Friday, March 28, 2008

Canyon Defense

Canyon Defense can be found here on MiniClip

It's an awsome but hard game. The graphics are neater and the enemies are more annoying but there is no 'upgrade' feature. Enjoy

Friday, March 21, 2008

Desktop Tower Defense

Desktop Tower Defense is my time sink right now.


Here are some of my attempts to play the Fun-10k mission.

This is probably my best strategy to date

Some tips/ideas
1. maximize range/exposure of towers to creeps by placing upgraded towers in central locations
2. slow the game down with freeze and bang towers
3. mazes help
4. ink/dart towers do not need to exposed to creeps directly. It's possible to attack from afar.
5. My previous strategy included combining the 'creep-flow' into a single heavily guarded channel. It feels like being able to reuse the endpoints somehow extends game play by having the creeps traverse the field in opposite directions, thus continually exposing them to upgraded tower clusters
6. don't forget to take care of Flying attacks. These usually get me

Monday, March 17, 2008

Some bad books and movies as of recent

Rant was just too boring and confusing for me to 'get into'. Maybe I'm just Palahniuk oversaturated. This lived under my bed for a month and went straight back to the NYPL. Some books just don't catch on.





















Vanilla Sky was one of those movies that fell through the cracks and I never got a chance to see. Seems like I should have left it there.
In retrospect, the movie is split into real and imaginary halves by the events following the nightclub scene. Every 'present time' scene in the movie, as well as some flashbacks during the 'jail time' scenes occurs in a dream.
There are some enjoyable cinematic effects, such as the use of sets and color to distinguish between real flashbacks, real dreams, and the surrealistic dream reality of the present. The blurring of these events is also very enjoyable.
However, the great disappointment here is twofold: a shitty deus ex machina and a missed opportunity for a decent movie.
What seems to be strange surrealism turns into uncalled for science fiction. It felt like the writers couldn't come up with an explanation for what's going on so they thought up some corporation that would freeze people and let them dream whatever they wanted. There are subtle hints of this during the film (appearance of tech support, few anachronistic scenes) but overall I would have preferred a more plausible ending.
There was a great opportunity for a 'Fight Club' like jamais vu that would make the viewer reexamine every scene with a completely different idea of who is who, when and what. Instead, we're quickly clued into the fact that David is having what surmounts to a bad trip.

Other bad movies I will breifly mention:

My expectation for Dan In Real Life were pretty low, but this movie managed to outdo itself in the crap department. The only thing this movie was missing is a holiday theme to serve as a pivot point for the plot. Then I could have made my girlfriend watch Rambo: First Blood Part II instead.
















The Reaping spiraled from interesting, to creepy, to scary, to creepy and scary and suddenly collapsed to ridiculous. Somewhere between the little girl jumping out of tree bark, scary houses and creepy southern towns this movie aquired a Satan worshiping death cult and a 12year old that wields lightning bolts. How and why did H.Swank decide to act in this ?