Being in Japan for a couple of months, I wound up missing most of the Big Summer Movies.  Fortunately, we have a $1.50 movie theater in town that has most of them playing right now, so my wife and I went on a movie binge this last weekend and did some catching up.

For a whopping $9 total, we took in Knight and Day, Iron Man 2, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

I was a bit worried going into Prince of Persia (You’ll forgive me if I leave the subtitle off from now on, I hope), because I’d played the game and quite enjoyed the story of it and was rather afraid that they were going to throw most of the game’s story out of the window and whatever was left would be terrible.

In fact, they DID throw most of the game’s story out of the window, but what was left was actually pretty good.  It keeps the important events from the game but replaces the “running around a booby-trapped palace while slowly building a rapport” bits with “running around the countryside while slowly building a rapport” and replaces sand-fueled zombies with, uh, some kind of Persian ninja assassin guys.

And, to be honest, that makes a lot more sense for a movie.  As a gamer, I didn’t mind that the game consisted of 10 hours of dodging whirling blades and spikes, but I can see how two hours of dodging whirling blades and spikes might be kind of dull to a movie audience.

It’s a rare video game move that you can say “it was quite good” about, without adding a “for a video game adaptation, anyway”, but this was one.

I am a little vexed, I admit, that the movie’s release has delayed – or perhaps put off forever – any sort of sequel to the 2008 PoP game, so we’ll be waiting longer for a resolution to that cliffhanger, if one comes at all, but it DID bring us a new game set in the Sands of Time timeline that comes between The Sands of Time, which was one of the best games ever, and The Warrior Within, which was dire.

So I bought that, and I may even play it at some point in the next year.

Oh, we saw those other movies, too.  Knight and Day was quite good, Iron Man 2 was not as good as the original but not as bad as, say, Spider-Man 3, both were easily worth the cost of admission granted that the cost was actually quite slight in this case.

For something completely unrelated, I ran into an interesting site while googling a game title I didn’t recognize: Lijakaca’s Otome Gaming Blog. I’m not exactly a fan of games chock full of attractive-yet-vaguely-androgynous men, but it was kind of neat to see an English-language site aimed at  women who are fans of visual novels and similar genres.