Back in the olden days, you know, the 20th century, I had a favorite computer game: Hellcats Over the Pacific. It was a flight simulator that ran on 68020 Macs; it was a simple, fairly crude game that was smooth and fun for it’s time. Most importantly, you could fire it up and do a mission in 20 minutes or so.

It took up 59K of disk space. How many games can you say that about nowadays?

To my short-lived joy, there is a Mac simulator that allows anyone to play the game on their browser. Check it out. See what glorious computer graphics enthralled us in the 1990s.

Oh gosh. Such flat terrain, 8-bit color, blocky objects made up of what, 10 or 20 polygons?

I can’t do it. Not after playing No Man’s Sky. It was still a great game in 1991, though.

This is dismal news, because they are both total crap.

I’m sure movie executives are pleased, though. Let’s dive to the bottom!

I had hopes. Deadpool is notorious for breaking the fourth wall and making sarcastic asides about the whole premise of comic book superheroes, so I thought maybe it would be funny. Maybe it was, but it was buried in over-the-top, nonstop violence — limbs lopped off, decapitations, multiple stabbings, and that was just in first ten minutes. The whole premise of the entire movie is that Deadpool has the superpower of instant healing, Wolverine is also able to heal any damage, and they didn’t like each other…so there were multiple overlong scenes which consisted of nothing but the two of them stabbing and chopping at each other in gruesome ways. I was bored.

Also, it’s a multiverse movie. I hate the multiverse concept. It erases the possibility of tragic mistakes, because you can just hop to a different timeline, or go back in time and fix an error, and it lowers the stakes. It also opens up the possibility of all kinds of cameos from other Marvel movies — even dead characters can pop in for a visit — and this movie worked that angle thoroughly and repeatedly to the point that I just stopped caring that so-and-so from an old superhero movie showed up.

It was not amusing when the culminating battle (it’s always a battle nowadays) was bringing in hundreds of alternate universe superheroes in a climax of pointless hacking and slashing. I was ready to fall asleep. The plot was also a mess, with two villains, neither of whom cared about the knifings and choppings going on, they were operating on a different plane of existence, apparently.

Skip it, unless you’re really into fan service.

While I was waiting for it to get dark so I could run my disappointing experiment, I walked down to the local theater to see A Quiet Place: Day One.

My short summary: my god, this was a stupid movie.

Here’s the premise: a meteor shower drops a swarm of alien animals on Manhattan, which proceed to run wild and kill everyone. That’s not much of plot, I know, but the monsters are really, really stupid. They’re big and vicious and fast, but they don’t have eyes, and not even the dimmest sense of sight — people shine flashlights on their faces and they don’t respond. But make a noise, and these gnarly sensors open up on their head and they bolt towards the source. That’s the different feature of these monsters: they can’t see you, but you better not make a sound or they’ll kill you.

The problem is that they’re not particularly good at hearing. They don’t have echolocation or anything particularly sensitive, they just respond to ordinary, human-perceptible noises. Drop a book, they’re on you. Shout, and they attack. Walk quietly on the debris-covered streets, they don’t notice you. They’re not bats, that have a highly evolved sensory ability, they’re more like psychopathic grade school teachers with claws and teeth that will murder you if you don’t keep quiet during study hall.

And then, their response is stupid. They charge blindly at any source of sound and attack it. A car alarm goes off — a stratagem used more than once by the protagonists — and monsters will run from blocks away to jump on the car and flail at it. This behavior and their extremely crude sensory capacity raises many unanswered questions.

How did these pathetic brutes evolve? What kind of environment did they come from? One where all kinds of radiation was blocked or limited, so deep underground or an opaque atmosphere? They could hear, but that’s it, and they relied on obvious sound cues to find prey…not able to detect stealthy movement, but their prey need to make a loud squeak to be noticed.

And what kind of hunting/prey capture strategy is that, to blindly run at any sound, especially in a cluttered, dangerous environment like the ruins of New York? There should be dead, wrecked aliens impaled on fence posts and razor wire and traffic signs and spiky debris everywhere. Also, one fortified bunker, a couple of .30 cal machine guns, and you would have endless waves of monsters throwing themselves against the racket and getting shredded by the defenders.

They arrived in a meteor shower that did the initial destruction, exploding and smashing and punching holes in buildings. Why weren’t they deafened by all that noise? Wasn’t this a terrible delivery method for dropping off creatures that respond to noise?

Why? Why have an alien invasion that involved dumping a lot of stupid, cripplingly limited animals on a city? Who is doing this, because these were not intelligent aliens, who could make even idiotic space ships that exploded during landing?

There was also some pathos-filled story involving Lupita Nyong’o, a random stranger who was following her around, and an imperturbable cat, but I was so annoyed by the stupidity of the premise that I couldn’t care. Hey, Hollywood: next time you want to put out a science fiction/horror movie, the first step is to get writers who can assemble a coherent, intelligent premise. You spent $70 million on this sloppy trash, the writers working before you spend millions on expensive acting talent and sets and special effects are the cheapest part of the process, so get that bit right before the budget explodes.

I feel a bit let down. I consider Mad Max: Fury Road to be one of my favorite movies of all time, so of course I walked into Furiosa with unreasonably high expectation, so of course it was unlikely that it would meet them. It didn’t.

That’s unfair, though. It was still an enjoyable movie. It was just lacking the focus of Fury Road.

The first problem was that the story was too diffuse and chaotic. Fury was a frantic chase, followed by an equally frantic race back, and it covered the events of just a few days. Furiosa covered a tightly telescoped few years in the life of an angry girl/young women, and it ambled between three locations: the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm, and half the time I was wondering why we’re even going to these hell holes. Oh, because they had a trade agreement. George Miller should have learned from George Lucas that that is never an interesting basis for an action movie.

Anya Taylor-Joy was OK as Furiosa, but she didn’t have that steely-eyed determination that Charlize Theron portrayed so well. This Furiosa was a victim of circumstance, and was lacking that rage burning inside her. I also missed Tom Hardy’s Mad Max — he was also a victim of circumstance, but his main role was to witness the events. There was no one like Nux, to surprise you with a spectacular redemption arc. It was a game of ping pong, with Furiosa the ball, and it wasn’t particularly compelling.

You know what I really missed? The music. Fury Road had an intense score to match its hard-driving (see what I did there?) narrative. Furiosa occasionally played memorable bits of that score, but never sustained them. It was choppier, I think to match the plot, which lacked the long scenes where the heroes were driving, driving, driving across the desert while Immortan Joe’s army was madly racing after them.

So I left the theater thinking “that was nice.” I didn’t leave it feeling that it was a good thing I was walking, because I might be a danger on the road if I were driving. Furiosa didn’t inject me with the fury that the previous movie did.

It was still good. It just lacked the adrenaline cocktail I should have been served.

This past weekend I played a sweet little game, Spiritfarer.

It was a pleasant break. It’s not difficult — I just bumbled about gathering resources and finding spirits and building my boat, and finished somewhat inevitably — although the minigames that involved jumping on platforms were a bit frustrating. My generation didn’t have the indoctrination into Mario style stuff that younger people might have.

I was mainly into it for the story. You’re Charon’s replacement, and you have to pick up spirits from your past and ferry them about, picking up memories and desires and eventually delivering them to the Everdoor where they ascend? Explode? Turn into stars? Whatever. You learn about their lives, and it’s all very sentimental and sad when they finally reach their destination.

It’s an interesting mechanism for delivering a series of life stories, and it’s pretty. Except for the damned jumping mini-games.

I honestly tried to give this Netflix movie, Rebel Moon: the Scargiver, a chance. I made it about halfway before giving up in boredom.

It’s a sci-fi fantasy story about a rag-tag group of deadly warriors defeating an empire…prosaic enough so far. But what totally killed it for me, besides the deadly dull characters and ridiculous stakes, was the logistics. There is the gigantic, ultra-powerful galactic empire, you see, and the local governor sends this gigantic starship crewed entirely by psycho Nazis, to collect…grain. That’s the macguffin here, bags of grain. This grain is the output of a small village of maybe 30 vaguely North European farmers who harvest it over the course of less than a week, so we’re not even talking about megatonnes of vital foodstuff to feed a planet or two. Nope, just a bunch of sacks of grain that the farmers can pile into a single building in their village.

An immense starship appears, so large that it looms over the village while hanging in low orbit, and then the stupid slow-mo fighting with swords and clubs and farm implements and a few rifles against a robotic army of multi-barreled tanks and armies of space nazis and I see from the synopses that the peasants win.

None of this makes any sense, but there are two movies in this series and a third threatened. There are also going to be “director’s cut” versions of this thing released, as if it deserves further attention. This is garbage of Hugo Gernsback quality, illiterate hackery. How does Zack Snyder get away with it?

You know, the first thing a good science fiction movie should have is a competent, compelling writer generating the ideas behind its premise and execution. I guess since Star Wars got away with neglecting that component, though, nobody thinks it’s necessary any more.