BRING ME THE HEAD OF STEVEN SPIELBERG!!!

That was pretty much my gut reaction today after suffering through what is easily Spielberg's worst movie and may also be Tom Cruise's (although it's hard to top stuff like Cocktail & Days of Thunder in terms of pure crapulence). I have never been so bored watching tons of Earthlings be brutually eliminated. The special effects were just loud, noisy and clumsy. There was no plot to speak of (you can tell because they keep repeating the same lines over and over throughout the movie). Any dramatic moments or character development feel horribly forced and hollow. Cruise is horribly miscast as some normal kind of jerk dockworker, and Dakota Fanning literally just spends the whole movie being an annoying whiny kid. And to top it all off, Senor Speilburgeo felt it was a good idea to stick with the original ending, and to add on top the ultimate mushy happy Hollywood ending. I was expecting something at least equal to Independence Day (dumb, but pretty entertaining), but this is more on the level of Plan 9 from Outer Space, just with an actual budget which makes it all the sadder. I wasn't expecting it to be a great film, but the fact that it wasn't entertaining on ANY level makes this easily the biggest dissapointment of this year (but The Longest Yard still beats it out by a little for worst movie I've seen this year).

After subjecting myself to the pure torture that was WOW. I definitely needed a pick me up. Luckily, this same day the newest RPG from the brilliant minds at Nippon Ichi came out: Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. The story is nothing new (mana is dissapearing from the world, blah, blah, blah), but it's main feature is the alchemy system. It sounds a little intimidating and limiting at first, since you have to combine elements you collect in order to make powerful attacks that are necessary to beat even the standard enemies in the game. But luckily the system itself is pretty simple, and since you can turn many enemies and inanimate objects that respawn into elements it's hard to run out. This also adds plenty of strategy and variety to otherwise mundane battles. The encounter rate is also suprisingly low, which can be trouble for big boss fights since you may be underpowered, but it's a refeshing chancge of pace. But like any really good rpg, the key to AI:EM is that the characters are chraming and interesting and you like spending time with them (really, it's important in all forms of entertainment, but since RPGs usually ask for much longer commitment, it's more important that the characters are at least not annoying and preferably entertaining). That's really it for now