Movies:
So I saw Funny Games last weekend, and it turned out to be a bit different than I expected.  Well, ok.. a lot different.  But it wasn’t really bad in any way.  Just that there are boring parts and I got sick of the “polite-ness” that the evil doers gave off in their characters.  But this really isn’t a standard movie in any sense.  In fact, you aren’t really supposed to be “into” the movie, and the characters are really “characters.”  It is more like a meta-film.  It had some violence, but not really.  You don’t actually see it on screen.  It’s one of those movies that is better when you look back on the movie, rather than the enjoyment you get while watching it.  Rating 3 /5.

I plan on seeing Doomsday sometime this week after it got some good reviews from my favorites sites (but not many positive reviews elsewhere on the web!).  I’ve also netflix’d Sunshine on bluray, and should watch that in the next week.  I got my 5 free blurays from the holiday rebate, but those won’t have much priority for now.

Games:
I’m continuing to play through Final Fantasy III on DS, Fire Emblem on Wii, and multi-player Rock Band.  On PC, it’s all about the Orange Box: both my favorite Team Fortress 2, and Half Life 2:Episode 2.  Man, is it nice to start up a good looking FPS (even if it’s not the #1 technically looking game), and run it at max everything with upwards of 80 to 100 frames/sec.  I’m sure I will forget what having a bad PC is like soon.  Anyways, HL2:Ep2 was pretty hard on the hard difficulty, so I moved it down to medium or normal and it’s about right there.  Fire Emblem is pretty hard, too, but I think I have that on a harder difficulty as well.

Apart from the clock, I got back into Final Fantasy III on the DS.  The game is a lot of fun, and is very “old school Final Fantasy.”  I haven’t played any FF’s between FF1 and FF7, but this one is great and reminds me of the first.  I’m still not sure whether I want to put screen protectors on the DS though.  I got some light scratches on my last DS lite from Elite Beat Agents, but I figured out that it was caused by the holding the stylus too diagonally, as opposed to point it perpendicular to the screen (straight down).

Lastly, today I figured out how to set up the Rock Band controller from PS3 to the PC in order to play Guitar Hero III.  Add the HDMI/optical out to my TV and stereo, and you pretty much have GH3 better than any console version out there.  I do like the Rock Band style controller much better than any of the Guitar Hero ones.  I think the graphics on PC are a little better as well.

Joe’s release calendar:
- None of interest this week