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Why I'm Mad Today: Excessive rambling has cut into my Diablo time.
Why I don't care:
It's fun to hate:
In My Grand Scheme of Things:
Music lost to history:
Obligatory Linkage: BlackChampagne.com- Without his site, my site would never have existed.
NinjaBurger-
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I would like to go into a bit of detail about my neck again today, but let's be honest, I am absolutely
sick of writing about it, and you are no doubt sick of reading about it. Instead I will just say
that you should assume that it is in the same condition as it was the previous update if I do not
mention it. That way, hopefully, I won't write about it again until the injury is healed...Don't
quote me on that.
I stayed up late last night playing DiabloII:LOD, several months ago that was a very common thing
for me to do, but now it seems almost like my world has gone in a big circle. I started playing
DiabloII after I had bought it for my wife as a birthday gift. I played single player for at least
a year or more before the 'purity' of on-line play pulled me in. By the time LOD came out, I bought
two copies of it, one for desktop, one for laptop. I played the game so much and had gotten so much
gear muled that I never played a character that was not *helped* by my other characters. This became
rather boring after a while, and I just resigned myself to just using a sorc, baba and zon for
magic find, and that was all I played for the last few months of my Diablo career.
While waiting for Blizzard to get around to releasing the patch (that was like two years in the making),
I split my time between everquest and a diablo mod that was really pretty cool. In the process of
doing that, my on-line characters mostly expired. Out of a total of 32 characters, only four of
them remained, one high level sorceress, and three mules, though not the mules with the elite
gear. None of my friends were playing online anymore as they had moved on to the everquest for
the PS2 or World of Warcraft, this made levelling a new character difficult. So what did I do?
I started an off-line character so that I could adjust the difficulty to help me gain experience
between act bosses.
It had been so long since I had played a character through from the beginning that I was a bit surprised
at how difficult it was. Not that there was really any threat of my death in the first act, just
that the monsters were all a lot tougher than I remembered them. Keep in mind that this was the first
time in probably at least two years that I had been playing a character without hand-me-down gear
to help him out. When Andariel (boss of act 1) died and dropped a magic mace I was overjoyed. I
used that weapon for the majority of act 2.
That led me to thinking about just how different this was than my recent play style. I never picked
up anything that was just magical unless it was an elite item, now I was picking up every magic
item I saw and saying please,please,please as I identified it. It is a lot more fun this way, but
if I were to start a character on-line again the temptation to trickle some gear down from my mules
would overcome me (probably about the time I had to fight Duriel, since I always have a problem
with him), and that would take away the anticipation and joy of seeing an item drop then seeing it
is actually a useful item.
What is it about DiabloII that has this effect on me and so many others? In just a quick look around
what passes for an office at my house I can see Morrowind, Alone In the Dark 3,Arthurs Knights 2,
Atlantis: the lost tales, Egypt Tomb of the Pharaoh, I could go on. I haven't spent more than an
hour or two playing any one of those games( never even installed a couple for that matter), yet
I am still consumed by DiabloII. The only logical answer is; Blizzard put subliminal messages in
the game cinematics that make you want to play it more.
As long as I am in the mood to write about Diablo, I may as well throw a theory out here regarding
ebay. In lots of articles over at DiabloII.net people have
criticised Blizzard for not taking a firm stance against people who sell game items for real money.
I don't really care either way, if someone is dumb enough to pay actual money for a string of binary
code that can only be used in an on-line game, the deserve what they get. A theory that I have had
in my mind for a while, though, is that the Blizzard employees actually sell gear over ebay to cover
the costs of maintaining battle.net without having to charge the players. The reason that I really
love that theory is that it would mean that people who don't play often enough to find the really good
stuff (that is part-time players), and those with more money than brains, would be paying for the dedicated fans who devote ten hours a day
to it without ever dropping a cent. This is also the reason that it can't possibly be true, it would
make me far too happy if that was the reality.
I woke up early this morning and was not able to get back to sleep, so I decided to watch a DVD.
I found one under the end table called Signs
and popped it in. Before I go into detail below, let me just say that there was a BlockBuster sticker
on the front of the case that said "Previously Viewed $14.95", and I think that BlockBuster is just
assuming that whoever rented it was actually able to view it.
If you have never seen the movie and plan to, I am gonna spoil it all here, so don't read it.
The trailers for this movie, as well as the description on the box, say that this is a movie about
one family's experience dealing with crop circles and extraterrestrials. That is true, to a point.
The villains in this movie could have been pigeons, frogs hell even day-glow ping-pong balls and it
would not have made a difference to the plot. Here is the entire plot in a sentence; Man loses faith
in God, things happen to make man believe again. That is the entire movie.
To be fair to the movie I guess I should do a bit more detail about that. The main character (mel gibson)
is a man of the cloth. His wife dies in a car accident which makes him question his faith, he turns
in the cloth (this happened before the point where the movie starts). As the movie progressess he
begins to think that his faith helps to save his son not once, but twice. He then believes that his
son has asthma only because there would be a point where poison gas would be sprayed in his face, but
God had made it so that he couldn't breathe at the time. He then believes that what he used to think
were his wife's non-sensical dying words were actually a vision of the future, telling him what to
say to his brother six months later when faced with a dilemma.
Okay, I am gonna take a few deep breaths and try to collect my thoughts since it does get even LESS
logical.
There are a lot of things in the movie that are inconsistent or just don't make a damn bit of sense.
The first in my mind is why would the aliens decide to try to invade the earth when water
is toxic to them. Wouldn't they have noticed in their cursory exploration that we live on a planet
that is more water than land? Wouldn't they have seen that every dwelling in the entire world
-regardless of wealth- had water in it? Attacking would be like trying to dig a paperclip out of a huge bowl of
razors, are these beings, that have already mastered interstellar flight, really that stupid?
There is also the issue of the aliens and their ability, or lack thereof, to open doors. In one
scene there is an alien that is not able to escape from a pantry which has a couch against the door,
in another scene you hear them break out windows to get into a house, then find a disused coal
chute (which would surely have been sealed off when the house went to a more modern climate control
system) and somehow break through that. Even in the basement where two grown men had done the
pole-under-the-doorknob trick and were also leaning against the door, the aliens nearly broke through.
This was necessary to build tension, sure, but it was just not consistent.
Then there is the dead wife. So she was hit by a truck and pinned against a tree. In the scene
you can see at least three ambulances and a dozen firemen and EMS workers. They just left her there
until Mel got there. Great. The movie explained this away saying that the woman should be dead
but that she hadn't died...Well that is when one is supposed to use medical knowledge to keep them
not dead, isn't it? I am sure that letting her bleed internally for however long it took for Mel
to get there was probably why she died, but I guess that was what the movie was going for. I think
that what you are supposed to believe is that their combined faith had kept her alive long enough to talk
to him one more time, so she could could say "swing away".
My wife said that she has never even made it thirty minutes into this film, and I am actually kind
of surprised that I did. I just kept looking at the timer on the DVD player and thinking, something
has got to happen soon, and it never did. This is one of the worst movies that I have ever actually
sat through, but I did sit through it, so that is something. I just sat through it waiting for
something to happen, and then it was over, and then I was pissed off that I had just wasted over an
hour and a half of my life watching a movie that you could see at vacation bible school. But don't
take my word for it, the Cap Alert
guy gave it what I would say is the best review of his that I have ever seen. Hoping to see how the movie was reviewed by people other than ultra religious kooks, I went to Rotten Tomatoes and found that it actually has a 78% positive review. Did those people watch the same movie as I did? 78% is like a C+ right? The movie I saw doesn't even deserve a letter, or if I had to give it one it would be a 'Q' or an 'S' for Quit or Stop. But it doesn't even stop there, I went and checked Ebert's review and he is blowing more sunshine up your ass. The last two paragraphs of his review aren't too far off the mark though; Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo's habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan's bright idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from alien waves. Hess' use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan's asthma attack, and his father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie aside and is only about itself.
The problem is that I could not find anything better (worse for the movie) to put here from anyone
with a reputation. I guess I may be the only one in the whole world that hated the movie and I am
okay with that. It just goes to show that there is a damn good reason why I rarely watch any movies
other than comedies.
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