Boardwalk Empire: "Spaghetti & Coffee" Review

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow...

"Tell Nucky, Old Pop Collingsworth says hello!"

The violent hair-trigger temperament of Gyp Rosetti that was established last week in the Season 3 premiere helped a great deal in carrying us through "Spaghetti & Coffee," adding a extra layer of tension to every single scene he was in. From his dealings with the young man at the gas station to the scene in the diner, you just could never tell what might set Rosetti off. And honestly, it made for some very great, nerve-racking scenes. But the Rosetti we saw in this episode was a much more restrained, plotting gangster, with enough smarts not to just fly off the handle and kill innocent people in public. And with enough intelligence to actually figure out a plan to thwart a giant booze shipment headed to Rothstein. I'll tell you this though: The next time Rosetti is actually alone, with no witnesses, with a guy who's pissed him off, the crimson's gonna flow!

But even though Gyp stepped up a few notches on the crime boss evolutionary ladder by actually hatching a devious idea, "Spaghetti & Coffee" was a quieter episode than last week's. And it was also the first time that I specifically missed Jimmy. Perhaps it was because Harrow and Gillian took this week off, or maybe it was because one of the side stories involved Eli returning home, prison-gaunt, to his family. There is sympathy to be found in Eli, but not too much. He backed the wrong horse and was complicit in the plot to murder his own brother. Seeing him humbled seems like a natural progression, but Boardwalk needs to be wary of not overloading itself with "fallen" characters. We've also got Van Alden over in Chicago, trying to make his way through life by looking into mirrors and self-motivating himself through psychotherapy.

"How the f*** are you still alive?" Eli says to Mickey, as his new life now involves answering to Nucky's oft-inept gigglepuss. But work is work and Eli's ready, eventually, to lend a hand to Nucky's transport operation. The most interesting thing that developed here though was, at the end, when Owen trusted Eli's advice over Mickey's when confronted by Rosetti's "everybody got guns" battalion of thugs. So it looks like it takes about, oh, one episode for a disgraced character to climb back a few rungs and become useful again. I say this assuming that Van Alden will also take O'Banion up on his job offer.

Although there sadly was no Harrow this week, we did get a peek back inside Chalky White's world and got introduced to Stephen Root's cryptic Special Investigator, Gaston Means. Means, the money-drop go-between for Smith and Daugherty, already fits in well on this show, being both someone who's direct and puzzling at the same time. Chalky, however, is having a bit of trouble at home when he discovers that his daughter, Maybelle, doesn't want to marry the extremely do-right future-doctor, Sam. Even after Chalky vetted him ("How bout you doctor me?"). No, being Chalky's daughter has given her a penchant, and attraction, to a more secretive, gangster life. Even though she doesn't fully know the gruesome details of his work and legacy. "Am I interesting now?" Chalky asks her after Sam's face gets slashed at a juke joint, which then leads to the assailer's face getting stomped in by Dunn Purnsley. Chalky's story didn't have anything to do with Nucky, or the bootlegging biz, but it's always awesome to visit his world. And it's touching to know how much he wants his daughter to elevate her position in life. He could easily succumb to pride, thinking that the paid-for-in-blood life that he's provided her is plenty good enough. But he's done the things he's done so that she never has to.

Margaret, meanwhile, is still on Dr. Mason about prenatal care education. It's a good story, but I have a little trouble latching onto giant, historical issues like this when I know that there're so many more years of research and work and protesting involved in evoking eventual change than this series can dare to encompass. It's a lofty undertaking, which at this point seems like a bit of a burden for a character that many are still straining to appreciate. And Nucky? Well, Nucky's off and under the spell of follies-performer, Billie Kent. His very own White Rock Girl, as he references. But Billie is anything but something that reflects the crystalline purity of White Rock beverages. She's a good-natured, but flighty, actress. And Nucky mistakenly thinks he can curb her flirty, secretive ways. And for a guy who's so direct, and expects honesty in return, it's a bit foolish of him to get wrapped up in her allure. But from their time together we were able to learn that all Nucky wants, more than anything, is for "everything to run all by itself." Which is close to the life he could have had with Margaret if she hadn't thrown all his money at the pediatric hospital.

I do miss Jimmy, and I still haven't found a "not-Nucky" story that can match up with Jimmy's former side of the Boardwalk Empire coin. Eli's not going to cut it, and while Chalky and Harrow are fascinating to watch, they're still mostly "the frosting on top." Rosetti, and the tension he brings, is already a great addition, but stretching him out over a whole season could be a tricky endeavor. This episode felt a bit shallow, but perhaps that's because Nucky was busy dipping his feet in the shallow end, hoping his hummingbird wouldn't fly too far away.

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and IGN. WARNING: No Nudity!

Source : ign[dot]com

Hoodwink Review

A dystopian world where gun-toting anthropomorphs, recycled human brains plunked down onto metal robot bodies, and hippy rebels all co-exist under the oppressive thumb of a trigger-happy pharmaceutical company sounds like a neat setting to dig into. It could be, really, except Hoodwink totally botches its inherent potential from the get-go. Almost every major step of the way in this insipid, barely hour-long point-and-click adventure feels like a lesson in how not to design a game.

Navigating Hoodwink's story might be a lot more enjoyable if it made some modicum of sense. Roguish protagonist Michael Bezzle (M. Bezzle)'s adventure kicks off with a night out on the town to pilfer the items he needs to propose to his girlfriend Francesca. Most of your time spent fiddling around with rote fetch quests in the dirty slums of Global-1 is dedicated to this seemingly mundane quest, yet sporadic encounters with a cat-detective and the comically oafish UniCorp troops hint at bigger matters afoot. Wisps of frayed plot threads pop-up along the way, but none of them really come together to explain or intrigue. This total lack of cohesiveness comes to a head at the awkwardly-placed cliffhanger ending that does precious little to inspire me to play a sequel in order to find out what the heck is going on, assuming one ever gets made.

It doesn't help that things get off to a rough start. The impact of the clever narrative slight-of-hand that unfolds in the opening scene introducing Michael is lost amidst some of the most unwieldy point-and-click controls I've encountered in a long time. Simply moving around to access specific areas of the screen and interacting with objects is a constant wrestling match. Changing the camera angle and transitioning between areas is triggered by clicking vague hotspots around the environment, rather than walking over to where you want to go. While this will sound familiar to adventure gaming vets, the way its implemented here just doesn't work that well.

After I accidentally walked past a crucial puzzle hotspot sitting on the back wall following a brief cinematic, it took me several minutes of cursing and frantic trial-and-error clicking to figure how to get back there. I knew what I needed to do. The game just wouldn't let get there without a fight. This particular issue is less prevalent in the open areas found further along in the trek, but most forms of movement and interaction throughout Hoodwink's brief jaunt are awkward and sluggish at best -- and that's when they're not glitching out.

In several instances, using a staircase caused the camera to get stuck on the wrong floor, forcing me to restart the game from scratch. Wonky pathfinding also occasionally made Michael walk in the opposite direction of where I intended him to go before looping around to his destination in a bizarre roundabout way. These funky moments stand out among the more general feelings of frustration that set in when trying to get around.

Hoodwink's poorly conceived puzzles are far from inventive, and most boil down to fetching objects and bringing them to the obvious spot where they're needed. Some puzzle solutions are absurdly disconnected from their objective, like one early-on that has you hunting down matches, smoking a cigar, and cranking a machine on the wall to reveal the item you're hunting for. Others are either too basic to begin with or are ruined by the erratic hint system, which alternately tells you exactly what you need to do next or spits out vague leads. There's a rare instance or two where interactive mini-games have you turning cranks or catching bugs, but these tasks are tackled within seconds and add very little to the experience. It's not terribly hard to figure out what to do simple because there's barely anything to interact with in the environments to begin with.

The lack of puzzle creativity carries over into the one-dimensional characters that they frequently hinge upon too. Playful stereotypes abound, from the flower child hippie spouting "stick it to The Man" rhetoric to the agitated Asian food vendor peddling rat burgers in bad English, but they're more hokey than humorous. Dialogue alternates between cheesy and obnoxious too, and while some of the voice work is well done, most of it is overdone. All of this is a shame, because the cel-shaded artwork is really quite good, and the setting itself is an interesting place to explore. Unfortunately, everything else is pretty weak.

Source : ign[dot]com