The Media Monster

I was at the movies, looking for a good one. And I was between Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness, & Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum. I’ve heard how good the Pursuit one was, but I wasn’t really in the mood to cry. I was more in the mood for a comedy. And Night at the Museum looked good. Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, DICK VAN DYKE, has to be a good film. Well, here’s the review.
Cast: Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs, Owen Wilson, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan

Plot: Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is a divorced parent. His wifes new husband is a cocky stock-trader who’s looking a little cooler to the kid than Larry. So Larry needs a cool job to be cool in his kids eyes. So, because of his terrible resume, he needs to resort to taking the job as the night watchman for the Museum of Natural History. He has to replace three elderly janitors, Cecil (Dick Van Dyke), Gus (Mickey Rooney), and Reginald (Bill Cobbs). So anyway, he takes over and starts his first night of night-watching, and fools around with some stuff. Until all of a sudden, everything comes to life. He remembers the janitors telling him about a tablet that came to the museum with the owner, and ancient egyptian pharoah. Because of this tablet, everything in the museum comes to life at night. He meets a lot of interesting people, and statues, and whatnot. He then meets the one person he can rely on, Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams). Theodore helps him out a little here and there. He also meets Jedidiah (Owen Wilson), who is the leader of a big cowboy calvary. One display away from them are the ancient Romans, led by Octavious (Steve Coogan). Now, these armies hate each other, and are both very small. I mean, that the people are action figure sized. They are also Mayans, but go see the movie to know about them. Larry is freaked out by his first night. He’s ready to quit his job, so he goes to Cecil and all them. He keeps his job, gets clever, and then brings his son to show off. He then finds out that Cecil and his Janitor Gang (PERFECT name for a Saturday morning cartoon) are stealing rare artifacts from the museum, including the tablet that brings things to life. So now he must embark on the adventure of his life, using living wax figures, statues and whatnot to stop the janitors.

Should you see Stiller’s new film, or just stick to his Meet The Parents?: I liked this film. I was entertained. It is pretty aimed towards kids, but it’s pretty enjoyable for others. The actors are great and enjoyable. It does have a bit of a history lesson, but still, it’s a good film. I would recommend it, it’s pretty entertaining. Night at the Museum gets 3.5 cavemen trying to escape their display case (don’t ask how to get half a caveman), out of 5.

I was looking for a movie to see on Thursday, wanting to see Happy Feet, but it was sold out. So I settled on Eragon since I read the book. I mean, the movie can’t be that bad, right?

Plotline: I’ll try to keep this as short as possible. Basically, this movie follows a young lad named Eragon who finds a dragon egg in the woods. It hatches, and he learns that this means he’s this dragon’s “rider.” The problem is, the egg used to belong to the evil King of the land, and he wants Eragon dead since he can’t have the dragon. The plot then follows his quest to escape from the King, and later to save the land.

Did it suck?!?: Well, going in I didn’t expect very much.. What I got was a very interesting translation of the book. It was much better then most book/movie conversions in terms of getting the book jammed into a movie, though everything went a bit too quickly. The music was well composed, too. But that’s where the problems ensue. For one - the special effects, which are a bit part of this movie, have a hard time doing their job. Example is the dark dragon; basically it’s a thundercloud with a mouth tacked on. Not believable in the least.

It doesn’t get any better. The crew was made up of mainly newbies, and the lead who played Eragon just wasn’t in the character. Oh, and please tell whoever did Saphira’s (the dragon) voiceover that she is not a robot dragon. The rest of the cast wasn’t bad, but they weren’t anything special either. I do have to hand it to the person who played the shade though, he came across as very menacing and made you want to hate him.

So, should I buy one of those Burger King games or go see this: Go get yourself Sneak King. It’s not a horrible movie - it’s just not good considering the amazing book it was. It really could have been good.. but they screwed up in casting. And if you haven’t read the book, steer further away from it. The people I know who haven’t read it really disliked it. So.. yeah, just pass on this, maybe rent it later or watch it on HBO. A relatively disappointing 3 out of 5.

Hey, Zam here. Welcome back everyone. I’m not going to be able to put any reviews up today, but this post is very special. Know why? Because I’m posting from my Wii!! That’s right, I’m using the new Wii Opera browser thingy that I just downloaded for free. But it’s only a trial :-(. So I don’t know if that means there’s a payment in the future, but we will find out. Also, if you have surfed the net on the PSP, this is about the same thing, but a little better.

It’s pretty cool. Let me tell you the good. First off, it’s sexy! Another thing is the keyboard. Sure, it’s a little annoying having to go letter to letter, but there’s one good part. There’s this little bar under the text box, that finishes your words. It’s great.

The bad is that when you load a page, the text shows up really small. Luckily, the + and - button serve as zoom buttons, but it does get very annoying.

Overall, it’s DEFINITELY worth the free download. Once again (after this post that almost took half-an-hour), I would like to welcome you all again. Also, I will put pictures up once i get on a real computer. This is Zam reporting from his Wii.

As promised today we are starting blogging! I’ll introduce everyone and then get working on my posts, Zam should have one as well in a bit. Here goes:

Zam: The founder of the whole Gamer Mania/Media Monster legacy. He’s a gamer like us all, and he’s a Nintendo fanboy to the core. Somehow he got a Wii on launch. Oh, and he’s also addicted to Guitar Hero. He’s pretty good. Any one want to challenge hiim?

Matt: I’m the guy who used to be ‘Ton’, but I decided, ah, screw that, I’m going to use my name. I joined the blog second. And I’m a Microsoft and Nintendo fan this time around, because Sony’s got a head full of hot air this go around. I’ve only got an XBOX 360 out of the new consoles, but I’ve been searching since launch for a Wii. Oh, music rocks too. Go U2!

Cat: The most different of the whole crew, Cat is a female gamer from Germany who lives in the UK. Got that? Good. She probably won’t do much posting.. But we can always hope, right? Oh yeah, she asked me to somehow advertise for her blog without making it too obvious. This isn’t obvious, right? And she said don’t even ask.. you can’t pet her.

See you guys around then!

Ok, so we are coming to WordPress for sure.. First I need to clear up the thing with the Blogger blogs.

Gamer Mania 2 is still available and is serving as an archive for our reviews and previews, whatnot. Media Monster. blogspot however, that was part of a big fiasco, the blog is technically gone but it still shows up.. but I can’t get into the dash and edit it, so it’s there, but you can’t get to the archives, can’t comment, and we can’t get the URL back.. which is how we got here.

Then we have this Media Monster.. we took a break, but we are officially “launching” on January 2nd, 2007. That’s when we’ll start out daily posting and things.

Hope to see you then guys!

Here’s the truth:

• Yes, Microsoft provided the image that is published in the Games for Windows cover story in the Holiday issue of PC Gamer magazine.
• Yes, this image contains what looks to be box shots of Gears of War with the Games for Windows branding bar on the box art.
• NO, this is not a confirmation, leak, tease, or sly viral attempt to announce, confirm, or admit that Gears of War will be published for Windows.

So there you have it, on the official Games for Windows blog, Gears is not coming to the PC as of now. What happened was the cover art got accidentally printed on the picture for E3 and they didn’t notice until after. You can tell they’re not making it up because AoE3 and Rise of Nations are both on there, and they weren’t “Games for Windows”. I don’t really care because if anyone with a gaming PC wants to play it badly enough, they probably have $300 they can drop on a 360. I doubt it’d even work as well on a PC.

Gears is a trilogy? If we can keep making quality games that fans obviously love (see announcement) then why would we have to stop at three? I don’t see the Metal Gear Solid, Mario, Grand Theft Auto or Final Fantasy series (among others) stopping at three and they’re still delivering compelling entertainment content that’s easily worth the money (see Unreal Tournament as well). There’s definitely, as many of you have pointed out, a lot more to learn about what’s really happening on the plant Sera and in the lives of the members of Delta Squad

I dunno about that.. with Mario and GTA there’s no real story so keeping it going isn’t very hard. With a game with a story as weak as Gears’ was, I really don’t know if it’ll still be interesting after 3 games. And the gameplay will probably get old after a while.. Even though it’s good they it has to be stopped sometime, like how Bungie’s ending Halo after 3 games even though everyone still loves it. Play it out too much and it gets boring.

They do have potential though, if they spin off of the main story and talk about other soldiers on other parts of the planet with different types of invasions happening in different ways. That could be cool.

Today along with spending a bunch of money I shouldn’t have, I finally screwed around with the PS3 to see what MS is up against. First of all I played Madden and NBA, both of which are pretty much exactly the same as the 360’s copies. Hell, side-by-side the graphics are almost identical. More powerful my ass.

Then I went out to the main menu.. the UI looks great, I admit it. The plasma flowing in the background is classy, but probably only on HD TVs. I’m sure it’ll look fuzzy on regular.. which sucks. All the menus are easy to access and it sort of puts the 360’s blades to shame because of how much more colorful it is.

Time for the real test now. MOTORSTORM! I really got amped about this back when I saw it at E3 so I loaded it up, picked my car, and hit the track. It loads like a slug through quicksand, sadly.. Anyway, a nice touch they put in is the ability to swap cars with anyone in the race before you start, so even if you don’t have a car unlocked you can probably find it among the 15 others.

And the race is off! After a few minutes I realize that this is a very, very fun game. The way the tracks are open (you can make shortcuts by flying through billboards and whatnot), the cool way your cars tear apart whenever you crash, the amazing amount of boost you can use (you can get so fast you can drive along walls, and you can’t tell me that’s not cool), it all makes for a hell of a lot of fun.

My only problem is that I think without the HD graphics a lot of the fun would be taken out, because the crashes just wouldn’t look as cool. And that’s about half what I like in the game, and I don’t have an HD TV..

As for the controller, it feels very light which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the lack of vibration isn’t made up for by the crappy motion sensing they put in it. Thumbs down for that one, Sony.

In the end, even though they pulled some unbelievably shitty moves, I think it’ll end up like the 360 where around March and April the good games will start to fire in slowly (Lair, Motorstorm, Assassin’s Creed), but the question is - will the lessening number of exclusive games be enough for people to pay $200 more?

I think it will be in about a year as long as the online isn’t horrendous.

As Cat said we’re moving Media Monster here because Doug and Zam has a problem and fought over it last night, resulting in Doug deleting the blog and then I republished it.. and then I found I couldn’t get back into the Dash, which means that URL will be lost forever.

So here we are as Cat’s been asking me to do for ages.

Anyway, over the next few days we’ll be reposting everything salvaged from the old blog in the respective dates. We’ll try to get new stuff up as usual while posting the old stuff but that might not happen very well.. we’ll see.

Yes, that’s right, all you PC Oblivion players can now use a mod which brings the convenant sword and the shield in Oblivion. Don’t believe me? Check out this video:

Interesting idea to say the least. What do you think?

Cat

It has taken a while, 2 years to be precise, but Halo 2 is now no longer the most played title on Xbox Live.

So you may ask, what is the most played game in the last week? Yes, that’s right, Gears of War.

What do you think? Is GoW the new Halo? Or just a one hit wonder?

Cat