DDMTA Trailer Drops!
Escape Room Review: The Castle
Company: Maze Rooms
Room: The Castle
Date Played: 8/8/15
Player Count: 4, which was perfect!
Success: Success! No hints.
Premise: You are trapped in castle by evil wizard.
Immersion: Our host seemed a little bit embarrassed by the premise. He sat us down to tell us "You are trapped in castle by evil wizard. It's me! I'm sorry!" and we were never able to decide whether this represented sheepishness about having to put a frame around the game we were about to play, or comic genius. Either way, it's how we've thought of the start of every game since.
The room itself looked a lot more like rented office space than a medieval castle. Luckily, after a couple of minutes, this didn't really matter.
Highlights: There was a lot to do, and a mixture of regular locks and neat gadgets. A lot of custom tech stuff, actually, but what each thing expected from us was fairly clear. There was more than one way to solve certain puzzles, which I thought was especially cool - if your group isn't good at puzzle type X, you might just discover while working on other things that there's a solution to the same problem available via puzzle type Z.
Lowlights: Not enough light! We had less lamps than players, which surely slowed things down a bit. One or two puzzles' solutions were hinted at by traces of previous players. One object was broken / falling apart. The mostly cool non-linear nature of some parts meant that we got ahead of ourselves and solved at least one thing before we discovered it was a puzzle. This wasn't a big problem, but it was definitely a question for our keeper afterwards.
And Finally: This room will probably always sit on a special pedestal for me and my team because it was our first room. I think it was a great introduction. None of the lows would stop me from recommending this room to you.
Out of 1 escape room played, The Castle ranks #1!
How to book this room for yourself: Visit http://la.mazerooms.com/quest/castle/
Set List is coming! To The Pack!
Coming soon to a theater near you (as long as you live in Los Angeles), it's Set List at The Pack!
The Pack is LA's hot new comedy theater, built on sketch and improv and the blood of Miles Stroth.
Set List is a comedy show format invented by Troy Conrad in which stand-ups are shown words and phrases that are largely nonsense, and then they perform comedy based on that nonsense as though it were their polished and honed material.
Hosted and booked by Jason Van Glass (who acquired Troy's blessing), produced by me, and written by the two of us, Set List at the Pack is the newest addition to the Gangbusters! conglomerate of comedy enterprises.
Join us every Thursday night at 10:30, at The Pack Theater, where every show will feature several booked comedians we hope will do a great job, and several randomly drawn audience members who we really hope will do a great job!
#2,282: Ghostbusters
The Legend of Tarzan - ★★★☆☆
• This movie is like if The Jungle Book was kind of good. Like, half-decent.
• There's a kind of 90s Three Musketeers vibe.
• And Christoph Waltz as the villain, Fitzcarraldo!
• It's the first time a movie has tried to make swinging around on vines make sense.
• It also really helped that Friendly Fire was set to Off during the final battle.
KidPoker - ★½☆☆☆
Too fluffy. Felt written to a template. The parts excerpting televised poker were fun.
Nintendo Quest - ½☆☆☆☆
I think that this is a really fun idea for a movie, and that there's still room for someone to go out and make a fun movie out of it, because this movie sucks.
Who was the intended audience? It's not going to be people who like Storage Wars or whatever since all of the prices are secret. It's not going to be Nintendo collectors, unless they're just feeling smug about how bad this guy is at collecting. It's not going to be people who want to see someone complete an unlikely challenge, or people who like travelogue, road tripping documentaries, because there's none of that in here. Context clues would suggest that this is probably made for people who have never heard of Nintendo before, but it doesn't seem like that's the sort of person that would click on this. Not on purpose anyway.
I guess I hope this documentary was a hoax. Then there'd be something interesting about it.
Ghostbusters - ★★½☆☆
Ghostbusters: The Phantom Menace
It's not great, but that's certainly not because of the core cast. I'd put it more on Paul Feig. This movie feels like the difference between film and digital, and maybe that's why it's a different (sub)genre from the '84 edition. The original was a textbook example of magical realism, and people who actually really dug that might be put off by this big cartoon. But if you look at the scope of the ghostbusters franchise, it's mostly cartoons. I bet kids who see this one first will prefer it.
Still, who goes and makes a movie that makes you say "ugh, I wish there wasn't so much Bill Murray in that movie"?
#2,278: Independence Day: Resurgence
Hello, My Name Is Doris - ★★★½☆
After the Sony hack, a lot of people scoffed at the notion that there was an Aunt May solo movie on the table, but I think it worked out just fine.
Iron Man Three - ★★★☆☆
I'm not convinced the plot of this movie completely works on a repeat viewing, but I am impressed with Shane Black for navigating the Marvel machine to make a good Iron Man movie that still feels like his own thing.
Iron Man 2 - ★★★½☆
It's fun to see how much Tony has changed, and how this movie fits into the bigger frame of MCU movies. I think I always liked it more than the popular opinion, and it would still rank in the upper half, top 7, let's say, of the MCU. The chief complaint of the time, I think, was too much connective material to other movies, but it seems so light compared to what we've seen in later installments.
Independence Day: Resurgence - ★½☆☆☆
Sometimes after seeing a movie, I like to think about who that movie was for. Who did the filmmakers have in mind as the ideal audience for their particular film? In this case, I think it was "people who have been harboring a grudge against the cast of Independence Day for the past twenty years."
I mean, it could be, "teens who have been eagerly awaiting a trilogy of films where a bunch of old people do things that don't affect the plot." I don't know. I don't think it was "the writers of this movie."
It's weird how they bothered to include the son of Will Smith's character as one of the 40 main characters even though the Will Smith role in this movie went to a white guy.