Archive for November, 2006

Casino Royale

 This entry includes spoilers. 

As expected (after seeing tons of reviews) I was positively surprised by Daniel Craig's performance as Bond. He can actually act, although he still looks too much as a brute to be James Bond, in my opinion. Unfortunately you don't see any depth in the Le Chiffre character, we all know Mads Mikkelsen is a fine actor, but he's not allowed to use his talent until his last scene. At the credits you know as much about Le Chiffre as you would by watching the trailer, too bad. He'd also have been a great villain all the way to the end, but in a pretty anticlimatic scene he's suddenly shot. Also, Eva Green is a great Bond babe, she can act and she looks gorgeus.

Over all the movie was pretty predictable, you know Casino Royale will shape the James Bond character into what he is in the other movies, therefore you know Vesper Lynd will either betray him or die (turns out she does both). The movie also has some irritating moments in which Bond makes some stupid rookie mistakes: watching the man in the airport even though it's obvious he's standing in front of mirrors, let's the black guy see the ear piece when making out with Vesper, etc. They are pretty easy to ignore, but stuff like that tend to bother me. Also, the whole "Bond-spotting-Chiffre's-tell" part at the poker table was just stupid. Every proffesional poker player would spot something like that, and the fact that a player like Le Chiffre can't even keep a straight face is just too unlikely. Some of these things may have been in the novel as well, but that doesn't change the fact that they're ridiculous.

I've been seeing all the positive reviews the last weeks, and I agree that it is one of the best Bond movies in a long time, but that's not exactly an astonishing accomplishment. Everything since Goldeneye has sucked. And what the hell is all this crap with Daniel Craig being the best Bond ever, he is not even remotely close to what Sean Connery pulled off. Still a good movie though, probably 7 or 8 out of 10, I'll have to think a bit more about that.

Also, no proper Bond vs. villain fights what so ever, and it's not that this movie hasn't got plenty of villains.

Leet speak is dangerous

I cannot believe the stupidity of this news segment. For some reason these reporters, and even a "cyber detective" from some police department, think leet speak is designed to keep parents in the dark, and that it's dangerous, but they never bother describe why. They interview some ignorant teenager and he says "All my friends use leet speak, I can see why parents would be worried, because it could lead to… danger." Wauw, now I totally get it. So what if kids are able to speak to each other without their parents knowing what it's about, and even if they want to know what it means it's not that friggin' hard to understand. Why are Americans so paranoid?

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Hellgate: London is yummy

I've been following the progress of this game pretty closely since I read an article about it in >pcplayer. I mean, what's not to like? Big swords, knights in sci-fi suits, demons and boobs. Anyway, the intro for the game has been released and it is sweeet. Watch it below or download it in a much higher resolution here.

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Legend of Zelda timeline

GameTrailers have produced some excellent Zelda Retrospective episodes, the final one, number 6, is about the timeline of the Zelda universe, and they try to line the existing Zelda games in a chronological order according to the periods of time they happen in the over all story line. It's very interesting, so take a look.

 

Behind ‘Make Love not Warcraft’ South Park episode

Recently a South Park episode featured a lot of ingame scenes from World of Warcraft, the four kids battle against a 1337 gamer who has reached a level so high no one knew it existed, yes it's not really authentic, but a lot of fun never the less. I was wondering how they created the game scenes, and stumbled upon this interview at Machinima.com, with members from the South Park animation staff. Very interesting, apparently Blizzard gave them a spot on a Burning Crusade alpha server to do the shots.

"The Blizzard team gave us a special "friends and family" server to play on. Every once an a while a strange player would walk by and check out group the filming. The programmers could instantly kill a player that got in the way of filming. There's a player out there wondering what they had stumbled upon just before they were wiped from the location."

Read the entire thing here.