Unqualified Offerings

I have a tediously long playtest review of The Princes’ Kingdom, a roleplaying game for adults to play with kids, on RPG.Net. This seems like an appropriate place for a public thanks to Bruce Baugh for generously looking the thing over before publication. I’d never written a game review before and Bruce helped my confidence.

Phasing: underpriced in almost every superhero game.
Q: Shouldn’t the precog have a painting of the hot chick showing up at his door?
I missed last week’s episode, even the Friday night scifi channel repeat.

Tried an episode of Heroes tonight. It’s up my alley after all. Now, I’ve never been wild about Jeph Loeb’s comics writing. The script here is serviceable, though it’s redolent of Rising Stars and probably some stuff I can’t even remember right now.
But that cast. They’re awful! The two Japanese guys are engaging, but that’s [...]

The principals’ press conference for A Scanner Darkly. I loved the book. I have hopes for the movie. The Linklater movies I’ve seen, Slacker and Dazed & Confused, I liked a great deal. Excerpt from the Q&A:
Q: Winona, is it true you have some connection with Philip K. Dick and his family?
Ryder: My godfather (LSD [...]

Well, that was a mess.
Not altogether bad, mind you. In fact, it had some very good qualities. The “stalker” angle that some have noted works in conjunction with some touches that succeed in (purposefully) making Superman a little scary, a little bit the Stranger. There’s one very good line as Clark and Lois finish this [...]

Gary Farber explains “WHY I’M BUMMED OUT ABOUT SUPERMAN RETURNS.” I haven’t followed the pre-release publicity intently, but if Singer’s film is as overly reverent toward the Richard Donner Superman movie as Gary’s pull-quotes suggest, it’ll be the worst combination of frivolous and leaden. Maybe one of the reasons I wasn’t as down on the [...]

In a hateful post characteristic of the depraved left, Julian Sanchez responds to my recent X-blogging. Unable or unwilling to attack me personally, he is reduced to countering my arguments:
Jim’s defense is a little weird. He notes that people often mistakenly suggest carving up a written work that seems to combine too different themes, failing [...]

Gary Farber makes the minor mistake of trying to think like a mundane. That trick never works:
But I am kinda sad that they didn’t go for the richer, deeper, more character-laden film that it could have been. I think in the long run that would have expanded the franchise much much more, and made the [...]

X3 isn’t bad at all. There’s the unfortunate “Plan 9 From Outer Space Moment” involving the timing of the assault on Alcatraz. In a couple of places the scripting goes flat. And man are they skating over the line with the early Juggernaut scenes. But there are a lot of nice touches and it’s a [...]

We’ve talked about the Jewish-American contribution to the development of comics and superheroes here before. Now there’s a book, Up Up and Oy Vey. I haven’t read it yet, but I gots ta, and soon.