If you have never played Heroes of Might & Magic III (HOMM3), I highly recommend checking it out. I know everyone’s playing their fancy shmancy Wees, Ecksbockses, World of WoWcrafts and such nowadays, but I can attest that HOMM3 is some of the best fun I’ve ever had playing a video game. Of course, that’s coming from a guy that has logged over 1000 hours of Mario 3 in the past 2 months, so I might not be the most up-to-date gamer. At least I have a Wii. Plus I have the new Nintendo console. ROFL - I know.

Anyhoo, I know most of the visitors to this blog are looking for pics of Katy Perry or trying to find Ikariam tips, so to the one person that actually reads this post: you should try out this game if you are at all interested in RPGs, turn-based strategies, any type of fantasy, or simply if you’ve ever looked at a really good illustration of a dragon and thought “that’s pretty cool” - even if it was only for a split second until you remembered how dorky all that stuff is. You don’t have to tell anyone you read this, and no one will ever know you tried out the game. You have nothing to lose. It will be our little secret. Then you can go back to your “cool” empty life.

Look at the world view and lust:

“But Gimcracker, what’s this jive about ‘The Wake of Gods’? Is that a whole ‘nuther game?” Nope. It’s an expansion pack for HOMM3. THE expansion pack. It’s the best expansion pack ever made for any game or any thing, ever. It was made by the Russians so you know it’s good. Believe it or not, they still play HOMM3 over there. Especially in the towns where the Innerweb hasn’t been yet. And they thought to themselves, “You know what would make this game even better? Way more creatures, spells, artifacts, maps, skills, and heroes!”

Check out the Rampart town and salivate:

So, if you’ve never touched HOMM3 before, I would suggest buying Heroes III Complete from Amazon. You can get it for $13.50 after shipping and tax. That’s the cost of a CD. Come on, I saw you buy that Train album last year. That proves you can handle thirteen bucks even if it’s for something you’ll never use. And you know you’re tired of the rep grind in WoW. Admit it, your account is only still active because you’re afraid of the scorn of your friends if you quit. I have let that fear go.*

Peek at the battle screen and yearn:

That’s gotta be at least 1024 x 768.

After you play Heroes III Complete for a while and get to know the 7 different town types, you’re ready for the In The Wake of Gods expansion (click on that link, scroll down to “WoG 3.58f FILES” and download the allinon1.zip file. Unzip it, then run the native unpacker that you just unzipped, then run the install file.) Now you’re in for a world of fun. WoG presents you with so many new options that it is impossible to go through them all and understand them unless you’re already a seasoned HOMM3 player.

Feast your eyes on the character screen and crave:

In conclusion, you can go play all your new-fangled Halos and Call of Duties, or you can wait for Starcraft 2 or WOTLK expansion for WoW if you want to, but you know what? One day, when the Interscreens break, you will be stuck with Minesweeper and I’ll still have my HOMM3:WoG running. And then you will feel stupid for not listening to me.

*As soon as WOTLK comes out I am reactivating my account. Let the record show.

It stars an unlikely actor as “The Joker” who’s accidental death came just before filming was to wrap up. It’s a 2.5+ hour comic book movie spawned from the same franchise that contains filth like Batman & Robin. It had to compete with such summer action blockbusters as Wanted, Hellboy II, and Hancock.

It shattered 5 box office records, including highest-grossing opening weekend evAr.

It also received an astounding 94% on the Tomatometer. But are these reviewers just caught up in the current of such a huge film? Are they succumbing to the hype? Are they giving it good reviews just to honor the late Heath Ledger?

No. It was that good.

The Good

I want to see it again. That’s a good thing because it means the movie was full of so much plot that it was hard to take it all in the first time. In that respect, it was sort of like a Scorsese flick. I was so interested in all the characters that I forgot The Reason I was seeing it: Heath Ledger portraying The Joker. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman are very good actors. Christian Bale is fitting as Bruce Wayne. Newcomers Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal just build up the list of amazing actors. And for a second there I almost forgot that I had not seen the main star of the film yet.

Then he came on screen. Everyone in the audience got chills. People audibly reacted to his first scene. It’s the first time I’ve ever witnessed such a thing, and I found myself reacting the same way. It was impossible not to. It is some of the best acting that’s ever been done.

Every little detail of the Joker was interesting. The way he talked, his mannerisms, his walk, his facial expressions - sheer joys to behold. I’ll be honest, the rest of the movie could have been terrible and I still would have liked it. It could have been the plot of Indiana Jones 4, Angelina Jolie as the entire cast, the soundtrack of A Knight’s Tale, and directed by the guy who directed Serving Sarah, and as long as it had Heath Ledger as The Joker I would love it.

Hell, it could have been a made-for-TV autobiography of Angelina Jolie starring Angelina Jolie, directed by Angelina Jolie, produced by a homeless kid, with a soundtrack composed entirely of Angelina Jolie belching the theme song to Friends, in Arabic with Chinese subtitles, with every scene containing either A) Angelina Jolie talking about how rich and beautiful she is or B) Angelina Jolie just staring into the camera with that “I’ve got one eyebrow raised and a smug grin on my face signifying that I can totally kick anyone’s ass (except not in real life because I only weigh 80 pounds)” look in her eyes, and as long as that movie contained one sentence spoken by Heath Ledger as The Joker I would give it a 10 out of 10.

I hate Angelina Jolie.

The great thing about The Dark Knight is that even if you were to remove Heath Ledger as The Joker it would still be a great movie. Since this review is being written so close to opening weekend, I’ll try not to give any spoilers here. Basically, we are immersed in the mob scene of Chicago - I mean Gotham City - throughout most of the movie. There are multiple villains, which is an element that I always look for in a well-made “good vs. evil” type film, and some of them develop right before our eyes.

The “City vs. Hero” aspect, where the once grateful population is quick to turn on its masked savior, is also present, as it is in most other comic book movies, but it is done to a greater depth in The Dark Knight. There is also an unpredictable love triangle involving Bruce Wayne - at least I was thrown off by its outcome.

There is a lot of good to say here. You’ve probably read most of it in the myriad of other reviews out there, so I’ll spare you the trouble.

The Bad

It is a very good movie, but it is not a perfect movie. The Dark Knight is an awesome movie. Wall-E is a perfect movie. There are three main reasons The Dark Knight couldn’t make the leap to perfect.

1) Pace. The film seemed to move around erratically. I like the fact that you never know when it’s going to end and it keeps you guessing as to whether or not there is still another predicament around the corner or it’s truly about to end. But I don’t like how some scenes were just thrown in there. There was a scene where cops are standing on the roof by the bat signal waiting for Batman, which was confusing to me. It was almost like we were seeing a scene in a montage outside of the montage it belongs in. Some of the other scenes just ended too quickly and I found myself trying to figure out if an hour or a month had gone by since the last scene. Especially during the part of the movie when Harvey Dent makes his transformation.

2) Unbelief. While The Dark Knight is much more believable than say, Spider Man, it still couldn’t quite get away from the outlandishness that just gets under my skin in these types of movies. For instance, it isn’t even close to possible for anyone to pull off the giant wall-o’-sonar-cell-phones that gets relayed to the eyes in Batman’s suit and lets him see anything anywhere. He could even see into rooms where there were definitely no cell phones. How was this possible?

Falling 100 stories onto a car with a half-broken hang glider (bat wing) while holding someone in your arms would instantly kill both of you. There’s no question about it.

You can’t reassemble a fingerprint by replicating the ballistics that were used on the crime scene, analyzing how the bullet would’ve shattered, and then reverse-engineering the outcome. You just can’t.

Harvey Dent’s burnt face was cool looking but ludicrous. First of all, why didn’t his eye get the slightest bit burned along with every single fiber of his skin? Second of all, where is the infection? The bleeding? The skin trying to regrow? I’m not a doctor, but I know this was just a silly excuse to go crazy with some slick CGI. And don’t tell me “it was cauterized”. There were freaking chasms in the guy’s face. Cauterization doesn’t result in that. Why would he refuse pain killers and skin grafts? How could anyone stand this type of pain? How could anyone even function at all? This was totally ridiculous and I just couldn’t look past it.

3) Not enough Batman. Isn’t this a Batman series? Why was 90% of the movie devoid of Bruce Wayne and/or Batman? Don’t get me wrong - I loved the content - I’m just pointing out that it veered a bit from what it was supposed to be. I needed to see more about the guy that the series is supposed to be centered around. The movie would’ve been better titled “Chicago a.k.a. Gotham City And It’s Inhabitants And Comings And Goings And Whatnot”.

The Beratings

Acting - No beratings. Some of the best I’ve seen in a long time.

Plot - No beratings. It was so interesting I need to see it again just to catch it all.

Inconsistencies - 1 berating.
We have this character, Harvey Dent, who is a do-good DA who fights for Gotham, stands up for what he believes, and sacrifices himself to take the fall as Batman. Then he sustains an injury, loses the girl he loves (through no fault of the authorities I might add), and somehow becomes a villainous, murdering, super pain-tolerating evil man overnight. They never explained this one to me.

Unbelievable Events - 1 berating.
Not as bad as Spider Man, but still unbelievable enough at times to be distracting. If I get distracted, I start berating - it doesn’t matter the category or the movie.

Schematics - No beratings.

2/10 Beratings = See it at full price

0/10 Stand in line for the very first showing
1/10 See it the first weekend
>> 2/10 See it at full price
3/10 See it at the Five-Buck-Club
4/10 See it at the dollar-fifty
5/10 See it OnDemand
6/10 Rent it from Blockbuster
7/10 Watch it on TV
8/10 Watch it purely for spousal points
9/10 Never watch it
10/10 Buy it and publicly destroy it

It’s Friday. That means multiple posts chocked full of stuff I find on Digg. Hold on to your butts.

If you’ve seen my first post about Flight Of The Bumblebee performances, you know where I’m going with this. There is some new video footage of the fastest guitarist in the world. Officially the fastest. That’s not just an exaggeration.

He performs Flight Of The Bumblebee song faster and faster and faster. Each time I thought it was the fastest the song could possibly be performed. But then he goes one faster. If the speed dial goes to 10, he turned it to 11.

I think if he went any faster, the signal sent from the pickup in the guitar to the amplifier to the speakers to our ear drums wouldn’t be able to keep up with his fingers and it would result in some sort of warp in the time-space continuum flux capacitor 1.21 jigawatts huey lewis & the news elisabeth shue fish under the sea dance. And we would all die and/or get injured.

Fast forward the video to 2:56 and get ready to live.

Which films did I annoyingly quote and/or reference in this blog post? Hint: there are 4 of them.

If I had 8 hours a day to sit here and come up with funny stuff to blog about I would have eventually come up with this. It may have taken years, but my LOLheads were the first step in the right direction.

You can clearly see that the author of this comic strip simply searched Google Images for pictures of Tom Cruise and Will Smith, used his intermediate Photoshop skills to piece them together, ran the images through the old “comic book” color filter, and pasted in some thought bubbles.

I realize that the author of this comic strip is also extremely witty, smart and funny, which I guess are important elements too. Nonetheless, it’s another simple idea that I wish I would’ve come up with. I hope they don’t mind that I posted it on my blog. Just in case you miss the huge watermark in the top-right corner, this was taken without permission from HolyTaco.com. I’m not recommending the site, just this funny funny comic.

Well, I was gonna post about how 99% of cops are complete idiots, but that is going to be a more involved post that I don’t feel like doing right now. In the meantime I stumbled upon a little gem on Digg today. So, here’s a little more light-hearted fun for you:

Step 1: Read this article and watch all the videos (the first two South Park videos are not required).

Step 2: Watch the new Pork and Beans video by Weezer.

They wouldn’t let me embed the video, so you have to go over to YouTube to see it.

I can’t believe some of these people came out of the woodwork, including Chocolate Rain Guy and Leave Britney Alone Girl. Do you think they got paid? If so, how much?

I bet these numbskulls did it for free.