Media Monday: Monument Valley Not a Monumental Value!

And also browser-based "idling" games!

- Choppin' Wood - ★★☆☆☆
I'm really into this kind of game lately. The balance of attending and then ignoring fits in just right with the jobs I've been working recently. There's not much to this one though. More theme but maybe less interesting than...

- DerivClicker - ★★☆☆☆
I collected all the things in this game. I don't think there's anything else to do. It's not as fancy as Cookie Clicking or Candy Box or Clicking Bad from last year, which it occurs to me now I never even logged. I guess I never got every last thing in Cookie Clicker though.

- A Dark Room - ★★★☆☆
The best of today's bunch. It was intriguing as I unlocked new things, and surprising as I kept forgetting I was playing and returned days later to find I had tons of supplies. Combat becomes a chore towards the end, but I finished this one twice.

- Monument Valley - ★★☆☆☆
It was a really shrewd move for the developers of this game to target the Apple and graphic design / tech nerd segment of the web, either instead of or in addition to the gaming press. I liked the one level that was a box that opens because I miss The Room, but I ended up disappointed in this one.

As far as I know, I don't mind the "non-game" game genre. These are games that are generally more of a walking tour of a (usually) lovely thing the developer has made to show you, different from a book or video in that there is usually some clicking or tapping involved to keep you engaged, but there are no real obstacles present to keep you from seeing all of the carefully crafted content. My blunder was not considering the non-gamer sources of the reviews and blurbs I was reading that promised 4+ hours of gameplay. After the first 45 minutes, when I thought we were just about done with the tutorial and intro levels and it turned out the game was over, I think I felt a little cheated over the relatively high price and small amount of content.

#2,042: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

About the numbering...
I have movied my list of movies from IMDB to Letterboxd, which sources their movie info from the "open 'wiki-style,'" rather-less-thorough-than-IMDB [TheMovieDB][]. So far, this has meant that 62 movies I had logged, mostly shorts, are not transferable to Letterboxd unless I take the time to get them added to TMDB first. Along the way I also nixed a bunch of movies that I can't remember actually watching, or were secretly internet comedy videos or theme park rides or DVD bonus features that I was using to pad my stats. And somehow, I still came out 40 movies ahead.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - ★★★★★
During the scene where Nick Fury drives to work, I realized why no one will ever be happy with the SHIELD TV show. You want it to be like this, and it they just can't do it. It felt like even the easter eggs and name drops and whatnot were a little classier, a little smoother than the TV crew can pull off. Also, I think it's neat to make a sequel in a different genre from the original.

My complaints for this movie are few and tiny. I cheered for my pal DC's cameo.

Some more video game stuff:

- 10000000 - ★★★☆☆
A match 3 type game. I played this last year, but I got a new iOS device since then, so my save was gone and I played it again. Took about 3.5 hours of game time, but felt rather longer, since it was spread over months.

- Halcyon - ★★★☆☆
Last year I described this as a kind of frenetic "match-two" game. For some idiotic reason I started playing it again and it got its claws back into me. A wasted day or two later, I've finally rebeaten the 'Stars' section.

- Thomas Was Alone - ★★★☆☆
PS+ keeps on giving. I'd been interested in this one. I think it knocked off in one night, and then I started again on the commentary track. It was just… fine. The kind of game 3 stars were invented to rate.

Media Monday: TV & Books

Some more of the TV I've watched so far this year:

Sherlock s3
I liked, in the end, the interconnectedness of the season, but only because without the final episode, it would have seemed like a season wasted. Early on it was feeling to me like the fun episodes you would put amid a long season, to break up the episodes with good cases. I began to think (and still might) that the show has become, instead of what it used to be, what the internet thinks it is.

Attack on Titan s1
Recommended from various angles, I watched this whole anime series on Netflix. I was really expecting it to be in space for some reason. The mobility devices are great. My complaints though: the thing that I was told was the basic premise of the show isn't actually established until almost halfway through, so boo to that reviewer for blowing a fun surprise. And second, and I'll say this carefully so as not to do the same thing to you, there was something very early in the show that I thought sure was going to happen, and then much later they announced it was going to happen, and now I'm wondering if I have to watch a whole second or third season before it actually does happen.

The Eric Andre Show s1
This show wasn't for me. I remember that there were a couple bits I liked, but I don't recall what they were anymore. Hannibal Buress seems to be getting very gently typecast, but maybe this show is the first one where he plays the role of "the writers' awareness."

And hey, let's talk books!

Screenwriting 101 by FilmCritHulk
Very interesting book with ideas I'd like to try to put into practice sometime. As an iBook, it uses its own medium badly.

In the Belly of the Fail Whale by someone or another.
Sometimes you're in a place and you read or watch something just because it's there or it's on. But that doesn't mean it's good, and this wasn't. Bleh. It's the story of a guy who signs up for twitter, and how he wrote a book about signing up for twitter while working in the names of his followers into cringeworthy asides so they would buy a book that has their name in it.

Looking for Alaska by John Green
I guess I'm a little wary because he's having a popularity explosion right now, but I've been avidly consuming his YouTube shows since sometime last year and decided to try one of his novels. And I liked it! Like an alarming number of books I've read in the past few years it takes place in and around a boarding school, and as in all of them, the first half is more fun than the second half. I think all my vlog consumption clued me into some pretty oblique references, which made me feel clever. I was just happy to go through a window into an impossible sounding but convincing world, to see what bits of a YA novel connect with me today and what bits don't.

#2,001: Veronica Mars

Hey, I cracked 2000 movies watched! Give or take, of course, the huge margins of error on both sides.

The A-Team - ★☆☆☆☆
I can't believe how boring this was. Looney Tunes has higher stakes. They even jammed a terrible 'lost his powers' subplot that gets resolved by turning to Ghandi as an inspiration to kill a bunch of people in with the other incomprehensible nonsense.

Small Time Crooks - ★★★☆☆
Fun, jokey, not much of a heist movie exactly. I was surprised to find it's as recent as it is.

Rififi - ★★★★★
Just great. I hadn't seen it in a while and I think it blurred together with The Friends of Eddie Coyle and maybe Topkapi for me, so it seemed fresh. It may be a little bit of a vanilla story and execution, but that's okay when you're first. It holds up as a solid, exciting, and precise-like-clockwork film.

Le Cercle Rouge - ★★★½☆
I was much more into the first half of this movie in which the team is assembled than the second half containing the heist. It's not a bad heist, necessarily, unless you've -just- watched Rififi.

Probably my biggest criticism though: not enough red circles!

Two lightly spoilery items I enjoyed:
1) How the crooks step over the first electric eye, but to get past the second wall of them, they just do it somehow while we're cut away to the other characters.
2) How they steal all the jewels off their displays, but when they go to the fence it's all nicely laid out on velvet backings and stuff. Must have been a nice afternoon craft project.

Veronica Mars - ★★★☆☆
As a viewer who has never seen the TV series, I still found this to be fun and fairly accessible. There were certainly some lines that I could pick out as references I wasn't getting, but at the same time I probably didn't actually benefit from the 'previously on' type opening sequence. I probably would have cut out the gang stuff and the line by Ken Marino that causes a tiny plot hole.

In the pantheon of movies that continue TV series instead of rebooting them though: pretty good! And better at standing on its own than a lot of those. Maybe a rung below Serenity, and while I really liked Homicide: The Movie, that's probably only because I watched seven seasons of the show first.

Songs are Sad in April 2014

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, dear readers. Before I crack open the sonic sepulcher of the Songs Are Sad Mailbag to explain to you why every last song you claim to enjoy is in fact bone-snappingly sad, allow me to address perhaps the most frequently posed query to our humble office.

That question is this: Rob, isn’t there any kind of music that you DO like? And the answer, dear readers, comes to you in three parts.

This month is probably the best installment in this series. We look at "Love Shack," and do a line-by-line reading of the horrors of "The 59th St. Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)"

Next month, we'll take on whatever songs you suggest at songsaresad@thehiggsweldon.com