THE SIMPSONS NEWS

As of the time of this writing, the actors haven’t signed. The table read has been postponed until Monday. If they sign this week, Fox won’t wait until next Thursday for the cast read. This means the show might begin storyboarding and designing next week and layout might start near the middle of July.

Please pray that things get settled soon. Thanks.

ROLE PLAYING GAMES

So I was reading an article in a gaming news site that really caught my attention. It asked a very interesting question which went like this:

Pong, released in 1972, relied on cutting-edge electronics. Dungeons & Dragons, which appeared two years later, employed technologies that had existed for thousands of years. The odd-shaped dice used to play original D&D – the pyramids, the icosahedrons, the strange gear of so many roleplaying games – are the five Platonic solids. The Greeks had advanced math, writing, drama, myth and lots of leisure time – not to mention an academy at Athens loaded with nerds. So why didn’t Plato ever think to deck out a dungeon for his fellows to loot?

The article itself is a little all over the place but in the end, it does answer the question. It’s interesting but it made me wonder how different games would be, had someone invented Role Playing Games (RPGs) earlier in history. Just look at what D&D has done in the short while it’s been around. If it wasn’t for D&D, games like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online wouldn’t exist. These games are basically taking similar D&D mechanics and instead of rolling dice, uses computer generated randomness to calculate successes or failure. But of course the biggest difference between games like this and a tabletop RPG is the lack of versatility the computer game has. Where in a tabletop RPG you can do anything and go anywhere you want, computer RPGs are limited to what the computer game program allows you to do.

Well anyway, I just thought it was a very interesting article and it just made me think.

MOVIES

Last Monday, Alesha and I went to go see the new Indiana Jones movie. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. For quite some time now I’ve had the feeling that the movie wasn’t going to be all that good. I thought it might be about as good as Temple of Doom, and I’m not a big fan of Temple of Doom. Well, we sat down in the theater at 11:45 am (less expensive around that time) and watched the movie. We were treated to pretty much what I expected, an entertaining, forgettable, shallow movie. In fact, even though it was entertaining, the movie just seemed to go through the motions of an Indiana Jones movie, but lacked the heart of an Indiana Jones movie. I actually think Temple of Doom is better. At least in that movie, the action had a purpose. There was always something greater at stake than just showing a fight. Not in this movie. In fact, the fights were so meaningless that they felt like I was watching a video game.

In a video game, you might enter an area to get some treasure or a key or something and then you get attacked by random ninjas that “spawn” before you or just come out of the wood work. You fight them, defeat them, get the treasure or whatever and then you go to the next area, where you get attacked by random ninjas again, you defeat them, get in a car were you get attacked by more random ninjas…and so on. Well, this new Indiana Jones movie not only felt just like this, it actually had “random ninjas”, in the form of natives, that came out of nowhere just to fight them. It was ridiculous and the main bad guys, who were communist Russians, were no better than that as well. They weren’t even an actual threat. I never, for one second, thought Indiana Jones was in some sort of danger while they were around, which was not the case in any of the other movies.

Not only that but the creators of the movie assumed every one in the audience was as big a moron as the characters in the movie and had to spell everything out for us. (The following is not a spoiler) There actually was a moment at the end of the movie where the characters of the movie discover the big ‘mysterious secret’ of the movie but the audience had pretty much figured it out from having watched the first ten minutes of the film. It was embarrassing. Am I suppose to respect these heroes if they don’t even have the same common sense as the audience? None of the other films talked down to the audience like this (although Temple of Doom came close).

Overall, the movie was a little worse then I thought it was going to be. It did have it’s moments though. It might be a great movie to watch and make fun of with a group of friends and family (like Temple of Doom).

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