Platypus of Truth

Do you remember Jim Henson's Labyrinth ?  It was that odd little early 90s fantasy written by George Lucas and staring David Bowie and the girl from The Rocketer (Jennifer Connely).  Computer animation had come in about ten years earlier with Tron , but we were still at the point when no one had quite figured out its potential to revolutionize movie making.  Muppets could still be muppets, no matter how complex they got, and the things achieved with them were wonderful. So maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic (my crow's feet are just starting to come in), but I like this movie.  My wife and I watched it again recently and with her help I spotted a few things I had never noticed before: 1.)  Did you notice that Sara's parents are divorced?  The evidence is shown to us, rather than explained in dialogue.  We see it in the initial pan of her room where we catch a glimpse of her scrapbook.  The pan of the room also reveals to us all the key im...

My wife and I have been playing through the Myst series of games over the past few years.  We recently finished Revelations .  Revelations takes up the story of Atrus' exiled children, Sirus and Achenar.  Over the course of the game, we learn what has become of them and the awful plot they were hatching right before they were ensnared in the two prison books their father left on Myst. The worlds of Revelations are almost all beautiful and as intricately rendered as I would expect from prior games.  Serenia's "new agey" culture seems a bit thin (like some sort of pre-teen calendar from the 90s with flying whales), but that doesn't detract from the overall experience.  The puzzles are do-able and move nicely up the scale from easy to mid-numbingly difficult.  I was more than a little exasperated with tuning the mechanism on Spire -but whatever.  What really impressed me about this particular edition of the Myst saga was its sad ending.  I don't ...

Excluding fragments, the final Solomon Kane story is Footsteps Within.   Drawing near to the far side of the African continent, Solomon Kane is captured by Arab slave traders who recognize the Englishman and decide to sell him to his enemies among the Turks.  One of the Arabs, a wise man and a hadji, also recognizes Kane's staff as the mystic staff of Solomon.  According to the legend the hadji tells, King Solomon used the staff to banish all the jinn of Arabia into Africa.  His discover goes unheeded by the others and they soon find themselves stumbling on the tombs/prisons of one of the jinn.  The sheik, thinking that there is gold inside, ignores the hadji's protests and opens the vault thereby unleashing the horror within.  Kane, regaining his staff, confronts the beast, frees the slaves, and finds new purpose as he realizes the religious significance of the talisman he has been carrying. And that's where our story ends.  For whatever reason, How...

I found this in the Fall 2013 issue of Houston Baptist's "The City" journal in and article by Paul D. Miller entitled Book Hunting in the New Dark Ages : When the Smithsonian American Art Museum held an exhibit on the art of video games in 2012, it confirmed my hunch that The Legend of Zelda video game franchise is one of the greatest pinnacles of human achievement in all of recorded history. Hyperbolic and provocative.  I want to hear more about this.