Sunday, November 6, 2011

Doom

  • 1 or 2 Players
  • Over 50 Hellish Levels
  • All-new 24 channel stereo sound effects
  • 2 player "Deathmatch" and "Competative" modes
  • The Best monsters, weapons and bosses from Ultimate Doom and Doom II
A frantic call for help from a remote research station on Mars sends a team of mercenary Marines into action. Led by The Rock and Karl Urban, they descend into the Olduvai Research Station, where they find a legion of nightmarish creatures, lurking in the darkness, killing at will. Once there, the Marines must use an arsenal of firepower to carry out their mission: nothing gets out alive. Based on the hugely popular video game, Doom is an explosive action-packed thrill ride! Starring: Dwayne ''The Rock'' Johnson, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Deobia Oparei, Ben Daniels, Raz Adoti, Richard Brake, Brian Steele, Doug Jones, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson Directed by: Andrzej Bartk! owiakGrab your BFG and get ready to kick some Martian-demon butt in Doom, another entry in the increasingly crowded videogame-to-movie genre. The Rock plays Sarge, the commander of a squad of Marines sent to investigate a disturbance at a scientific research facility on Mars. Among the squad is John Grimm (Karl Urban, who played Eomer in The Lord of the Rings), who turns out to have had a previous relationship with Samantha (Rosamund Pike, Die Another Day), the scientist who's accompanying the Marines in order to retrieve some vital data from the facility. Based on id Software's legendary first-person shooter, Doom tries its best to look like a game, with dark, angled corridors, ferocious creatures appearing out of nowhere, and a variety of lethal weapons that will, like the aforementioned BFG, warm the cockles of a gamer's heart. There's also one memorable sequence that actually turns the movie into a first-person shooter; the good news is t! hat in the context of the whole film, it's not quite as goofy ! as it mi ght have been. And that's not a bad frame of reference for the film in general. Considering the game-to-movie field includes such duds as Wing Commander, if you go into Doom with low expectations, you'll probably find it a surprisingly respectable horror/sci-fi thriller in the Resident Evil vein (including its somewhat obligatory subplot of corporate wrongdoing). Also in its favor is that it's unabashedly R-rated, for the extreme gore that is a trademark of the game. After all, the purpose of the movie is to pack scares and thrills into a setting that gamers will quickly recognize. In that sense, it qualifies as a success. --David HoriuchiNo question about it: Doom is one of the greatest games of all time. The blend of a simple, yet compelling mission, breakthrough 3-D interface, brilliant level and weapon design, and the effective use of fear made Doom an instant classic and launched a revolution in computer games. Born on the! PC, this game has been ported to almost everything imaginable, and the PlayStation port is one of the best.

You play the part of a space marine who was stationed on a research station on the Martian moon, Phobos. Something went very wrong when the researchers opened an extradimensional portal. Now you're trapped far from home, grabbing guns and ammo to blast the demons. A one-man crusade, you shoot everything that moves--and, likewise, everything that moves tries to return the favor.

This was the game that launched the multiplayer craze on the PC, and the PlayStation version does its best to live up to Doom's reputation as the ultimate multiplayer deathmatch game. If you have two players, two PlayStations, and a link cable, you can enjoy some mad two-player mayhem.

A few words of caution: remember that Doom was the first wildly successful first-person shooter, and while its graphics were astounding for its era, it hasn't aged well. If you want the ! latest and greatest graphics, you'll be disappointed, but if y! ou're in to quality gaming and appreciate history, you'll still get a huge blast out of Doom. --John Cocking

Pros:

  • Lots of mayhem
  • Terror mounts as your ammo count drops
Cons:
  • Older graphics
  • Nothin' but violence
  • Sluggish when compared to the PC version

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

  • Based on the best-selling book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, a multidimensional study of one of the biggest business scandals in American history. The chronicle takes a look at one of the greatest corporate disasters in history, in which top executives from the 7th largest company in this country walked away with over one billion dollars, leaving investors
ENRON:SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM - DVD MovieOne of the greatest scandals in American corporate history is chronicled in the riveting documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on the bestselling book by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin, and directed by Alex Gibney (who also produced The Trials of Henry Kissinger), the film is an epic morality tale, drawing upon a wealth of insider interviews and archival material to show how Enron, once the na! tion's seventh largest corporate entity, essentially faked its bookkeeping to report profits that never existed. The corrupt and closely-guarded mismanagement by Enron executives (including Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, later placed on criminal trial) is revealed through such heinous concepts as "Hypothetical Future Value" (a way of reaping fortunes based on false profit projections) and the use of offshore "shell" companies to hide the massive losses that eventually toppled the company (along with the venerable Arthur Anderson accounting firm) and left 20,000 employees jobless. As a maddening portrait of hubris and white-collar crime, Enron transcends political and corporate boundaries by showing how smart and powerful men grew blinded by greed and brought ruin upon themselves, along with thousands of otherwise innocent victims. For better and worse, it's a perfect double-feature with eye-opening 2004 documentary The Corporation. --Jeff Shannon
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