games

060 – Majesty Gold Edition (2002 game)

Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim is a real-time strategy video game developed by Cyberlore Studios, and published by MicroProse for Windows in March 2000. MacPlay released a Mac OS port in December 2000. Infogrames released the expansion pack Majesty: The Northern Expansion for Windows in March 2001, and Majesty Gold Edition, a compilation for Windows bundling Majesty and The Northern Expansion, in January 2002. Linux Game Publishing released a Linux port of Majesty Gold Edition in April 2003. (wikipedia)

The High Definition edition of Majesty Gold contains main game, the Northern Expansion Pack as well as 2 new quests and several other graphics and gameplay updates. Majesty is a Real-time strategy game with indirect control – your heroes have a will of their own! Your rule is not absolute, as you face subjects that are independent, stubborn – and greedy. They will need a great deal of persuasion (ok, gold) before they carry out your wishes…

steam


http://www.majestyquest.com/

movies, Uncategorized

034 – Skrítek (2005 slapstick)

spacetime coordinate: 2000’s Czech Republic

_____

imdb: “Language: None”

animation, music, series

0032 – the wonderful adventures of Nils (TV Series 1980–1981)

spacetime coordinate:  the historical provinces of Sweden 1900’s

Nils_no_Fushigi_na_Tabi_(DVD_cover)

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (ニルスのふしぎな旅 Nirusu no Fushigi na Tabi) is an anime adaptation of the novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf ( She devoted three years to Nature study and to familiarizing herself with animal and bird life. She has sought out hitherto unpublished folklore and legends of the different provinces. These she has ingeniously woven into her story.). The 52 episode series was mostly fairly true to the original, apart from the appearance of Nils’ pet hamster, and the greater role allowed to the fox Smirre.

watch on youtube (german)

Nils Holgersson is a 14-year-old farm boy, the son of poor farmers. He is lazy and disrespectful to his fellowman. In his spare time he enjoys abusing the animals in his family farm. One day Nils captures a tomte in a net while his family is at church and have left him home to memorize chapters from the Bible. The tomte proposes to Nils that if Nils frees him, the tomte will give him a huge gold coin. Nils rejects the offer and the tomte turns Nils into a tomte, which leaves him shrunken and able to talk with animals, who are thrilled to see the boy reduced to their size and are angry and hungry for revenge. While this is happening, wild geese are flying over the farm on one of their migrations, and a white farm goose called Morten attempts to join the wild ones. Nils manages to flee on Morten’s back together with his new hamster friend Carrot, and they join a flock of wild geese flying towards Lapland for summer.

The music was written by Czech composer Karel Svoboda. (OST on youtube)


imdb

animation, documentary, movies

ooo4 – Room and a Half (2009)

(Полторы комнаты или сентиментальное путешествие на родину)


spacetime coordinate: 40’s > 90’s, Saint Petersburg > New York

When asked in an interview whether he ever intended to return to his Motherland, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Such a journey could only take place anonymously…”

The creators of this film imagined that the journey in question was undertaken after all, selecting the genre of an ironic fairytale. The poet sails to the country of his childhood, and with him we traverse not only geographical expanses, but travel through time as well; stringing together a number of facts from the Nobel Prize Laureate’s biography, we return to the USSR of the 50s and early 60s, soaking up the atmosphere of the “European” city of Petersburg, to this day Russia’s cultural center.  Along with live-action sequences, the film features animation, as well as documentary footage concerning Brodsky and his milieu.

Some of the animated sequences — of winged horses and flying sleds, of Brodsky as a farm animal on all fours drawing a cart — suggest Chagall. Other, more elegant pictures — of pianos and other musical instruments flying in formation while framed against the heroic architecture of St. Petersburg — are closer to Magritte’s surrealism. Visually, it is an ode to St. Petersburg (its museums, architecture and statuary are lovingly photographed), and to the Neva River, which runs by the city.

With its unabashedly nostalgic glow, the film belongs to what might be called the “rosebud” school (after “Citizen Kane”) of film biographies that locate the essence of a life in childhood memories. Recurrent images in the film are visual representations of the family’s house cat. The youthful Brodsky (Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan) is shown conversing with his father in meows and later subverting the solemnity of a school anthem sung by a chorus by substituting cat cries for words. He later confides to a friend that he wants to be reincarnated as a cat in Venice.


imdb