Reviews

I'll say it right off the bat: Firefly is a decent enough show. However, it's not as perfect as the die-hard fans like to claim it is. To them, Firefly is a matter of those who "get it" and those that don't.

I'm here to tell you that there's a way to "get it", but still not like it.

Watching the series, it can become pretty obvious why the series (and movie, for that matter), didn't attract more attention, despite considerable advertisement for it when it started.

Firefly was advertised as proof that, in a future society, not all the planets were equally high-tech. What was presented, however, was an anachronistic mess. Instead of showing the viewers something along the lines of a futuristic slum (something higher in tech than our own, but far less than what the rich have), we were faced with a scenes from western movies. The disparity was just too great.

While an interesting concept from a cognitive perspective, the use of a second language was a serious distraction. Other TV shows and movies use a foreign language to allow the characters to swear legally. Firefly goes the extra distance to occasionally have the characters speak in Chinese in casual conversation. This seems fine, but it has a tendency to render those conversations pointless - we don't know what they are saying, and the scenes suffer for it. I should say that most of the dialog one *can* understand are often quite enjoyable, with a natural/normal tone that is rarely done in serious science fiction.

While all the characters were enjoyable, the characters of Simon and River weakened the concept of a Han Solo-like team of people. Because they were OMG IMPORTANT TO KEEP, the show dealt with them for much longer than I would have liked.

Like I said, Firefly was a decent enough show. The characters were enjoyable, but there were some pretty serious flaws. Looking back, it's no real surprise that the show - and movie - didn't find a audience outside a very small (but very vocal) community who were willing to spam IMDb rating polls and buy tons of DVDs (to make the series seem more popular than it really was).

Enjoy the show. It's not the best.

I figure since nobody has commented - not to mention that I'm going to be adding quite a few things to this - I figured I'd comment.

Afterlife is what I would consider a 'successful failure' - taken together, the concept is great, the execution is generally good, but when everything is tabulated, you can't help but think slightly poor of the overall product.

There are a great many positive qualities to Afterlife. I don't think the concept of SimHeaven and SimHell has been tried before or after this game, so doing it was a great starting point. To my knowledge, no 'Sim' game has since tried a bi-planar approach of running 2 'cities'.

The rewards and punishments are often funny and interesting, although Heaven's rewards typically seem blander than their Hell counterparts. Having played Black & White, and hearing development stories, I can perfectly understand the comparative difficulty of designing "Heavenly" things as opposed to Hellish things.

A great deal of the credit for the quality of the game has to be on the voice actors behind your angel and demon assistants. While Aria occasionally sounds like little more than a typical Angel, Milton James provides a solid voice for a demon that is not altogether demonic. Jasper personifies a working trait in this game - the Great Beyond not as some serious thing, but a simple business.

The humor in the game as a whole is excellent.

However, there are some flaws to the game, in general.

Most notably is the micromanagement system in the game. Buildings must be calibrated based on the type of souls currently occupying it, lest the building does not grow to larger, more effective buildings. To fix this, there are 2 options - either pay large amounts of money to auto calibrate, or personally calibrating thousands of buildings. With this and more, Afterlife is a game you'll spend a large amount of time at the slower speeds - the faster the game runs, the more difficult it is to keep track of a myriad of things.

Another flaw/benefit is in how the game treats both planes differently.

As you'd expect, Hell is supposed to be the Anti-Simcity: Less diverse, long roads, Bad Vibes, etc. The game is easier as time progresses, as natural Simcity ideals will benefit the improvements on it. If a ton of Bad Souls enters Hell, and expects to be punished for Green, putting a large amount of Envy punishments on the map is perfectly fine.

Heaven, on the other hand, wants small roads, diversity, and Good vibes. While this seems easy, it isn't. Eventually, your Heavenly assistant will complain that your Heaven is crowded, your roads are overtaxed, and your rewards are not diverse enough for proper growth. Heaven is most difficult when you're going broke trying to put diverse reward zones, and the game sends you 100,000 Good Souls who all want a single color reward. Either you lose money by not providing those zones, or never see them evolve from the most basic of buildings, because there's only 1 type of reward for miles.

That said, however, Afterlife is a rare, but extremely fun game.

It has been joked that during every Elder Scrolls game produced by Bethesda Softworks, they've never repeated the same mistake twice in games - they've invented *new* mistakes with each one. Before Bloodmoon, there was Morrowind - considered an excellent game, despite serious performance issues. Before Morrowind, there was Battlespire, a game considered good, despite an aging engine that should have been replaced. Before Battlespire, there was Daggerfall - commended but considered the buggiest games in history.

Bloodmoon, the second expansion of Morrowind, continues this trend.

Like most Bethesda games, Bloodmoon hits on so many positive notes, you want to love it. Essentially, Bloodmoon is more like Morrowind than Tribunal was. Whereas Tribunal consisted of essentially a series of small indoor buildings (even the 'open air' areas are indoor areas), Bloodmoon consists of a fully-designed island, off the shore of the main island.

In Tribunal, you feel you're being lead from Room A to Room B to Room C. In Bloodmoon, you're given an entire island to play with. A player can choose to do the Plot Quest, or aid the construction of a mining town - which takes roughly as long as the Plot Quest to accomplish. If none of those strike your fancy, there's enough non-plot quests to keep a player far busier than they were in Tribunal.

All this is great, but (as I alluded to) Bloodmoon continues Bethesda's history with their games. Bloodmoon amplifies the already-shaky performance issues with Morrowind. For some, the myriad of trees on the Bloodmoon island will lower performance. For others, the snowstorm effect will do it. Many others have reported that even installing Bloodmoon has lowered performance significantly.

Overall, Bloodmoon is like most of the Elder Scrolls games - the execution of a very good idea hampers the playability and enjoyment of the game.

This movie won't make you go 'wow'. It won't be deep and philosophical.

But if you get a big bag of popcorn, sit down in your chair, and just enjoy a lighthearted romp through a slightly skewed reality, you just might enjoy it (horror of horrors!)

This is a enjoyable summer movie that you'll rent or buy when it comes out. People won't think better of you for having it, but they won't be adverse to watching it with you.