I guess I never mentioned it, but I went to Anime Mid-Atlantic. I'm not writing up a full report, as I still need to shorten the Katsucon report to a more readable length, but I will comment on it soon. Just as soon as I remember to get around to it at a time that's not right before I need to go to bed. I did go, I did have fun, but it wasn't anything special. Well, as far as anime conventions go, anyway.

So I've now played the Battlefield 2 demo. Well, maybe I shouldn't say "played", more like downloaded, installed, loaded, joined a game, tried to reconfigure my controls, was immediately revolted, and quit the game immediately. It's bad enough that they [b]still[/b] don't allow you to turn with keyboard keys, a decision that continues to baffle me and every right-thinking human being ever to want to utilize their keyboard to perform the simple action of turning left and right. But now, they have a new configuration menu that, when you try to change your key to something else, it just says "That key is already assigned to something." Yeah, thank you Captain Obvious, but I don't want it to be what you set have it set to by default, I want it set how I like it. Unfortunately, this would involve unassigning every key from every function first. Without even playing the game, I knew I would not be buying it. I'm not even going to bother pirating it. I've got the demo. It's going to suck enough. Why waste my time downloading the full version of something I'm not going to play?

Maybe it's a really great game. The first one was, but I just can't play it because of the lack of turn keys. It's too irritating to try to get used to it. Also, I want to play other games, so if I do get used to it, it'll be weird going back to something like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto. Once I get used to either of those again, I'd have to get used to Battlefield again, and it just isn't worth it. If you enjoy picking up your mouse, moving it, putting it back down, sliding it, then repeating this process rapidly and frequently, then perhaps Battlefield 2 is for you. I personally hate doing that, so BF2 is a game I shall avoid.

I saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie last week (meant to post this the day after, but forgot). To say it was good... well... I wouldn't. Zaphod Beeblebrox was basically an idiotic country singer, and incredibly annoying. Many plot elements were changed, and most of the humor was removed. The humor that was left was obviously not understood by the people making the film, and thusly fell flat. While they cut many things short to save time, they dragged out all the special-effects scenes. I would normally disagree with this decision, but considering how well they handled all other aspects, this was probably for the better. The best part of the movie was Trillian. I didn't like how they changed the plot into a love story between Arthur and Trillian, as that was both never in the book/radio-show/TV-mini-series, nor was it relevant to the heart of the book. The movie basically gouged out the soul that the book/radio-show/TV-mini-series had.

I recall something that John Carmack said that I'll always at least somewhat remember. I don't remember his exact words, so I'll paraphrase it for you: "If you give a good script to a bad team, they'll make a bad movie. If you give a bad script to a good team, they'll probably make a decent movie out of it." He was making an analogy to video games, but in this case it applies quite literally. Here you had a good book, and the wrong people tried to make a movie out of it. I was never impressed with the TV mini-series, but it was better than the movie.

Now, I'm not saying it's a bad movie because I'm some purist who requires the movie to be true to the book or original radio show. If I had never read the book, heard the radio show, or even seen the TV mini-series, I would still say it's a bad movie. It would still feel like everything was rushed, but in addition, a lot of things would not make sense, or would seem rather irrelevant. For instance, the annoying "So long and thanks for all the fish" song. Yeah, they do explain the situation before then, but being at the beginning of the film, not knowing the impending fate of the planet, or having any sense of the way things work in this story, I wouldn't understand why they would even have this song, or why they were focusing on the dolphins so much. The rest of the movie was quite similar in it's fashion of not letting the viewer ever really know what's going on. They were just kind of going from place to place, and things just kinda happened.

There was one good part, where they're walking through the field that smacks them in the face every time they have a thought. I bet that's what the people making the movie went through every day. Maybe that's why the movie turned out the way it did. Every time they thought of something, they got smacked in the face with something resembling a shovel. If it's not the case, maybe it should have been.

At any rate, don't bother going to see the movie. It's not the guide we've all come to know and love. It's just not. Even if you don't know and love the guide, it's still a bad movie.