Your Votes on Transformers 2

I have not seen the movie, so let's hear your votes.

Josh was not impressed. Hunter enjoyed seeing the U.S. military take control.

Any other opinions?

COULD SONY PULL A SEGA?

At the beginning of this generation of game consoles, I said that Sony was acting SEGA-esque by launching with a high-priced system that was notably difficult to program, much as SEGA did with the Saturn in 1995/1996. Like SEGA, Sony has dipped its toe in the handheld business and come out in second. Just as SEGA followed Game Gear with the limited release of Nomad, Sony wants seconds.

With Microsoft and Nintendo pulling away in overall console sales, rumors abound that Sony could pull the plug on its console business. Not a chance, folks. Sony has hit a rough spot after two colossal consoles. Even with its PS3 problems, Sony has still sold more hardware and more games over the last decade than anyone else.

Besides, where would Sony turn to to replace its game business? Back to televisions? PC computers? Cellular telephones? Stereo equipment? MP3 players? Sony's been there. Sony's done that.

A more likely scenario is that Sony will pull yet another trick out of the SEGA playbook. In 1998, SEGA abandoned the Saturn--a wise idea since Saturn sales had ground to a halt. In 1999, SEGA released the Dreamcast, a real gamer's game system bolstered by masses of incredible games created on the most part by SEGA. (Midway, Capcom, Namco and a few other companies jumped on board. We all remember when Namco released Soul Calibur on Dreamcast.)

With PlayStation 2 still 12 months away and Xbox and GameCube two years off, SEGA launched Dreamcast to try and jumpstart a new generation of hardware. Dreamcast had a tepid launch in Japan and then hit genuine paydirt with its U.S. launch. And then it fizzled to a halt as the world closed its pocketbook and decided to wait for PlayStation 2.

What went wrong? People had not yet tired of the PlayStations... and to some extent, their N64s. Many of the best games in any generation come out toward the end. SEGA launching its 16-bit Genesis had to compete with Super Mario Bros. 3. 3DO and Saturn had to compete with Donkey Kong Country.

Another problem was that SEGA did not have the money to launch and support a new system. SEGA was a company that always ran in the red. Even when Genesis/Mega Drive ruled in the United States and Europe, SEGA hemorrhaged money. Had it not been owned by the forgiving Hisao Okawa, the richest man in Japan, SEGA would not have survived into this century.

Nintendo is still selling lots of Wii systems and the Kyoto giant does not need to worry about the hardware becoming obsolete because it was obsolete at launch. (Keeping up with technology is not what Wii is about.) Microsoft is in distant but solid second place, just as Nintendo was a distant second against the original PlayStation. Both companies are talking about staying pat and giving off signals about staying with their current hardware into 2012.

Sony, losing at least $50/PS3, on the other hand, may well try to jump ahead. The problem is, that just as SEGA ran into satisfied Sony and Nintendo customers in 1999, Sony may well find the same thing in 2010.

Amazon Reviewer MJG if you are out there...

Did you buy a print book or was that on Kindle?  I would like to get that straightened out?

Punch-Out!! More Fun than Satisfying

Punch-Out!! is back with all of its wacky, ethno-stereotypical fighters and goofy puzzles.  Punch-Out!! was never so much a boxing simulation, not like Ring King or Fight Night.  It's a puzzle game.  Each opponent has a pattern.  Once you figure out which punches to duck and when you can attack, victory follows.  

Punch-Out!! for Wii is faithful to the spirit of the series.  It is slightly less puzzle-centric than its predecessors, but it's still about facing wacky fighters who can only be hit in one or two ways during one or two moments of vulnerability.

So here's the deal.  You are Mac, a tiny "up-and-coming boxer" fighting his way through three virtual circuits--the minors, majors, and world circuit.  Along the way you will encounter a host of politically incorrect opponents such as Von Kaiser, the goose-stepping German; Glass Joe, the croissant-packing Frenchman; King Hippo, the enormous Polynesian, Great Tiger, the mystic Indian; Bald Bull, the angry Turk; and more.  (Fortunately Heike Kagero, the angry Japanese metro-sexual is gone.)

The shock value of the racial humor wears thin pretty quickly.  Fortunately, once the humor is gone the play value continues.  Punch-Out!! is the kind of game that keeps you on your toes even after you have figured out all of its secrets.  This is not to say that the  replay value is incredibly high, but you probably will replay the game a time or two.

For an old timer like me, anyone who played games on the old NES really, Punch-Out!! is packed with nostalgia.  The game looks and plays like an updated version of that masterful old game--it even features classic game controls for those who don't want to play using the nun chuck.

I am not suggesting that this is a great game, though I think it is a pretty good one.  On the Wii scale, it does not come close to scoring on the Mario Galaxy/Mario Kart level--though it beats the heck out of all the party games that have come for the system.  It's more on a production par with Metroid.

WAIT, THIS IS TERMINATOR?

It was one of those weird dementia moments in which you become disoriented and forget where you are.  I'm watching this move, right, and there's this 10-story-tall robot chasing two guys and a little girl that are driving in a tow truck.  And then these motorcycle robots come speeding out of the giant evil robot's legs, and I'm thinking, "Oh boy, I hope Optimus gets here soon!"

But wait, the guys in the tow truck took care of the problem themselves.  They did this amazing fishing trick with the truck's hook and chain, and all of a sudden I realized, "Yeah, this isn't a Transformers movie, it's Terminator Salvation."

I figured that out about one-third of the way through the movie.  I think it took the script writers a little longer.  For some of the movie, they seemed to have thought they were writing War of the Worlds II.  And for some of the movie they went Transformers.  Some of the movie even reminded me of Logan's Run.

That said, Terminator Salvation is worth seeing.  Count me among the 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes who gives this movie a grudging thumbs up.  The special effects are good, the characters are good enough, and the surprise at the end is too cool.

This is the story of what takes place after Judgement Day...  The machines are finally on top, and humans are living like rodents in the wild.  John Conner is not the big chief of the resistance, but his star is rising quickly.  He's sort of the Che Guevara to Michael Ironside's Fidel Castro.

Then along come a big, mean, brooding survivor who is not really a survivor and we never mistake him for anything but a machine with skin--this is not a spoiler, they show that in the trailers.  The machine-man seems trustworthy.  Since Conner is played by Christian Bale, we even like the machine-guy more than Conner. 

As the movie goes on, it gets more and more on track.  By the end, it's pretty good.  And then it loses a little momentum at the very end.  Terminator Salvation is guilty of the all-time most flagrant misuse of the macho nod in film history.

When we left the movie, my friend Kevin and I tried to stack the movies of Summer 2009 in order of enjoyment.  We both put Star Trek at the top--I wasn't kidding when I said that I went back and realized how much I had missed.  Kevin liked Wolverine more than Terminator Salvation.  It certainly had better characters and the dumb moments were not as dumb.  I preferred Terminator for one simple reason, the climax.  With Wolverine, right at the moment when you want to the movie to be at its best, it lets you down.  With Terminator, the movie rose to the occasion.

STAR TREK REDUX!!!

I LOVE THIS MOVIE!

I just got back from seeing Star Trek a second time.  Am I ever glad I went a second time.  I saw so many great things that I overlooked on my first time out.

I still don't like the young Kirk scene and have little use for the bar scene, either.  Other than that, I take back everything I said. 

My first time out I gave this movie a B verging on B+.  This time I give it an A.

I have not gone out and bought a movie in a long time, but when this one comes out--legally--I will undoubtedly buy a copy.

STAR TREK...Trampled Space

I'm not going to bury the lead on this one...  I did not love the new Star Trek movie.  I liked it, but I did not love it.

Star Trek starts out with a bang!  Man, the opening scene in this movie may well be the best scene in any Star Trek movie ever.  Faran Tahir (the head terrorist from Iron Man) makes a haunting showing in that opening sequence.  Is it just me or does this guy radiate intelligence.

He may be the smartest man alive in real life or he may be too slow to spell his own name, I don't know; but on screen, he comes across as an understated genius.  If I had to guess, I'd place him on the genius side.

What follows after that first scen, however, quickly settles into  just above average story telling.  There's a bunch of meaningless stuff about the young and rebellious James Kirk, the Iowa roughneck, etc. etc.  We see him enter the Starfleet Academy.  Predictably, they show the Kobiyashi Maru incident.  All of this is entertaining, but not great.

Finally we get into the guts of the story.  Here's a new territory  for Star Trek, the show is about aliens in a really big spaceship that destroys entire Starfleet fleets in a single whack.  No one can possibly stand up to it, until the Enterprise..  

So Kirk, and Spock, and Chekov, and Uhura, and McCoy, and Scotty, and Sulu fly a dangerous mission as they learn to work together and earn each other's respect.  And just when things are bleakest, well, you know.

The cast of this movie does an excellent job.  John Cho makes no attempt to play Sulu like George Takei.  He makes the character all new.  Chris Pine paints some new wrinkles on James T. Kirk, but the character of Kirk has long been evolving.  Zachary Quinto looks the part of a young Spock, but he's a tad too soft-spoken.  Zoe Saldana has modernized Uhura brilliantly.

In truth, they all earned their keep and played well together.

As Nero, the evil bad guy, Eric Bana is also good but understated.  He plays a man made evil by outrage who might otherwise have been a pretty good fellow.  Bana has experience in these kinds of roles and plays them well.

So why didn't I love the movie?  What's to love?  Spock spends most of the movie as an irritating simp, the special effects were uneven-ranging from great to good, the dialog was peppy but sometimes weak, the actors did the best they could with story twists that felt dated in the 60s, everything was good... few things were great.  

I give this movie a B and look forward to an A+ sequel.  It is well known through out the SF community, the even-numbered Star Trek movies are always better than their odd-numbered counterparts.

Hey, has anybody here War Machine by Andy Remic?

I've heard good things.