Escape Room Review: The Castle

Company: Maze Rooms
Room: The Castle
Date Played: 8/8/15
Player Count: 4, which was perfect!
Success:  Success! No hints.

Premise: You are trapped in castle by evil wizard. 

Immersion: Our host seemed a little bit embarrassed by the premise. He sat us down to tell us "You are trapped in castle by evil wizard. It's me! I'm sorry!" and we were never able to decide whether this represented sheepishness about having to put a frame around the game we were about to play, or comic genius. Either way, it's how we've thought of the start of every game since. 

The room itself looked a lot more like rented office space than a medieval castle. Luckily, after a couple of minutes, this didn't really matter.  

Highlights: There was a lot to do, and a mixture of regular locks and neat gadgets. A lot of custom tech stuff, actually, but what each thing expected from us was fairly clear. There was more than one way to solve certain puzzles, which I thought was especially cool - if your group isn't good at puzzle type X, you might just discover while working on other things that there's a solution to the same problem available via puzzle type Z. 

Lowlights:  Not enough light! We had less lamps than players, which surely slowed things down a bit. One or two puzzles' solutions were hinted at by traces of previous players. One object was broken / falling apart. The mostly cool non-linear nature of some parts meant that we got ahead of ourselves and solved at least one thing before we discovered it was a puzzle. This wasn't a big problem, but it was definitely a question for our keeper afterwards. 

And Finally: This room will probably always sit on a special pedestal for me and my team because it was our first room. I think it was a great introduction. None of the lows would stop me from recommending this room to you. 

Out of 1 escape room played, The Castle ranks #1!

How to book this room for yourself: Visit http://la.mazerooms.com/quest/castle/

#2,282: Ghostbusters

The Legend of Tarzan - ★★★☆☆
• This movie is like if The Jungle Book was kind of good. Like, half-decent.
• There's a kind of 90s Three Musketeers vibe.
• And Christoph Waltz as the villain, Fitzcarraldo!
• It's the first time a movie has tried to make swinging around on vines make sense.
• It also really helped that Friendly Fire was set to Off during the final battle.

KidPoker - ★½☆☆☆
Too fluffy. Felt written to a template. The parts excerpting televised poker were fun.

Nintendo Quest - ½☆☆☆☆
I think that this is a really fun idea for a movie, and that there's still room for someone to go out and make a fun movie out of it, because this movie sucks.

Who was the intended audience? It's not going to be people who like Storage Wars or whatever since all of the prices are secret. It's not going to be Nintendo collectors, unless they're just feeling smug about how bad this guy is at collecting. It's not going to be people who want to see someone complete an unlikely challenge, or people who like travelogue, road tripping documentaries, because there's none of that in here. Context clues would suggest that this is probably made for people who have never heard of Nintendo before, but it doesn't seem like that's the sort of person that would click on this. Not on purpose anyway.

I guess I hope this documentary was a hoax. Then there'd be something interesting about it.

Ghostbusters - ★★½☆☆
Ghostbusters: The Phantom Menace

It's not great, but that's certainly not because of the core cast. I'd put it more on Paul Feig. This movie feels like the difference between film and digital, and maybe that's why it's a different (sub)genre from the '84 edition. The original was a textbook example of magical realism, and people who actually really dug that might be put off by this big cartoon. But if you look at the scope of the ghostbusters franchise, it's mostly cartoons. I bet kids who see this one first will prefer it.

Still, who goes and makes a movie that makes you say "ugh, I wish there wasn't so much Bill Murray in that movie"?

#2,278: Independence Day: Resurgence

Hello, My Name Is Doris - ★★★½☆
After the Sony hack, a lot of people scoffed at the notion that there was an Aunt May solo movie on the table, but I think it worked out just fine.

Iron Man Three - ★★★☆☆
I'm not convinced the plot of this movie completely works on a repeat viewing, but I am impressed with Shane Black for navigating the Marvel machine to make a good Iron Man movie that still feels like his own thing.

Iron Man 2 - ★★★½☆
It's fun to see how much Tony has changed, and how this movie fits into the bigger frame of MCU movies. I think I always liked it more than the popular opinion, and it would still rank in the upper half, top 7, let's say, of the MCU. The chief complaint of the time, I think, was too much connective material to other movies, but it seems so light compared to what we've seen in later installments.

Independence Day: Resurgence - ★½☆☆☆
Sometimes after seeing a movie, I like to think about who that movie was for. Who did the filmmakers have in mind as the ideal audience for their particular film? In this case, I think it was "people who have been harboring a grudge against the cast of Independence Day for the past twenty years."

I mean, it could be, "teens who have been eagerly awaiting a trilogy of films where a bunch of old people do things that don't affect the plot." I don't know. I don't think it was "the writers of this movie."

It's weird how they bothered to include the son of Will Smith's character as one of the 40 main characters even though the Will Smith role in this movie went to a white guy.

Media Monday: Video Game Edition

Tiny Tower Vegas -  - Another Tiny Tower! The economy in this game was much slower than in the original game, so it took me more than a year - maybe pushing two - to collect all every floor. Finally done!

Lost tracks -  - Not much of a game, really. This was a student project I read about online somewhere.

Sky Force Reloaded -  - I've collected and completed everything available so far in this game. Better curve and card power ups than the 2014 edition, which I've gone back to replaying now that this one is pretty much done. 

Emily is Away - . - Good atmosphere. This is an epistolary type of game set in late 90s instant messaging. I always run into the same problem with these kind of games though, which is that I want to replay to see another branch of the tree, and then you realize how little effect your input actually has on the course of events.

Affordable Space Adventures - - I've been looking forward to this since seeing the demo at E3 last year. The co-op in this was great! I was expecting player two to get a flashlight, but the split of controls was a treat. Definitely a game about the journey more than the destination. If I would have waited like two weeks, I could have gotten the game for next to nothing in a humble bundle, but I can feel good about giving the devs full price for this one.

Media Monday: The Books of Spring

I'm kind of caught up on movie reviews for the moment, so while we wait for those to start stacking up again, here are tiny capsules of books I read in the spring this year.  (My friend David counts comics in things like this, but I do not. A few times I a year I go on jags of reading hundreds of comics over a week or two, but I always have trouble tracking it and never leave myself notes.)

Cats' Cradle (Vonnegut) - Beautiful. Wonderful to learn about a duprass. I think if I'd read this when I were younger, I might have converted. Appreciation of this book is one of the two things I had in common with Brand New Old Love's leading lady Aya. The other was a susceptibility to the horrible mid-production cold that went around.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (Mr. Feynman and Leighton) - Anecdotes from a father of The Bomb, and generally busy guy. How lucky he must have been to live in an internet-free era. The notion of the students who learn the facts but have no idea what to do with them seemed useful and topical!

Song of Spider-Man (Berger) - The third book I read during the shoot of Brand New Old Love that concerns itself in some way with a horrible disaster. Kind of interesting at first, but just drags on and on repetitively, like any project involving U2. Probably you could just read a few chapters from the beginning (or anywhere) and then know that those problems never cease. 

This is Water (Wallace) - I'd just seen The End of the Tour and thought of how I hadn't ready much DFW. This occupied just a fraction of a day at jury duty, but gave me some ideas I'd like to investigate one day.

Molly's Game (Bloom) - I thought this was going to be about a lady card sharp, which it is not. Still fascinating for a while, although like Song of Spider-Man, the history repeats itself rapidly. I wonder who will play Tobey McGuire in the movie.