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The War For The Planet Of The Apes Proves There Are No Bad Ideas!

At this point you have either seen the Planet of the Apes prequels, or you are not interested in seeing them, but here is the deal, they are way better than they have any right to be.  War for the Planet of the Apes continues this trend, finishing the trilogy off perfectly.  Though it makes no sense by itself, so if you haven’t watched Rise and Dawn yet, than you really need to because War is the best of the three.  Somehow beating the curse of the third movie.

Since it is hard to review the third movie in a series were they all build on one another, I am instead going to use it to prove a point: For the most part there are no bad ideas.  If someone a decade ago would have come up to me and told me that some of the most thoughtful and well constructed blockbusters of the next ten years would be prequels to the old Planet of the Apes movies, I would have laughed at you.  What a terrible idea, but instead Rupert Wyatt (Director of Rise) and Matt Reeves (Director of Dawn and War) have created something wonderful.  How? By working hard and elevating the material.  Finding ways to explore humanity through the eyes of apes just gaining their sentience, continuing to find new and interesting ways to explore a being’s fight for survival, and the universal importance of family.

That can be true for all movies.  Movies with terrible premises can teach us and entertain us in all sorts novel ways, while movies with the best setups can be utter bores, or slapdash in their execution.  Wyatt and Reeves went the extra mile for movies that most people wouldn’t have given a second thought to, and they were fantastic and should be lauded for that.  All this to say, that I am still not sure I would greenlight a Planet of the Apes prequel if I was sent back in time, but at least it is good to know there are people out there who can make an outrageous idea like that work.  Plus, I am sure having Andy Serkis around always helps too.

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Shmee Is Ready As Player One!

While Ready Player One was a fine book, I doubt it will go down in history as a literary classic.  It was regurgitation of pop-culture that people either loved or hated.  It got even more backlash after all the Gamergate nonsense because in the book only certain people could be thought of as true “gunters” (egg hunters) if they knew enough 80’s trivia.  Which mirrored the ideas of Gamergaters’ who insisted that only certain people were true geeks.  Everyone else was just posing.  With all of that in mind, I was interested to see how the movie was going to deal with all that baggage, not to mention turn the book in to something filmable.  I am happy to report that Steven Spielberg and Co. did a pretty good job.

The movie Ready Player One changed pretty all of the major set pieces of book, and it cut out a lot of the book’s over the top nostalgia mining moments.  I mean there is still more than enough nostalgia to go around, but no one is reenacting War Games.  Though the movie does still follow Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his friends as they try and find James Halliday’s (Mark Rylance) Easter Egg in his virtual world The Oasis, and if they find it, it will give them control of the company that owns the game.

I was pleasantly surprised with all the changes that they made.  Usually I prefer movies that stick closer to the source material, but in this case the source material was pretty thin anyway, and a lot of it would have been downright unfilmable.  Not to mention the film rights for a lot of the stuff would be way to expensive to secure.  Ready Player One the film is a streamlined adventure tale, but with video games and comic books instead of Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient manuscripts, and it is better for it.

The actors are all fine in Ready Player One, but I don’t remember any standout performances, but what I do remember was all the wild spectacle that Spielberg was able to put up on the screen.  None of it really matters, but it can be breathtaking.  While it may be quite a bit different from the book, it is the same in that it is a large dose of nostalgic action packed explosive cotton candy, but this time it is injected in to your retinas via large format technicolor.

Ready Player One is a fun movie, but it may not be for everyone.  If the thought of large action sequences involving Batman and the Iron Giant excite you like a ten year old playing with his toys, you will like Ready Player One.  If that sounds like nonsense, it is, and this isn’t the movie you are looking for.  I, on the other hand, quite enjoyed myself.

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Shmee Plans Cities’ Skylines!

Are you someone who obsesses about budgets, and do you think that you could do a better job as City Planner than the dude or dudette they currently got in charge?  Colossal Order made the game for you, Cities: Skylines.  You are in charge of planning a city from the ground up, but you also have to provide services and keep that city running.  Which would be simple if the citizens of your city would just be happy with being sick, uneducated and stop setting their houses on fire.  That way you could spend all your time laying out roads and placing parks.

Cities: Skylines is actually a pretty simple game, you pick the grade of road you want, and then zone the areas on either side of that road for different things, like residential or heavy industrial.  Of course you will need to provide power to those areas, and clean water.  Not to mention those people will probably want their kids to go to a good school.  Then for some reason they like to start fires and get sick all the time, so you will have to manage the budget.  Which means setting the tax rate and overfunding or underfunding the schools and hospitals, that sort of thing.  Which sounds bad, but if you have too many schools for your small town, they don’t need to be fully funded to meet your town’s needs, but on the other hand, if you don’t have the money to build a new school, overfunding the ones you have can get you by for a few months.

That is the game: drawing roads, zoning, budgeting, and planning out city services.  All the while your citizens are doing everything they can to make your life difficult, but if you can keep everything under control, they will build an amazing city that you can watch grow.  It is fascinating and engrossing.  You will make plenty of mistakes, and you will want to tear everything down, but you would hate to evict all the people that are just doing the best they can.

For some this game sounds terrible, but don’t knock it until you have tried it.  It is always super cheap on Steam, and it is included with the Xbox Game Pass for now, so it is worth giving being a city planner a shot.  I think you have what it takes, but if not, you will at least apricate what the poor saps in city hall are going through.

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Shmee Takes On A Clustertruck!

Remember when you were a kid and you were on a road trip with your family, and when you were daydreaming looking out the window you envisioned yourself jumping from the top of one semitruck to the next? If not, I did all the time.  Well apparently the guys over at Landfall Games did the same thing when they were kids, and they made a game about it, Clustertruck.

In Clustertruck you just jump from one truck to the next, but these trucks are not just driving down the freeway.  They are falling off cliffs, exploding, being pushed in to the air, being sucked in to vortexes, and all sorts of random things, and you have to do your best to jump your way out of danger and get to the end of the level.  To help you do this, the more levels you complete, the more style points you get, and you can cash in those points for abilities like stopping/slowing time, double jumping or dashing, and bunch of others, so while the levels get harder, you become a much better jumper.

It is a simple fun idea that was executed well.  While there is not a lot to the game, it is also very cheap, so it makes for a perfect quick diversion if you don’t want to get in to something deeper.  If you have Game Pass or a couple extra bucks burning a hole in your pocket, there are worse things to spend them on.  The worst thing I can say about Clustertruck is that it isn’t very robust, but it was never supposed to be.  It was always supposed to be a game where trucks were going crazy and you just had to get from one to the next.

So that is another one of my childhood backseat daydreams turned in to a game, and it was not one I was expecting.  My other major window gazing daydream was using my feet to grind on everything, but Sunset Overdrive and Jet Set Radio delivered on that one in spades.  Who knows, maybe we will get a game about punting brothers out windows for crossing invisible lines next.

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I Am Not Sure How I Played Morrowind On The Original Xbox

Yesterday I started playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again thanks to it coming to backwards compatibility on Xbox One, and the first thing that struck me while playing was how much smoother it was.  Sure the bump in resolution up to 1920p (on the X) made it seem like I was wiping a thick layer of Vaseline off of my TV screen, but on the original Xbox the framerate would take massive dives, so that it seemed your character was trudging through molasses.

I was shocked to find out that the Xbox version of Morrowind was targeting 60FPS, even though it almost never hit that mark, sometimes dipping down in to the teens, but the Xbox One does a better job keeping things above 30FPS, and the Xbox One X almost manages to keep things at 60FPS despite pushing out more than 16x the pixels and adding 16x anisotropic filtering.

The game still looks dated, and it makes me want to find a way to push out the draw distance because everything is popping up like ten feet in front of my face, but game is still fun, and I find myself getting lost in it again.  There is something about playing Morrowind on a console that just makes me happy.  Below is a video comparing the Xbox One X, the Xbox One, and the original Xbox.  It is pretty impressive to see what Microsoft has done by just tweaking their emulation.