Tales Of Monkey Island
I came late to Monkey Island (Curse was the first of the games I played), but it’s easily one of the most accessible, intelligent and enjoyable of the old adventure game franchises, all of which kept me bad at sports and bad at talking to girls well into my teens. This new game, developed by Telltale (who make two okay Sam And Max games and the superlative [if you really dig Homestarrunner] Strongbad’s Cool Game For Attractive People) fits in with the Curse Of Monkey Island mold – there’s unapologetic punwork, Dominic Armato voicework, and an entirely piracy-based economy. Telltale releases their adventure games in episodes, but Tales Of Monkey Island appears to be a single story split into five. They’re not standalone adventures. And that suits me just fine.
The Glass Key
One does not associate 1930s literature with a relentless pace, but Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key survives on jackhammer momentum, rushing through its complex story of the interaction of politics, criminals, and the price men don’t know they’re willing to pay for power.
Katzenjammer – Le Pop
A full review will follow in the next couple of days, but I haven’t found a new band this committed to fun in years. They play a brand of Eastern European folk-pop with all the energy and confidence of the frothiest girl-pop band. I hear they tore it up at SXSW this year, and they sound like they’d be an absolute blast live.
I also have a total crush on these girls. Look at that cat bass.
Lord Of Illusions
I’ve been meaning to write a review of this for…um…eight years. Maybe this month, I dunno. But I caught it on Cinemax HD, and was impressed again by its commitment to unpleasant weirdness. A lot of the movie doesn’t go in the direction it would benefit from, but it takes its world of magic seriously, and the best scares come from a reasonable exploration of an unreasonable world.
Powers Book 2
I’m poor – I can only read comics collected up. Over the last decade the Comic Company’s habit of compiling several trades into hardcover collections (and Amazon selling them for less than the cost of the trades put together) has made me a happy collector. But for Powers, it is going to make me poor. I love the hardcover presentation, I love the story, and I’ll be forever half-a-decade behind other Powers readers because I want to buy it in hardcover, and it seems these are coming out every other year. Boo.
But Powers itself is astounding. About a cop precinct that specializes in cases dealing with powers, this second collection deals with super-groupies and a billonaire super-group become increasingly unstable, and perhaps murderous. Brian Michael Bendis is the writer, and is constantly finding inventive ways to tell his story. My favorite in this collection is an issue told half in police interrogation, the other half in the subsequent court transcript.
That’s July. Let’s hope August is just as bountiful with distractions from an increasingly irrelevant existence.
