David’s Ramblings

You have to see the first Bill and Ted to get the complete storyline of this movie. This movie features God, the Devil, and Death, as well as time travelers planning on dominating the world by changing the past with killer robots. Both this and the movie preceding it are excellent movies and get 4.6π in my books, but you must understand that these have a certain brand of humor to them you may not ascribe to.

This movie features Samuel Jackson as a big time coach that wants to help the school he attended. It’s the typical ghetto high-school and the kids all think they’re gang members and all that. He comes in and turns them around and gives them some discipline. An MTV film through and through, it is nevertheless a generally good film I would recommend to anyone. 4.5π out of 900º

This movie stars Bruce Willis as a washed-out hostage negotiator. Even though he thinks he’s gotten away from the problems of his past job, he soon finds himself in another hostage situation in his small town. And then he finds himself personally involved when his family is held hostage in an interesting plot twist.

This movie was pretty well done. It kept the suspense well enough, and I rather enjoyed how good the acting was and such. My aunt did mention that every Bruce Willis movie is the same story with a different kid, and though that may be true, I still think this is a unique and well portrayed story. 4.3π out of 900º

This movie was shown in previews as a simple-minded ‘black family tries to accept white in-law’ movie, but it proved to have its moments that transcended the obvious racial differences. I thought it was rather humorous, so in this mini-review it gets 4π out of 900º. How can you beat Bernie Mac? He’s a funny guy.

Video Game “Second Life”
Rating: 3.7π out of 900º

Second Life is a fairly new game that I caught being advertised on Apple’s website the other day. I decided to try it out and see how it worked for me.

First off, a quite noticeable advantage of the game is that you download a 40mb client and the rest is handled by their servers, meaning quick and easy download (on broadband) and manageable download even on a 56k. The clients are also made for multiple OSes, something I always like to see.

The game isn’t completely free however, and it costs somewhere around $15 dollars to get a basic account to play with. It’s not monthly, just one flat fee. Whether it is worth it is up to your tastes in games, but I’d petition it’s worth looking into their free trial and bailing if you don’t like it (which they make very easy to do — no complex hoops to jump through).

Their main source of revenue is in the fact you can pay a monthly fee to be allowed to own land in their virtual world. Something that you wouldn’t do unless you really started spending a lot of time on.

Anyway, enough about costs and technicalities and on to the gameplay. The basic idea of Second Life is similar to that of the Sims, only with a single character for you and a much larger, more open world to play in with other people. Second Life was put together from the beginning with mods in mind, and they actually have people setting up shops selling vehicles, special haircuts, clothing, etc.

The idea of such an enveloping world is compelling, and was kind of fun to dink around with. My Mac seems to need a bit more RAM to run the game smoothly however, so I didn’t explore near as much as I’d have liked to. I would say that anyone that finds an internet chat room worth investing time in would likely enjoy a game where everyone is controlling a character and running them around without any purpose. And how could you not like the fact that every character can fly? Fun stuff.

If you think you might enjoy looking into a complete virtual world, you might do yourself a favor and try this game out. I’m not saying it’s for you, but you can have a free trial to find out.