Shmee.Me

June 13, 2013

Revisit the 80s with Cloak & Dagger!

Cloak & Dagger was a 1984 movie that was released as part of a double feature with The Last Starfighter. It was directed by Richard Franklin, and it was one of my favorite movies as a kid.

The movie is about a Davey Osborne played by Henry Jackson Thomas, Jr. (the E.T. kid) as he tries to deal with the loss of his mother, and he immerses himself in a spy role playing game that has a video game counterpart. He also uses the main character from those games Jack Flack (Dabney Coleman) as his imaginary friend. While doing a favor for the local game store owner Morris (William Forsythe) with his best friend Kim (Christina Nigra) he witnesses a murder by some spy thugs, and now he is playing Cloak & Dagger for real.

What I love about this movie is that Kim and Davey run around San Antonio all by themselves and no one seems to care. They have their bus passes and giant walkie-talkies, so they can get around. I also noticed that Louie Anderson plays a dirty cab driver in a bad part of San Antonio at midnight, and he refuses to give Davey a ride: shame on you Louie!

Even though this movie was mostly an excuse to sell Atari games like its double feature partner The Last Starfighter, they still made a pretty decent movie, and it holds up surprisingly well. They all act fairly well and even though hiding secret plans in a video game is the worst plan ever, and Davey could have been thwarted a couple of times if the thugs would just lock their doors every now and then. It is still a movie that I will watch with my kids someday.

I know nostalgia my be clouding my judgment, but it seems like in the 80’s that all kids movies didn’t have to be garbage like they are now, and I wish more people would take the time make some good ones.

June 12, 2013June 12, 2013

I Visit The Boardwalk Empire

Boardwalk Empire is a about Prohibition era Atlantic City created by Terence Winter, and its executive producer is Martin Scorsese. It is the crime drama that HBO used to fill the shoes of The Sopranos, but from what I have seen of that show, this one is better.

The show starts just as Prohibition is starting, and crooked politician Enoch “Nucky” Thompson (Steve Buscemi) is going to use all his contacts and favors to keep Atlantic City’s booze business going. This of course gets him involved with gangsters. The longer the show goes, the deeper in to the crime scene Nucky has to go.

It is a fun show, and Steve Buscemi is great in this. It is good to see him get to be the star in something, but like most HBO shows they try and be too edgy too much, even when it doesn’t add anything to the scene, but it is not as bad Game of Thrones.

I like shows and movies about 1920’s gangsters, so this show was kind of made for me, and it is a much more interesting time period than the current day based Sopranos. So if you are looking for a good crime drama than this could be for you.

June 11, 2013June 11, 2013

Shmee Watches Event Live Blogs So You Don’t Have Too!

June 10th was a big day for tech and games, so I decided I would let you know what I thought was important or interesting.

Microsoft

First up was the Microsoft keynote for E3. This as you can imagine was about the Xbox brand and the stuff the are developing for it. They were smart with the keynote and pretty much kept everything about the games since last time they talked about it, it just sounded like they were making the worlds greatest DVR.

They started off with a cool video about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Since Metal Gear passed up the 360 it is cool to know that will be in on the action for the next gen.

They also announced a new slimmer Xbox 360, and that all Gold Live subscribers will be getting free games similar to PlayStation Plus. Which is good because Gold is a rip off, so they should give us something, but they also announced the One would cost $499 it includes the Kinect 2.0, but still ouch.

They also announced quite few exclusive games, but the two I am most interested in are: Below which is a roguelike and the first time I had heard that description at E3, and a new Killer Instinct game which has been promised since MS bought Rare.

Then they showed Master Chief in a cloak, and since he wears armor I am not sure what it is for, but I am guessing he is a mage now, so I wonder what his favorite spell is. I am hoping it is Magic Missile.

Apple

Apple at the same time as the E3 press conferences was doing their developer keynote at their WWDC, which pretty much boiled down to that they were stealing Windows Phones design language, they are launching their own Pandora, and they made a computer looks like a black trash can. Not really, but pretty much that.

EA decided for their Press conference that it would be good to keep faking people out that they were showing Battlefield, but instead showed us Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, and Star Wars: Battlefront. Both of which look like fun. Then they talked about sports games for like … forever. Like that now basketball games have a real ball with ball like physics: huzza!

Butt then they said the magic words: Peggle 2 and all was forgiven. This will be my wife’s favorite game of this new generation, and one last piece of awesome news was they announced Mirror’s Edge 2. Which is great. There are so few non hyper-sexualized female protagonists it is good to see one return.

Ubisoft

I thought Ubisoft was going to drop the ball for awhile just showing us games we knew were coming, but their new Crew racing game that takes place in the whole USA looks pretty cool, and if they are true to their word then I can’t wait to terrorize Lynden with a dune buggy in the game.

They saved the best for last and showed a new Tom Clancy game, but instead of it being a shooter it is a modern day open world RPG called The Division and it looks amazing! That is how you save a press conference.

Sony

Sony was the last presentation of the day, and they started off with some Vita and PS3 stuff, and it was all fine, but just uninteresting, Beyond: Two Souls looks like fun though, and it is good to see that they are still catering indie support.

They finally got things going with a steam-punkie game called The Order: 1866, but then they quickly just started showing us already announced games, and games from other people, but they turned it around.

The first bit of news was bad: you will need a Playstation Plus account to play online, boo, but you can buy, sell, and trade disk based games all you want, and your console doesn’t call home to check licensing, yeah, and it only costs $399, the crowd goes wild (though since it doesn’t included the Eye it insured no one would ever use it)! After that they dropped the mic and went home.

I hope you liked this little press conference write up. It was fun to put together.

June 10, 2013

Where did Westeros end up?

So last night the last episode of season three aired, and so how do you follow up the most talked about television event in the last ten years? With a filler episode of course. Last night was all about letting the events of the season settle and seeing where everyone landed, but the problem is that after episode nine this episode was a complete let down, so this episode probably should have been a fifteen minute vignette at the end of last weeks episode, and just called it a season, but as it is, it was still a fun year, and I look forward to next May.

June 9, 2013

Try Not to Cry, It is the Last Episode of Game of Thrones!

Today the last episode of season three airs, and it has been a good season with a lot of twists and turns, and if they could cut down on some of their questionable content, it would be possibly the best show on TV. I have reviewed Game of Thrones before, and all of what I said still sands, and it will be agonizing waiting until next year for the show to start up again, so try not to cry and be happy because Summer is Coming.