Movie review

Since I've taken a job as a traveling server virtualization consultant I've had very little time to game, but I have had time to take in some movies and catch up with my pre-parent backlog of movies.

The 13th Warrior

I didn't remember this moving when it game out but those of us have or still do enjoy a bit of Pen & Paper RPG's with our friends will find it an archtype of a D&D campaign. There's the forigner that's pulled in to a quest as the "chosen one", the bard, the paladin, the fighter, the ranger, etc. All in all it's a very enjoyable action movie that walks the line of being almost B-movie grade at times. Still I would recommend it highly recommend it for any DM looking for ideas to torment their players or any D&D player looking for a D&D movie.

As a player, there is seldom an adventure with out a fataility. It's almost a sure be that someone is going to roll a one, or be the victim of the DM's over sizing of the adventure and a few well timed 20's, yet some characters seem to survive longer than they should and either come through the adventure alive or die heroically in the end. This adventures of the party of 13 in this movie is no different.

The movie is even structured like a 4th edition champagn with skill challeneges, multiple encounters with different class enemies.

All in all, if you're a pen and paper RPG player and are looking for a good, but not great movie, I would highly recommend this.

I Am Legend

There was once a time where I really enjoyed this type of movie. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe is that I have a wife and children I love dearly, maybe it's that I started watching it after spending a full day effectively alone while I linger in a town between the completion of my work and when the customer cleared me to leave. What ever the reason, I found the movie really hard to watch, so much so that in the end I had to bail before the climax and look up the ending on Wikipedia.

I'd recommend the book instead of the movie.

There's still plenty of movies in my personal pile of shame, but I really need to find a good way to fly with an Xbox 360 :)