There is an issue where the kids catch on pretty fast that there’s more than one episode they can watch, in which case they then beg to see episode after episode after episode.  However, with proper parenting (it’s called “No”) that’s usually pretty easily avoided.

In an effort to find shows that are age appropriate, my wife and I have fallen back to the shows we watched as kids.  For whatever reason, they are more entertaining to children and not as condescending to everyone watching.  One such series we’ve found is an old favorite for me; The Real Ghostbusters.  Ever hear the phrase, “You should never meet your childhood hero.”?  Turns out you shouldn’t watch your childhood shows either.

Watching these episodes now, as an adult, is a little uncomfortable.  Some of the character development is a little laughable, and the interactions between the Ghostbusters isn’t exactly . . . . normal.  As a kid, you’d never notice or care about any of this.  But as an adult, it’s weird.

"I want you to know, I'm having a wonderful time."

If you think that picture is weird, you should see the whole scene it’s a part of.

It promises to be an amazing single player medieval fantasy action RPG, without the loss of story or the endless repetition of an MMO.

And I want to believe them. I really, really do.
It’s just that I don’t trust the developers.
Or the publisher.
At all.

This whole thing smacks of copycat marketing. I can just imagine how the idea formed in the mind of some top EA executive: “Hmm, I’ve been playing this new Dragon Age: Origins game for like 35 hours straight! It’s an amazing-single-player-medieval-fantasy-action-RPG, without the loss of story or endless repetition of an MMO! Too bad it’s a brand-new franchise. Just imagine if we already had an established fan base for a game like this! If only EA held the rights to a popular fantasy role-playing franchise, we could totally cash in… hey, wait a minute!”

So yes, I believe it’s an attempt to duplicate the success of Dragon Age by making a nice-looking clone game wearing a fresh Lord of the Rings T-shirt.

But it’s not just the recent success of Dragon Age that makes me think this is all just a lot of hype. Does anybody remember a few years back, when the LotR RTS “Battle for Middle-Earth II” was coming out? Remember Hugo Weaving’s deep monotone voice booming that “the final battle of the War in the North is about to begin?” They made a huge deal out of expanding the LotR franchise to never-before-seen places and events. It’s like this: “all the huge battles in the LotR movies took place in the south of Middle-Earth, but there was an even more awesome and less well-known war taking place in the north of Middle-Earth that you never get to see, and we’re finally going to show it to you!” And BFME2 was very nearly a super-amazing game. Except that EA spent way too much effort on hype and not nearly enough on gameplay, so that it ended up only being an average game; fun, but not earth-shattering.

And now in 2010, lo and behold, a scant four years after the release of the over-hyped “War in the North” RTS game, we see the announcement of a sure-to-be overhyped “War in the North” RPG. Except this time, it’s actually called “War in the North,” because they just couldn’t think of a better title. Except that they already had a better title, because of the simple fact that they already had a better game in the works.

In 2006, a new game was announced under the working title “Project Grey Company.” This was soon revealed to be a cool-looking LotR action-RPG entitled The White Council. The concept art for this game looked really sweet. It looked like it had an interesting and original plot, and it was really going to bring some awesome new places, characters and events to the LotR franchise.

And then in 2007 it was inexplicably cancelled.

They say it was due to “management problems” or some such. It was replaced by a purely action-based game called “Lord of the Rings: Conquest,” which sucked, to put it mildly. I’m not certain, but I think Conquest may be the worst-rated LotR game ever made, and there have been some real doozies, like that ill-begotten farce of a console RPG known as “The Third Age,” for one.

But why cancel such a promising game just to replace it with a poorly-bundled package of tripe? That excuse EA gave about “management problems” was pretty ambiguous. What I think really happened is that someone in “management” had a “problem” with the game. As happens so frequently in the game market, another brilliant idea was squashed by an egotistical executive who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else and can come up with better, more lucrative ideas. I’m sure whoever this goober was used all sorts of rhetoric about how the age of RPGs was over, the market was dead, that action games were the latest big thing, and that to make real money off of LotR they needed to make an action game instead of an RPG. That’s my take on how The White Council died.

Unfortunately the hypothetical executive’s sentiment that I posited here completely misses the point of the entire LotR franchise, and that’s why Conquest was such a bland, worthless game. RPGs owe LotR for their very existence. If we acknowledge that the parents of the modern RPG were the well-suited pair known as “Dungeons” and “Dragons,” then that makes the Lord of the Rings a grandparent four times over, which in turn must make J.R.R. Tolkien a very happy great-grandfather indeed.

It’s a given that the role-playing game and Lord of the Rings go hand-in-hand, and losing sight of that fact is to lose sight of the essence of both. But of course EA doesn’t care about that. They’re a company — they just want to make money. Of course, they could have made bank with The White Council, because of the simple fact that good games usually make good money. Yet for a while, it seemed as if EA had doomed the LotR franchise to mediocrity, which is the equivalent in the gaming world of a slow, lingering death.

And then Dragon Age: Origins happened. The RPG gods (aka BioWare) finally released their Wunderspiel, a fantasy RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate that was designed to single-handedly revive the dwindling fantasy RPG market. The bigwigs thought it was just a niche market game, that it wouldn’t really be noticed, that it would be the last hurrah of the genre, the last of the dying breed of fantasy role-playing games that actually involve both “fantasy” and “role-playing.” I don’t think anybody except BioWare expected it to do as well as it has. Some people think that somebody at BioWare must be prescient or something. They’re not. They just know the great secret: if you take well-prepared, fine-quality gamer-crack and bundle it in a pretty package with lots of wonderful little goodies mixed in, it will get spectacular ratings and IT WILL SELL LIKE MAD.

Which brings us back to War in the North. After Dragon Age’s big success, EA has announced what amounts to a lite version of what The White Council would have been. Instead of an epic fantasy RPG with real depth, we’re getting a good-looking RPG with no real substance to it. EA still doesn’t get it. It looks like they think that it was Dragon Age’s pretty package that sold, rather than its carefully-crafted gamer-crack.

I want to be excited about this game, but I’ve just been burned one too many times. Anyway, check out the teaser trailer below. It’s a visually impressive trailer, at least. As for the actual game, we’ll have to wait and see.

You may ask then, “What is your problem?”. For starters it takes place in China, Jackie Chan is Chinese, and the boy is learning Kung Fu not Karate (the spiritual nature of Kung Fu seems to be a central theme of the film). As my friend can tell you Kung Fu is a Chinese fighting style that is very different from Karate. China and Japan are very very very different nations who historically don’t like each other very much.

Make the movie, fine, continue to capitalize on my childhood, fine, but just call it the Kung Fu Kid. Honestly I think it looks like a pretty good flick that I’ll probably rent (OK watch at home wink wink). But please don’t make westerners look even more stupid. I can understand that the average American doesn’t know much about… well anything, but at least get the GIGANTIC parts of the story right.

Here is a link to the trailer, let me know what you think.

Karate Kid (2010)

The CGI (for the train) is on the “meh” side of things, but considering it’s on broadcast television I think it’s pretty good.  The writing is good, the characters are cleanly defined, and the action is awesome.  The fight in the train car is one of the best sequences I’ve ever seen on TV (and I’m evidently not the only one).  Again, if you want a fun show to watch this season, be sure to tune in to Human Target!

People will claim that I am a huge Microsoft fan/spokesperson, but the honest fact of the matter is that I simply like what works.  If it does its job well, then it’s a win in my book.  If it goes above and beyond what it needed to do, then it gets bonus points.  Some special features aren’t really useful to me, so I don’t factor them into my grading.  Sometimes this means I rank Apple products rather highly.  Sometimes I prefer Microsoft products.  I rarely like Unix/Linux items (no features, no “above and beyond”, and requires three weeks of work to get it to do what I need?  No thanks).  Overall, though, I think I’m pretty balanced about what I consider “good” in the technology world.

So then why my plea to Microsoft?

Well, let’s assume you aren’t one of the millions of people who already hate Internet Explorer.  Let’s pretend today is your first day on “teh interwebs” and you have no idea what else is out there.  You have programs called browsers, which you use to “browse” web pages (hence the name).  There are five major browsers in the world right now: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and Opera.  All other minor browsers are actually just shells that run one of these other browsers as the core.

Of all these, it would be argued that Internet Explorer has been around the longest.  Netscape Navigator came out about the same time, but closed doors in the late 90′s.  The technology used by Navigator was later picked up and the rendering engine was used in Firefox.  Since it has been around for so long, many web pages have been built specifically for Internet Explorer.  By design, the web is supposed to be open to all standards.  However, because Internet Explorer was always a little . . . quirky in how it rendered web pages, people started actually breaking their web pages so they’d at least look normal in IE.

It actually got so bad, that Microsoft finally overhauled the rendering engine that IE uses (called Trident) to finally be compliant with all the open standards of the web.  While you think that would have actually fixed things, it was soon clear that the newest IE, version 8, couldn’t even render pages made for IE7!  There’s actually a test to see how well a browser renders a web page called the Acid3 test.  I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure how or what is being testing, but it’s touted as the baseline benchmark for all modern browsers.  I happen to have all modern browsers installed on my computer, so I thought I’d give it a test.

Even my phone was able to pull a 100/100 on the test!  Well, how about another test?  Sure, we know that IE can’t display things correctly . . . but it has to be fast, right?!  Right?!?!

You can access this benchmark yourself at home by going to http://www.futuremark.com and clicking on the “Peacekeeper” benchmark.  In it, it tests a browsers ability to quickly render HTML, API’s, Java, Ajax, and on-the-fly HTML editing.  A 916 IE?  Really?  That was after I stopped using the 32-bit version (which got a paltry 901) and went for the “faster” 64-bit version.  I also expect this chart to silence all the people who keep going on and on with “You have to use browser X!  It’s so much faster!”  The one I use trounced all of yours, so please stop telling me I don’t know because I haven’t tried it.  (Side note: Chrome 4.0.221.6 is actually not out yet.  It’s a developer’s release version similar to an Alpha build.  And it still beat the crap out of IE)

Bottom line is that Internet Explorer needs to be put down.  There’s simply no place for it anymore in the world.  The mobile version is utter crap.  The Mac version was discontinued at v5.0 (which was crap when it was new).  Microsoft, seriously, get with the picture!  You give us something as wonderful as Windows 7, but then bundle IE8 with it?  Yes, I know you said we can uninstall it (a first for Windows, by the way), but what good is that when so many websites we need to use everyday will ONLY work with the broken standards that you don’t even support anymore?

Since Stolen Droids is read worldwide (or at least in 109 countries at last count), I thought it might be a good idea to add something like this.  Of course, I don’t speak/read all those languages so I don’t know how accurate the translation is.  If anyone sees anything horribly wrong, just let us know!

It surprises me that someone who has been as original and revolutionary as Spielberg has run out of ideas to the point that he has to remake an American classic. However this is the way of Hollywood. Remakes are the way of things. Even some of the other classic films are themselves remakes. The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart and released in 1931, was the third filmed adaptation of this story.

I suggest a new rule. I call it the “Joss Whedon” rule. If you’re going to remake a movie you must remake, and improve, a bad movie. Whedon took his terrible film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and turned it into a fantastic TV series. We can be done, we have the technology. So before Spielberg can remake a beloved classic he must remake something terrible. I personally would love to see what he could do with an update of Road House, or Supergirl.

What think you?