Ramblings about crap in my life.
Archive for July, 2007
Microsoft is generous
Jul 22nd
About a week ago I received the wireless Xbox 360 controller I was promised. Yesterday, I received another one!
Too bad I almost never play split screen multiplayer.
No more Potter
Jul 22nd
I’m feeling weird. About an hour ago I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the Harry Potter series. I’ve been reading since 9 AM, so I feel kind of dizzy. I don’t know how to feel at the moment, I’m not disappointed; it’s just strange that there will be no more Harry Potter. I’ll probably write something more tomorrow. For now, I’m off to bed. :)
Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Jul 15th
I’m a huge fan of the Harry Potter books, but not so much of the movies, not that I think they are horrible, I just don’t think that it’s possible to make a really great Potter movie, so I can’t really blame the crew, or anyone else. The reason I think this is because when making a HP movie you automatically lose all the small things that make the books so brilliant, i.e. the small details, the sub storylines, and the surprising endings, that don’t really work when the movies are only about 2,5 hours long. In my opinion it would’ve been more interesting if they had made the books as high quality mini-series, maybe in a narrative way so you know more about what Harry’s thinking, since that’s how the books are written. Anyway, when I watch the movies I do it with most of this in the back of my mind, so I don’t end up bashing the movies senseless because they suck compared to the books.
I’ve just watched the newest installment, the Order of the Phoenix, and I expected less than the previous movies since the fifth book is my least favorite: it’s very long, and even though there are a lot of interesting parts with Umbridge, she’s not exactly the coolest villain one might imagine. It actually met my expectations, nothing extraordinary, as expected they left a lot of things out, but I was pretty satisfied with it. Especially the fact that they’ve made it a lot darker than the previous ones, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had made it more children-friendly to make more money. The beginning was very cool, by far the best in all of the movies, very dark and almost scary, and since the same director will be making the Half-Blood Prince I’m calmer about it being dark enough, just like the book.
I’m very close to rating it with a 7 because of the mood-change, but it wasn’t that great, so it’s going to be a 6/10. Now I’ll just wait anxiously for Saturday, where I’ll receive the last book!
Ring of Death – Microsoft isn’t so bad after all
Jul 12th
As mentioned before on my blog, I was promised compensation for the delay of my Xbox 360 repair. They told me I could choose between Project Gotham Racing 3, Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo, all mediocre launch titles so I wasn’t very pleased. I received my console last week and today I called them to have them ship the game I wanted, to my surprise that was only a small selection of merchandise I was able to choose from. All in all I was able to choose one of the following items:
Project Gotham Racing 3 (149 DKK)
Kameo: Elements of Power (179 DKK)
Perfect Dark Zero (97 DKK)
Viva Pinata (265 DKK)
Gears of War (295 DKK)
Wireless Controller (400 DKK)
Wireless headset (450 DKK)
Xbox Live Vision (webcam) (450 DKK)
I chose the controller, because I’ve wanted to buy one for a while. Also, I was told the maximum number of work days for the repair would be 15, apparently they had to change this to 25 just after mine was sent in, so I was still noted as a 15-day repair even though the repair center’s estimate was pushed to 25. It still took more than 25 work days for me to receive the console though (28 to be exact), but I’m not as annoyed with Microsoft now that they’ve given me a proper compensation.
Review: Bleach
Jul 10th
I’m very fascinated by manga and anime, recently I’ve wanted to read and watch more of it, and I had heard about the popular manga-turned-anime Bleach, so I started watching it about a month ago…
… and it’s actually very entertaining, it’s about this 15-year old boy Ichigo Kurosaki, who is forced to become a substitute Death God, a warrior who slays hollows, evil ghosts that used to be deceased human souls, that lost their hearts to despair or remained in the real world for too long. Ichigo gets his new powers from Rukia Kuchiki, a real Death God who transfers her powers to Ichigo because she is wounded in a fight with a hollow. Annoyed at first, Ichigo eventually accepts the duty as a Death God, performing so-called soul burials on wayward souls and hunting down hollows, cleansing their spirits and sending them back to Soul Society, the home of souls and Death Gods.
In the second season (or ‘arc’) it all gets a lot more exciting, Rukia is taken back to Soul Society and sentenced to death, because transferring Death God powers to a human is forbidden. The second and third arc is about Ichigo travelling to Soul Society trying to rescue her. So far there are six arcs and I saw the last episode of the third arc today (which means I’ve seen 60 episodes so far, damn).
The coolest part about Bleach is the fighting and build-ups before the fights. The show is very well animated and there are a lot of scenes with powerful characters fighting the less powerful (or so they think) Ichigo and then going “holy shit you kick ass”, kind of like Neo going apeshit in the end of The Matrix. It’s cliché, but for some reason it never gets old, especially not when it’s presented so great. As mentioned there’s a lot of these sequences in Bleach, the second and third arc primarily focuses on Ichigo training, thus building up incredible powers and then gaining the ability to defeat characters that kicked his ass at some earlier point in the series.
But the fights would be nothing without the additional, minor storylines, for example, two fairly unknown characters are about to fight, but before they start we see a long flashback about their history, how they meet, who they are, etc. and it makes the battle more exciting. There’s also a lot of background information about the main characters, and that’s the second reason why I’m enjoying Bleach so much. Some of the episodes are kind of stupid though, they suddenly focus on something completely different than the main storyline, and the Japanese humor and drawing style is a bit too much once in a while, but the majority of the episodes are really worth a watch.
Bleach: 1st to 3rd arc: 8/10.
If you’re interested, you can watch the first episode right here.
More information about the show can be found on WikiPedia, here.
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