The Top 100 Reviews

Top 100 NES Review: #80 – The Adventures of Lolo (1989)

A Thinking Man’s Game

Screen Shot 2018-01-25 at 5.00.13 PM

Sydlexia’s Ranking: #80/100
Developer: Hal Laboratory
Rating:

I have a soft spot for the puzzle genre in video games. I think it’s video gaming at its best: no story nor plot, just some basic mechanics that completely twist your brain. I admire people who can turn a few simple rules into extremely engrossing mind riddles while inducing an effort headache as you try and solve them.

This is the Adventures of Lolo in a nutshell: couple of blocks, couple of buttons and couple of enemies, but put all together an extremely enjoyable game. There is a little bit of a backstory, as you play as Lolo trying to save Lala who has been kidnapped by the evil Eggers (view the above image if you need the emotional coloring). Lolo then has to go through 50 rooms of puzzles to save his princess.

Continue reading “Top 100 NES Review: #80 – The Adventures of Lolo (1989)”

Top 100 Movie Review: #12 – Sunset Blvd. (1950)

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

sunset-boulevard — Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, an old washed-up silent movie star.

American Film Institute Ranking: #12/100
Academy Awards: Nominated for eleven, won three including best original screenplay but none of the biggies.
My Rating:

I really enjoyed this movie. A lot.

There are a lot of different angles, and it’s all packed into a tight presentation: a critique of hollywood; an unintentional period piece; purposeful inside references; old vs. new. The end result is a poignant insight into a time long gone, showing the underbelly of show biz that has been there since the very beginning.

Continue reading “Top 100 Movie Review: #12 – Sunset Blvd. (1950)”

Top 100 SNES Review: #81 – Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Breaks Loose (1993)

Fun, But Really Short (Like This Review)

Tiny Toons Title Screen

Sydlexia Ranking for top SNES games: #81/100
Developer: Konami
Rating:

I was a Tiny Toon fan when I was a child; every day after school it was on, and not until I reached middle school did I make the jump to Dragon Ball Z on Toonami. My favorite episode is easily where they danced to old-school songs for a whole episode. Tiny Toons was always weird, popcultured, and cerebral, taking advantage of breaking the fourth wall to interact in a way different than other cartoons at the time.

So I guess no different than today, it is important to monetize anything we enjoy and video games seem to be an easy way to do that.

Continue reading “Top 100 SNES Review: #81 – Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Breaks Loose (1993)”

Top 100 Movie Review: #99 – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Entertaining, but Almost Hard to Take Seriously

All-Star Cast (Left to Right): Sidney Poitier, Katherine Houghton, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

American Film Institute Ranking: #99/100
Academy Awards: Best Actress (Katherine Hepburn), Best Original Screenplay
My Rating:

Leave it to Hollywood to insert itself in a social issue, have it packed with trite stereotypes and interactions, and somehow still make it good enough to enjoy. This film is a constant roller-coaster ride, but not due to some concrete plot or character development. What’s going to have you squirming in your seat instead will be how a movie with such beautiful moments can be juxtapositioned with such ridiculousness.

Take for instance a scene where Matt and Christina Drayton (played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn respectively) have to leave the house due to the stress of the day (aka: their daughter wanting to marry a person of another race). They end up at a drive-in diner where Matt Drayton orders ice cream which was not the flavor he is expecting, and while at first he dislikes it he loves it after giving it a chance. This is a not so subtle suggestion of a parallel with what is happening in his personal life with his daughter’s soon to be husband. The movie uses fresh Oregon Boysenberry Sherbet to make a statement on race relations in America.

Continue reading “Top 100 Movie Review: #99 – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)”

The Top 100 Book Review: A Death in the Family – James Agee (1957)

Beautiful Writing, Tepid Story

“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”

Rating:

113091

I almost hate myself for doing this: a book that is so beautifully written with descriptions of life that burst from the page getting only two stars. There were times I put the book down and really took a moment to live the words. That’s how good this writing is. Take a moment to take in this excerpt below:

“Before long the city thinned out into the darkened evidences of the kind of flea-bitten semi-rurality which always peculiarly depressed him: mean little homes, and other inexplicably new and substantial, set too close together for any satisfying rural privacy or use, too far, too shapelessly apart to have adherences as any kind of community; mean little pieces of ill-cultivated land behind them, and alongside the road, between them, trash and slash and broken sheds and rained-out billboards: he passed a late, late streetcar, no passengers abroad, far out near the end of its run.”

Continue reading “The Top 100 Book Review: A Death in the Family – James Agee (1957)”

Top 100 SNES Review: #90 – Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Basic Platformer with Star Wars Stuff

Sydlexia Ranking of Top SNES Games: #90/100
My Rating:

This game might be the foundation for my worst video game memory and source of why I sometimes say “Yipchawww” in social settings. Let me get the former off my chest, and why I retrospectively still take two stars off the rating.

You didn’t always beat the video game you owned in the 90s. With the lack of save features, it was not unusual to have a stack of games you played, owned, and never beat. This wasn’t always because you got bored with it; some games were just impossible to beat or were variable in their rewards. This meant anytime you go to those ending credits, you did something.

I had just defeated the emperor of the empire, and in my triumphant moment, I had 30 extra lives stockpiled. I couldn’t believe I had gotten to the end of the game with this many extra lives. I was on video game accomplishment high.

Continue reading “Top 100 SNES Review: #90 – Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi”

Top 100 Book Review: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers (1940)

“It was funny, too,how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.” Mick.
37380

Rating:

It’s always the books about the human spirit that endure. There is no need to worry about setting or plot as the things people dealt with then are the same things we deal with now. It’s like when James Baldwin said “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Carson McCuller wrote “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” at the age of 23. It was an immediate hit and was the first of many of her works to focus on loneliness and isolation. She herself was not in good health and would die at the age of 50 after living a life of strokes and health complications. It’s hard not to think that these personal, life experiences weren’t the catalyst for many of her novels.

This book checks off many of my personal-taste preferences: vignette chapters from each character’s perspective, the setting of a small town in the rural south and a focus on characters and not necessarily plot. While this might not move the needle for other readers, there is plenty to love about the temporary world McCuller builds in small-town Georgia.

Continue reading “Top 100 Book Review: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers (1940)”