Category: Entertainment

De Blob 2

De Blob
The first game, which we haven't got. Yet.

Harking back to a recent post, I mentioned that there is very little in the way of small-child-friendly software for the Xbox as opposed to the Wii or the PC.

One of the titles we picked up by chance some time ago is called De Blob 2 (I’m assuming it’s a sequel, confirmed by the box cover I found to the right). Our youngest – 3½ – has picked up on it recently after getting a little bored with repeating the opening levels of Lego Star Wars (mainly as he hasn’t figured out the save and load mechanism yet which, in fairness, is rather over-complicated in these games).

He is loving it and it’s a great game for kids of his age – and of mine!

I’ve not read the plot or anything, but essentially you’re the hero blob. You live in a world where a nasty individual has removed all the colour, leaving everything a boring grey. Dotted around are fountains and waterfalls of coloured paint which you soak yourself in, and then use yourself to “paint” buildings, trees, people and parts of the landscape.

It sounds nice and simple, and at the bottom level it is. As the game goes on, though, it gets a little more complicated as you have to destroy some things, go into platform-game style stages between levels, and learn how to mix colours (great for the younger kids) to get just the right ones. There are also side-missions, which don’t need to be completed, and bonuses dotted around all over the place.

If I have a quibble, it’s a small one – the right joystick is used to pan the camera around as it is in many games. However, it seems to work in a reverse fashion to every single other game I’ve played which is quite annoying. There may be a setting somewhere to change it, but I’ve not spotted it as yet.

After having sat with Little Mister for some time as he’s worked his way through the early staged, I think De Blob 2 has just become next on my “to do” list once I finish off Lego Indiana Jones.

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Kids and computer games

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
Little Mister's current favourite

I still hear a lot of people whinging about how children play too many computer games, and how they’re bad for them. I have a lot of experience of video entertainment (this doesn’t mean I’m any good – I’ve just played them a lot), and some limited experience in the child-rearing side of things but here are some things I’ve noticed.

Our littlest is around 3½. Despite his age, he’s still not a talker and has some communication issues which are mainly due to problems with his hearing. We got an Xbox at Christmas and he, of course, wanted to play all the time. But he was rubbish. Worse than me rubbish. Which is very rubbish indeed. He’s very active – too active, frankly. Runs circles round us and will chase the dog or cat for hours, bounce on the trampoline, run around outside until he falls over and comes home screaming… you know, a proper kid. As such I’ve no issues with him spending some time glued to the telly if it keeps him quiet and out of our hair for a bit.

There aren’t that many toddler-friendly games for the Xbox, but what we have so far are: De Blob 2, Megamind (scratched to hell and unplayable), Toy Story 3, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Star Wars. Over time, he watched us playing and we often let him have a spare controller in co-op mode. This usually involved him twiddling the two joysticks randomly and giggling when a Lego character dropped off a cliff in an explosion of coins, releasing a Wilhelm scream. Or Wilhelm Wookie roar. Or whatever.

Hey, he was happy.

Over the last few weeks, though, he’s taken to it big style. He can’t read yet, which means we often have to explain things to him, but if the game has good use of imagery then this can help. Toy Story 3, for example, has “help” bubbles that show you a ghosted image of a character performing an action while the keys you need to press are displayed next to them. The Lego games are similar, although both games suffer from the player often having to be in just the right position for those buttons to work.

What’s amazed me, and prompted me to post this, is how quickly he’s come on since we sat him down with a controller and let him loose by himself. I just sat with him this morning as the played through the train stage at the start of TS3. Aside from one section which I did for him, he completed the whole thing himself. Picking aliens up and throwing them off the train, throwing bouncy balls at moving targets, smashing boxes open, jumping and double-jumping gaps and obstacles. Wow.

Lego Star Wars has captured his imagination more than the Indy game and its simple problems in the early levels are just right for him. After some demonstration from myself, he’s able to work out some of them with no assistance. Swapping to use the correct characters to perform a task is an example. If he sees a C3PO head, he knows he needs the right kind of droid. Sparkly things? Jedi force. Bounty Hunters only? Wander off, find a helmet machine, get a helmet, go back and get through the door.

And so on.

He can now control the characters and camera independently using the two joysticks. His timing for jumps is good. Not brilliant, especially double-jumps where he often can’t hit the jump key quickly enough in succession, but still pretty damn good.

Now, he’s a good kid with his other toys. He loves tool kits and his Toy Story figures – and his sister’s Lego much to her annoyance. But I don’t think we have much else that has improved his logic skills or hand-eye coordination as these computer games.

I actually think his communication has improved slightly as well, as he tries to explain where and how he’s stuck, or tells us what he’s managed to achieve.

Over and above that, he’s learned how to check whose profile is active when he comes to the console and change it to his own. It’s simple image recognition (as I said, he can’t read but he can identify the icons and avatars), but it also shows he’s aware of what “belongs” to him and to others.

So to those who say that kids shouldn’t be let anywhere near computer games? Think again. There’s a time, a place, and a use for them.

 

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Kill ListBurn After Reading

By إبن البيطار (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsWell, we took a trip to the cinema last night to see Kill List, but the projector failed. We sat through almost ten minutes of sound with no picture before giving up and walking out. Shame, as it’s now unlikely we’ll get a chance to see it at all as we’re otherwise engaged next Friday night.

Instead, we wandered through Asda on the way home and perused the cheap DVD section and grabbed some movies. Gillian watched Shutter Island which I’ve seen before and quite enjoyed it. Next up was a toss-up between Moon and the Coen Brothers‘ Burn After Reading. As Gillian was in the mood for  comedy, and the box said “Comedy Of The Year” we popped that disc in.

Good. Gumption. What a complete load of arse. I mean, “comedy”? Didn’t someone tell them that comedies are supposed to be funny? I’m not even going to give this a full review. Suffice to say that despite an very good cast, it was an utterly awful film and a complete waste of an hour and a half. It was badly scripted, slow, tedious, boring, didn’t go anywhere, and the wrap-up at the end viewed as if someone had told them to cut the last ten minutes and replace it with a quick tie-up.

On Twitter and facebook last night, I found one person and her hubby who had found it hilarious. Pretty much everyone else hated it, including one comment of “Worst. Film. Ever.” Perhaps not. But damn close.

Burn Before Watching would have been a better title.

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Conan the Barbarian / The Guard

By إبن البيطار (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsA little bit of a David v Goliath competition this evening with a dinky Irish film competing for my attention against a meaty Hollywood blockbuster. Which will win out?

Conan the Barbarian

“By Crom!”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: barbarian loses family and swears vengeance on the baddie who killed them

See it if you  like: muscley men with long hair hitting people with things

If there’s one good thing to say about Conan the Barbarian, it’s that it isn’t a remake of the old Arnie films. Given the huge detailed history given to Conan by his creator, Robert E. Howard, and successive authors following on from him there is plenty to draw from. How, then, did we end up with such a dull and vapid tale as this one?

Jason Momoa is passable as the bulky Cimmerian, though his facial expressions seem to range from annoyed to angry and not an awful lot else. Mind, this is a little better than Leo Howard who plays Conan as a youth and who seems to have modelled his part on some kind of pissed-off wolf cub. With a pet lip.

The film shows its cheesy intentions from the opening sequence where Conan is born and held aloft on the battlefield. Well, a really shitty obviously rubber fake baby is held aloft anyway. While dad (Ron Perlman) roars. As you do on a battlefield when people are running around you with big bloody swords.

As far as plot goes, it’s about as deep as the 80’s versions. That is to say as deep as a thin film of water spilled on your worktop. It’s pretty predictable, the characters are just as shallow and the action sequences are about the only thing to alleviate the tedium. The “sand creatures” which appear in one sequence are particularly well done, although I swear the exact same piece of footage of a creature jumping in the air is used about five times.

Yeah, you may have guessed I wasn’t that impressed. Gillian summed it up:

“Even Red Sonja was better than that.”

The Guard

“I can’t tell if you’re really motherfucking dumb, or reallymotherfucking smart.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: A member of the Garda comes up against some seriously nasty drug smugglers.

See it if you like: Good British (yes, I know, it’s Irish but the style’s the same) detective dramas with a heavy hand of quirk.

And here’s David. All set up with a large Irish sling with which to smack Goliath firmly in the temple. $6m up against $90m. That’s a big gulf to cross. How could it possibly hope to compete?

The most simple answer is – by having a far superior script. The Guard actually has a great story. And some wonderful characters, one in particular – Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). The quote above comes from Don Cheadle‘s FBI agent shortly into the film and I was actually thinking this about Boyle shortly before the question is raised. He’s a wonderfully written enigma and portrayed perfectly by Gleeson.

So, what happens? Boyle is a police officer in the arse end of nowhere in West Ireland. Cheadle arrives with information about some rather nasty drug dealers in the area and things kick off. This isn’t Lethal Weapon in scale, and the humour is far darker than you’d get in most Hollywood movies. In fact, the closest I can think of offhand is In Bruges which, coincidentally I assume, also stars Gleeson.

If I have an issue it’s that the film seems to try too hard to be funny at the start with a bit too much in the way of bad language and forced humour. Once things settle down, roughly around the time Cheedle’s character appears, the humour settles in and becomes far more natural.

As well as the crime and laughs, there’s a lovely side-story relating to Boyle’s mother who is dying of cancer. There’s no real reason for this little splinter of a story to be there other than to develop the protagonist’s personality. And it works.

It’s films like this that restore my faith in cinema at times. Please, if you have the choice of only catching some stupid sword and sandals flick (even worse, the aforementioned crock in 3-flipping-D) and this little pearl, hand your coins to David so he can load them into his sling.

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The Inbetweeners Movie / Cowboys And Aliens

By إبن البيطار (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsAh, Thursdays. Child-free and cinema-bound…

The Inbetweeners Movie

“Ow, gentle on the sunburned cock please.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Four boys just out of school head off on holiday for sun, sea, sand, sex, booze, sex, drinking, sex…

See it if you like: low-brow British humour about poo, vomit, sex and more sex.

Way back in the mists of time was a film about two boys going abroad with the hope of getting drunk and laid. It was Kevin & Perry Go Large and it was utter ****. Released around the time that Harry Enfield had slipped from comedy genius to being as funny as syphilis of the face, it smacked of desperation and had as many laughs as a funeral on the banks of the Ganges.

So, The Inbetweeners Movie doubles the number of boys and sends them to Greece. It also adds jokes, some cracking dialogue, a great poo gag and a decent story – the latter quite surprising given the otherwise low-brow nature of the film.

Oh, and yes, it’s based on the similarly-named Channel 4 show which I didn’t even know existed until tonight. I assume the cast and characters are the same. Out of our little group we have a nerd, a pretty-boy who’s just been dumped, a sex maniac and a guy with lower standards than I ever had. So pretty much your average bunch of 18 year-olds.

Off they go to Greece to stay in the worst hotel in the world, while the dumped kid’s ex is wandering around the same resort and they try to cop off with four girls they meet on the first night.

So a thin plot, but some excellent scenes and brilliant comic timing from the cast and director. There are really moments where I sat there thinking, “Yeah, well, that was going to happ… no, wait. He didn’t!” It is possibly the best comedy I’ve seen since the first Hangover film, and probably done on a fraction of the budget.

If you’ve even got the slightest smidgen of immaturity in your body, go and see it.

Cowboys & Aliens

“It fell off.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Aliens are kidnapping people in the Wild West, which makes the folk they don’t snatch even wilder.

See it if you like: to disengage the old grey matter and revel in some old-fashioned sci-fi with a novel setting.

I’d heard great things about this graphic novel adaptation and the trailers held my interest. It’s certainly got a damn good cast with Harrison Ford as the mean old Colonel, Daniel Craig as the mysterious stranger and Olivia Wilde as the slightly weird looking woman (not typecast at all).

Craig is introduced, suffering amnesia, in the opening scene and the revelations as to how the titular Aliens fit in is revealed through his flashbacks. It doesn’t take long for the action to kick off, and the back story supports the set pieces well. It’s still a little slow at times, though.

It’s always good to see Harrison Ford these days – he does “curmudgeonly” so well, but Craig is on fire here. Jake Lonergan could take on James Bond any day and leave him begging for his mother. Imagine “The Man With No Name” with a headache, taking it all out on everyone else. Only cooler. And with scarier eyes. That’s Lonergan.

The effects serve the film well, and the supporting cast are up for the job. There are a few mawkish scenes which do jar a bit (the scene where one character is buried and words are said over his grave, surprisingly, isn’t one of them) and Ford’s Woodrow Dolarhyde changes a little more over the two hours than seems believable.

It’s not the best sci-fi film of the decade, but it’s certainly a fresh take with some nicely slimy aliens.

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