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Last night Jenn and I rented “21″ the Kevin Spacey film based off of the MIT students who counted cards and made a lot of money.  I guess there isn’t a whole lot to say about this movie.  Smart kid gets pulled into a group of math geniuses and whoe have created a system to beat blackjack legally.  The previews for the movie are pretty much exactly what happens in the movie and there are really no surprises a long the way.  The movie keeps a simple premise, throws in some love, some gambling, a little money and a protagonist who has learned some new tricks and life lessons.

The movie was nothing special, but nothing terrible either.  If you are looking for a decent rent, when you’ve seen the rest of the “what’s new” shelf you can’t go totally wrong by picking this movie up.

I give it 6.3545 double downs out of 10.

ps.  For additional reading check out the wikipedia article on the real MIT students.  It’s worth a look, and you’ll be just that much more educated on how people won lots of money that you’ll never see. -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team

I grew up on an Island, because of this we had to take a ferry to get across to the main land every-single-time we wanted to leave and see the larger world beyond our little space in the corner of the Atlantic Ocean.  This boat ride would take around an hour and you had to plan you’re entire trip with the boat crossing.  This isn’t a problem anymore with the huge bridge and all, but this created a situation for my young video game addicted self to gravitate towards the arcade machines for the hour long ride.

One of those trusty arcade machines was 1942.  I can even remember it’s exact location and on which boat it was on.  Well I pumped many a quarter into that game and rarely ever made it past the first few levels as I ran out of quarters pretty fast.  On Wednesday Backbone Entertainment released 1942: Joint Strike for Xbox Live Arcade for a grand total of 800 MS points or roughly $10 for you people keeping track.  I was excited for this release as I was hoping it was going to take me back to my glory quarter pumping days.

Well, after playing the game for a good couple hours the other night, I can say this game both met my expectations, exceeded my expectations, but also failed miserably in a few areas.  So I write this review with mixed emotions, a little sadness, disappointment, nostalganess (is that even a word), and happiness.

Lets start off with what I liked about the game.  The graphics are updated to the new “HD” standard that most of the XBLA titles are adopting and because of this the game looks great.  It is a perfect mix of the old retro feel, but looks amazing on my HDTV.  The music is also perfect and they nailed it exactly, although I wish the music was a bit louder in the game.  The gameplay is there, which is hard to screw up as it’s basically flying around shooting stuff.  So with all that wrapped up with a great co-op game it should be perfect right?  Well, no.

Here is where the game falls short for me, and it’s the fact that the game is really, really short.  There is only 5 levels, takes at most an hour to complete.  I found the difficult to be just about right, the controls seems a little sluggish at times, especially when you’re dodging 8000 little purple and green dots.  An odd nitpick too is the pause screen.  They insist on displaying this animated pause menu every single time and it can get quite annoying.  It was cool the first time, but when I’m playing casually it’s because I’m only half paying attention and pausing frequently caused quite a bit of annoyance.  Lastly, I was fairly disappointed at the amount of power ups in the game.  There are three types of weapons that can be upgraded twice.  I was hoping for a bit more variety on that front.  Also I would have like to saw more drops from the enemies.

Overall, they built a solid game with a ton of potential.  It just feels like they laid a great framework down, but just didn’t put the icing on the cake like they could have.  It’s not really worth 800 points, but on the other hand I don’t regret buying as I will be playing it again, and again.  As I’m sure I wasted much more than $10 back in 1991 on this classic.

Rating? You could do much worse in the genre, but it falls short.  If your buddy has this game, take the hour to play through it though.  I would easily recommend this title if it came in at 400 MS points instead.

Late last week I was surfing the net and came across a list of contemporary classics.  On the top of that list was the name of a book I had never heard of titled The Road.  Later I found out it was on Oprah’s book club and had been given a pulitzer.  It was also written by the same guy (Cormac McCarthy) who gave us the acadamy award for best picture last year in “No Country For Old Men.”.  So I picked up the book and gave it a read.

At first If found his style very different, and difficult to get into, but soon after 50 pages I started to understand the world he was painting and the way he was going to go about it.  The book depicts the story of a father and son who are living in a Post-Nuclear war world in which all morals and laws of the days of old are thrown out the window.  He describes a hauntingly accurate description of what could await us as a species if we are not careful.  The book was spine chillingly descriptive, gray as ash, and very poetic.  The book is a story of absolute love, in the face of when everything is loss.

It’s not an easy piece of literature to go through, but one that I think people need to read.  Pick it up, prepare yourself for a haunting naritive, but guarentee you’ll enjoy the journey down the path.  I’d also suggest having a childrens book about rainbows and kittens ready as soon as you’re done to counter balance yourself.

This is also coming to the big screen this November.  I will be going opening weekend.