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Star Trek: Discovery has a trailer.

by Aaron Williams on May 18, 2017 at 1:18 AM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater, The Idiot Box

The much-beleaguered Star Trek: Discovery has a trailer, with special effects and everything:

Knowing next to nothing about the series or what to expect, here’s what I like:

• They changed the look of the ship. While it was great they went back to some old school Ralph McQuarrie drawings to design the ship, making it look like his Star Trek Star Destroyer concept art kind of made the ship look a little sinister in the test footage.

• The cinematography, sets, and costumes look pretty cool. It does make the Kirk-era uniforms and tech look a little goofy by comparison, but we can just assume that if Starfleet hadn’t been operating under the budgetary constraints of the 1970’s, it would’ve had spiffier duds and digs.

• The glimpses of some pretty neat looking alien races that seem to go beyond the old “forehead of the week” from previous shows.

What seems a little worrying:

• Prequel-itis. All the events we see have to lead into Star Trek: The Original Series, so fans will be on the lookout for any contradictory events. I just hope the Borg don’t show up again only to somehow vanish without a trace, like they did in Enterprise.

• The prune-alien’s claim about his genetic heritage. How can you be “biologically determined” to sense the coming of something as vague as “death?” Telepathic powers are one thing, and I’ll even buy precognitives that can sense likely futures, especially their own, but just “death?” It doesn’t help that he kind of looks like Grandpa Simpson, because now I’m picturing him kind of sounding like him, too.

• We appear to have yet another person trying to bridge the gap between being Vulcan and human. I can’t tell if Burnham is supposed to be half-Vulcan or just was raised on Vulcan, but I’m not all that excited about another Star Trek character doing the whole logic vs. emotion thing, if that’s what we’re going to get.

Armchair criticism aside, it looks a lot more cinematic than previous outings, and there are no pop songs being used for the theme, so I’m hoping those are good signs. It’ll have to pull out some pretty hefty sci-fi chops to beat out The Expanse for my current spaceborne saga of choice, but I’ll give it the opportunity.

5 Comments

If you owned an Amiga in the 80’s, I might have found a movie for you.

by Aaron Williams on May 16, 2017 at 5:18 PM
Posted In: Cineplexia, The Internetonomicon, Video Gaming

“Hey, Bob?”
“Yeah, Roy?”
“We should make a monster movie.”
“Okay, what kind of monster?”
“How about giant ants?”
“You mean like Them?”
“Heck, no. We can’t afford the rights to that.”
“Why do we need to buy the rights to anything? Nobody owns the concept of giant ants.”
“We’re a small studio, Bob. We can’t get noticed if we’re not basing our movie on an established intellectual property.”
“So we want giant ants someone has done before, but cheap.”
“I like the way you think.”
“Okay, here’s a video game that had giant ants in it called It Came From the Desert.”
“I like the title. When was it made?”
“1989. For something called an ‘Amiga.'”
“Was that, like, a car?”
“Who knows? So it looks like this video game was based on old movies about giant ants.”
“That’s meta. Audiences dig meta.”
“Can we make ants that look as good as these screenshots?”
“Pfft. Like anyone who played the original game is still alive.”

If you can’t go one more second without playing the game this magnum opus is based on, “It” is available as abandonware.

4 Comments

Alan Wake-up call.

by Aaron Williams on May 14, 2017 at 5:16 AM
Posted In: Video Gaming

There’s a game out there called Alan Wake, and overall, it’s pretty good. It’s an homage to Stephen King horror/suspense TV mini-series from the 90’s, complete with “previously on…” recaps and rock music bookending each episode. The reason I bring this up is apparently Remedy Entertainment’s rights to some of those songs are expiring, so you can get the main game for about three bucks on Steam or GOG.com, adding the DLC, American Nightmare for a dollar more.

You have until May 15th to grab it (the removal of the game for sale won’t affect your digital copy), so if playing a writer visiting a haunted lake and fighting a mysterious “darkness” in the guise of a playable TV show interests you, it could be worth the cost of a value meal.

The game itself has gotten overall good reviews, but it’s a bit of an odd duck. Originally, it was meant to be less linear and more free-roaming, and some relics of that history still exist in the game. There are coffee thermoses that may have once served a purpose, and now they’re just a collectible for getting an achievement. Being able to traverse the playable area and go wherever you want was discarded, though you can still drive some of the vehicles around. From what I gather, the developers found that allowing players to show up wherever they wanted broke the narrative flow more often than not, so they (wisely, the critics said) re-tooled their vision.

It’s also noted for having product placement in the form of Energizer lithium batteries and a rather incongruous ad for Verizon that takes place in an otherwise tense moment of the game. Maybe that does more to invoke the small-screen adaptations of horror novels for some?

If you want to see the game in action and you don’t care about having the game snarkily spoiled in an un-scary “Let’s Play” format, you could (occasional adult language warning) watch the cast of “Spoiler Warning” critique a playthrough of Alan Wake. Their take is that it’s a good, though flawed, game, and one commentator says American Nightmare is much improved over the initial installment.

If nothing else, it’s a cheap addition to everyone’s “I always meant to play that” section of their game library.

There were plans for an Alan Wake 2, and those may still come to fruition, but apart from a prototype video and elements that went into American Nightmare, the once-planned sequel remains in development limbo.

3 Comments

Forget teaching your kid to play the piano and get them one of these…

by Aaron Williams on May 12, 2017 at 5:11 PM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, You call that noise "music?"

Apart from adding electronics to existing ones, few truly new instruments appear in our culture these days. The Theremin is the last one I can recall, but I recently stumbled upon one that’s kind of unique and embraces the fate the Theremin suffered. The Theremin is an electronic instrument that was embraced by sci-fi movies of its day, and has since become a cliche of drive-in flying saucer films. This device wholeheartedly throws itself into the kind of genre it wants to evoke, and boy is it effective:

Imagine the pride you’ll feel as your offspring practices late into the wee hours, especially during stormy nights when the police have advised residents to keep their doors locked…

2 Comments

Friday Internettery.

by Aaron Williams on May 5, 2017 at 5:09 PM
Posted In: Articus Pharticus, It Came from the Internet, It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater, Stuff with magic and swords, Tabletop Gaming, The Basement Storage Bin

• KFC is trying to steal my eBook publishing debut by releasing a Colonel Sanders romance novel in time for Mother’s Day. Is this the first entry in the bucket-ripper genre of literature?

• There’s a voiceover teaser for Marvel’s Inhumans TV show in this Entertainment Weekly article. I wonder if someone will do a money-counter on how much Medusa’s hair costs to animate per episode?

• Game of Thrones is going all “expanded universe” on us as HBO orders up four sequel/prequel spin-offs. So if you’re into betting on “deadpools” for the characters in George RR Martin’s fantasy world, you won’t be bored anytime soon.

• I predict we’ll someday see a mainstream TV or movie series based on the Warhammer 40,000 game universe, but until then, here’s a neat-looking animation based on one of the more recent novels.

• From the Helpful Tips for Arting files, here’s some tips on drawing straight lines and curves without all that shaky-hand stuff happening.

• Stevens Point, Wisconsin hosts a pretty hard-core trivia contest that sounds like it’s right out of a quirky cult TV series.

• A salty language and dark humor warning on this next one, as it’s an animated short from the people behind Cyanide and Happiness. It’s relevant to our interests because it features the vocal talents of Kevin “Tom Servo” Murphy.

• Finally, waste some time on Heroes of Myths, a flash game where you’re a Zeus-type person who can summon up warriors, heroes, archers, and so forth to go fight the forces of darkness and smash their temple before they smash yours. Earn Olympian cash for upgrades along the way and smite-smite-smite!

2 Comments

The Cantina Band sounds a lot like four lads from Liverpool…

by Aaron Williams on May 4, 2017 at 5:04 PM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, It's got Robots and Lasers, You call that noise "music?"

Alert Reader Albert has made me aware on this May the 4th (be with you) of a most anti-Imperial song that the dregs of the galaxy are finding amusing. Be on the lookout for anyone humming this ditty and report them to your nearest Department of Imperial Corrective Behavior facility immediately:

2 Comments

There are other worlds than these, Gunslinger.

by Aaron Williams on May 3, 2017 at 7:37 AM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Stuff with magic and swords, The Idiot Box

The official trailer for The Dark Tower is out, and it looks pretty durn good:

For those who haven’t read the series of books by Stephen King, it’s probably best understood as his tribute to all the things he loved growing up: The Lord of the Rings, science fiction, cowboys, King Arthur, monsters, and adventure. Throw all that into a blender and you’ve got most of what’s at play.

If you do decide to read the books, and they’re worth reading, I’ll warn you that a lot of fans think the series peaks at book four, The Wizard and Glass, that book five, Wolves of the Calla, is still good, but the series takes a kind of odd turn with the next volume, Song of Susannah. Myself, I stuck with it and largely agree with those sentiments, though my complaints are largely about how several villains meet their ends in the final book. Still, if you’ve read the series, there are other endings than these, if you know what I mean…

3 Comments

You can get four short stories by me on Amazon!

by Aaron Williams on May 1, 2017 at 9:28 PM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, It's got Robots and Lasers, Writing

I took the Kindle plunge and put a book up on Amazon. It’s called “Wasteland Rulemaster and Other Tales from Odd Places.” It’s got four stories in it, and I hope they pass muster with the reading public.

In two of the stories, a traveling Rulemaster travels the post-apocalyptic weird-science wasteland with a cart full of role-playing and tabletop games with which he entertains settlements and earns a living. Along the way, he falls into adventure, his game-refereeing skills being called upon to solve mysteries of the old world or prevent new catastrophes. In addition to his tales, there’s one from a world where superheroes exist and one man finds himself up against both the heroes and the villains when he tries to rebuild his life following a metahuman-caused crisis. Then I came up with a Twilight Zone-esque look at someone whose life becomes an occasional real-life “Escape The Room” game, but this time she has company with her and he might not survive the ordeal.

If that sounds great to you, you’ll be supporting my household by picking up either the Kindle version or the printed edition. I hope you enjoy them, as I’ve got loads of stories squirreled away in various stages of construction on my hard drive.

I’ll probably also weigh in on the whole Amazon experience at some point. It’s a relatively easy system once you get the hang of the menus, with my only major hang-up being the placement of the ISBN barcode on the back of the print version’s cover. Their template, I suspect, has a larger live area for the code than I’d realized, and it took several tries to get it to go through.

3 Comments

Not exactly creepy pasta, but still tasty.

by Aaron Williams on May 1, 2017 at 12:09 PM
Posted In: The Internetonomicon

I don’t want to spoil it completely, but if you like a little fear of the unknown with your breakfast, then you might want to read “I ate 3 eggs every single morning for a week – Here’s what happened.”

I think I’ll have cereal, instead.

2 Comments

A trailer for the Super Friends League

by Aaron Williams on April 29, 2017 at 8:26 PM
Posted In: Mystery Clip Theater, The Idiot Box, You call that noise "music?"

I predict that someday, someone will re-do the video from an entire superhero movie using only animation from the many cape-oriented cartoons that have aired since the 1970’s. In the meantime, we get this, and it is glorious:

And can I just say (probably not for the first time) that the Cartoon Network’s “Groovie” version of the Superfriends theme is really awesome?

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