The Thing from Another World was on TV last week…  We DVR’ed it and watched it a couple days later.  Decent movie…  Dated, but still fun.  And it’s great to see where what the original looked like, before Carpenter got his hands on it.

What was even more interesting was listening to John Carpenter talk about the movie…  Apparently it is one of his favorites.  I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be able to re-make it.  Must’ve been a lot of fun.

Then we watched The Thing a few days later.  This remains one of my favorite horror movies – right up there with Alien.  I love the isolation and the paranoia.  You can’t just run away and escape, you can’t just wait it out, and you don’t know who is still human.  Great fun.

The new Thing comes out next week, and we’ll be going to see it.

I’ve really gone back and forth on this movie…  Carpenter’s film is one of my favorites, and I’d hate to see the story sullied by a bad prequel (like Star Wars).  And the early teasers and trailers didn’t look terribly impressive.

But the more recent trailers look far better.  And it’s being done by the same folks who did the Dawn of the Dead remake, which was terrific.  I think the thing that makes me most hopeful for a decent movie is this bit from Wikipedia:

After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they felt that remaking Carpenter’s film would be like “paint(ing) a mustache on the Mona Lisa” Eric Newman explained; “I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake The Exorcist… And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie – they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”

I’m in the mood for a good shooter…  Something like Far Cry, or Quake II with modern graphics.  A classic one man versus an army kind of thing…  Preferably with a sci-fi setting.

There’s certainly options out there…  Crysis 2 just shipped, as did Bulletstorm, but I sure as hell don’t want to spend $50+ on a new game.

I was kind of hoping I could pick up Crysis cheaply…  It’s been out for a few years, and was successful enough to spawn an expansion and a sequel.  I figured they’d be selling it cheap at this point, to get people hooked into playing Crysis 2.  I was wrong.  $30 for the original, $20 for the expansion, or $40 for a bundle…  Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Slashdot | Blade Runner Sequels and Prequels Happening

The iconic science fiction film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s book and directed by Ridley Scott, will be followed up with sequels and prequels soon. Alcon Entertainment is in final discussions to secure film, TV and franchise rights. They are in the early stages of sorting out how to proceed and were not sure if Ridley Scott would be involved.

Just what I always wanted – crappy prequels and sequels to one of the most awesome movies of all time.  I can’t wait to see this classic get destroyed.  I bet we’re gonna have explosions and high-speed chases and stuff all over the place.  I wonder who they’ll get to direct it?  If Michael Bay is busy, maybe they can get Uwe Boll.

Been reading Shadows Over Baker Street lately – great book.

It’s a collection of Lovecraftian stories featuring Sherlock Holmes.  The two settings fit together just fine, and the character of Holmes makes perfect sense as he delves into the dark corners of the world.  Very interesting stories, very entertaining.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

But all these stories of squamous horrors and deductive detective work are putting me in the mood for something similar in my gaming.  I don’t want to just run around blasting badguys…  I want to solve mysteries.  And I don’t just want to play through a normal adventure game, I want shoggoths and eldritch horrors.

So, when I discovered that Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened was an adventure game featuring Holmes in a Lovecraftian setting…  And that we actually had a copy of it…  I was thrilled!

I installed it and tried it out last night…  And was very disappointed.

We don’t have the new “remastered” version – just the old version.  And even with the newest patches it’s still barely playable on my computer.  Movement is jerky and halting.  Mouse responsiveness is nearly nonexistent.  It’s horrible.

The basic gameplay is great.  I was investigating a missing person…  And I had to measure footprints and note that one shoe was missing a nail and collect fibers and analyze things under a microscope…  Very cool stuff.

But the game engine was getting in my way the whole time.  Really ruined the experience.

They’ve got the “remastered” version over on Steam.  It’s supposed to have a new engine – better graphics, more responsive, etc.  But I don’t really want to spend $20 on a game that we already own.

There’s an interesting post up on Slashdot today, musing about the new TRON: Legacy movie.

I enjoyed the movie.  No, the plot wasn’t amazing…  But the movie as a whole was enjoyable.

I’ve seen lots of criticism of the movie.  Lots of people complaining that the 3D didn’t add anything, or the plot was abysmal, or whatever.  And those are all valid complaints and folks are certainly allowed to like or dislike any movie they want.

But there’s another theme to a lot of these criticisms, that I think is best summed-up by simply quoting one of the comments made on Slashdot…

More specifically, my main issue with the OP’s point is that the movie’s anthropomorphization of the computer’s inner workings is too obviously inaccurate — anyone who knows anything about computers can easily see that it’s just a thin sheen of technobabble hastily thrown on top of a standard action movie.

Now, I’m not going to say that this guy is wrong…  It is, indeed, inaccurate to think that the bits running around inside your computer are anthropomorphic.  And it is, indeed, a thin sheen of techno-babble thrown over a standard action movie.

But I think he (and others like him) is missing the point.

No, the bits in your computer are not anthropomorphic.  There is no night club in your CPU.  You don’t have programs going out for drinks after a hard day of computing.  They don’t fall in love, have kids, grow old, or die.  That’s all part of the fantasy of the TRON universe.  Just like lightsabers and Force powers and faster-than-light travel are part of the fantasy of the Star Wars universe.

But we don’t go to a movie like TRON to experience reality as we know it.  We’re going to a movie like TRON to escape from our reality and live in some kind of fantasy for a couple of hours.

So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to complain that the anthropomorphizing of a computer’s inner workings is inaccurate.

The problem, largely, is that people are too intimately acquainted with technology these days.

When TRON first came out back in the 80′s, computers were just starting to become mainstream.  They were just starting to show up in the classroom or the house.  Most people didn’t have a whole lot of experience with computers.

Worse, they were rather cryptic beasts…  They ran some kind of command-line system, where you had to type out obscure commands to make them do anything.  And they’d do bizarre and unpredictable things if you got the commands wrong.

Most of them also shipped with BASIC installed…  Which meant that if you really knew what you were doing you could sit down at virtually any computer and make it do all kinds of interesting things.

Computers were, in short, mystical.  Magical.  Mysterious.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that the bits inside your computer were going out for drinks after a hard day of computing.  It wasn’t hard to imagine that if you crammed enough computers together you could come up with something like TRON or the MCP or even CLU.  We didn’t know the limits of technology.  It was easy to embrace the fantasy.

These days, however, we know the limits of technology.  Our phones have more processing power than the machines that turned out the graphics for the original TRON, and we’re no closer to walking around The Grid.  There are no gladiatorial battles in our laptops.  No nightclubs in our processors.  Just electrons flying here and there to render a picture on the screen or load an email attachment.

And people seem to be far less willing to embrace any kind of fantasy.

Just look at all the folks who scream “fake!” at every video or picture posted on the web…  Yes, it’s photoshopped…  No, cats cannot talk, even in broken English…  But it’s still funny.  Relax and enjoy the show.

And that seems to be one of the problems with TRON: Legacy.  I’m seeing people complain that computers obviously don’t work that way.  Or that the world of The Grid just doesn’t make sense.

Well, no, they don’t work that way.  And maybe it doesn’t make sense.  But it looks good, and it’s fun to watch.

Relax and enjoy the show.

Went to see TRON: Legacy over the weekend.  Was surprisingly good.  I honestly didn’t expect much out of it, and I was pleasantly surprised.

I’ve always like the original TRON, but it wasn’t a stellar film.  It was standard Disney fluff.  The big reason to go see it was simply to see the computer generated world.  Which, at the time, was really spectacular.

So I was really expecting more fluff.  And, while TRON: Legacy wasn’t some kind of cinematic masterpiece…  I don’t think I’d call it fluff either.

Decent acting, great visuals, terrific soundtrack, fun action…  Thoroughly entertaining.  Definitely a movie that we’re going to have to own.

Slashdot | H.R. Giger Returns To The Alien Franchise

Great news for Alien franchise purists, as conceptual artist H.R. Giger has been confirmed as a contributor to the prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The originator of the ‘xenomorph’ design, Giger was left out of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), since Cameron only needed a new ‘Alien queen’ design, and had come up with that himself. This article features the Swiss TV broadcast where Giger’s wife broke the news, and a full gallery of Giger’s conceptual work for Alien.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.

They’ve got Ridley Scott directing, and now H.R. Giger on board.  This might actually shape up to be something decent.