| Articles posted February 2005 | Older >> |
I, Robot
It's been over a week since we saw this one, but, well, I've been busy with some other stuff. Being a big fan of Asimov's robot novels, when I first heard of this movie I thought ... huh? How can they make a movie out of a bunch of loosely connected short stories? Soon enough it became apparent that calling it I, Robot was simply a marketing ploy. Oh well. I tend not to let these sorts of things bother me.
We didn't see it last summer, even though it was directed by Alex Proyas, who also directed one of my favorite movies Dark City. Why? Probably because from the previews it looked a bit too much like a Will Smith movie and less like an Alex Proyas movie. I'm sad to report that my first instincts were correct.
After watching it, I felt like I had just seen Men in Black ... with robots. Will Smith spends too much time riffing and being Will Smith and not enough time convincing me he was the character he was attempting to portray. On the plus side, the special effects were top notch. The robots are pretty convincing as a whole.
One thing that puzzled me as I watched the credits was that Sonny was "played" by Alan Tudyk, who was the pilot/navigator on Firefly. But given that Sonny was fully CGI in the movie, was he "played" by the actor kind of like Gollum was played by Andy Serkis? Or did he just do the voice (which was also heavily modified)? Or did he just get a free screen credit? :-)
Overall, it was somewhat of a disappointment, but still an OK sci-fi movie. Anyone other than Will Smith in the lead would have made it much better. 2.5/4 stars. (Edit: I originally said 3/4 stars, but looking back at my history, that appears to have been a bit on the generous side.)
All finished for now
Finally put everything back together enough to give it to the rest of the team. Hopefully Haze will compile it into a new release soon. Things are looking pretty good overall, not too many things broken (actually, nothing that I'm aware of, but I can only test so many games before saying "good enough").
I did manage to slip one user-visible change in, and that's the ability to crank up the volume above 100% (well, above 1.0 now) in the mixing controls. This will let you overdrive the sound on some of the games with lower volumes.
At last….
The whole thing compiles. Some of it even works. A lot of it doesn't. Time for some debugging. But first, time for bed to let my poor fingers rest from all that typing! :-)
More progress
Data East and Konami are finished. Konami uses a bunch of special chips and RC filters, so that one took a while. On to Exidy....
More chipping….
Compiles up through all the Sega games.... Still a bunch more to do!