Monthly tally so I can keep up with a quick look

So in January 2014 I watched/read/played the following:

Books:

American Nations, Hellblazer: Bloody Carnations, Raising Steam, Deadpool volume 1, One Summer

Total of 5 books, best book Raising Steam, worst book Deadpool 1

Movies:

Troll Hunter, The World's End, Anchorman 2, Godzilla Vs Destroyah, Ghost Rider SOV, 1408, Her

Total 7 Movies, best movie Anchorman 2 Worst movie Godzillah Vs Destroyah

Games:

Rogue Legacy, Lego Marvel Superheroes, Dead Rising 3, Saints Row 4

Total 4 games, Best Game Saints Row 4, Worst game Lego Marvel Superheroes.

Books

American Nations: Colin Woodward This is a book about the different cultures that make up specific geographical locations in the North American continent. Its also about why those nations clash against each other. I decided to read this book to get some understanding of why North America is the was it is and why the US government seems to be unable to move past its gridlock. Its an interesting read which details the diverse cultures from the Yankees, through to the Far West. If I had to name a flaw is that the book never provides any competing ideas, its self assured to the point where I wonder if i'm being bullshitted.

Movies

1408: starring John Cusack and with a significant appearance by Samuel Jackson. It's based on a short story from Steven King the plot revolves around a cynical author who writes books about haunted hotel rooms. He doesn't believe in this stuff but its an easy way to make money. So one day someone sends him a postcard that tells him to check out Dolphin hotel's room 1408. The hotel doesn't want him to stay there but he essentially annoys them until they let him. He goes into the room and promptly goes mad. Some of the ways the room sends him crazy are pretty cool and I especially liked one longer scene. Performances were fine to good. one small issue is the heroic ending, it just didn't fit to me.

Her: Joaquin Phoenix stars in a move about a dude who falls in love with his operating system. My girlfriend dragged me to this and I didn't really enjoy it. The whole thing was offputting, Joaquin's mustache, which has about 25 minutes of close up time was grating. the supporting cast seemed to be there exclusively to be parts of the plot and didn't seem at all like real people. The look of the future was all high waisted sweatpants and twee bullshit, everything was too soft including the characters. I just wanted the guy to get some fucking agency the whole film. Also the whole time I was watching I was thinking, how does that operating system work? is it on his machine at home or on a server somewhere? If it isn't on the device in his pocket how the fuck is he getting signal in all the places he's getting a signal, what the fuck is the EULA for that thing, why isn't the business inserting ads into what is obviously very manipulative software that can read people when they are emotionally exposed. . Not to mention the issues with property/IP all the way through the movie. I tried to take it as a love story and I found it a basic rebound story, I tried to take it as a scifi story and the rose-coloured glasses and lack of actually considering any of the science/business made me want to scream....there is also more than one awkward sex scene in the movie.

Games:

Rogue Legacy: Its a 2D action platformer with roguelike elements. This game was a blast to play, the controls were tight and the experience/purchase mechanic was fun and didn't seem like a grind. I would still be playing it right fucking now but I have to move on to something else for this goddamned challenge. Look these aren't really reviews but its been a long time since an action platformer captured my attention for any length of time (not super meatboy, not spelunky) and I thought I was done with that kind of game, apparently not. I guess if I had to nitpick its be that there could be more parts to the map, and there was a 2 or 3 hour cycle of sadness where I wasn't strong enough to go into the harder areas where gold was more plentiful but I wasn't getting enough gold during my runs of just the castle to purchase any upgrades that would allow me to go into those harder areas. I eventually overcame this by buying some equipment that upped my gold collecting and focusing on heath upgrades and playing a few really careful runs with Spelunkers.

For the period 15/01/2014 to 21/01/2014

This week is almost a write off, I haven't beaten any games or watched any movies. For the first time I'm wondering if I'm gonna get this shit done.

Books:

Hellblazer: Bloody Carnations, Its a sizable graphic novel/story arc. Constantine has fallen in love and wants to get married. The only thing standing in his way is an old alien "ally", a spurned lovers curse and creatures from the pits of hell, add in a little time travel and you have pretty much the whole plot for Bloody Carnations. It was a fun read the art was adequate to bordering on good most of the time. I liked it so much I'm considering picking up the next story arc trade paperback.

Movies: none couldn't find the time to sit down at home and watch a movie, let alone hit the cinema.

Videogames: I didn't beat anything this week, I'm in the middle of Rogue Legacy and I've played a bit of some other games but I haven't finished anything at this point. Tis pretty crappy.

So week 2 8-14 January 2014

Books:

2. Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett, This was a pretty good book, actually it was better than good. The story centre's around Moist Von Lipwig, Ank Morpork's resident con artist, turned Patricians face man. It centre's on the invention of locomotion, the building of the first railway on Discworld and a civil war between dwarves. I have read every Discworld novel and while I have a very soft sport for Vimes, commander of the city watch and consider him to be my favourite Discworld character Moist is quickly catching up, a few more books of this quality and Moist may become my favourite fictional character, period. That's not to say the book is without flaw. "Spike" Moist's wife, does not feature enough in the story and the addition of Vimes and the watch to sizable chunks of the story near the end makes it feel for like an "ensemble book" rather that a coherent Moist Von Lipwip story. As it stands it probably sites within the top 10 to 15 Discworld books.

3. Deapool volume 1 trade paperback issues 1 - 6........ Deadpool kills the reanimated corpses of the US presidents. During 80% of the story he makes average one liners.

Positives, the art is fantastic, some of the comedy is good, the premise that a wacky SHEILD necromancer brings the presidents back from the dead to get the country working again is interesting and kind of an inherently funny premise,

Negatives, The execution of the premise falls flat, many sections of the book are just page after page of Deadpool killing zombie presidents, with poor jokes I am dissapoint.

I bought this due to my love of Nerd Poker, a D&D podcast hosted by Brian Posehn, and my interest in other things he has done (metal by numbers, sarah silverman program). Posehn is one of the writers along with Gerry Duggan, also a regular on Nerd Poker. I had high hopes, and they were not met.

Movies:

3. Anchorman 2, well fuck that was an awesome film. It seems to be a bunch of sketches sort of wrapped around a newscaster in the late 70's/early 80's the fucking movie begins and ends with a shark attack. There were only a few bits that fell totally flat with me, and I usually dislike Will Farrell. I will be purchasing this when it comes out on bluray.

4. Godzilla Vs Destroyah?, I dunno man, I am still not sure what was happening during this film. There is a super radioactive Godzilla who is going to explode and destroy the world or meltdown and destroy the world. There are also giant bugs that seem to come from a time before the earth had oxygen and some kind of oxygen destroyer has awoken them.....there is an Aliens parody about an hour into the running time.. and then the anti oxygen monsters get big join together and fight Godzilla for 20 minutes at the end of the film.... I can't tell you if this was good or not, I can tell you I wanted it to end.

5. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, as a kid growing up late 80's and early 90's I loved comics, I don't buy many now but my favourite character back then would likely have been Ghost Rider (Dan Ketch era). Now I've seen the first Ghost Rider movie and it was fucking terrible and when I heard the guys who directed Crank were working on the sequel I was Jazzed, then I heard it was going to be PG13 and I was bummed. The Bluray was finally 10 bucks so I picked it up on a whim.

I am happy to say SOV is better than the first GR movie, but honestly that isn't saying all that much. The story, such as it is revolves around Ghost Rider saving a kid who is essentially the anti-Christ from the devil before the devil possesses him. There are some cool flame and black smoke effects and the decay effects from one villain are pretty cool too however the action sequences are almost as terrible as they are in the first film. GR is still slow and the action has no kinetic impact. Cage has also done voice overs while GR is killing people and they fucking terrible. At least it didn't outstay its welcome and ended before the 100 minute mark. I still think there is promise in the GR character but it wont be served by a PG13 movie, it needs to be a horror action movie.

Games:

Lego Marvel Superheroes, I've been playing this on and off for three weeks or so I'd mainly been going the side stuff and unlocking characters until last weekend when I got super bored with it and just decided to finish. It's a weird game I found the primary characters used during the story missions got super repetitive and the switching, once there were more than two characters annoying. Did they really need to go back to fucking Ironman and Thor that many times? That being said I can say I enjoyed it for the first 10 hours or so.

So I'm doing the 50/50/50 challenge to read 50 books, play 50 games and watch 50 movies over 2014.

I'm hoping this will get me to read some of those books that have been sitting on my shelf for a long time and watch some movies that I usually wouldn't watch, Games are going to be an issue as I generally don't even buy 50 games a year let alone beat them.

There aren't really any official rules for this so Ill give you a lowdown on my self imposed rules.

Movies: these need to be feature length movies (longer than an hour) that I have not seen before. They don't need to be released this year but I can't have seen them before.

Books: These need to be books that I have not read before, it can be fiction, non-fiction, I am also going to include graphic novels.

Games: I am going to allow myself to replay games, however certain parameters must be met the replay must be either be on a new system (console to PC) or including DLC....there must be something new to it.

Week One 1st January 2014 until 7 January 2014 I've finished:

Books

1. One Summer by Bill Bryson. A book in which Bryson take us on a tangential journey through American in the Summer of 1927. Babe Ruth breaks his own home run record, Lindbergh makes the first New York to Paris flight and becomes and instant superstar, some anarchists are executed and bankers essentially make a decision that will result in the great depression. It was written well, like all of Bryson's books breezy and lightly comedic. The only flaw was that the epilogue, following up with the principle players felt too brief.

Movies:

1. Troll Hunter, found footage "horror" film about some university students who follow a guy who they think is a poacher but is really... a troll hunter. It was a good time, I had a few drinks and enjoyed the straight up stupidity in front of me. The shaky cam was not too distracting.

2. The World's End, the third movie in the Cornetto trilogy and I personally think it was much better than Hot Fuzz. It deals with a alcoholic who tries to relive his best night with the friends who have left him behind due to his own actions, and at some point during the night they stumble into a conspiracy of alien robots, much action ensues. The action was well choreographed and the humour was dead on target. Only the ending was a bit disappointing.

Games:

1. Dead Rising 3, I liked the first two, but I really liked this one, I got this with my Xbox1 and have just been restarting over and over levelling up once I got to level 50 and went on to finish it. Hundreds of zombies on screen, bosses who are totally nutballs, and a particularly silly story. I killed many many zombies, I finished on 71,143 zombies killed.

2. Saints Row 4, So I was done with every new game I had (not beaten but just kinda done) so I bought this on a Steam sale. I have played and finished SR4 on the 360 I was interested to see how this would run on my newish PC, I was able to run it on highest settings and a rock solid frame rate. I also bought the DLC and beat that as well. It was a fun time. The superhero mechanics are fun the story is OK (I still prefer SR2 and 3) the only issue I have with the game is the lack of music and the repeating of jokes from SR3. The music just seems to repeat a lot more often than it did in 3, its not even in the same league as GTA 5. The DLC was kinda weird ETD was almost just fan service with it's story board cut scenes and SSC was just bad.