1 was awesome. 2 was enjoyable, though instantly forgettable. I saw no reason not to give 3 a try!

I went into the theatre expecting a nice fun action movie and not much else. It totally delievered on that level. Living up to it’s successors Mission Impossible III is an actioned packed guaranteed good time (not an actual guarantee).

When it comes to fun explosions, car chases, people jumping from helicopters and stuff like that I’m not generally a sucker for it but in this case I was at the edge of my seat from begining to end. On top of that there’s just all sorts of fun spy stuff. Messing with cameras, costumes, scaling walls, skydiving, retinal scans and all sorts of craZy stuff. It’s like James Bond only not stupid, boring or British.

Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, really steps it up in this movie. So much so that I’m confident in saying Ethan Hunt could kick that pansy Jack Bauer’s ass any day of the week. Not only does he run like only Tommy seem to (very reminiscent of Minority report at times) but he jumps around, gets all blown up, shoots people, beats people up, nails a hot chick and acts super cool all the way through it. Tom is phenomenal in this movie. He’s been a real craZy freak with the Katie thing and his cult but when it gets down to it there’s one thing that distinguishes him from the likes of John Travolta and Kirsty Alley and that’s the fact that he’s a good actor. Whether it be in acting like an mental patient or in his latest movie we can always count on Cruise to put everything he’s got into a performance and that enthusiam is never more appropriate than in a movie of this tone.

The rest of the cast is also solid. Ving Rhames’s character is a nice favourite to see back. Didn’t really see any repeats with the others but the newcomers were all solid. New spy guys Larry Fishburne and Billy Crudup were interesting and well played. His love interest was smokin’ hot! Above all else the performance which really blew my mind was Philip Seymour Hoffman as villain of the week. He just came off as so mean and totally in control of every situation. He’s come a long way since stealing a kiss from Marky Mark.

One beef I had with this flick, which I understand is a problem with Abrams in Alias and that I have seen briefly in Lost, is this super annoying flash forward scene he shoves at the starting of the movie. Watching this flick was like watching Payback after having been exposed to the all too revealing trailer. I’m seeing things develop and I know exactly where the story is supposed to go but now I’m just guessing at ways in which the story will lead me there. I much prefer to just learn the story as it goes along especially when the flash forward is quite late in the movie. This wasn’t like American Beauty where it was so vague that I forget it happens until it comes back. It was just too much.

That being said I still think this was a really solid movie. A great thrill ride for people who just like getting really into a fun action movie. If you like Mission Impossible 1, Alias, Felicity or Tom Cruise you really need to check this puppy out.

PS: Tom Cruise is not gay.

Nintendo has started to put DS download stations in stores everywhere. Basically you just walk into a store that has one, turn on your DS and use the built in download option to download demos of games just like you would from your friend’s DS.

To find out if there’s one near you check out this store locator which lets you find all locations within 50 miles. Here in Canada it would seem that EB has cornered the market though in the US they seem to be primarily at Best Buys.

I dropped by my local EB and tried it out. Apparently the station had been there for 3 weeks which I found pretty annoying considering I’ve been to EBs a bunch of times since then without noticing. My DS saw the station as “volume 1” insinuating there would naturally be more demos to come as new games neared release. I spoke with a friendly EB employee who explained that it was just a DS sitting there with a cartridge that provided this functionality. He said their Nintendo rep would eventually come by to switch the cartridge when new demos are available. A pretty simple but engenious gimmick.

Nintendo’s customer service FAQ boasts that these stations will work within 65 feet of the source. The guy at EB said they kept it behind the cash and it worked at about a 15 foot raduis from there. Some pretty conflicting opinions there. I didn’t try to log on from the parking lot but I’d be more inclined to believe the 15 feet story as it’s just a DS sitting there. When I’d go to Best Buy to set up the display DS with the chat and hide behind the aisles sending pictures of penises to it with my DS while looking for people’s reaction I noticed that the range was in the wearabouts of 15 feet. Maybe a bit more but not 65 to be sure.

These games will stay on your DS as long as you can keep it powered. This means no turning it off and no switching to another game you’ve got in there without losing your download. Luckily it will still retain the game in sleep mode so, as long as you don’t leave it unplugged for days at a time, you should have no real problem keeping a game for long periods with a little common sense.

So go and steal games as sales people look at you hoping you’ll actually buy something for a change.

Rented King Kong today… oh …wow… what a mistake.

This movie was just so horribly bad. Boring boring boring. Why was it so long? Why did they take so much time dwelling on such retarded things? All this crap on the boat and stuff.. and why? To set up a second love interest for this girl? It’s so boring and pointless. I just wanted to see the monkey and then after over an hour when he finally shows up I’m just so frustrated and sick of wanting him to show up that he comes way too short of the hype. Pretty lame CG. I mean… he’s kind of ugly!

And all these stupid dinosaurs and junk. They’re all so imcompetent. These things that looked like brontosauruses if Jurassic Park was a budget movie are just running in a heard and falling off cliffs and tripping over each other but there isn’t really anything going on that makes them trip that they’re not bringing upon themselves. Or Kong is smashing rocks and a big boulder falls on his head… well nothing caused by the human interaction on this island is causing this to happen. He’s just stupid. No wonder all these things are extinct in the rest of the world. And these bats… Kong sleeps in a cave with them… and then a human shows up and they all start fighting Kong who is essentially their roomate. I’m not really following here…

And what’s the fascination with white women? Okay I can get Kong ’cause that’s sort of the point of the story but all these freakin’ T-Rexes are fighting Kong for this white girl who’s maybe a buck 20 when wet. Is it that she’s on the rag and everything’s trying to screw her? I just don’t get it. I mean even when these things are falling to their deaths in this ravine and getting caught in vines rather than try to save themselves they’re fighting this buffet of an ape to nibble on the appetizer that is Naomi Watts. Do T-Rexes have a human’s appreciation for a smokin’ hot rack?

And all these important things happen in cutaways. We spend a ridiculous amount of time on the boat and then when they get to the island we don’t even see them land. They get in a raft and then they’re treking through the woods. You know that would have made a better scene than half this movie. Then they drug the ape and I’m wondering how they’re going to get this guy on the boat, transport him to the city, move him, store him, keep him contained and fed… and … they cut ahead weeks to him on broadway. What? Why can’t we just cut out the scene with the killer bugs and fighting penis plant monsters and put some interesting things in. Scenes which would have been included in an hour and a half version of such a film are omited from this 3 hour + monstrosity.

I realised I was left with far too much time to contemplate how a woman and a giant ape could have sex at some time between the ideas of urethra fisting and 2 armed snorkel assisted prostate diving. I should have been engrossed enough in this movie not to need to have my mind wander on to such things.

Peter Jackson has lost all ability to properly gage what should be put into an entertaining movie. He likes King Kong so he makes it into the only thing he knows how to do after Lord of the Rings, a majestic epic insanely long craZy movie… well it just doesn’t work! And if it could it wasn’t handled well enough to work. Are we back at the stage where people can tell Peter Jackson what to do again or does the industry still respect him too much to stop him from doing any retarded thing he wants?

I asked myself after watching this if I prefered it to the horrendous failure that was the Roland Emmerick Godzilla commonly refered to by the losers only as “GINO” and as much as I hated that movie I’d rather watch it for no other reason than the fact that it leaves me with a lot more time when I’m done with it. This movie wasn’t just boring. It was annoying and painfull to sit through.

Don’t see it. Don’t encourage him. In fact just stop seeing his movies alltogether until he can start keeping things under about 2 hours like normal people do.

Megaman – Upon A Star is not a game but a straight to video 3 episode Megaman series I bought on a whim at one of ADV’s 5$ anime sales… and what a weird thing I got!

First off I asssumed this was a somewhat new as “2005” is the only year indicated on the box. Once I started watching this video it was obvious to me that this was not made last year as the image quality that, while not bad, was obviously not made not made in a digital colouring DVD era world, not to mention the character designs and animation style looked a good 15 years old… and then came the real age indicator. The main character was playing a famicom (that’s a Japanese NES) and Megaman 5 of all games. Well as it turns out this series was made in the early 90s, and dubbed around the same time, but never released in either Japan or North America until last year.

Dubbed by the Ocean Group in Vancouver, the same guys that did the old Megaman cartoon I’m sure we all know and love, the dub is of solid quality, though I didn’t watch it in it’s entirety. Megaman has a different voice as he’s a child in this series, unlike in the old show… which as it would turn out is probably newer than this.

The story is entertaining in that it’s so ridiculous it’s funny.

In the first episode we Dr. Wily, a character in a video game, on a whim one day decides to leave his game and conquer the real world. This is not done through any technological mishap or anything. He just looked to the side one day at the real world he’s been looking at through the back side of a TV screen all his life and comes out. Megaman follows and they run around fighting each other. Young Yuuta, who’s home he lands in, has understanding parents who fully accept the fact that a game character has crossed into our world, but prioritise homework and school over having their son help Megaman save the world from evil robots. Dr. Wily, as his first act against our world, conquers an amusement park and creates an army of robots to play in it. Weird things happen like Megaman is confused by the fact that people in Japan drive on the left side of the road. He comes from a game. How does he even know what a car is? Are we to understand all these robots weren’t made in Japan or what?

All throughout this first episode our hero is, even in the Japanese version, refered to as “Megaman”, which sort of hurt my brain since the Japanese have always refered to him as “Rockman”‘. His girlfriend/sister is still refered to as “Roll” making the pun as ineffective as it was when I first heard it.

Along comes episode 2. Megaman is now called “Rockman” in the Japanese version. How no Japanese child is expected to notice this sudden change is a mistery to me. The characters are all the same but they seem to have half forgotten the events of the first episode. Megaman escapes the game under totally different circumstances. At new years time Yuuta and his sister Akane are fighting over the Famicom and Megaman, frustrated over losing to Wily with no one in the real world to control him, appears in the real world when the Famicom is knocked around. The children are amazed that Megaman can enter the real world, seemingly forgetting the events of the last episode. Everyone seems to remember Megaman’s last visit though as Yuuta’s parents shrug off the visit saying only “I didn’t expect Rockman to show up to offer New Year’s greetings” as if he was a flakey neighbour or something. Do these people actually remember his last visit or is it just so common that characters escape the game world that they don’t bat an eye at it? The rest of the episode then revolves around Wily using a time machine he stole from Light to use the asteroids that killed the dinosaurs to ruin the present… and then he quickly gets confused and uses his powers to steal food from children and such. Other weird things include the fact that Protoman’s name has changed to “Blues” since the last episode and Rush has since lost the ability to talk, conversing only in barks.

Once episode 3 rolls around we’re not even trying to come up with reasons for which Megaman and Wily are escaping the game world on a regular basis. The children simply scream at the TV to call them out of the game to come watch a parade. Can’t say I’ve ever tried that one before. Dr. Wily then furthers his plans to destroy the future by not using time travel and destroying the present. Megaman notices this through the wonders of time travels and jumps from month to month, arriving only at significant cultural events, trying to catch him at the time when he’s being bad and attacking the world with a Typhoon robot of all things.

So go out and buy this DVD if you want the world to stop making sense.

I got into a little argument with some Firefly fans a while back. Not believing that there would actually be a wide release Firefly movie I made a vow that, should such a thing get widely distributed in theatres, I would drink a bottle of salad dressing… oops! Being a man of my word and a big whorish ham I have documented this gut wrenching event. Be entertained by my pain!

Take a classic style Super Mario Bros. game, switch Mario with Peach and what do you get? Super Princess Peach.

In a terribly obvious role reversal we see Mario get kidnapped (by a goomba of all things) and Peach now tasked with the role of saving him. Pretty basic concept that one would expect to produce an inferior style title. But no! This game is solid. It really does play just like a an old school Mario Bros. game. This game is what I was hoping New Mario Bros. would turn out to be like. So why are all the fanboys out there drooling over New Mario Bros. without giving this one a shot? … maybe they just don’t want to look gay like some guys who always choose Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2? I bet they don’t have such reservations about playing Metroid!
So basically you’ve got peach walking around in a world which looks kind of like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World and a bit of Yoshi’s Island tossed into it without having that ugly looks like it was drawn with crayon style Yoshi’s Island had. She doesn’t use standard power ups but instead uses her emotions to fly, cry on enemies, burn things or heal. You can also purchase power ups with the coins you collect in levels to do things like tricks with your super parasol to get through levels. The object of the game is to rescue 3 hidden Toads in each stage and then fight a boss at the end of each world. This plays out pretty well because, through the use of your special abilities, there’s quite a variety of ways in which the Toads can be hidden. While the game starts out as being quite simple it picks up in difficulty soon enough. While not a terribly difficult game the maze like levels do offer a challenge reminiscent of later levels in Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World. The bosses all require little tricks to beat in the style of a Yoshi’s Island or Super Mario Sunshine boss. This keeps things interesting.

Simply put I recommend this game to anyone with an appreciation for side scrolling Mario games who wants to try something new.

Now check out the official site which has tons more content then your average game’s official site. And it’s just bizarre stuff like t-shirt designs and a little app to make a fake magazine. Nintendo.com also has a nice page for the game put together.

Well it’s getting real close now to the year’s most anticipated game*! Super Princess Peach, the Super Mario Bros. style side scroller for the Nintendo DS, is hitting stores in a little over 2 weeks now on Febrary 27th.

Check out the official site which has pretty much no information and a weird little flash magazine maker program.

* According to aDam