Very Mediocre. What's all the fuss.
925257
I found this book very run of the mill. Characters were fairly two dimensional, plot was fairly plodding. Not awful, but nothing out of the ordinary either. Doesn't even come close to Kathy Reichs or Patricia Cornwell. No substance.
3228228
Whoa, look at all the rave reviews!  Nah, I thought it was mediocre at best.  The main characters are frivolous, silly, facetious, sardonic, and cynical.  All these book loving ladies are falling head over heels with Matt.  What a little punk, jerk, cheater, dim witted, and not a real man, afraid of his own skin, seriously lacking in courage.  But then again so is Hannah, seriously people you love liars and manipulation and simply minded couples?  Pick this one up then its for you because there are no redeeming qualities in this hot mess.

However ironically I'll be moving on for I have faith M. Pierce will pull a miracle outta his a$$ and write a better piece to this disaster, we shall see what happens in Last Light and for $9.99 you better kill me for the only reason I'm continuing on is because I to am a Coloradoan.
2868212
Bought the game Friday night, by Sunday night I was at first prestige and tired of it, so I'll keep this short and sweet.  I only play multiplayer.  Some folks are saying this is better than Ghosts, but I just don't see it.  It's every bit the re-hashing that Ghosts was, but with inferior maps and guns.

Pros:
-None that I can think of.

Cons:
-The guns are pretty much all nerfed crap.  A couple of assault rifles and a couple of SMG's are OK.  Many are 3, 4, or 5 round burst weapons.  One sniper rifle is halfway decent, but all are slow handling.  Forget LMG's.  Too slow.
-A couple of maps are OK, but most are crap.  Most of them are cut up like a three dimensional maze so that there is no obvious center of attention, and you spend a lot of time looking for opponents, only to have them pop out of an opening and kill you from the flank or you do the same to them.  These maps very much randomize the game and diminish the skill element.  I can't tell you how many "King Killer" medals I've gotten.  It's like a big game of Wack-A-Mole with guns instead of a hammer.
-At least as of opening week, gameplay is crap.  Lag, dropped frame rates, unresponsive menus, you name it.  Virtually every time when a match starts, you get stuck in spectator mode for up to a minute or two.  That's a minute or two when you aren't scoring, and it is very frustrating.  I've also had a couple of hard freezes and many times a game gets kicked.
-Despite what the 10 year olds say, the exo suits are, you guessed it, crap too.  I'm sure the kids love hopping around like a bunch of rabbits on steroids, but I got tired of "Skeet Shooter" medals after the first couple hundred.  Getting a "Skeet Shooter" medal used to be a big deal, now it's half my kills in an average match.  The exo abilities are pretty anemic, and the exo lauchers just take the place of all the old grenades, throwing axes, etc. in the older COD's.  Heck, they didn't even rename most of them.
-Perks are nerfed beyond description, so unlocking them really isn't a big deal.  Come to think of it, unlocking most everything is this game isn't a big deal.
1269003
Not exactly sure why this movie did so well in the reviews. I can appreciate good cheesy comedy if executed well, but this just kinda stunk. The plot was lame with big holes and unrealistic characters and happenings, the acting mediocre at best. Sorry but it jusy wasn't funny no matter how much I tried to like it. Waste of $4 and timespent... waiting for it to get better.
2901664
Way too much CGI. Way too little plot. The dialog is as expected.. the same rhetoric for movies of "the old kingdom" filled with gazes that take way too long awkward pauses and, easily predictable outcomes. Some of the fight scenes are just so unbelievable it doesn't make it enjoyable. The dynasty of LOTR has really just seemed to have taken the knife to itself.

If you're looking for entertainment its here - but I don't think it's worth renting, let alone buying at this price. Wait for it to appear in your local .99 cent store in the bargain bins.
3405094
The concept is great. The execution is bad. Here's why I think that. It comes with two sets of earpieces. As nearly as I can tell, they are the same size. They don't fit very well. They do block our some outside sound, but even my $15 Skulcandy earbuds are better. The sound is mediocre. it is very bright, and somewhat lacking in the bass. The accompanying manual is poorly written. It does not explain much about charging, eg. what the lights on the charging case  mean and what the button is for. The microphone audio is poor the noise reduction does not work. I can put up with that considering the low price. The big problem for me is that the battery life is unacceptable. The first time I used these earbuds the batteries lasted through a 2+ hour workout just fine. The next time it was 2 hour. A few uses later and the batteries last less than 20 minutes. These things are useless.
2253413
Considering there are so few gothic westerns out there, and considering how strong the first issue was, I really really wanted this to be good.

It's not. If you've read the first issue, you pretty much know what is going to happen through the rest. There are no major surprises or developments. A good-guy sidekick is introduced just to be killed off; a bad guy is introduced to make threats and little else.

There are major gaps in logic, threads left hanging, long passages of doldrum action (which mostly feature our hero riding hard across the plains, with no dialogue of any kind). A few sinister birds and ghostly Indians, neither of which are as relevant as the writers think they are. The writer's afterward just confirms he didn't know what he was doing.

I got the compilation for a buck and a half. Not sure it was worth it. Strictly amateur hour, here. Sigh.
3661151
I don't have a lot of demands for my phone, so it shouldn't take much to make me happy.  This pantech simply is not very good.  It started out ok, but I'm closing in on two year (almost at my trade-in date thanks goodness) and it's getting worse and worse.  And I'm not hard on it at all.  It charges poorly and often seems to suffer quick draining of the battery, without my having used any apps or anything.  Other times it simply powers off for no reason at all, even with plenty of battery power.  My wife uses the same phone for her job and like others have said, the internal memory is very limited, which is a problem for her.  Not a major issue for me, but worth mentioning that the camera is not up to standards of others, particularly related to not having a built in flash.  I'm not a fan of giving negative reviews but in this case I wanted to warn others out there to look for better options.
1828544
I have no idea why so many people love this movie so much. It doesn't work on any level for me. As a sci-fi story, the allegory is forced and trite. As an action flick, the action is dull and uninspired.  The world shifts uncomfortably from grimly "real" to completely fantastical, and not in a good way. The sequences that work (esp the school car sequence, with Alison Pill as a Kool-Aid drinking zealot of a teacher) are so out of whack with the rest of the movie as to shine a light on all its narrative failings.

Characters are flat and underdeveloped. You never feel anything for any of them. The only actor that garnered a reaction from me was Tilda Swinton, and that reaction was merely annoyance as she gleefully chewed the scenery in her fake teeth. Ultimately, her character does nothing for the plot, making her cartoonish presence even more irritating. The "backstory" for the main character is delivered MINUTES before the finale, when he - gasp! shock! - has to perform an action that directly correlates to the speech he just gave. Clumsy doesn't begin to describe it. The ending is as hollow as the rest of the film, especially if you're trying to glean a "message" from the proceedings. I won't get into it at the risk of spoilers, but rest assured that depending on how you interpret it, it's either really, really disturbing, or incredibly adolescent.
1431056
I don't have much to add to the conversation. Just read the other one and two star reviews. The editing is worse than abysmal, the storyline is confusing and convoluted, and just plain unbelievable in the end. The romance was nonexistent. The dialogue wasn't half bad, and it did make me laugh out loud on the first page or so, which is rare for me, but that is just not enough to win very many stars.
198775
Mediocre at best! Poor acting and hopefully forgettable.
2345114
So I bought Legendary solely for the concept, despite the awful reviews I'd seen on here. Why? Because the premise interested me a lot. Pandora's Box holding all the creatures now regarded as myth, mixed with liberal application of heavy ordinance? That was worth four bucks.

However, the developers had a clear target and they couldn't have missed it harder. The game looks awful. When the textures aren't simply failing to load (leaving the models looking like mannequins), the graphics look mediocre at best, and I swear they forgot to edit in the character's head in one cutscene.

The writing is bland, although I didn't expect much, but the story is oddly compelling, even if it does leave an awful lot untold and leaves things wide open for a sequel that we'll probably never see. The characters are mediocre, the girl who is worked up to be the love interest is totally dismissed, and the main protagonist is bland as can be, and somehow has a mastery of any weapon he can get his hands on, despite supposedly being only an art thief.

However, it's the gameplay that manages to even partly save this. While things are extremely linear, it's actually rather fun, despite some controls being a bit odd (having to hold down a button to aim, rather than simply press a button) and some match-ups being so hopelessly uneven (taking on a gryphon with a shotgun? A minotaur with an assault rifle? Those two were real pains to get through) and the checkpoints being seemingly at random points. Sure, they only roll out six or seven types of non-human opponents (firedrakes, werewolves in two flavors, gryphons, minotaurs, echidnae from greek mythology, two asian-mythology creatures, both of which are annoying as hell to fight, and the kraken for something desperately trying to resemble a boss-fight) but that actually helps, as it prevents you from getting bogged down trying to figure out which two weapons you'll need most desperately in this level.

What really lets this game down is the story. They try to work it up as society crumbling to make things seem more dramatic and desperate, but we don't really see evidence of this, and although I shouldn't expect as much from an indie game, it comes off as overly hammed up at times. The unskippable cutscenes get to be a real pain, but it doesn't detract from the game too much. The entire thing ends rather abruptly with a final battle that totally failed to make me care at all, and winds up with a total anti-climax.

All in all, it's a decent game that could have been great if it'd had a little more time and money behind it. For four bucks, it's well worth it.
4616539
Movie was okay.  I don't understand why people seem to like it so much.  Just generally not very interesting.
4070930
These days Uwe Boll has become something of a running joke among genre fans.  With titles like Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead on his resume, the German director has become synomynous with hack work crapfests.  Hallmarks of the weakest the horror genre can be.

I suppose it's somewhat callous of we the fans to relish so much the pursuit of Boll bashing, but if the man didn't so vigorously attempt to make excuses for and defend his work in interviews, I would be much more willing to cut him slack.  It's one thing to make a terrible movie and defend it through a delusional assumption that it's somehow good, but another to try to cover yourself when you know you're making dreck.  I wait patiently for Uwe's half hearted defenses of Bloodrayne.

As in all of these half baked, video game based quickies, the plot is irrelevant.  That's not to say a descent story couldn't have been produced about the character of Rayne,  but it certainly fell flat on it's face here.  The script is the first culprit.  It comes off about like something I wrote in tenth grade English class.  Every cliche imaginable is on display. It's as if screenwriter Guinevere Turner had an encylopedia of banalities. I suppose the excuse could be that she is new to this sort of piece but come on. The world is non-descript and full of things incongruous with it's old world setting. But despite said anachronisms, the dialog is nothing but stiff, old-worldy speak with a humorous aversion to contractions in sentences. The various plot machinations that provide the impetus for the characters actions always remain vague and irrelevant. There is just so little here for the actors to work with.

Not that they are trying to hard. No one here seemed to give a crap, which is understandable. There is humor to be had though in the clumsy, stilted line deliveries of many of the actors. It almost seemed as if some of them, (Michael Madsen and Michele Rodriquez most obviously), were reading the dialog off a cue cards for the first time. Udo Kier and Billy Zane have pointlessly tiny rolls,(though Zane manages to ladle on some of his particular oddball qualities). Ben Kingsley basically sits in the same chair for three quarters of the movie, barely reacting to anything anyone says to him. And Meatloaf, well..I find myself somewhat nonplused by his short sequence in the film. All I'll say is that was one hell of a wig.

Let's see..was there anything good? I will say that Kristanna Loken is definately hot. It's hard to say if she can act because there is not dialog worth reciting and no director capable of pushing her in the direction of a performance, but she definately looks like I would imagine Rayne. The gore, particularly on the Unrated version, is rather vivid, if a little clumsy and unconvincing. There's a big troll..who's never really explained..and..uh..ah, hell, I just wish someone would give Uwe Boll some career advice. Maybe he could be a fight scene choreographer, he likes those, or he could try his hand at being a Production Assistant, work his way back to the top, relearn how to make a movie. Heck, he could be a garbage man for all I care, someone just tell him to stop making movies. In that way, all of mankind could benefit.
1922877
The Wii is being lauded as the the best system available this cycle, that is far from the truth.  When you take the time to get past the gimmick of the motion controls, you find out it's pretty mediocre overall.  The first problem lies in the games themselves.  Of course you have your obligatory Mario, Metroid, Zelda etc... but those franchises have been so overused by Nintendo in previous years that they just aren't fun any more.  You go 2 or 3 years between Final Fantasy's, but Mario peaks his head into a Nintendo game almost monthly.  Getting past those all you really have are mediocre excuses for games.  How many games where you pretend to play sports or drive a car do you need?  Is aiming at your screen and acting like you are hitting a pool ball that entertaining?  At first the gimmick makes you think so, but after a while you realize you aren't having fun anymore.

Secondly, this game is far from future proof.  If you use an HDTV and have any experience with High Definition gaming consoles, you'll be tearing your eyes out at how awful this system looks.  Topping out at no more than 480p, it will always appear muddy.  Also it lacks those things important to 21st century gaming.  A complete lack of online play (while it is becoming more frequent, it still lacks a user friendly interface to access it) also hinders this system and makes it a one trick pony.

The Wii is fun... for a short while.  If you can borrow one from a friend and play it for a week or two you'll have your fill.  The price tag may pull you in it's direction, but save up some extra money and put it in a PS3.  I'd recommend buying a XBOX 360 instead, but with the hardware reliability issues of those things (I've had 4 break on me) I'd be doing you a disservice... but that's for another review all together.
958115
This is a Syfy wannabe that manages to uphold their low standards in like fashion.  The budget was either sparse to begin with or someone mismanaged their finances.  It looked cheap-cheap-cheap.  The orc makeup/masks was marginal (they'd work for Halloween but not in a movie).  The black blood spatter looked like puffs of smoke from a car.  They could only manage to cough up one witch and one elf.  The dragon appeared very-very late in the story.  I forgot there was even supposed to be a dragon featured in this movie (the main reason I bought it).  The cover art on the DVD is very misleading in this regard.  The story mainly takes place in this world with rare glimpses of only one of the nine realms they keep harping on.  The action is what you'd expect, lots of gunplay and a catapult.  The hero (Rusty Joiner as John Norton) is reluctant and low-key.  The damsel/princess in distress (Masiela Lusha) spends half her time striking fierce poses, the rest of the time she squeaks, reverting to being helpless.  How can you eviscerate someone in one scene then turn all girly and powerless in another scene?  Her behavior was erratic at best.  There are also odd bits of comic relief peppered throughout.  The wicked witch was a bag lady in that she kept her head covered in a bag of sorts while she floated around giving orders.  It's a strange movie that I begrudgingly found entertaining enough.  But it isn't very well made.  It's not destined to be a cult classic.  But.  If you enjoy schlock, you might like this.
3819063
Where do I begin. This thing barely works. Primary problem: as the user, you'll have no clue what's going on if anything goes wrong.

1) The software presented to the user is amateurish, buggy, and unintuitive. It's a web-based interface, but it feels about 10 years old. It's not responsive, there are lots of modal dialogs, nothing close to the current state of the art in HTML5 web-driven applications. You can see things refreshing while you work. You get a "Unit Busy" message while something happens on the back end (turns out, that something is their primary server crashing and restarting.) But the problems are much deeper than a UX issue. The application does a terrible job of reporting the hardware's status accurately back to you, which is really its primary job. You will have little to no visibility into what's going on on your z-wave network. That's probably fine if everything works right out of the box, but there is little chance that will happen in a world of thick plaster walls, metal work boxes, and other environmental challenges to the z-wave protocol. You're flying blind if anything doesn't work perfectly. An especially infuriating feature: there are many "click here for help" links throughout the web app that point to non-existent locations on the public web. You might get dumped into a pseudorandom page in their wiki at best.

2) Speaking of documentation: there is none. You get a one-pager with the unit, which would be fine if the application itself were in any way intuitive, or simple to navigate. Nest or Apple can do that. But the application is really just a thin wrapper around the direct, low-level configuration variables of the hardware. There is no context provided for what these dozens of variables mean. A key issue during setup: what does it mean for a device to be "configured" on the network? You'll never know. But you'll get a big red error light if anything isn't configured. There is a user forum which has some helpful people there, and bless their hearts, but it's a purely volunteer operation and you have no real expectation of assistance. I batted about .250 there.

Bottom line: this is not consumer-grade software. I am a twenty year software professional and I would have been fired from any job I've ever had if I delivered this to production. If you are expecting an It Just Works experience, you're screwed. If anything goes wrong, you'll be ssh-ing into the box itself and tailing log files (are you a linux hacker? you'd better be) to try to figure out what's going on while you wait for someone to answer your forum posts. I've gotten pretty good at predicting which user actions cause their server to crash (basically, changing anything) but I have no idea what to do about it.

Oh, and for the record: it looks like this is just an OEM wrapping around a software product called "MiOS." Vera put their logo on it, but as far as I can tell, that's really all this is. Most of the documentation links go to mios.com, and they're happy to sign you up as an OEM, too. Near as I can tell, they are a small Taiwanese shop that might have a lot of smart electrical engineers but who don't know how to make a software product. I would be very careful to avoid any other thinly wrapped MiOS-based home networking controllers, unless you have tangible evidence that the rebrander is serious about supporting the product's software.

This is unusable trash. I don't know if Amazon will take this back since I foolishly didn't save the original box, but I will try anyway. If they won't, I will smash it with a hammer just to make me feel a little better.