October 2002 Archives

Over the last couple of weeks I've spent 20 or so hours on planes. A lot of that time was spent watching films. Here are some comments on the ones I watched:

Minority Report

It's based on a Philip K Dick story so it gets a pretty good head start. I really enjoyed this - tho the airline showed a widescreen print on one of those tiny chair-back screens so it wasn't particularly easy to watch. I certainly plan to watch it again at some point on a larger screen.

Insomnia

Not as good as Memento (very few films are) but an intresting film. A very strong cast, but I'm not sure about casting Robin Williams as the bad guy.

Men in Black II

I knew all I needed to know about this film before seeing it. I don't know why I bothered. It's just more of the same rubbish that we got so bored of in the first film.

Bend It Like Beckham

Small budget British films are generally of very high quality - and this is no exception. I just worry a little that the Billy Elliot "child is prevented from doing what he/she is good at by nasty parents who eventually change their mind" plot is getting a bit overuser.

Hollywood Ending

It's a typical Woody Allen film. You'll either love it or hate it. If you hate it then you probably don't understand the first thing about what makes a good film.

Reign of Fire

I wanted so much to like this film. I love the idea of dragons coming back and destroying the modern world. But something went horribly wrong in the execution and we've ended up with a dreadful film.

One small glimpse of what the film could have been. I loved the scene where the adults are telling the children tales of the old days - and they're acting out the "I am your father, Luke" scene from The Empire Strikes Back

Unfaithful

I have no idea why I watched this. It was dreadful

Just upgraded the site to run on Moveable Type 2.5. It looks very nice :)

I'm not much of a console game player. I have a Playstation 2, but that's just because I got a good opportunity to upgrade when my original Playstation was stolen and we got the insurance money. To be honest it's mainly used as a rather noisy DVD player. I buy the occasional game, but only when I see them in sales as I think that the RRP is far too expensive.

I was, however, interested to see that there was going o be a game based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I looked forward to buying it. Recently I saw it was in the shops, but only for the Xbox. I couldn't find any information about its availability on any other platform so I emailed Fox Games to find out what their plans were. This is what I wrote:

I'm very interested in buying your Buffy the Vampire Slayer game, but I see that currently it's only available for the Xbox.

Can you please let me know when the game will be available for the Playstation 2 as I'm not that big a Buffy fan that I'll pay for a new games console in order to play the game :)

I know that Xbox sales have been disappointing for Microsoft and they probably need all the exclusive deals they can muster right now, but surely your first responsibility is to your customers - most of who won't have an Xbox.

Frankly it seems a very strange business decision.

Today I got a reply:

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was envisioned as a video game, all parties involved agreed that we should not compromise the vision of that game for any reason. When it came time to shift Buffy into the current generation of consoles we decided that the Xbox was the only system available that would allow us to make the game as we wanted to make it. While every system available would have given Buffy its own look and feel we felt that the Xbox's powerful architecture allowed us to create a graphics engine that would display the locations from the show that we all know and love true to life and still allow us to pack the game full of exciting and addicting gameplay. There are no plans to port Buffy to any other system at this time. Thanks for writing and happy gaming!

So it looks like I won't get to play the Buffy game after all[1]. It's nice that they claim it's some kind of artistic integrity thing, but I'm pretty sure I don't believe them.

[1] And no, I can't go and play it at someone else's house. I don't play video games in front of other people - I suck far too much :)