12:14 am - Too Many Possible Projects
There comes a point in your life when you know there are just too many things bouncing around in your head, and there's no way you can really even do most of them. I have a whole series of unfinished/undone/uncompleted RPG projects I'd really like to move forward on.
Amongst the outstanding, in rough chronological order of concept:
Sanrioverse) Yes, Hello Kitty, Batz-Maru, and all the rest of the gang. Probably using Fudge as the core mechanical resolver in a diceless mode to keep things simple. I was going to move it into the future, with HK and friends as the PCs "commanding officers" in a space setting/military that owes more to elementary school than Starfleet (or is that redundant?) but I never really moved beyond a few character basics and feel.
CrystalM*) Sort of a predecessor of the modern Massively-Multiplayer RTS craze that's slowly starting. I wanted to create a hybrid RPG/wargame site in which your decisions as a character actually affect the war on the greater scale. To that end, all the PCs are assumed to be corporate liaisons from various companies, buying rights to a planet and staying bodily in an orbiting station/meeting house, while the Players run units on the planet below, mining materials to trade for more points which could be traded for equipment. Claim jumping, expansion, and politicking. If I'd ever finished it beyond the design documents, I could have been a rich man by now. Still could be, if anyone wanted to contract me to complete the design. ;)
The Lucifer Chronicles) More a supplement than a game in and of itself, I really, really want to see a book for Nobilis that goes into detail on the whole issue of Lucifer, his rebellion and Fall, with a goodly section on the things Hell has been up to since, organizations, et al. I've tried to convince R. Sean Borgstrom, the author of Nobilis, to do this stuff up as a novel or trilogy to little avail. Sadly. Nobilis is an awesome game in and of itself.
Heartquest) Admittedly, the thought of me working on a Harlequin romance/shoujo girls' manga game should probably give anyone pause, On the other hand, I think its a niche that should really be exploited and developed a lot more than it has been. I was very, very impressed with Guardians of the Order's Sailor Moon RPG, for its openness to female gamers who normally wouldn't be interested in gaming. I'd love to do something similar in terms of accessibility. Unfortunately, when Heartquest was an open project being worked on by a group on the ML, pretty much my every suggestion to make it as mechanics-light as possible, to bring the feel of the source genres into it, to promote emotional ties as important if not more important, than character attributes got me hustled off the list and the whole project got taken over by three folks who, at least on their new web page, say they'll be actually publishing it for pay in PDF format. I don't have to tell any reader here how likely that is to sell; just above lemon ices to Eskimos/Inuit.
Ace of Angels Wargame) Ace of Angels is an online, 3d, realtime space flight simulator which seems to be stuck in AEternal Beta. I'd really love to work on a full-bore minis wargame for it, and still may, but the deal has yet to go through. Ergo, I'm on hold with this one, too.
That's just the ones that come to mind right now on these projects. I'm sure I'm forgetting a pile more.
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10:05 pm - Invincible Reviews
All right, children. Settle down. Uncle Alex has once again subjected himself to great pain and suffering on your behalves. Believe me, you'd really rather I suffered like this than forced it upon you.
Now, I am an admitted connoisseur of "bad movies." These, by and large, come in two sorts:
Those that are labours of love by some member of the cast are fairly obviously so. Amongst these are a host of B-movies, where some director or artiste has taken the production under their wing and financed the lot. El Mariachi is a fine example of this sort of work. Most of these are actually pretty decent from at least one artistic PoV, whether it be cinematography, or writing, or direction, or even editing. Usually this was the domain of the sponsor, and it shows. El Mariachi has incredible direction and good writing, both hallmarks of Rodriguez. Modern Vampires is, likewise, cheaply made but shows Richard Elfman's deft hand with comedy and self-parody and contains an awesome example of Udo Kier hamming it up and having a great time, ignoring the lousy (if unintentionally humorous) acting by its leads.
Some movies are, unfortunately, "just crap." Nautilus is a good example of this, as is Razor-Blade Smile, quite possibly the worst vampire movie ever made. They have no redeeming features, save for the fact that they actually made it, somehow, to distribution channels. I buy and savour these pieces of drek because they actually give me hope that my own drek might see the screen some day in some capacity. (Feel free to go poking around http://www.chancel.org/WyvEnt/texts sometime for prime examples; I'm particularly fond of Nasty Habits; it even includes a cameo spot for Richard's brother Danny, whom I hear is a fine singer.)
Invincible, somehow promoted by TBS as their "movie of the week" this week, aired twice in a row, sacrificing four hours, albeit late-night hours, to its unholy altar. If I had the writer and director in front of me, I'd have them play Russian Roulette until one of them blew their brains out all over one of the monochromatic sets, adding a much needed splash of colour, and then I'd shoot the other myself, following up with the DP, the wardrobe artist, and every single producer what signed off on this abomination.
Don't misunderstand me; I adore "bad" kung fu movies, especially those subtitled monstrosities from the 70's and 80's that wormed their way over here. I've laughed at Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and even have a copy of Kung Fu Genius on VHS in all its bizarre glory. I've relished every moment of Snake Deadly Act. In short, I know my bad kung fu movies and I know the formulas which make them fun. Invincible only wishes it was as fun as Five Deadly Venoms, even though at times it tries to pay a shadow of an homage to that genre of wuxia/kung fu. Unfortunately, it looks like the writer really didn't pay attention to the films of his youth, and the director and DP recently finished watching X-Men and saying, "Damn, we could so do that better." They're very wrong.
Plot summary: There are these really bad guys, see, called Shadowmen. They seem to have superhuman speed, agility, strength, and a real sense of wuxia fu wire-work we really only see demonstrated in the first scene. Maybe they ran out of money. The Shadowmen were banished to our world 2000 years ago for "inhibiting cosmic evolution." I think they're supposed to implicitly be demons. Anyway, our boy Billy Zane (Os, to his friends), looking a lot like an escapee from Clockwork Orange, having a great old time killing some poor schmo. Then he gets into a wall-running kick-ass wire fu katana fight with a chick in a glowing white diaphanous gown who, basically, kicks his ass, presses her blade to his forehead and forces in The Love ... which, of course, kicks off our plot proper. Since someone just dug up some bizarre moldy tablet which looks a lot like a plaster of paris mold with Cyrillic, Greek, and Aztec icons on it, the head Shady-Guy, Slate, wants it to open the Vortex, destroy the Earth, and, having destroyed his prison, return the Shadowmen to their rightful place in the universe. Os, now being full of love and shit, dedicates himself to finding and training the four "Elementals," hyper-evolved humans tied to the four elements of the universe. Why hyper-evolved humans are all about to die if they actually carry on with their lives unless Os steps in, well, that seems to be the fate of the hyper-evolved, being complete fuck-ups, I mean. Did I mention he only has six days until the end of the world?
Even the dimmest amoeba can see a hundred or more problems in this setup already, but just to run down the points ...
Billy Zane did a fine job in The Phantom, and by my "bad" measure, a pretty keen one in Demon Knight, but let's be honest. The man can't act. Give him a nice set of one-liners, an opportunity to smile a lot, and a little ass-kicking, a general air of being sardonic, and he fits right in. Hell, Clint Eastwood got by in Hollywood for decades without much more at all. Don't, however, put Billy Zane in a black monk's robe, shave his head, and intermittently give him long, rambling monologues about the nature of life and soul. That's pure movie-toxin.
If you're going to create sets for an action movie, light the fuckers. You need light to see the actors. You need colour to direct the eye, to point you at the action. You need interesting places to look at, not just big empty places full of pillars.
Along with the above point, if you insist on largely monochromatic sets, at least put the actors in something other than black cloth jeans and shirts under black shiny raincoats. Or at least one side, the good guys or bad, should be in something different. Else your climactic battle scene will render down into eight guys, some in black and others in, well, black, fighting on a black set in -- get this -- the rain. Its not enough to have black people on black sets in low lighting, but then you add badly lit rain ... it was just mush. This is strangely iconic of the whole movie.
Now, speaking of big plot issues that should have been dealt with in the first pass over the script, when you have hyper-evolved humans who are supposedly linked to the elements of the universe, don't you think you should give them some kind of supernatural power outside the overly-extended training montage? They get their asses handed to them in combat, for the most part, until Metal whips out his Powerball, climbs a big ass tower, and charges up with lightning ... and then they all throw it, dusting the Shadowmen they were just fighting. Why he didn't start with that is beyond me, because they sure were getting their asses kicked.
Of course, Os is the one that actually gets Slate. This should actually surprise you and act as a spoiler, if I thought you would really care about this movie. Structurally, thematically, it should have ended with our four Elementals doing the nasty to Slate while Os nursed a nasty wound inflicted by the bad guy through nasty, underhanded means, with huge gouts of flame, lightning, wind blasts, and lashing water ... but no. This is the kind of abdication from expectation that ends up butchering over the fans of the genre ... frankly, the only folks who'd even try to watch this sort of thing in the first place.
Basically, and in summary, Invincible is the worst kind of garbage. This was brought home to me during one of the movie's most tedious rambling Zane-ologues ... as the pseudo-monk with shaved head and black obi rides around inside a fountain on a bicycle. Un Chien Andelou, eat your heart out.
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