Recently I played through Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. It's rather good, incrementally better than Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The length is similar, though Warrior Within is more replayable (in that there's a different ending if you win 'better', though I don't think it's intrinsically replayable enough that I can be bothered to try). Today, having no other new games, I went back to try to finish Thief: Deadly Shadows (what is it with sequels and colons these days? Fair enough for Prince of Persia, since I have no idea what number it would be and it's not actually similar to the early ones, but Thief 3 is bloody Thief 3).
After Mr Persia's grace and responsiveness, Mr Thief's sluggish idiocy is absolutely unplayable. When you tell Mr Persia what to do, he's like "right away, I will certainly bounce off those walls, slide down a curtain, backflip onto a narrow beam and then swing down into the midst of some swarming ghouls and decapitate them by using one of them as a shield and then swinging around a pillar with my sword out, just as you have asked." Then you tell Mr Thief what to do and he's like "what's that? You want me to fall off this three-foot-wide walkway onto the metal floor below and then shout hello at the guard?" "No, you idiot, I want you to walk along the walkway! Just walk! It's three fucking feet wide!" "Fall off the walkway?" "Walk along! W-A-L-K..." "F-A-L-L?" "Fine, you fall off the fucking walkway and I'll stop playing your stupid game." "Oh! You want me to get stuck in a chest! You should have said." "You already did that." "That's okay, I can do it again."
Meanwhile, in horrible Hong Kong movies, China Strike Force was surprisingly good as a generic Die-Hard-esque action flick, with suitably Hong Kongly ludicrous action such as riding a motorcycle up the vertical back of a moving truck. Raiders of the Shaolin Temple, on the other hand, was unsurprisingly bad as a probably-early-seventies horribly dubbed kung-fu movie, which was just what I wanted it to be, and more, including a man fighting 24 mechanical horses of kung-fu that move very similarly to Doctor Who machinery, him getting his arse kicked despite that, and, absolutely best of all, an extremely Pythonesque scene of the same man which went thusly:(Man leaps into the air) "Yaaaaah!"
(cut to shot of someone present looking surprised, then to...)
"Yaaaaah!" (from a different angle)
(cut to shot of someone else present looking surprised, then to...)
"Yaaaaah!" (from another different angle) Just like the Monty Python running-towards-the-castle scene, this gets funny after about the fifth repetition. Unlike the Monty Python version, though, it continues to get funnier with each subsequent repetition, up to a total of somewhere around eight "yaaaaah"s. All kung-fu movies should feature this scene in future. It's even better than Jackie Chan's Police Story angle-cuts of similar nature, because Jackie Chan doesn't yell "yaaaaah" during his.
Also, there is a TV series called Crime Traveller, about a policeman and his friend the police scientist who travel in time to solve crimes. There were only 8 episodes made. It's English, and features Miss-Marple-esque music. I think that's all that needs to be said about that.
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