🎬 Long movies, Oregon Trail, Buzz Lightyear and more - This Geek in Review for 2022-02-11

By goz

February 11, 2022

Longer movies…

The worst experience watching a long movie was Titanic. No, not Leo or anything, but the theater. The AC wasn’t working correctly, so by the three hour mark I was thinking how nice it would be to be freezing in the North Atlantic. As you can see, I survived the ordeal.

The next week we saw The Wedding Singer, who’s length felt like a sitcom. What a breath of fresh air from the marathon of Titanic.

Unfortunately, since that time the length of movies has gotten longer and longer, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. Titanic was such a monumental undertaking that it really needed that length of time to tell the story. Then we have Spider-man: No Way Home, a juggernaut of a film that runs for 2 hours, 28 minutes. I enjoyed the movie, but throughout there were times that I thought scenes could have been cut or pacing sped up. It could have still been an amazing film at 2 hours.

I’m firmly in the camp that while there are exceptions, most movies should be under 2 hours long.

Why it feels like movies are getting longer - CNN

Cue the dysentery

The Oregon Trail for the Apple II was released at the wrong time for me, at the end of my school career, but for some reason that didn’t stop it from becoming a staple in middle and high school libraries everywhere.

Its charm, and what I believe is the key to its success, was the ability to enter your friends as members of your party heading out west. How much fun is it to make fun of Brandon for dying of a snakebite or cholera.

Oregon Trail has been updated for Apple Arcade to remove historical inaccuracies, including the representation of native Americans. This requires an Apple Arcade subscription to play though. However, if you would like to play the game with a space bent, check out Orion Trail