essentialsaltes | Diamonds Are Forever, by Ian Fleming -- Dead Space 2

Although Diamonds is not a very good Bond film, the novel has quite a few differences. However, it is also not very good. Diamonds, horses, gambling, yawn.... Bond wanders through without much in the way of interesting internal or external dialogue, nor are the villains anything more than greedy thugs. Bond visits Las Vegas, but there's so little life in it, I think Fleming must have researched the town from his armchair. But at least the novel doesn't have a moon buggy in it. Instead it has a vintage train that blows up real gud.

I had enough fun at Garrett's table-top version of Dead Space that I gave the actual game (or at least its sequel) a try. Some good writing, and great locations, but it doesn't take long to go from being afraid of every shadow to running around blowing things up. In other words, you get to experience both Alien & Aliens. I found the final battle really annoying. Not only did it not make much sense, but it was too hard for my lame self. I could have, I suppose, gone back a few steps and chosen different weapons and such before the save point, but that would take effort and time. And caring. And by that point, I was past caring, so I dropped the difficulty, had a meaningless victory, and moved on with my life.

Less easy to put away (for me, anyway) is Pinball Arcade, which provides pretty accurate and realistic recreations of fun tables from the 80s and 90s. It's good to know that I can still rock Theatre of Magic, and I've spent way too much time on Ripley's Believe it or Not. Awesome to see that Twilight Zone is coming in November, but will they do Addams Family?

[One cool codicil to Dead Space 2 is that the disc ships with a bonus game, Dead Space: Extraction, which isn't bad either. It's intended for use with a point-y thing-y, like a Wiimote or PS Move, but it works okay with the controller. It's still about killing weird monsters, but now you're stuck on a rail, spending much of your time aggravatedly trying to pick up ammo that you see for a fraction of a second as your stupid POV character swings his big lummocky head around all over the place. But it's kind of novel, and I like that in some chapters you get to be a different protagonist... albeit often that role turns out to be necessarily a temporary one.]