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We bought the Cars - Mater-National game for our Wii mainly because it is my son Noah's favorite movie and I thought he'd enjoy watching the game as much as watching the movie. I was not wrong. He loves it.
But I must confess that I like it too, and it's a very well executed game. The graphics are extremely well done, the story that guides you throughout is imaginative and well-written, and the game play itself is very good. The cars handle in a realistic way (for the most part) and the controls are intuitive.
I especially like the fact that certain areas of the game become unlocked after you achieve certain milestones and that results in barricades with "Road Closed" signs disappearing from roads in the game, allowing you to explore new areas of the map. I also like that time progresses as you go through phases of the game, so sometimes you are driving during the day, and sometimes at night. Overall it's a great game and I would strongly recommend it, even if you don't have kids!
It's only been a week since the season finale of my favorite show LOST, but I'm already having withdrawals. Season 4 was the best one so far, in my opinion, and I'm hooked all over again. It was touch and go there for a while. The show's producers made some poor decisions concerning the pacing of the show (starting with Season 2's preoccupation with "the hatch"), and have alienated a lot of their fans as a result, myself included. I was ready to write the show off after Season 3, so it's good that Season 4 was so strong (despite being interrupted by the writer's strike) or I would no longer be watching.
I'm still dismayed by their decision to deliver the final 48 episodes as three seasons of 16 episodes instead of the customary two seasons of 24 episodes. Decisions like this make it painfully obvious to viewers that TV is not entertainment, it's a business. Decisions are made to maximize profits, not to maximize the audience's satisfaction. I have a coworker who is a fan of the show, but only watches a season once it is released on DVD so that he can control the pace. I admire his discipline. I'm not sure I could do that.
By the way, if you are a fan of the show, but can't manage to remember the myriad of details and characters (and who could, unless you're some kind of freak?), be sure to check out the Lostpedia wiki. It is a fan reference without peer.
A while back, I wrote about how movie franchises rarely make it to the fourth installment, and that there's a reason for that. The latest offering in the Indiana Jones series is a painful reminder of why this is usually true. It would be easy to blame George Lucas, and, in reality, he is mostly to blame. He really tried to do too much in this movie. Like a quantum physicist struggling to find the Theory of Everything, this movie attempts to weave every crackpot conspiracy theory on the Internet, from alien autopsies at Roswell to the Nazca lines, into a coherent story that features the crystal skulls as its centerpiece.
As an audience member, I am willing to suspend my disbelief at some implausible hokum if it furthers the plot in some way. But what exactly was the point of showing Indiana surviving a nuclear weapons test in the Nevada desert, apart from offering yet another showcase for the CG talents of Lucas's crew at ILM? And this was in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, so it was all downhill from there. This movie is a cross between National Treasure and The X-Files. And not in a good way.
Like his Star Wars prequels before it, Lucas forgot everything that made the original Raiders of the Lost Ark such a classic, and went off in some entirely new direction, and buried the characters we know and love in a CG-laden reality that is anything but real. I can't believe Spielberg agreed to direct this mess. Do yourself a favor, and forget this movie was made. Go rent Raiders and Last Crusade (skip Temple of Doom) instead. It won't cost you as much, and you'll enjoy it much more.
