Multimedia Completion, February

Another month, another small stack of things finished. 

Books:

5. Cross the Stars. David Drake dips into the Hammers slammers universe to try and mimic the Odyssey. *shrug* It was annoying at points, had a decent enough ending though.

6. Neptune Crossing. First book from Jeffrey Carver that I’ve read. I’ll have to read more. Was interesting. A guy who formerly interfaced with computers to pilot shuttles is crippled by incompetent doctors and loses his link, and thus he frequently drops into a state of disconnection from the world… encountering an alien who wants to ride around in his head.

Games.

1. FF2. 21 hours, seemed awfully abbreviated. The beginning of actual storylines in FF games.

Videos.

Lots of videos this month, mostly very short… 

4. Doctor Who: The Rescue. Their first attempt at introducing a new companion for the doctor. Not horrible.

5. Doctor Who: The Web Planet. Alien tale with multiple warring aliens on a planet. Mostly horrible.

6. Doctor Who: The Time Meddler. Fun episode, I wish I hadn’t missed the ones between the web planet and the time meddler though.

7. Doctor Who: Lost in Time (Hartnell): They give you the audio to fill in the gaps on one of the series, but they didn’t on the other 2 that are included. I think it would have been better with this.

8. Doctor Who: The War Machines: A bit choppy in places where some of the images were missing, the insertion of unrelated imagery was jarring. I thought the episode was meant to be that way and it was the fault of poor directing and camera work until I watched the part where it mentioned how they were reconstructed, then it made sense… The storyline was amusing enough.

9. Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury. Probably not the best movie to start watching Riddick. 30 minutes long and pretty much relies on you having seen the first movie… I guess I should go back and watch the first one now.

10. The Sky Crawlers: Looks really good, aside from some early shots where they were going “Look, we can have 2d characters interacting with the 3d environment!” It has some jarring transitions, the air combat is all 24fps and smooth. The initial ground stuff was 12fps, even for the 3d elements. It seemed like it got less noticeable at the end. Air combat was also in english, whereas the rest of the movie was in japanese. As for the storyline, think Roman Colosseum in aircraft.