Archive for April, 2007

“Zoooom!” – The sound of 20 Mbit

CyberCity has just upgraded my internet line from 8 Mbit to 20 Mbit. Sweet? Hell yeah. Haven't really downloaded anything big yet, although the upgrade is pretty apparent when I download smaller files, such as:

I know it's incorrect as it has no time to estimate the real speed, but come on, 82 megabytes per second is one hell of an e-penis.

Crackdown will crack you up

Look, he’s gonna step on your face! He’s THAT cool.

I never liked the Grand Theft Auto series that much, great games, but I found them boring pretty quickly. They lacked a couple of things that would’ve kept me interested: no co-op mode, nothing to do other than driving around killing stuff and doing missions and none of the games had any cool physics, when it comes to human bodies and explosions. Crackdown has it all: the co-op mode is extremely well incorporated, friends can join ongoing singleplayer campaigns, you can enhance skills in various categories (and not boring ones like in San Andres, but stuff like throwing busses and jumping over building) and lastly the explosions look fricking cool! Throw a bunch of cars together, flick a grenade into the mess and KABOOM the entire thing erupts, littering the area with debris, just take a look at this:

[youtube]eaWqseH2A60[/youtube]

New Order of the Phoenix trailer

Although the book isn’t one of the best in the series, I’m looking forward to the movie. Cool trailer, I think I’m gonna go through some of the interesting parts frame by frame, looks like Azkaban in the end! :D

[youtube]GLud6yM47u8[/youtube]

Why I hate Star Wars ep. 2 & 3 – Part 1

One day more than 10 years ago my dad brought home three brand new, blue VHS covers, they featured astonishing artwork and soon there after I was introduced to the incredible saga that is Star Wars, a series of masterpieces way ahead of their time. In 1999 George Lucas released a new episode: The Phantom Menace, a decent movie, but never the less, from this point on he steadily started buttfucking the classics we enjoyed as kids (I rock at analogies!). In my opinion Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, in their current state, should never have been created, and I’ll try to explain why.

Humor
There was some funny moments in the original movies, especially between R2-D2 and C-3PO, and it fitted nicely into the films. In the newest two movies it’s different, almost all droids are made out to be funny. The standard battle droids look funny, they have weird voices and say ridiculous things like “Uh-oh!” and “Roger, roger!”, which means you never see them as a threat, like you did with the stormtroopers, even though they were stupid and couldn’t hit anything, they were at least somewhat threatening. Now, let’s get back to our blue and golden friends. I particulary remember two scenes from the new movies, the first one is C-3PO accidently having his head mounted on one of the battle droids, he then runs around apologizing while his body shoots at stuff. Not only does it seem extremely unrealistic that his head just so happens to be placed at the body, it’s also just a ridiculous scene. Make the humor subtle, don’t push it into peoples’ faces like it’s some sort of second-rated Adam Sandler flick, it’s Star Wars for fuck’s sake. The second scene is even worse, the beginning of episode 3, R2-D2 is battling two of the big, black battle droids, as far as I remember he squirts oil at them, they slip in it, and he lights them on fire. The scene is full of the mentioned ridiculous punch lines. This lame humor is probably the biggest reason why I dislike these movies, it just doesn’t fit in.

CGI
The first movies were revolutionary when it comes to special effects, since CGI kinda sucked back then spaceships were created as miniature models, all the environments, it being space battles or dusty outskirts of strange planets, it looked astonishing. There was a time period before CGI became good enough to portray city environments, characters up close, etc. when, even in low-budget movies, everything had to be built, which made the sets of many of these sucky movies look pretty incredible. Today CGI is used in almost all movies, you can more or less create everything with it. I know it’s not easy to create these realistic scenes, but it still seems a bit like seeling out when you use CGI in abundance, I’m more impressed when they actually build the sets from scratch, like they did in Lord of the Rings. Another reason for disliking the new movies; almost every single fucking scene is created with CGI, even though it would be possible to build the stage. For example; in episode 3, every single clone trooper is created with CGI, not a single real combat suit was used, that is fucking sad.

Well, that’s all for now, I’ll think of some more to bash later. ;) What do you think of Star Wars episode 2 and 3?

Favorite… song intros!

Yup, my very first top list of something unimportant.

1. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Can’t Stop (first 34 seconds)
[youtube]m9ipa4cd410[/youtube]

2. Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine (first 50 seconds)
[youtube]P-AYAv0IoWI[/youtube]

3. Dire Straits – Money For Nothing (first minute)
[youtube]U82WISdfT3A[/youtube]

Been browsing my music for a while and that’s actually all I can think of for now. I’ve got tons of favorite songs, but not really intros. Maybe you can contribute with something. :) Anyway, what do you think?