11/22/1963 by Stephen King

What if you could go back?  I think we all ask ourselves this question.  Probably why time travel is such an interesting idea.  I love time travel, be it movies (Primer anybody?) or in this case, books.  When an author of Stephen King’s caliber decides to tackle the subject, I was quite confident it would be a good read.  King did not let us readers down here.  11/22/1963 is the date John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, so the plot should be pretty obvious.  What King does so well, and what makes the story so interesting, is that this is not just a story about time traveling in an attempt to save Kennedy.  It’s not that easy.  The mechanics of going to the past are unique.  It becomes a tale about humanity, cause and effect, love, evil, and how the universe itself works.  It’s most certainly a tall order, hence the book being over 800 pages long.   King makes every one of them count.

The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom: You gotta use that head, you buttwit

Into ETERNITY. For pie.

As video games go, we don’t often get to play the part of the villain.  Sure, every now and then we’re given a dark character like, say, Nico Bellick from Grand Theft Auto 4 or Alex Mercer from Prototype who are so driven by revenge they’re willing to tell the world and everyone in it to get bent during their own personal crusade of wrath.  But how often do you get to play as a 1920s era dapper scoundrel who is obsessed with finding and eating all of the pies that ever existed?  The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom went on sale on Steam last week, and I’ve been slowly helping the lovable buttwit through level after level of pie consuming platforming.

The only problem here is that I’m apparently too dense to solve any puzzles ever.

Time Gentlemen, Please!: An adventurer’s guide for the distinguished gentleman

Mistakes have been made. I am man enough to admit that.

The title of this game?  It’s false.  Also, instead of reviewing one game, I’m actually reviewing two, since Ben There Dan That is a direct precursor to the game Time Gentlemen, Please!, and is required gaming if you want to have any idea what is going on in the story.  Actually, that’s not strictly true.  The main characters give you a brief run down of what they’re doing and why at the beginning of Time Gentlemen, Please!, though honestly it enhances the experience if you’ve been there through it all.

Ben There Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please! are both adventure games in the same vein of Sam and Max and Monkey Island.  That is, they are incredibly funny point and click adventures with an increasingly bizarre plot, involving characters that can usually get a chuckle out of you with their antics.  Actually, when I was talking about this article with Elrood not more than like twenty minutes ago, I told him these games were like playing Sam and Max, if there were a lot of dick jokes in Sam and Max.

Dr. Who: Have you met my friend?

No matter what era you're in being dapper never goes out of style

I wasn’t originally planning on making a post about a TV show, but since I wasn’t originally planning on making a post today at all, I guess it all evens out in the wash.  See, I don’t have cable.  All movies and TV shows that grace my ocular globes are streamed straight through the Xbox (I’m…  not sure why I just said ocular globes instead of eyes just now).  As the story goes, one day I woke up with an insatiable appetite for terrible science fiction shows, which have led me down the path of watching shows like Farscape (meh), Sliders (ehhhh) and Primeval (ugh).  One show that I have found that I have enjoyed thoroughly, however, has been Dr. Who, which I kind of went in to with complete ignorance about what kind of show that was.

The Final Countdown: Danah DAH dun…Dana dat dun da

What if Martin Sheen, Kirk Douglas, that girl from The Graduate and Doc Hopper from the original Muppet Movie all got together to make a film about the Navy inadvertently traveling in time? Specifically a Nimitz class, and indeed the U.S.S. Nimitz herself, aircraft carrier traveling back to Hawaii on December 6, 1941? You get a surprisingly good film believe it or not. And what with today marking the 70th year following that day of infamy, what better way to remember than to take the modern symbol of American military might back in time to defend Pearl Harbor against an “unprovoked and dastardly attack.”

Radiant Historia: Do it again, whore

:(

Anyone who has been reading Faceplant! for a while is probably aware that I’m a sucker for RPG games.  I like the tedious micro management that accompanies battles and character upgrade menus, watching the best laid plans of the vapid and shallow characters in the game go completely to hell, and nothing quite beats that feeling you get when a game world completely sucks you in.  It’s kind of a hit or miss science, really, and every RPG I pick up gives me a certain sense of unease.   Waaaay back a while ago, I discussed which video game was THE BEST GAME EVER with Enosh and Elrood, and one of the things I said I look for is a game’s replay value.  To me, a truly great game is one that you keep coming back to after you’ve completed it, one that continues to suck you in regardless of how advanced of spiffy newer games have become.

Well, I guess someone at Atlus games was reading the article.  Radiant Historia has tons of replay value.  Actually, it’s required.  In fact, if you don’t go back through and replay sections of the game over BEFORE you have completed the game, you can just forget about actually reaching the game’s true ending.