Razzies

So the Razzie nominations are out. I was amused (but not entirely surprised) to see the Indiana Jones film in there.

I saw the third Brendan Fraser 'Mummy' film on one of the flights in Australia. And do you know? As 'Belated sequels to old film series that no one really wanted to see resurrected' films go it's actually a better film than Indy 4. There's words I never thought I'd see myself type.

Both start from a similar premise (post-WWII, heroes work in intelligence during war, grown up son involved), and the Rachel Weisz replacement has the problem of, well, not being Rachel Weisz frankly, but where Mummy 3 has the advantage is that it doesn't look as cheap. There are parts in Indy 4, particularly the jungle scenes, which (especially on second viewing) look horribly studio-bound.

While, honestly, neither are great films by any means, but overall Mummy 3 looks less tired and more like people are having fun.

Gaming update

So far I am following my resolution not to buy more games until I've cleared some of my backlog. Thus far:

Played Blue Dragon (XBox360) for another couple of hours and decided to abandon it. I normally like JRPGs but this one is just so generic it's not holding my attention.

Picked up Mass Effect (PC) after only playing it for an hour or so a few months ago. Now it's getting going it really is turning out to be quite a lot of fun.

Unfortunately I've scuppered myself by deciding to give EVE Online another go after a couple of years and it has rapidly become a new obsession. Overall it seems to have improved the new user experience a bit in the intervening time. It doesn't try to train up everything at once and has gone some way to dealing with the skill issue. Unlike most online games it doesn't have character levels, instead you have skills (it has a certain relationship to the old Traveler RPG in that sense). You are constantly training up but there are literally hundreds of skills and it is very difficult to know what to train when. So they have introduced the idea of 'Certificates'. So, say you have a particular type of ship. On the ship description it tells you which certificates it recommends to make the most of the ship. The certificates then group together which skills you need to get to earn that certificate. You can also choose sets of certificates depending on what type of activity you wish to engage in (Mining, Piracy, Trade, Bounty Hunting, etc). So that's occupying my gaming experience at the moment!

Incidentally, EVE also offers a 'Buddy' system: current users can recommend the game to a friend and the friend will get a 21 day trial. If they then become a paying player, the person who recommended gets some 'free' playing time. So if anyone fancies giving this a go let me know and I'll be happy to 'buddy' them!