King is a master when it comes to using verbs to give character to every scene, using the perfect amount of detail to make it all seem real. And in this case, the realness makes it more scary.
Our heroes, a mom and her four year old boy, are in trouble, and with every scene change, I felt myself begging anybody from the supporting cast to get the idea, and go to the rescue. And this is what you come to expect from Stephen King. Cujo was a great time, worth doing again.
Set in an Atlantic City casino, Snake Eyes tells the story of a crooked detective named Rick Santoro (played by Cage). With a lot of money on a big fight, distracting Santoro while he was supposed to be protecting the secretary of defense, Charles Kirkland. But there was treachery within treachery surrounding the assassination of Kirkland.
The story unfolds after this inciting incident, in alternate timelines and a well-calculated narrative. With hopes of diminishing his gambling losses, Santoro puts the casino into lockdown for the investigation. As new evidence is uncovered, Santoro has to make some tough, dangerous decisions.
These decisions make way for a level of Character Arc, rare in Cage's many films. For those who haven't been keeping count, I still haven't seen over thirty of them. While Snake Eyes probably won't do it for everyone, I consider it great way to spend 98 minutes.
Child of Light is a side-scrolling, turn-based RPG in which you control a little red-haired princess named Aurora. The side-scrolling aspect is especially fun, because you can fly. It's the perfect game for those who like to explore beautiful worlds. And beautiful it is, this world called Lemuria, hand-painted with watercolors with papery texture to boot.
So there's a lot of style in this title, but not as a means to compensate for low quality gameplay. That's not to say the gameplay is especially profound. While the exploring is fun, and the world is filled with little puzzles and a ton of loot, most of the loot has little impact on your method of play. Healing items are good for boss fights, but most of them go unused. You have a firefly friend who can illuminate different areas of the map, allowing you to find more treasures.
There's no shopping in this game, and your only equipment comes in the form of gems called Oculi, which can be crafted and combined from their different varieties. After each level-up, your characters get to choose different upgrades, which is cool, but your characters are all going to have their general strengths and weaknesses, even with permanent stat-boosters. Characters also pool experience, so the fun exploration often gets halted so you can stop and choose upgrades for these characters you never use, but might need... maybe.
The characters themselves aren't very interesting, but I didn't look too deeply into it. Why not? Well, there's something about this game I really can't stand. The developers decided to make every single line of dialogue rhyme. And the rhyming is bad. Almost every sentence reads like it was spoken by Yoda, causing most of the text to come out in a jumble of terrible sentence structure. I figure on every block, there's a kid rapper who could have done a better job.
The battle system for this game is pretty good. It's much like Grandia, in the way that all fighters share a time bar. Each action takes a certain amount of time to execute, which gives you and your enemies space to interrupt each other. This is all swell, but a lot of enemies counter attack when you interrupt them, others counter when you use physical, magical, or elemental attacks. Each enemy has its own mode, which you need to keep in mind. This is fun, but there are no quick battles. They all require a certain level of focus, causing you to, after upgrading your characters, forget where you're going.
Looping back to the subject of elemental magic, I'm not really a fan of it, especially when you don't have all the elements at your disposal. Most RPG games have the tree levels, where everything's weak to fire, then the fire world, then the water world, and so forth, in an order you're never aware of. And this works fine (albeit uninventive), so long as you're not forced to use elemental magic, and don't have to gamble on which magic to learn.
The music in this game is all right, fitting, but there are only about four songs in it. But even that's fine, since it only took me twelve hours to finish this game. Despite it's flaws, I think Child of Light is a good game. It doesn't make you do boring things, like talk to every single person in town before getting to it. The gameplay is immersive, with the perfect amount of complexity. Some of the battles are also pretty hard, which scratches an itch. It would have been better if they'd included some impossible fights that, in spite of your perfect strategy, require you to come back later.
Child of Light's pretty good, but not really my kind of RPG. It's magical and whimsical, and more for the 90s born fairy tale fans instead of us who grew up worshipping Japanese games. I've watched Brandon Sanderson's lectures on Fantasy writing, and many of his concepts apply to all forms of media. Every story opens with a promise about what kind of experience the consumer is going to have. And if that promise isn't fulfilled, the readers (or players) will be unsatisfied. Despite its challenges, I think Child of Light is too short. It puts a lot of systems in play that are never used to their remote capacity. There are some touching moments to its story, but its resolution is flacid and crowded with one-note party members.
Style: 4/5 - Substance: 2/5 - Music: 3/5 - Fun: 4/5
Sauce on top doesn't always work. The dough has to be soft, which Pizza Hut's is, lending a special decadence to this special pie. As you see, there's even a varience in the style of pepperoni, and there's something festive about a little pepperoni that curls up and turns into a cup of spicy, delicious grease. I did order this pie with a side of red sauce, and I'm somewhat concerned that Pizza Hut's once thick, delicious sauce is slowly going the way of SpaghettiO. I guess that's one more reason to get this delicious, Detroit Pizza while it's available. Thank you, Pizza Hut, for makin' it great again.
I got a strong feeling our writer didn't know what was going to happen in his novel, aside from knowing he had a few short stories to work from, and that his novel had to be novel-length. In The Onion Girl, Jilly has a bad accident and is partially paralyzed, and staying in the hospital. During this stay, she gets especially into visiting the dream worlds.
As a young girl, Jilly ran away from her troubled home, leaving her younger sister, Raylene, to feel forever, bitterly abandoned. As adults, Raylene and her friend Pinky seek revenge in both the dream world and the world as it is. Set in fairly modern times, we get the idea that De Lint prefers hippies and artists over most people. And that's all fine, but it doesn't need to be illustrated at every opportunity.
But the story itself is pretty heart-warming, and eventually surprising. And I realized some of those chapters, which I thought unnecessary, served as valuable coupons for an allegory beyond the old reaffirmation that the only way to beat Evil is with Love. With all that said, I still think The Onion Girl is a good book, but I was not prepared for how much patience it would require.
It's pretty scary stuff, as the film takes you between scenes of these two heroes bleeding to death, deep underground, followed by the meanwhiles of their terrified families. Then you see more heroes, some crazy, and some just doing their jobs, making the most of what little chance they had to save the many who were trapped beneath the fallen towers.
Most films based on true events tend to be dramatized or satired for entertainment value, and I understand. The situation here didn't need to be contrived. It was a terrifying, emotional experience for everyone involved. And I appreciate how the film didn't put a patriotic, militaristic slant on the whole thing. We all know terrorism is bad, and it was left at that.
Despite laying it on a bit thick with the "oh no, oh gosh" moments, I found World Trade Center to be a very immersive, emotional experience. Many of the fake New York accents were bad, but at least they tried (which is more than I can say for The Frozen Ground). And as is normally the case, Cage's performance was awesome.
