Osmos
Platform - pc
This crafty and calming puzzle game won't addict you, but it will lull you into the occasional trance.
This crafty and calming puzzle game won't addict you, but it will lull you into the occasional trance.
Sir Isaac Newton really was on to something. The famous physicist is renowned for his law of universal gravitation (famously inspired by the fall of an apple from its tree), as well as his laws of motion. You're probably familiar with the third of these laws, which is often paraphrased thusly: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Osmos' title may invite you to imagine a different scientific process--osmosis--though Newton's theories form the basis of this clever but oh-so-relaxing puzzle game. Newtonian physics? Relaxing? Yes indeed, thanks to a soothing soundtrack that eases your nerves even when the frustration rises. Osmos languishes a bit too much: the visual style lacks variety, and the most demanding levels don't gel well with the game's peaceful ambience. Nevertheless, there's a dash of genius here that will make you wonder what independent developer Hemisphere Games has in store for us in the future.
You control a small circular organism called a mote, and as a rule, your primary goal is to grow. You do this by propelling yourself through space toward smaller motes and absorbing them. As you grow, you are then able to absorb larger and larger motes, until you "become the biggest," as the game itself so eloquently phrases it. This basic concept seems simple enough and bears more than a passing resemblance to games like Flow, Katamari Damacy, and Art Style: Orbient. There's one very important difference, however; in order to shoot your mote forward, you have to sacrifice some of its mass. Bubbles of mote matter are left in your wake and float into the void, where it can be absorbed by other motes. In the meanwhile, your own mote shrinks by a proportionate amount, while other motes absorb each other and gain mass. This simple variant means that you must make smaller initial sacrifices to earn greater gains, all while avoiding the threat of getting sucked into a massive blob. Consider this scenario: You are close to a mote that is just smaller than your own, and your strategy requires that you absorb it. Yet you need to change your trajectory lest it float right past. If you aren't careful, you could eject too much mass when thrusting and become smaller than your target. Then, you'll need to adjust your tactics or be sucked into the larger mote.
The situations get complex. Motes called attractors will draw you and other motes into their orbits. A helpful line will indicate the trajectory of your orbit and whether it is safe or will result in a collision with an attractor. Unfortunately, you can't always tell how other motes will react to the gravity of multiple attractors, so you need to be alert. Multi-attractor stages require you to be speedier than in most of them; if you waste time, motes and attractors will merge and grow too large for you to ever absorb, which causes you to lose the level. These stages are the most challenging but also seem most at odds with the vibe Osmos embraces. The simple shimmery visuals and chill-out music don't always mesh with the quick thinking the toughest levels require. The production values invite you to relax--but the game doesn't always let you.
The more successful levels give you room to experiment without forcing you into a quick solution. In some cases, that may mean babysitting a larger mote as it oh-so-slowly is absorbed into another, and then consuming it just as it reaches a palatable size. In a case of quantum physics meeting Newtonian law (could this be the infamous theory of everything?), you can shrink motes by pushing antimatter blobs into them with your flow of ejected matter. The slower-moving levels create an interesting antithesis to the more exacting ones, but thankfully you have control over the greatest of all equalizers: time. You can slow time down or speed it up at will, and the minimalist soundtrack will follow suit, which is a neat effect. Slowing down time is helpful in the stages where keeping expelled matter to a minimum is crucial, while speeding things along will keep you interested on the frequent occasions where you have to wait for ultra-pokey motes to float out of the way so you can pass by.
Osmos' music does its job well; each track stays true to the game's ambient vision while providing subtleties of its own. The visuals should have taken a cue from the soundtrack. They are pleasant but unchanging and will make you long for a touch of diversity and contrast that never comes. Yet if you've got the patience to work past the occasional frustration and frequent lulls, Osmos will both delight you with its ingenuity and induce that meditative trance that few games can evoke.
The Good
Relaxing ambient soundtrack
Clever physics-based gameplay
Can lull you into a trance
The Bad
Not enough visual variety
The gameplay and ambience don't always jibe
By Kevin VanOrd
Brought You by Gamespot
Driven to Kill (2009) HDRip-AVCShort Review by Albert Walker
Synopsis : “Driven to Kill” is Steven Seagal’s second direct-to-DVD film this year. Yes, his second movie released on DVD in the year 2009, and movie #3 is already in the can. There’s really no way to keep track of all the DTV films Seagal has made since his career in theatrical releases sputtered out about 6 or 7 years ago. At this point, he’s pumping out generic action movies faster than Nadya Suleman pumps out babies. Alas, these days Suleman is probably in much better physical shape.
This time out, Steven Seagal is Ruslan Drachev, a former member of the Russian mob who served time in a gulag, and is now making an honest living writing crime novels. Yes, Seagal does a Russian accent here. His preoccupation with doing accents is one of life’s great mysteries, because he’s completely incapable of pulling them off believably. But then again, the faux Russian accent is a refreshing change of pace from the strange, Southern-fried, black-blues-musician accent he put on for his last nine films. But then again, his voice rarely rises above a whisper, so he may as well not be doing an accent at all.
Seagal is living in Los Angeles, I think, and one day he flies to New York, I think, to attend his daughter’s wedding. (It’s difficult to tell, because the movie was filmed in Eastern Europe, and the filmmakers don’t even attempt to make it look like either of those cities.) Once he arrives in “New York”, he reunites with his estranged ex-wife Catherine, played by Inna Korobkina, who’s wearing thick layers of makeup to make her appear older. There’s a reason for this: According to the IMDb, Korobkina is actually a year younger than the woman playing her daughter. You really have to wonder why they couldn’t find someone Seagal’s age to play his ex-wife, instead of a 28 year old model. But lately, it seems Seagal has developed an acute aversion to playing opposite any actress more than half his age.
Catherine is now married to a defense attorney, who shows extreme disdain for Seagal’s mob past, and for the sleazy books he writes. By the way, we get a scene of Seagal sitting at his computer working on a novel, and it’s a hoot: He’s hunched over the keyboard, hands splayed out, pressing twenty keys at once. He looks less like a novelist, and more like a bear about to tear apart a salmon.
Seagal’s daughter is set to marry a guy who, coincidentally enough, is the son of another ex-Russian mobster. And that mobster actually grew up in the same town as Seagal. Will wonders never cease? But prior to the wedding, hit men break into Catherine’s house, killing her and sending the daughter to the hospital. Together, Seagal and his would-be son-in-law track down the men responsible, and that’s when Seagal is… driven to kill. Hey, at least you can’t say the title is false advertising.
In some objective sense, this is the “best” film Seagal has made in a long time. The plot moves along quickly enough, the story generally makes sense, the action scenes are staged well, and unlike his recent films where you think maybe Seagal’s stunt double deserved top billing, we actually see Seagal himself doing a lot of his own fight moves. In other words, it’s pretty much free from the hilarious incompetence of recent Seagal efforts.
This is a double-edged sword for his fans. The main draw for Seagal films of late, sadly, is that they’re unintentional laugh riots from start to finish. Don’t expect to have that kind of fun with “Driven to Kill”. The whole thing is too competent to laugh at, but at the same time, it’s not competent enough to be worth watching. The action scenes are good, including a sequence where Seagal engages in all-out war with the bad guys in an intensive care unit, but there’s really nothing in this movie that you haven’t seen a million times before.
When you get down to it, it’s just a bog standard revenge plot, and most of it is depressingly paint-by-numbers. None of the characters have any real personality or depth. And alas, other than a fight in a strip club where they clearly used creative editing to stretch it out to a ridiculous length of time, there are simply no moments that make you question the sanity and/or sobriety of the filmmakers.
This is disheartening news. Seagal has actually returned to the level of mediocrity he reached back in the early 2000s. If this keeps up, he may be back in theatrical films soon.
Jeff King (director) / Mark James (screenplay)
Cast: Steven Seagal - Ruslan Drachev
Laura Mennell - Lanie Drachev
Dan Payne - Sergei
Holly Eglington - Regime
Mike Dopud - Boris
Inna Korobkina - Catherine Goldstein
Igor Jijikine - Mikhail
Aleks Paunovic - Tony Links
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