#2,341: Operation Avalanche

Hide and Seek - ★★★☆☆
Four young adults disengage from society to go live a big, crazy, all-consuming art project. They make themselves outsiders, but nothing gold can stay.

The Lego Batman Movie - ★★★☆☆
I don't know if it's on the page, or in the hands of the animators, but there are a delightful sack of deep cuts in this thing. DVD buying freeze-framers, if they still exist, are going to have a lot to look for. Maybe that's the secret to selling DVDs.

Somehow this movie still wasn't immune to the DC light-and-noise ending - I think I might have started to doze a little during that part.

Operation Avalanche - ★★★☆☆
Operation Lune - ★★½☆☆
A very moon-y double feature.

I tell a joke in my stand-up, "I think there must have been one week each year at Space Camp when every kid there was a Double Dare champion."

And sometimes I make the mistake of telling that to college kids. It's the kind of sentence that will make a drunken 19-year-old just stare at you. 

But the real mistake is that I don't just move on, I get the idea that I should unpack it for them. 

"Okay," I start in, "Space Camp is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was a place where you could send fancy children so that they could pretend to be a part of the Space Program, which is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was this thing we cooked up in the 60s and it was a plan to shoot United States citizens at the moon. And it worked!  Of course, some people don't believe it, they think the whole thing was faked by Stanley Kubrick, who was a filmmaker that doesn't exist anymore–"

Eventually I realize that I have not so much lost them as never regained them in the first place, because I had unpacked the wrong part of the sentence. 

"Okay," I try again, "Double Dare was a game show, that doesn't exist anymore, where the grand prize, so named for its size compared to the other, lesser prizes, was a trip to Space Camp. Now obviously, we're talking about original Double Dare, and not Double Dare 2000, not Family Double Dare, and definitely not Super Sloppy Double Dare, because as we all know, the grand prize of these latter-day Doubles Dare was a trip to Universal Studios Florida. 

"Also known as the place where Double Dare was taped."

That's right, if you someone found yourself on the show, played your ten-year-old heart out, and won?

You got to go outside.

To the theme park you already paid to enter, so that you could be on Double Dare.

At least runners-up got a home copy of the game, which, if they took it home and played and won, they could put away! And take an all-expenses-paid trip to their kitchen!

Set List: Pepsi

Look, uh... how are you?  Why don't you tell me about who your sponsor is for a change?  No? 

Set List at the Pack is brought to you by... um... Pepsi. 

Look. We didn't know. We book these months in advance. How could we know? I tried to find a last minute replacement, but the only ones interested were Uber. 

#2,338: Weiner

13th - ★★★☆☆
It's so refreshing, personally, to see a thought-through documentary, making deliberate choices in both style and substance. That said, it feels just a little bit like the movie the filmmakers intended to make, and then an extra chunk they didn't plan for, but felt obligated to include.

The Founder - ★★☆☆☆
Man, I was looking forward to this one for a while last year, but I think they forgot at least an act. I guess sometimes there's a reason you move a film to the movie release graveyard.

Snowden - ★★★☆☆
I thought that since I saw Citizenfour, I wasn't going to learn anything from this movie, but I did. I learned a lot about Ed Snowden. IF any of it's true!

Weiner - ★★★½☆
Man. This guy. Is it fair for us to be mad at someone about their addiction? Is there a followup special we can watch where someone confronts him about whether we can pin 45's presidency on him?

In any other political generation to date, I bet he would have just been a well-liked and effective public servant.

Set List: Wondering

Set List at the Pack is brought to you by the notion of Wondering!

Hmmmmmmmm........

Escape Room Reviews: Testing Facility

Company: Escape Chronicles
Room: Testing Facility
Date Played: 4/9/17
Player Count: 2, but 3-4 would be ideal
Success:  Success!

Premise: You’re here to help the professor, and his helpful AI assistant. Except, there was one little tiny barely noticable glitch, and the AI is trying to kill you. So maybe fix that.

Immersion: Our setting is the company break room, which is a pretty easy look to set your sights on. Luckily, this room does a great job. There are several custom items that totally fit the room and are very fun interactions. The characters are pre-recorded, but in a really nice touch, it seems that the designers have recorded hints and reactions to common-but-wrong actions that the GM can trigger.  

Highlights: I can't explain why, but I really like it when there's a computer in an escape room. It's not super common. The aforementioned tech items were neat, but a lot of low tech puzzling is also present, as well as some easter egg kind of content. The whole thing seems to be designed with a little bit of Portal flavor, but never actually feels like it's ripping anything off. The end game is undoubtedly easier for more players but working around that little problem was fun.

Lowlights: This sounds a little bit silly when I abstract out all of the spoilers, but there was one part where I got the sense that the GM could see exactly what I was doing to solve something, and I felt surprisingly self-conscious. Like I didn't want to look like I was guessing or doing something dumb. I worry for the owners and future players about the durability of some of the props. We received one unsolicited hint that kind of wasted some of our time by directing our attention away from the puzzle we were working on.

And Finally: The Testing Facility had not been open long when we got to it, and I hope more people have discovered it since. Looking back over my diagram* I'm reminded that there was actually a lot of neat things going on in here. I might be in favor of a room providing a larger number of smaller tasks to create the feeling of forward progress. This room does that by breaking into non-linear chunks in between story beats, so your group can split up to take on various tasks that lead you all back together for the next burst of plot. Plus, it's great to have a functional plot in the game! It's taken me by surprise as I write this, but out of 21 games played, the Testing Facility comes in at #3!

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.escapechronicles.com/rooms/testing-facility/

*What, you don't have a drawing of the each room you've played in which you've labeled the points of interest and flow of events that you can refer to later on?