The King of Kong
I watched this tonight after hearing about it from a co-worker. It’s a documentary about a bunch of competitive gamers. No, not Major League Gaming or QuakeCon, but players who compete for the highest scores in retro games like Donkey Kong. The people competing are such characters and the movie his hilarious; even the non-gaming bf seemed to enjoy it.
Bioshock
I didn’t even pay attention to this game until a week or two before it released. The screenshots and comparisons to System Shock were what started to get my attention. After playing the demo, I knew I had to buy it. The environment in this game is amazing. The whole city of Rapture feels so alive. Or rather, it feels like it was once a live and bustling city. The game is eerie like that: you feel like you arrived to a party an hour late and the champagne glasses are still out, but you’re wondering where everyone else went.
Then there’s the game-play. On the surface, it feels like your typical FPS, but combat is intensely satisfying just because of how you can combine a variety of plasmids (magical powers) and weapons to kill your enemy with.
His Dark Materials Trilogy
I finished reading The Golden Compass, the first book in this trilogy sometime last week. I picked up the set because I needed something to read after Harry Potter and I read somewhere that Pullman’s books are even better. I liked The Golden Compass a lot. So far, so good.
What I like about these books is that they’re kind of a cross between science fiction and fantasy. There are witches and all, but there are also pseudo-scientific explanations about things.
I also wanted to read the book after reading some insane reviews on Amazon by overly-religious people claiming that this book was evil. Wow, and I thought the church hated Harry Potter.
I LOVE His Dark Materials. I’ve had them for years and read them over and over. It’s one of those books that you can really pick up details you missed the first time.
There’s a part in the third book that makes me cry every time.
They’re making The Golden Compass into a movie that’ll be released in December (I think it was). Hopefully it’ll do the book justice!