Brutal Legend
A hilariously funny game about a rock and roll roadie(voiced by Jack Black) who gets tranported to a mystical world where the rock is the power. Armed with a battle axe and a lightning spitting electric guitar, he battles through the world to free the people from demonic oppression. The game is an interesting slight twist on the typical hack and slash adventure game, and a fun one at that. The voice acting, although very repetitive, is often hilarious and the various different game missions keep the action pretty fresh. Teamed with a rockin' soundtrack, its definitely a great gaming experience.
That said there are some things that I would like to see fixed in a sequel.
1) The mission marker: Your destination is marked with a column of light, which is good, but its often very difficult to find this light. Bridges, mountains, statues and all manner of insanity are often very tall and often right in the way. A lighted path, like in the Fable series, would make the game much easier to find objectives.
2) Driving controls: Much of the game, your guitar playing allows you to summon a hot rod to drive around in. For as often as you drive this monster, the controls are far less precise as the walking mechanics. This leads to crashing often, comically often. Also the "homing" missile is far from accurate, especially in the escort missions where it seems to fly off up into the air instead of going after enemies.
3) Controlling Your Units: I can't really put my finger on it exactly but the unit control really causes me to pull out my hair often. There's seemingly a way to hit two buttons and select just a certain kind of soldier, but it often doesn't work correctly. Also in the stage battles, you have to keep placing spawn flags with a guitar solo to get the guys to move up from the back of the field. I would much prefer that they just all obey my commands no matter where they are on the battlefield. Also it would be convenient if the units actually obeyed all the commands, instead of just doing so whenever they want.
Overall the shortcomings of the game dont make it much less enjoyable. I'm not sure if I will finish the game, one of the missions involves me driving around in a circle and trapping an animal in that circle, with the noted poor driving controls, its pretty darn terrible.
I give Brutal Legend 3 1/2 Angry Badgers out of 5
The Ghost Writer
In this movie, Ewan McGregor gets hired to write the memoir for the ex-prime minister(Pierce Brosnan). While the cast and concept definitely seem to have the possibility to be entertaining, it really fails to deliver. The Ghost Writer is sorta like showing the audience your poker hand in the first five minutes and then spending two hours to describe why spades are black. It doesn't add to the hand in the slightest and just makes all your friends wonder why you were ever invited to poker night. Also the plot has so many holes that its hard to stick with even the basic plot line of the movie. Why wouldn't they just send the old finished manuscript to the editor to fix? Why doesn't Ewan McGregor just finish up rewrites in a week and get out of there before everything gets funky?
Also Pierce Brosnan's wife is one ugly depressing chick, he could do much better.
I'm gonna give The Ghost Writer a whopping two angry badgers out of 5.
