A small rant.

I really hate the internet sometimes. Scratch that, I really hate the people of the internet. Giving people such freedom, ability to judge, critique or comment and such a wide variety of information and knowledge at the click of the button, would make people smarter I'm sure you'd imagine, but no. Almost everybody on this thing are fools, including myself. In fact, here's a graph to demonstrate...

Nostalgia - Part 1

Nostalgia, it’s a funny thing. Especially the bittersweet reaction to it - happy that it, whatever ‘it’ may be, occurred and sad that ‘it’s’ now gone. I should know a bit about nostalgia, at least the boring side of it anyway, for in my A2 level of English we studied the pastoral genre. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty for in reality I’ve locked away all the things I learned in Year 13 over the summer, ready to be released when they are inevitably needed at university. However, the basic principle of pastoral found in many Philip Larkin, R.S Thomas and Dylan Thomas poems to name a few is an overall nostalgic yearning for the past, when the grass was greener, the apples were juicier, the birds sang lovelier and the children were innocent…ter.

Come to think of it, many may find The Great Gatsby, a classic piece of American Literature to hold major ties with nostalgia – the last few pages in which Fitzgerald depicts the raw, natural beauty of the American landscape in the eyes of the new settlers wafts of the ‘American Dream’, what it once meant and what it means now (now being 1925, faced with the likes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and their money, greed and carelessness).

Bah! This post has not-so-suddenly turned into an English essay! (Well at least that bodes well for the future.) Hmmm, let me recollect my thoughts for this post was actually supposed to digress off and into my nostalgic stance on video games, then possibly branch off into the wider meanings of such (see, I do plan these things). For now, we’ll call this Part 1 - the preface, the prologue, the set-up, if you will and be done with it.  Look out for Part 2, where instead of discussing the serious themes of literature we’ll be talking about things like this…

In the summer time when the weather is high...

BAH! JUST CLICK HERE TO SEE A BIGGER VERSION!

THAT'S RIGHT, HERE! 

(Why must trying to create a clickable image be so difficult? I really hate the internet sometimes...)

I'm sorry Matthew.

I'm sorry I haven't done anything with this blog.

I'm sorry for the lack of updates.

I'm sorry for the absence of reviews.

You have re-ignited a small flame (I said small, so don't go moaning if it's not much) within me to continue with this thing.

So I shall start this update with a nice collage of faces, which I noticed were particularly funny when looking through some Facebook photo albums...

The middle one has an expression similar to Mr White's...oblivious yet cheerful.  

P.S. I would just like to say 'Oh Mark...', if Mark is indeed reading this.

Pictures Fail.

All my pictures are disappearing. How annoying. I could link to my own files, but that takes too much effort.

On a brighter note, I have some ideas for this increasingly empty blog.

That is all for now.

Ciao.

More GTA News...

Once again it's not great. We are getting 3 to 4 missions done a session which isn't good enough dammit!

We're now stuck on a mission where you have to chase a helicopter along a free way, get off and aim a manual bazooka at the still flying copter and destroy it. Absolutely ridiculous.

This will not go well.

GTA: SA completion update

It's not going well, to be honest.

We have reached the middle point of San Fiero missions, and that's through a few sleepovers. We spent quite a while on a Zero mission called 'Supply Lines' which I believe is impossible (with that statement being made even more probable by the fact Rockstar even changed the mission slightly in a later version of San Andreas). Only after an hour or so did we realise the mission was not required.

Other missions are getting harder as well. Woozie's missions started easy but now we're having to increase our swimming skills and other crap.

However, we will persevere - it's better than Black Ops anyway.

By the way...

Christmas and New Year happened...

Review: Tron Legacy

Ah...Tron. What a strange film you are. I remember watching bits of you around 3 years ago on TV and wondering 'what the hell is this thing?' I still haven't seen all of the original 1982 film, the one that I guess you could say was way ahead of it's time and can now be considered a flop at the box office. What it did do successfully was create a 'cult' which probably led to the 2010 sequel Tron Legacy we see today.

Well actually, I saw it yesterday and I have mixed views about it. Before seeing the film, I was actually reading a review on the game being released as a tie in 'Tron Evolution' but the article made some very strong points related to the film. Whilst the original film was ahead of it's time, when the general public didn't really know of CLU's and RAM, this film is perhaps past it's time. Nowadays, even 10 year old's know of the ins and outs of computers and slightly older audiences could just laugh off character's called 'Clu' and races called 'ISO's' I'm not sure how true this is but it's certainly a good point - are we as an audience too savvy to find Tron Legacy interesting?

Well I'm not incredibly techno minded, but I found the film interesting. That's not to say good however. I'm not giving spoilers but too be honest, I was waiting for the final showdown between good and bad to happen quite early on. Is this a result of a good storyline with emotional characters? No, I just wanted the end to come. Not so much to get the hell out of the cinema, but just to 'see' the ending. I've now confused myself - is that a result of a good plot? You tell me.

I'm not going to go overboard with describing the visuals. It's pretty obvious they spent a lot of time on them and they do look good. Not mind-boggling good, but then again I didn't see it in 3D, so maybe that was the reason.

A lot of things in the film just didn't make any sense...at all. Large chunks of the film are used to tell of what happened to 'the Grid' and the perfect world Flynn wanted to make in it. To do this he believed in 'Isomorphic Algorithms' or ISO's which are incredibly intelligent forms found in the Grid that could actually  help the real world with religion and science etc. How they could is never really explained and just breezed over, down to sheer laziness on Disney's part I would imagine.

Tron Legacy didn't do amazingly well acting wise, with our protagonist, Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund, a pretty flat, boring character. Olivia Wilde plays Quorra, the real Kevin Flynn's apprentice and she was fine. Oscar winning Jeff Bridges gave the best performance, as you'd imagine, but even then most of it just involved him doing lots of yoga and meditation. There were also a few odd cameos splashed about - Michael Sheen as some David Bowie-like club owner, Cillian Murphy as some corporate nasty-man and even Daft Punk.

Yet the main star in my opinion was Jeff Bridges CGI younger self -Clu. Digitally made, the character looks like Bridges fresh from the 1982 Tron or there abouts. And my, my it's creepy. There's most certainly a case of teh 'uncanny valley' in question here with Clu*. At first, watching the trailers, I didn't realise it wasn't a real person. But the more I watched, his rubbery face and lack of facial expressions gave it away. You'd think they might have done something about this for the final film but no, it's still there. Over done Botox-Bridges gives one main expression - a creepy looking smile and that's all. Unfortunately, in the end I couldn't really take the character very seriously because of the strange effect he had but it was a good try on Disney's part.

One more thing about Tron Legacy I want to take note of is the amount of Star Wars-like imagery in there. Now, having not seen the original, I don't know whether there was a lot in there, but in this I counted at least 4 to 5 major links. Let's see if I find a few images to show you what I mean...

1) The main character being in some kind of aircraft gunner during a space battle (ok, so it may not look very convincing with these pictures, but if you've seen the film, you should know what I mean).
















2) The main character having a wise-guardian/teacher - I'm mean c'mon, look at these pictures! Plus, in a part of the film Kevin Flynn reprogramme's an evil guard thingy to allow him to fly a jet in the same fashion as Obi Wan using the force to allow them into Mos Eisley Cantina.



3) Tron's evil jet things looked like X-Wings to me.













4)  I can't find any good pictures but in one scene, Quorra's arm get's chopped off - remind you of anyone?

5) Finally, again I can't find any pictures but near the end of the film, people can expect to find huge similarities to Darth Vader and his forces. This in turn mirrors Hitler. That is all I shall say

Ok, this review has gone on long enough. If you liked Tron from 1982 go see this. If you like crazy visuals go see this. If you're bored go see this. But don't expect anything more than a cheesy Disney movie crammed full of 'homages' that doesn't really become what it could have done. It's like Inception but more tech-y! And worse.

* I'm sure you're asking 'what the hell is Uncanny Valley?'

Sudden Realisation.

Ever since I owned a copy of GTA: San Andreas way back in 2004, I have never ever ever played through it's storyline. It's terrible to think now, but back then I was only 12 - all I wanted to do was drive and shoot and blow up thing and mess around.

Skip forward 6 nearly 7 years and me and a friend are trying to complete it (I wouldn't say 100% because that's ridiculous, maybe just the missions and collectibles). Only now do I realise how cheat-y 'Weapons Set 1' was, only now do I realise how incredibly useful the food shops are, only now do I realise how body armour is vital.

This game shows absolutely no damn mercy.

You died? Well back to the hospital, then to the mission again, but now you've got to go get a gun again, and do the whole mission again. It's so tedious, but we will finish this damn game. I love it and now I hate it at the same time.

I'll keep you updated on how it's going, but don't expect anything amazing - my friend can't shoot and I can't drive!