June 24, 2003 Comments Off
Release dates updated. I'm especially excited to see River City Ransom and Double Dragon being released for Game Boy Advance this November. Go, retro!
Speaking of which, the Game Boy Player is in, and I'm happy to report it's easy to install. The GameCube has three access ports on its bottom, and the GB Player and the broadband/modem adaptors use different ones, meaning both peripherals can be connected simultaneously. Phew. (But… can they be used simultaneously?)
Of course, now my GameCube's so tall that I can barely fit a game in without bumping into the shelf above. I'll prolly need to move wires and consoles around to put the front-loading PS2 & Xbox next to each other in the lowest shelf. But that won't make it easier to remove a GBA cart without picking up the Cube itself.
I am also unsurprised to report that The Hulk is no good – in some ways, even worse than I feared, though not toally without merit. Altogether, if it had been on TV, I would've switched channels a third of the way through, I was so unengaged. Bruce Banner's origin here is much different from the comic book; his father, David Banner, experimented on himself, and his mutated genes were passed down to his son. The cirumstances of Bruce's first transformation were disappointing: he basically thinks about a lot of upsetting things, then trips over a can.
I missed Lou Ferrigno's cameo as it coincided with Stan Lee's, which was much less subtle than his usual appearance in his films (X-Men, Daredevil, Spider-Man).
Hulk featured a form of layout I've never seen in a movie. At any moment, the screen may divide into two to five sections, like a TV's picture in a picture, or the panels of a comic book. This technique is used to display characters at different points interacting (such as across a room or over the phone), or different perspectives on the same action. It's really distracting, though, to have a new frame suddenly pop up in the middle of an existing one.
The final scene and the ultimate villain were both devoid of meaning. Why was this happening?
Marvel's had one good movie this year, which isn't a great ratio. When video games first started adapting licenses, they often had no strength beyond the name; though this sadness is still true in some cases, it seems in Hollywood, licenses are just now working their way through this initial phase.