes him to task for this at the climax of the film, after which the good doctor and his coffin-bound corpse-wife drift down an underground river while Phibes sings "Over the Rainbow" and Biederbeck, deprived of the life-giving water, ages rapidly.

This film is certainly not as good as the first, but it still has plenty of good moments. It's also interesting that while Phibes does kill plenty of people over the course of the two movies, he's almost sympathetic while he does so since he's driven not by a lust for money or power, but simply to avenge (and later restore) the love of his life. In some alternate universe we might have gotten more films starring Phibes, in which he goes up against eccentric semi-mortals whose goals are less pure than his own.

QUICK BITS

MOVIE: Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1971)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: The B-Masters Cabal
OBTAINED: Best Buy
WATCHED BEFORE: Yes
WATCHED WITH: Alone
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Good

On the other side, we have Brandon Lee's second film and what appears to the first film featured in this series that's been on RiffTrax:

Laser Mission is a film born for afternoons on basic cable, and my copy is on a two-pack with Abraxas which I purchased from Wal-Mart for one dollar, meaning that my viewing experience was more like watching something taped off TV rather than any sort of DVD experience. It was, perhaps, the most appropriate way to watch the movie which is an action movie so by-the-books that it features Germanic bad guys and a random ninja showing up. The plot is that Brandon Lee's Michael Gold has been hired by the United States government to get a laser scientist named Professor Braun on their side. During their meeting, Gold is knocked out and Braun is captured, so Gold has to go get him back with the help of the scientist's daughter, Alissa. There's lots of chase sequences, some gunplay, and a few explosions before everything is done.

The surprising thing about the movie is that it's not that bad. It's not the best action movie you've ever seen, but the cast manages to overcome the script and it's enjoyable to watch them interact with each other. Lee definitely shows off his acting and action talents, and most of the rest of the cast does the most with what they've been given. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the film's theme, "Mercenary Man", which was an alternate title for the film, and plays several times during the film but should not have been.

QUICK BITS

MOVIE: Laser Mission (1989)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: The Internet, maybe?
OBTAINED: Wal-Mart
WATCHED BEFORE: Yes
WATCHED WITH: Alone
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Meh

3... 2... 1... FIGHT!

Dr. Phibes Rises Again immediately gets some points for Vincent Price, who elevates every project he's involved with, and being the sequel to one of my favorite horror movies. Laser Mission gains some ground since it has some more interesting scenery, including one scene which takes place at a zoo or something, but both movies also have incredibly long sequences in which there's nothing but sand. Walking on sand, driving on sand, riding horses on sand, killing people on sand, sand, sand, sand. Why is there so much sand?

The films both feature women whom are given a fair amount to do, with Laser Mission's Alissa being able to hold her own almost as well as Gold and Phibes' Vulvania performing her duties perfectly and then retreating to a weird mirror tube or... something. It's mysterious and the closest thing we get to any explanation as to who or what she was. Phibes does have better comic relief, but this is because the comic relief in Laser Mission comes from two Cuban soldiers who start off fine and are generally all right until one of them discovers the other is a woman. The woman, who is also his commanding officer, then has to deal with her subordinate constantly telling her that she shouldn't be doing physically strenuous things because she's a woman. It gets old quite quickly.

At this point, Phibes is far ahead, but then we have to acknowledge that Laser Mission's Braun is played by Ernest Borgnine, who is pretty good. You know who's better, though? Peter Cushing, who only shows up in a few scenes in Dr. Phibes Rises Again, but he's there. That gives Dr. Phibes Rises Again the edge it didn't really need, and Laser Mission goes down.

Next time's a battle of aliens and weird pregnancies as we watch Alien and Enemy Mine go toe-to-toe.

You may remember several months back when I pledged to review all the movies I owned. I started strong but the project quickly became more of a burden than anything else as I wondered why I was forcing myself to review this collection of movies instead of something more constructive and the more I pondered this the more I was sure that you, the hypothetical reader, was having just as much fun reading them as I was writing them. What I needed was some sort of goal, some sort of gimmick, something to keep myself and you fine folk reading. So why not make the movies fight?

These could be done in any number of ways: I could stand the discs (as these are all disc-based, and most of the things I had on VHS have been upgraded and it's been proven that digital media is only ours so long as the capitalists say it is) up next to each other and see which fell first, throw them at things to see which broke, rigged up some sort of Pinewood Derby-type racetrack for them to slide down. Yet I had already done four reviews and had segmented things out so that they could, perhaps, form something of a bracket and I've been asked what my favorite movie was more than once with no real answer. So why not try to figure out which of my movies is my favorite?

So, in each bout, I'll talk about the two movies a bit and then decide which one I like more which is definitely not an indicator of quality. I've already done four movies, and here they are, paired against each other!

Annihilation (2018) has to take on Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) which is an easy bout because I liked Annihilation a bit more, though I will say that Tomb Raider is a bit more fun if you're looking for a movie to watch one night that you don't really need to focus on. Unfortunately for Arrival (2016), it has to take on The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), which is not only an immensely entertaining film but also has the twin power-horses of nostalgia and the white whale factor working for it. This means that, at the time I bought it, it was far harder to find than it may be now. And since whole thing is just based on favoritism, we can just move on to the bout between The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Annihilation, in which I'm sorry to say that the former lives up to its name.

Now, since I wanted to ensure the brackets boiled down to just two movies, the former list needed some movies added to it:

9 (2009)
10,000 BC (2008)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe (1991)
Laser Mission (1989)
Addams Family (1991)
Addams Family Values (1993)
Annihilation (2018)
Arrival (2016)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Alien Nation (1988)
Enemy Mine (1985)
Alien (1979)
~~Aliens (1986)~~

Now, there are a few rule changes. The 50 Sci-Fi Film DVD set, Godzilla movies, and Marvel movies will all be in their own brackets, each sending forth one representative. However, I'm still doing the "if part of a franchise gets chosen I'm just doing them from the start", which is why our next bout will be Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) against Laser Mission (1989).

Another change: I forgot I had gotten another movie which would have fallen into this bracket, which means that 10,000 BC is replacing Aliens, which is getting pushed to the second bracket. This rule might get changed at a later date.

My comics are now on (well, two of them) are now available to read on Tumblr! They should be fairly easy to navigate.

Zorgnox's Depository of Earth Sundries
Hankbert

They are also available on my Patreon, though the whole Zorgnox archive is not on there.

My first experience with Final Fantasy IV was with the Nintendo 3DS remake and even without that game's bells and whistles, I still found it to be one of the most enjoyable games of the series. At least, so far. It was the first game for the Super Nintendo and the second available in the United States and, for me, is the first in the series to feel like what I think a Final Fantasy game should be. Unlike the previous games in the series, each character is locked into their job and so the game knows what you'll be capable of at each stage of the story and so each enemy is tailor-made to be defeated by a specific set of skills. The issue with this is that you'll get used to a character and then, wham, they're out of the game. This was fixed in the remakes, allowing you to eventually retrieve the different party members, but as this is based exclusively on the original version this option isn't available. However, as each boss is supposed to be defeated in a certain way, this hardly matters in the wrong run.

The game's story is one of its strong suits, featuring your protagonist Cecil (who can be renamed, along with everyone else in the game, something unavailable in the voice-acted 3DS remake) coming to terms with his role in his king's murderous campaign against darn near everyone and making amends for both his past deeds and those of his monarch. Along the way, he makes a number of friends and enemies. There's also giant robots and trips to the moon, which are always fun for all involved.

My sole criticism of the game is that it's a fan of making you think one of your party members has made a noble sacrifice only to later reveal that, nope, they're actually still alive. This happens with nearly every character in the game at one point, with only one remaining dead, something which feels rather emotionally manipulative. I also didn't really like Edge all that much, an arrogant ninja prince who joins you late in the game, but in a game with such a wide cast there's bound to be a few characters who aren't all that great.

Next up: Final Fantasy V, a game which I know absolutely nothing about.

At the beginning of the millennium when spending money was sparse for me and movies were far more expensive, I spent a lot of time on the sites belonging to the B-Masters Cabal, a group of people who reviewed (and some who still do review) movies that were bad, weird, forgotten, or in some cases just kind of fun. Most of these films were reviewed with a certain amount of affection, though there were always one or two which were obviously despised, but every so often there'd be a movie which was a true cult classic. The Abominable Dr. Phibes, starring Vincent Price, was one of these films. I don't remember much of the review, save that I'm sure they mentioned how darkly comic the film was, but it was more than enough to ensnare my teenage imagination and put me on the hunt for it. This, and the fact that it starred Vincent Price, who I first encountered in the context of The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and later found to be a positive presence in whatever he chose to do. I even remember the exact moment my hunt bore fruit: I was chatting with an ex-girlfriend in Best Buy when my eyes happened to spy, sitting right there behind her, a two-pack of The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel. I may have even gently pushed her aside to get to the DVD, which turned out to be a double-sided disc but still well worth whatever I paid for it.

The movie proved to be just as advertised: a darkly comic film starring Vincent Price. In truth, it's the tale of a super-villain taking revenge on those he believe took his wife from him, with the titular Phibes utilizing a loose interpretation of the Biblical plagues to murder the team of doctors (and one nurse) who had attempted and failed to save that wife. We know what's going on almost immediately, at least that he's going around murdering people in intricately planned and bizarre ways, with the protagonist only having to try to figure out why Phibes is doing this and who his next target will be, and if he can stop him. This protagonist is a Scotland Yard inspector named Trout, and his name seems only to serve to allow his superior to call him by the names of many other fish. The amazing thing about the movie, at least in the context of today's cinema, is that Phibes gets away with all of it. He murders everyone involved with his wife's failed surgery but one doctor, and even that can be counted as a win for Phibes due to the man's machinations. And then, his job done, Phibes retires to the darkness of the grave to be with his departed (and incredibly well-preserved) wife.

Even though I've watched the movie a number of times at this point, it's still enjoyable since everyone in the movie seems to be having a great time getting murdered, murdering, and trying to find a murderer and Price does steal the show, seeing as how Phibes is supposed to be wearing a life-like mask and so his mouth never moves with his dialogue coming from a cord hooked up to his throat and into various sound amplification apparati. There's also several musical interludes featuring Phibes and his mysterious assistant Vulvania, whose true nature is never revealed in this movie and I can't remember if it is in the sequel.

One of the most overtly comedic parts of the movie is when one of the doctors is murdered by a brass unicorn head launched through the air by a catapult in order to skewer him against a wall. This by itself is ridiculous enough in that it actually worked (though we don't get to see Phibes standing on a rooftop by a catapult, unfortunatley) but then we see them unscrewing the unicorn from the wall with the impaled doctor along with it, his feet twisting along with the unicorn.

There's honestly not a lot I can say against this movie. The plagues used do seem to be an especially liberal interpretation of them, and several of them use live animals and I can only hope that these animals emerged unscathed. In any case, I'm looking forward to the sequel, which I'll review next, and hopefully within the next few weeks.

QUICK BITS

MOVIE: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: The B-Masters Cabal
OBTAINED: Best Buy
WATCHED BEFORE: Yes
WATCHED WITH: Alone
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Good

There was a small trend on the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese equivalent, the Famicom) where the second installment of a game would alter the first game's formula only to return to and improve upon the first game's base. This could be seen with Castlevania, Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, and of course Final Fantasy. In this case, the level-up system of the second game has returned to something similar to the first game, along with being able to choose a definitive class for each of your characters. The twist in Final Fantasy III is that now you could change those classes on a whim with the introduction of the job system. This, coupled with a map fully three times the size of the previous games, makes this a far more robust experience than Final Fantasy I and II and makes the fact that those two games were released on a single cartridge while Final Fantasy III was given a 3DS remake make more sense.

There were aspects of this game I enjoyed a lot more than the previous games, with more to explore and NPCs which were more fully realized. There's even brief cinematics littered throughout the game. This did seem to come at a cost to your protagonists and their personalities, and since the game could never be sure who you were bringing to a fight a lot of the bosses were fairly easy. There were only two instances where a certain job would be beneficial, both times heavily hinted at in the game itself. The protagonists, a group of four orphans initially called Onion Knights (and whom are given names and whatnot in the 3DS remake), also lack any motivation other than being chosen to go on this mission though the game's still enjoyable despite this. It's certainly a fuller game experience than the first two, and if you do choose to fully explore the world you'll find a lot to like and things to help you in your quest to stop the darkness from taking over the land. There was also a moment when I flew off the initial map and discovered another full map beneath it which would have blown my mind as a kid though I doubt I ever would have gotten that far.

If I had gotten that far, then there is a point when I would have just completely given up, and that's the last area of the game which is called the Dark World. The most powerful enemies in the game dwell here, and not just as one of the five bosses you have to face, but just wandering around the map. In fact, the man the game had thus far claimed was the ultimate evil and provided one of the more difficult boss fights in the game is just wandering around. You might have to fight him at any point in the Dark World, and you better hope you stocked up on whatever items you needed before you came here because once you're in the Dark World there's no escape. It's a treacherous slog of grinding and trying vainly to make some progress, any progress at all, and the only mercy is that you can save at any time in the Pixel Remaster. You couldn't do that in the original version of the game, so anyone who beat that is not someone you should mess with.

To be fair, the Dark World does get easier once you've defeated one of the four sub-bosses, as you can then use the crystal they were guarding to heal yourself indefinitely. This, coupled with the ability to turn off encounters and boost the experience you get from winning fights, gradually makes the Dark World less of a terror. You still have to contend with several enemies who can completely kill your party with one attack if you're not careful or strong enough, including the final boss who just keeps shooting your entire party with a particle beam that'll kill your entire party in three shots if you're not lucky.

In short, outside of a lack of protagonist personality and a punishing ultimate area, this game defintiely represented a step in a positive direction and showed the world what a Final Fantasy could be. Now, if they hadn't decided that part of this was an absolutely brutal final area, that would have been great but there's not a lot we can do about that now.

My previous attempts to play Final Fantasy II were few, mainly on the Game Boy Advance after beating Final Fantasy, as the two were on the same cartridge and what else was I going to do? I knew little about it, as my knowledge of the games jumped from the first one to the seventh one with bits and pieces from the others thrown in and so I was unprepared for its unique leveling system which didn't grant you experience and levels like many RPGs, but did something akin to an Elder Scrolls game and gave you a bit of experience every time you used a specific weapon, spell, or got hit. I was prepared to deal with this when I was in high school, but I had missed some bit of dialogue and wandered around the overworld completely lost thinking that I might revisit the game again someday.

That day finally came when I started on the Pixel Remaster, and I managed to figure out what I needed to do since I forgot about about an NPC that needed to be told a certain phrase. Which is the other major thing FFII brought to the series, random words and phrases you had to learn and use on various NPCs. It's a nice idea, but seemed largely inconsequential since it's not like using the wrong phrase on the wrong person would have any consequences.

I didn't talk about the first game's story at all, but while it was a very basic "go save the world from evil" sort of thing it didn't feel like it needed to be explained. This one was a wee bit more complex, as the evil is some Emperor and fighting with the rebels against his forces actually brings about changes to the game world and since you have a set character and companions (one of which swaps in and out throughout the story) it feels more like you're actually playing a role than just a Black Mage or Warrior whose characteristics you keep inside your head. That said, there aren't a lot of choices to make with these characters, except for in one section where you can try to fight a bunch of soldiers who overpowered me quickly and seemed easier to avoid.

The game's attempted innovations were laudable, and for something that was originally a Nintendo game it's fun to see this amount of attempted complexity. I do wish seeing your progress with your weapons was a bit easier (there's red bars but I would have liked numerical signifiers after each battle, like my skill with a sword went up four points and needs sixteen to get to the next level or something) and the larger amount of actual NPCs did help flesh out the game world and made it feel more like I was fighting for something.

The weirdest part of the game, by the way, is when you encounter a bunch of large beavers and one of your characters (named Gus, though I renamed mine Hugo) announces that he can speak beaver. This is apparently part of his established backstory though as far as I know there's no real way to access this information within the game. This is also the first game with a battle designed that you can't win, which is always such a welcome surprise.

The second Final Fantasy was certainly a worthwhile experience and, once I got the hang of its idiosyncrasies, one which didn't overstay its welcome. And now I go on to the third one.

At one point in my life, I had it in my head to figure out a way to play a lot of the Final Fantasy games though I was unsure how I would go about it due to their bizarre releases in America. The first two games were easily available and I even had their Game Boy Advance remake, though I had a bizarre amount of trouble trying to figure out where to go in Final Fantasy II. The third and fourth games were available on the Nintendo DS, though these were re-done in 3-D with voice-overs and all that. I believe the fifth was available on the original PlayStation, while the sixth had a Game Boy Advance port which was stupidly expensive to get. Everything past the seventh was easily obtainable, and I've played most of them to some degree. As time passed, the urge to play through all of them faltered because the thought of bouncing back and forth between all these consoles was too much of an annoyance, as well as having to buy a lot of them. It just wasn't worth it.

Now, years later, every single one (more or less) is available for the Nintendo Switch and so I've started on this mad quest starting, of course, with Final Fantasy. As mentioned, I played it on the Game Boy Advance (as well as a little bit on the original Nintendo though I was unable to understand what was going on at the time) and beat it, though it had updated a few things such as abandoning the original's Dungeons and Dragons style spell slots in favor of the more typical mana pool. It turns out that, if you know what you're doing, you can beat this in about a day and while it's an enjoyable day it's still a relatively short game.

The major thing I liked about the game was how much customizability you had for your party, where you could just make everyone whatever you liked (within reason) and name them whatever you like. The character designs are also fairly iconic, being revisited quite a lot over the years, though I didn't much care for the Black Mage's upgraded form. There's honestly not much more I can say about this game, but it's a worthwhile if threadbare experience.

When I was younger, my first RPG (role-playing game) was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. My cousin had Final Fantasy and I had tried it a few times but I was young and had no idea what was going on with all the menus and whatnot and so I just ignored it, for the most part. I still wasn't sure what the genre meant until I Super Mario RPG in an issue of Disney Adventures and I saw multiple characters on the screen and just thought, "Oh, it must be multiplayer, so that means we can rent it when my cousin comes over and we can play at the same time." This did not work as intended as, like many RPG video games, this one was only meant for one player. Still, I played it as much as I could during the rental period and while I still didn't fully understand it, I was starting to and I eventually bought the game.

I still didn't fully understand it but I gradually figured out what was going on and so, in time, I beat the game and sometimes went back to play through it again. It wasn't until high school (or perhaps a bit after) when I discovered two things:

1. There was a secret area called Grate Guy's Casino where I'd never been.
2. There was a secret optional boss named Culex, based on the boss fights from the SNES (Super Nintendo) era Final Fantasy games.

The rumors were that Culex was the most difficult boss in the game, and while I had beaten it I'd also had trouble with another optional boss named Jinx and so decided that I didn't care about Culex all that much. Getting into the casino was far more important a goal, and I remember spending at least one afternoon trying to figure out how to get into the stupid thing until I gave up and went on with my life, occasionally thinking, "Maybe I should play the game again, try to get into that casino."

Luckily, the game got a re-release late last year and once I started playing it, I made the vow that this would be the time I'd get into the casino and see all its glory. I made my way through the game (which seemed much easier than I remembered, which is partially due to increased skill with RPGs and partially because they made some tweaks with the game) and got the item which would allow me access into the casino and, on a lark, the item which would allow me to battle Culex should I choose to do so.

Last night was the night I decided to finally enter the casino. I knew the method and got in there with little trouble, and after years of anticipation, I found a single little house with a single little room which even Grate Guy himself found boring. I played a matching game (in the SNES version, I understand it was Blackjack) and something similar but not a slot machine (in the SNES version, it was a slot machine) and finally a little thing in which Grate Guy wanted me to guess which way he'd be looking.

I was incredibly underwhelmed, and had I found this during my initial play-through of the game, I'd be quite put-out that I'd put any effort at all into finding the casino. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I got.

Filled with disappointment, I then went to fight Culex and while the battle took longer than anticipated because I also hadn't known during my initial play-through that one of Mallow's abilities (a little fluffy man who has weather-based magic) would bring up little tidbits when scanning an enemy and now I was trying to see them all and having this little man try to scan what amounted to a pixelated dark god with four magic crystals, each of which also needed to be scanned, resulted in most of my party being killed again and again and relying on Princess Peach to revive them. This actually made things easier as Culex and his gems ran out of FP by the time I was ready to actually fight them and so I defeated the fabled secret boss and felt like playing more 90's era Final Fantasy games afterwards.

I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes the things you've been trying to avoid for years wind up being more pleasurable than those that you've awaited and have built up in your head. Also, after I beat Culex I figured I could go fight Jinx (who is a little bug thing) and I did and beat him easily.

Also: I am going to watch the next movie soon, I just haven't had the time or inclination to do so.

My goal is to put out five comics a week, more or less, of differing difficulty. The issue, lately, has been Zorgnox's Depository of Earth Sundries which has, for the past year or so, been going through a tournament arc whose completion just so happens to align with the 300th comic and such things have been on my mind for months and as the moment comes closer this 300th comic has completely eclipsed my ability to do most other comic work.

It's almost done, though: the time has almost come for it to see the light. I've sketched most of it out and it's half finished, and once it's up and out I should be able to actually focus on stuff like Hankbert and my other comics. Which includes a Zorgnox spin-off, which I've been looking forward to doing for some time.

There are going to be some movies in my collection that are going to be difficult to write about since the only reason I own them is because they came with something else and the only thing I remember about them is that they exist. 2016's Arrival is one of those movies.

You might remember hearing about it, though all I could recall was that it involved aliens coming to Earth and a linguist trying to talk to them. This made me think it was going to be one of those cerebral science fiction movies, where we see the aliens once at the end, if at all, and most of it is spent with people talking about things at each other. And it's not exactly that, but also isn't not that.

The plot is, as relayed above, incredibly simple and does concern aliens coming to Earth and humanity trying to communicate with them. There's a number of ships hovering above different locations and each country has dispatched their own team to try to figure out what these aliens want. America's team includes linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and while there is an awful lot of talking most of it is done with aliens we actually get to see. They're called heptapods (as they look like octopuses but with seven legs) and it was nice to see a slower movie like this know that people want to see aliens in a movie about aliens and while the plot is basic this isn't a bad thing and watching Louise and Ian slowly figure out how to communicate with the heptapods is rewarding. This isn't to say that the movie isn't without conflict, provided by China's team thinking that the heptapods want to give factions of humanity weapons they can use to destroy each other. The sudden influx of actual stakes is sort of jarring but underpins the movie's message that being able to communicate with each other is of the utmost importance. Which brings me to how that plot resolves, though I'd skip the next paragraph if you'd like to avoid spoilers.

One of the major threads of the movie is that Louise had a daughter who died of an unspecified yet deadly disease, and so what we're watching is a character who has lost everything and is trying to rebuild a life without her family. We see flashbacks of the pair, as the daughter gets older and closer to her ultimate fate, interspersed with Louise and her team making progress with the heptapods. At one point, Ian brings up that sometimes learning the language of another culture rewires your brain so you think more like them, which seemed like a throwaway line until, after one flashback, Louise asks who the girl she keeps thinking of is and we realize that her brain has been rewired to be more like the heptapods, who don't perceive time in a linear fashion and these flashbacks are actually flash-forwards. This allows Louise to successfully stop China's hostilities and set her on path in life leading mankind towards understanding though with the knowledge that whatever good she does her yet unborn daughter will ultimately die. It's an effective twist and should I ever watch the movie again, I'll keep it in mind to see if it re-contextualizes what happens.

Spoilers are now over. And so is the review, more or less: I'd recommend it if you're looking for a science fiction movie that's a bit more cerebral, though this does make its inclusion in a three-pack declaring itself to be all action-packed sci-fi somewhat baffling. It reminds me of a movie from the seventies, with its more deliberate pacing. Plus it's always nice to see a movie about aliens actually deliver on the aliens.

Our next movie will the The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and after that, Dr. Phibes Rises Again since I'm doing direct sequels after their first installments when possible.

QUICK BITS

MOVIE: Arrival (2016)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: Cultural osmosis
OBTAINED: Walmart cheap bin
WATCHED BEFORE: Nope
WATCHED WITH: Alone
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Good

I've been playing video games for most of my life, and through most of those years I've primarily played on Nintendo consoles though I'll dip into other consoles when the opportunity arises. In the early years this meant getting a Sega Game Gear and getting heavily into the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons and comics. After all, while I could just play the Super Mario games his cartoons were usually at the same time as the Disney Afternoon and my loyalties laid squarely with Scrooge McDuck and Darkwing Duck. In those days, I'd also eagerly page through issues of Nintendo Power and GamePro (and, later, Electronic Gaming Monthly) and try to imagine what the games they were describing might play like. I was young and would rarely get new games, and so whatever those magazines might give me in the way of articles and comics was all I would usually get.
In those magazines, around the same time as the rise of the Nintendo 64 and the fall of Sega, I started noticing a new participant in the console wars called the Sony PlayStation. Eventually, I'd start seeing them in stores and would play their demo discs, but it'd be a long time before I saw one in anyone's house. And soon after, amidst the mentions of strange new characters like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, there came something altogether strange and new: Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider. Not only was she on this alien PlayStation but the images that'd usually accompany her were far different from those of Mario and Sonic since her developers had used all the polygons available to them to create what would become a cross-media sex symbol. There'd be official renders of Lara in slinky dresses, form-fitting outfits, and even bikinis. It was a lot to take in for a young man, and while I've yet to play a single Tomb Raider game for any meaningful length of time, I'll always remember her rise to stardom.
In case you weren't around for all that, Lara Croft is a British woman who raids tombs though I wonder if they can actually be called tombs if no one is buried in them. Unless she specifically chooses ruins which are also tombs? Usually, she seems to wear a pair of short shorts and a blue tank top, both fairly tight, but she probably changes outfits sometimes. The way she raids these tombs involves shooting at things and, possibly, using gadgets. That seems like a safe bet. The movie successfully adapts all of these things, which I was expecting since while I've never seen it it was cited as one of the more successful and faithful video game adaptions before the current renaissance. I may have never seen it were it not on the same three-pack as Annihilation and Arrival, perhaps because all three feature strong female leads? I fear this will remain a mystery to me.
As for the movie itself, Angelina Jolie portrays the titular Lara Croft and is the only female character of any note in the movie. While there are moments where they play up her sexuality, they aren't as frequent as one might think but this is likely because it has a PG-13 rating and there's only so much you can show in such a circumstance. She has to find two triangles to stop the Illuminati from doing something to time, something which is never really made clear but we can assume it's bad. Two of the movie's more memorable sequences also seem like they could have been pulled directly from a video game. The first involves Lara and the Illuminati agents (including a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig) fighting a horde of living monkey statues that culminates in a boss fight that requires the use of environmental hazards to overcome. The other has Lara doing a bunch of platforming to reach one of the two triangles. So it all seems accurate enough, and it moves at a fairly brisk pace and is generally entertaining. The question, then: is it a good movie?

No.

It's not a bad movie, either. Jolie does a serviceable job carrying everything, but the whole experience is is remarkably like playing a video game but skipping past all the cut-scenes and only giving the instruction manual or strategy guide a cursory glance so you have a general idea of who everyone is and why everything is happening but ultimately you're just watching Angelina Jolie do action movie things until she gets the power to control time which she uses to have a brief chat with her deceased father (whom everyone in the movie seems to know and have messages for Lara from) which results in her deciding that no one should be able to control time and so she just shoots the ultra-power artifact and destroys it with one bullet. There's even a gratuitous boss fight at the end, all the more extraneous because the man she's fighting has already been stabbed and there's no reason for Lara not to just leave him lying there to bleed out and be crushed by the falling debris, because of course the place they're fighting in is collapsing around them. All of it fails to come together in an organic way and one gets the sense that the movie was crafted with certain scenes in mind with little care given about how to get from one to the other. There are some other side characters (Lara's butler, her tech guy, the bad guy's assistant, various minions) and they're all harmless enough.

I wouldn't be against watching this movie again someday, and perhaps if I do I'll decide to play the first few games to see how things match up with the movie and see if anything is the same beyond the protagonist and her profession. I'm willing to bet that there's not, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Or maybe I should just try to see the sequel, if I ever see that in the Walmart cheap bin, which might be a better movie. Unfortunately, since this is the second movie I've reviewed, it is also the worst movie I've reviewed thus far. Our next review will finish off the weird three-pack with 2016's Arrival.

QUICK BITS

MOVIE: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: Cultural osmosis
OBTAINED: Walmart cheap bin
WATCHED BEFORE: Nope
WATCHED WITH: My girlfriend Jess
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Meh

These reviews are ultimately an excuse to reminisce about each movie I own and, in many cases, talk about how bad they are but why I still like them. Or, indeed, why I might dislike them. In this regard, 2018's Annihilation is simply an awful way to start things off. I was unaware of it before it came out, was dimly aware that it did due in part to a video from Red Letter Media, and then promptly forgot about it until I saw it in the cheap bin at Walmart in a three-pack with Arrival and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and had two thoughts. The first was, "Why is Tomb Raider in this?" and the second, and more pertinent, was, "Well, why not?" This accounts for my entire history with the movie and were it not for the fact that it's the first movie I'm watching for this exercise, it would an utterly unremarkable part of my life.

I have now watched it almost twice. The first time, I fell asleep at some point and missed a large chunk of the film but this is not meant to demean the movie because dozing off like that is a minor medical issue. The second time, I was able to confirm that this is not a bad movie and therefore not something I would have written about it were I not on a mad quest to watch every movie I owned and document them. Annihilation stars Natalie Portman as Lena, a former soldier and current scientist, as she and four other women travel into a mysterious area called the Shimmer. This is because it shimmers from the outside, you see, while on the inside things are just mutating and every other team that's gone into Shimmer hasn't come back save for one person: Lena's husband Kane, played by Oscar Isaac. His return is what spurs her towards the Shimmer, in an attempt to find the answers needed to hopefully save his life because while Kane came back he did not come back well. These answers are found, but this is the sort of movie where each answer found produces more questions.

My favorite part of Annihilation were the creatures that popped up a few times during the film and left lasting impressions, and the sense of unease that permeated the entire movie. Even when Lena and her team aren't in immediate danger, you get the sense that this could radically change at any moment, especially since they're always in some kind of danger because that's just the sort of place the Shimmer is. My least favorite part, and consider this your spoiler warning, was the reveal that Lena was having an affair with one of her colleagues in a subplot that not only seemed unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, but was never resolved. It wasn't as if Lena or Kane needed an additional reason to go into the Shimmer and the knowledge just cast a sort of jarring ickiness on the movie that the writhing intestines and skull-faced bears that would call out for help in the voice of their latest victims in order to ensnare new ones could not. We shall now be spoiler-free.

Despite that, the movie was enjoyable and I wouldn't mind watching it again. I'll certainly say that it's the best movie I've watched for this project, but as it's the only movie I've watched for this it's also the worst. We'll see how well it ranks by the end of this experiment, though I don't intend to keep some sort of ranking. Our next movie will be 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider which was probably summoned by its mention earlier.

QUICK BITS
MOVIE: Annihilation (2018)
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: Red Letter Media and just... wherever
OBTAINED: Walmart cheap bin
WATCHED BEFORE: Yes, but fell asleep
WATCHED WITH: My girlfriend Jess
GOOD/BAD/MEH: Good

The first ten movies:

- 9 (2009)
- The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
- Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
- Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe (1991)
- Laser Mission (1989)
- Addams Family (1991)
- Addams Family Values (1993)
- Annihilation (2018)
- Arrival (2016)
- Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

The first movie chosen has been Annihilation. So look for that soon.

Hello, my name is Lord Mýk (feel free to leave the accent off the y, though it's alt+0253 on the Numpad if you want to type it. Or just copy-paste it) and you may know me from The Works of Lord Mýk,The Fictosphere, or any number of other things you can find through those two links. I write stories, draw comics, and I used to write articles and review things and make videos. My goal with all this is to ease back into those last three things, and to that end I am going to be using this account to do little reviews of all the movies I physically own. This is going to take a while, I have many of them, and at least one of them is a 50-movie pack. So here's how I intend to work things:

I'm breaking it up into ten movie chunks, and each time I start a chunk I'll list the ten movies within that chunk. Most of the time it'll be alphabetical, but sometimes it'll be... not alphabetical. This is because of things like the stated 50-movie collection. I will then roll a die (starting with a d10 and working my way down) to see which movie I'm going to write about. If the movie has a sequel, it automatically goes next. Other than that, things will just happen.

After ten movies, I will then watch one of the Godzilla movies, one of the Marvel movies, and one from the Wallet of Despair, which are movies my friend got from the dollar store because he wanted Blu-Ray cases and he offered to let me have the movies within, including three copies of Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature. I do not intend to watch it three times. The Godzilla and Marvel movies will be done chronologically, while those from the Wallet will be chosen randomly.

The reviews will be somewhat informal, more about recollections of the movies themselves with cursory plot synopses than anything else, but they might evolve over time. I do intend to collect them at the sites listed at the start of this, and to figure out some way to turn this into video content. So this is a mighty endeavor indeed. The first ten movies will be listed shortly.