Oddball Update

Apple christened this post the “entertainment entry” because, as I was telling her about what I was going to write, we both realized it was basically a leisure update — food, games and movies. Well, it’s a lightweight exercise then; that’s fine — that last huge post about San Francisco was the real meat and potatoes, so this is dessert. There hasn’t been much dessert on this site lately — well, actually, there hasn’t been much to eat at all, so the readership is probably all going hungry. But anyway, as this silly food allegory is getting rather stale — uh, sorry — as I often say on “Private Oddball,” it’s time to just stop the torture and get on with the next paragraph.

For the “food” portion of today’s update, Apple totally outdid herself yesterday by making a killer Pad Thai. In case you aren’t clear, Pad Thai is probably the Thai dish that is most well-known to the western world, a tasty dish of stir-fried noodles with a tamarind-based sauce, bean sprouts, peanuts and usually chicken or shrimp. Anyway I was so completely blown away by Apple’s rendition that I’m ready to say it was the best Pad Thai I’ve ever had. Everything was cooked to perfection. The shrimp she added were authentic Thai shrimp too, and were tasty enough to eat all by themselves, actually. Fantastic. These will be some leftovers I’ll be glad to eat. Apple, I salute you.

We also had some good dim sum this morning at Bo Ling’s, where we haven’t been in quite some time. Dim sum is a traditional Chinese brunch-type meal consisting of a vast array of choices, usually served a la carte. I particular like the barbecued pork buns and the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. My favorite way to cap off the meal is with steamed buns with a sweet yellow custard filling, only problem is they’re not easy to come by. You usually have to flag down a waitperson and try to make them understand what it is you want, then they have to make them as special-order. This doesn’t always work, but today we were met with success. Mmmmm, good. Because I’m a freak, I attached a picture. Custard buns! Oh yeah! After all this tasty Asian food, tonight I’m having hamburgers and chips. Running the gamut here, people.

Now we move into the “movies” portion of today’s post. Actually it’s “movie,” singular — Mission: Impossible 3, to be precise, which we went to see today. Yes, I know Tom Cruise is of questionable sanity lately. Yes, the spectre of his and Katie’s recent “goings on” did rear its ugly head once or twice during certain moments in the film. But overall I thought it was a good flick. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as M:I:II six years ago, but some relatively mindless action is always good once in a while.

I also really like Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible theme, so whenever one of these films comes out I find myself anticipating the soundtrack more than the film. The soundtrack this time around is more generic than the alt-rock style score from the last sequel, but it’s very well produced and very much in keeping with the style of the original Tom Cruise M:I film soundtrack from 1996, composed by Danny Elfman. But where Elfman’s score was mostly very blah, this one is quite lively throughout. I’m going to pick up the soundtrack album this week to complete my collection, although I noticed this weekend that I have no idea where my M:I:2 CD is anymore. I’m not sure I’ve seen it since I sampled from it extensively while arranging the score for “Future Schlocked,” though only my friends will know what that means — and how long ago that was, for that matter.

And now to the final segment of today’s posting tri-fecta, the “gaming” segment. Yesterday I finished Tomb Raider Legend, the latest in the Lara Croft franchise, on my Xbox360. It was a great game, with excellent gameplay and a well-produced story that played like a feature film. Unfortunately, it was very short. I think I beat the central storyline in about 14 hours of gameplay, and explored most of the Croft Mansion besides. It somehow didn’t feel like a game I’d be playing again and again for posterity’s sake, so I hit up EB Games last night and traded it in on some new merchandise. Well, “used” merchandise, actually.

After taking Lara back to from whence she came, I picked up a preowned copy of Black for Xbox and Resident Evil 4 for PS2. Black is a classic Xbox title (not X360), but was just added to the Xbox360 backwards compatibility list, which means I can play it on the newer console without having to crank up the classic ‘Box or unravel that hamfisted wired controller. RE4 has been recommended to me by every gamer I personally know, not to mention the gaming public and media as a whole, so I figured I couldn’t do wrong by picking it up. EB even had a preowned copy of the “limited edition” RE4 in a metal case with a “making of” DVD and a prologue book, all of which was actually present and accounted for, much to my surprise. It was stickered at the same price as their standard used copies, so I obviously went for it.

First, Black. It’s a first person shooter of the utterly mindless order, a “covert ops” military-type game where you play the role of some secret government operative with a huge arsenal of weapons. What’s great about Black are the destruction dynamics. The folks that brought us the Burnout series, which I have previously lauded for their amazing grasp of how cars smash and fly apart, here present us with a shooter where you can destroy almost everything in the environment with equally satisfying gusto. Shattered glass, concrete and metal fly everywhere, making an incredibly satisfying sound, as you fill the air with a hailstorm of lead. Abandoned cars shudder and rock back and forth as you riddle them with bullets. Fire an RPG up into a tower, and a sequential series of explosions blows out the entire front of the building one floor after another, showering the street with a glittering halo of broken glass. It’s awesome! Completely!

If you’re not a mega destruction-head like me (as a kid, I used to throw stuff down the basement stairs over and over just to hear it crash and fly all over the place), there won’t be all that much to love about Black — honestly, unless you really love games with big guns that blow up stuff in a big way, this is just another shooter. The story is engaging but nothing outstanding; the enemy AI is awful and there isn’t much depth to the whole thing. But it’s a very pretty package and a lot of stuff blows up in a very big way, so think of it as “Black, a Jerry Bruckheimer production!” Which is just what you need to unwind sometimes, admittedly. For that purpose, I recommend it heartily.

On to Resident Evil 4. This latest installment in the decade-old Resident Evil series follows the characters we were first introduced to in Resident Evil 2, an original PlayStation game which has always been my favorite in the whole series. Personally, I’ve always felt — much like the Tomb Raider series, ironically — that after the second game, the RE series went down the toilet. I’m happy to report that it seems to be back from the water treatment plant with a clean bill of health, as this is easily the prettiest and deepest Resident Evil yet. It’s clearly pushing the PS2’s aging hardware to its limits, as I’m not sure I’ve seen a game look so good on this system before. I’m not sure if this is a stylistic choice or a peculiarity of the fact that it’s a Gamecube port, but the colors in the game all have a sort of desaturated feel, like a gritty horror film. If intentional, it works better as such a device than the simple noise filter Silent Hill employs for the same ostensible reason.

Resident Evil 4 is also damn hard. At least, I think it is. Shortly after you begin the game, you’re thrust into a small village where every damn fool who lives in it wants to kill you with farm implements. At first it seemed like there was plenty of ammunition available to fire at them, but jeeze are there a lot of baddies. Before long your clip is dry, your handgun’s slide is locked back and you’re running, running, running for your life. I’ve died at this part of the game several times now, and I’ve decided that there are two keys to surviving this: Pistol accuracy (pop ‘em in the head!) and kicking. In other words, shoot the dude’s kneecap, and while he’s reeling, move in and kick him to death. And whatever you do, don’t wake up the chainsaw guy. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game just come right out and show the player character’s head being sawn off before, but now I have, and it’s nastified.

There’s only a couple things I don’t really like about RE4 so far. First, the audio. The sound effects are well-chosen, but the quality is horrendous — the muddy, low sampling rate of the foley and hard effects sounds akin to the original Wolfenstein. Since I hear this game is quite long, they probably chose this particular quality just to fit everything onto the disc. The other somewhat annoying thing is the point of view from which you play the game. The camera seems too close to the main character so I have trouble seeing what’s around me, and it’s also kinda over his right shoulder (not right behind him) so there’s a blind spot to his immediate left. Sure, you can swing the camera nearly 180 degrees in either direction with the right analog stick, which is great, but this means that just walking and looking around can be a little kludgy. I think I can get used to this, though — admittedly I’ve only been playing for about an hour. I also hope that my accuracy improves — because I’m having trouble putting the bullets where I want them to go, even with a laser sight.

For all that, though, RE4 looks like a fascinating game, and after guiding Leon through the nightmare that was Resident Evil 2 way back in the day, if nothing else I feel obligated to check out his latest adventure to see how the story progresses.

Anyway, that’s it from me for today. Time to go grill the hamburgers. And then I have lots more damn work to do for my former employer that I’ll have to focus on for the rest of the night — as I feared, there was a lot of stuff the guy I’m working with didn’t tell me, so now I’m basically redoing everything I spent all of last Sunday on. This particular guy was always like that; he doesn’t care enough to give you any information until after the fact, even if you ask, plead and BEG for as much detail as you can think of up front, you still won’t get it. But whereas, when I was an employee, this meant only a lot of head-shaking and pointless rework, now it means their bill for services rendered gets to grow exponentially with every withheld detail. I was banking on this being a $500 project, but after this latest cock up, it’s worth at least a grand. Hey, that’s pretty good payback.

Categorized as Games/Console, Games, Life, Media/Movies