VIDEO GAME: Suika Game (2021)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Suika GameYear: 2021Rating: ETime Played: ~15+ hours It’s interesting how a simple puzzle game adaptation can create an entirely original experience. Matching games aren’t new by any means, and ones where matching fuses the two into something bigger can be done as simply as numbered tiles (a la 2048). The challenge of innovating this simple game concept comes with another mechanic: gravity. Suika Game takes this matching puzzle and not only gives it a cute coat of paint by making all the pieces into fruit, but it adds a physics engine that’s both ingenious and frustrating to deal with. In Suika Game, your goal is to fuse fruits of different sizes until they become a watermelon. Once you manage to create two watermelons and fuse those together, they disappear and allow gameplay to continue. This is no easy feat. Getting to a watermelon is itself a challenge, but getting two of them in a limited space on the game board/box is something...
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MOVIE: Ad Astra (2019)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Ad Astra Year: 2019 Rating: PG-13 Length: 123 minutes / 2.05 hours I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect with Ad Astra (2019). The trailers I had seen made it seem like it was an action-filled space adventure akin to Interstellar (2014) or Gravity (2013). While it did handle all the outer space issues in a somewhat scientifically accurate way, Ad Astra was a much slower movie than I thought it would be. In fact, I’d probably compare it more to films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for its almost plodding pacing. The real trick is that the plot of Ad Astra is basically an outer space version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, of which Apocalypse Now! (1979) is perhaps the most notable movie adaptation. Ad Astra does get credit for the beauty of its outer space environment. The settings felt massive in scale and intimate in their proximity. Each portion and waypoint of the journey seemed precisely how I would picture them eventually occurring in our not-to-distant future. Even if some aspects of the film...
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MOVIE: The Martian (2015)

by benmweilert1 Comment
The Martian Year: 2015 Rating: PG-13 Length: 144 minutes / 2.4 hours I, for one, am excited that space travel is now a topic regularly covered on the big screen. If the general public becomes even a little bit more interested in interplanetary travel, perhaps I can see man stand on the surface of Mars in my lifetime. The Martian (2015) is merely the latest in a string of space-themed sci-fi movies that brings the excitement of outer space to theaters. While not nearly as continually intense as Gravity (2013), or as epic as Interstellar (2014), what The Martian does right is give a sense of scale to the challenge of returning to Earth from being abandoned on Mars. Gripping and just humorous enough to keep it from being dour, director Ridely Scott uses many cinematic techniques, including several montages, to tell the story many have already read from Andy Weir's novel of the same name. While many sequences and scientific explanations were obviously cut for...
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