Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

The years move faster than the days

Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:32 pm Comments (1)

Well, September was a bit of a tizzy. Harking up and down across the country to attend a course during the week and then being too exhausted during the weekend to do anything. That routine hasn’t exactly changed, it’s just I had the pleasure of getting a cold and spending the whole week in one place, which helped me gather my bearings, I guess.

I watched Dark Star. This is the first film I’ve watched since the start of September, and man, I didn’t realise how much I missed that little routine! (I think the last film I saw was Dragon Ball Evolution. It was a decent little romp. My dad described it as something to the effect of “Buckaroo Banzai on crack.”)
You know it’s a Ragey review when it wonders if it’s even worth summarising the movie’s plot.
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Tech Rally Water Guard

Friday, September 16, 2011 at 2:31 pm Comments Off on Tech Rally Water Guard

Some new Games I Own reviews are up on the site. They’re not of games that are frighteningly terrible, so you’ll have to look for hyperbolic remarks elsewhere, I’m afraid. I’d planned to have a few other updates to the music page and some of the shrines, but I just don’t have the time, to be frank – I’m occupied during the week and then I’m totally drained during the weekend.

I’ve been playing a really unnecessary amount of Pokémon Rumble lately. It’s… it’s an odd game to pinpoint why I’m still playing it. It’s fast-paced and has you in direct control of your creature, so it ditches the turn-based battle system that I just don’t have the patience for. But at the same time, it simplifies the game so much that it’s hardly even a Pokémon game.
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Teetotaller? I ‘ardly knew ‘er!

Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 7:17 pm Comments Off on Teetotaller? I ‘ardly knew ‘er!

Just trying to wrap my head around life at the moment. Excuse the lack of activity.

Today’s observation: For the longest time, I thought “teetotaller” was pronounced “tee-toe-tale-er”. Naturally I thought, why would you want to publicly identify as a non-alcoholic if the term for it was so goddamned dorky? Just today I discovered it’s actually pronounced “tee-total-er”. That’s a little less embarrassing, but by not much.

Who defends the Defendor?

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:53 pm Comments (1)

Just a heads-up – the Defendor review is pretty unfinished, it’s mostly just my notes cobbled together into a very clumsy whole.
It’s an intriguing film and it really got me thinking of a lot of things to discuss, but I left the review off for too long until I’d forgotten a lot of what I wanted to ramble about.
In a nutshell it was basically how Defendor as a character is really intriguing, the atmosphere and locale around him just isn’t anywhere near as gripping, but the two do need to be blended for it to work well.
Well, I’ve basically summarised my whole review anyway. You can skip it if you want! There’s two other reviews shoved at the bottom somewhere.

I watched Defendor last week. It came out two years ago, but I’d never even heard of it before; I’m not sure if that’s just because of poor advertising or if it even got a cinema release over here, but it’s an interesting little film. The city is being run down by the no-good goings-on of the mysterious and nefarious Captain Industry, the head of a gun, drug and prostitute smuggling ring. By day, Arthur Poppington works as an unassuming construction foreman, but by night, he dons his black sweater and VCR-backpack and becomes… Defendor!

In actuality, he’s a well-meaning if literal-minded man with mental difficulties. He dons the superhero guise as a means of escaping from his embarrassing civilian identity, and his vendetta against Captain Industry is due partly to his mother being a prostitute who died from drugs, and partly due to misinterpreting something his grandfather said. The first two acts of the film are actually told through flashback, as Arthur retells the events leading up to him dunking a paedophile in a rubbish bin to a psychiatrist.
Yeah. It’s advertised as a comedy, but it’s a bit of an odd film.
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Madsen Attacked!

Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 9:50 pm Comments (1)

I’ve been playing a lot of 24: The Game lately. I never really followed the show nor did I see it as the best damn thing to grace television since sliced bread (it is a little known fact that in 1964 sliced bread staged a takeover of all known television stations in Ukraine, and people hailed it as the best television ever), but I quite enjoyed what I watched of season 3. My brother, being a big fan back then, bought this game before I even had a PS2, and it’s actually not a bad little package. The gameplay offers no unique surprises, but it captures the atmosphere of the TV show frighteningly well – the movie scenes genuinely look like scenes from the actual show, recreated with PS2-quality 3D models! If that’s not a selling point, I don’t know what is.

But I’m not here to waffle about the game, though (I’ll probably review it the next time I update Games I Own, Like & Hate) – I’m here to talk about a glitch.
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“It was a nice thought, G.”

Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 3:56 pm Comments (3)

I rented Shadows of the Damned and finished it on Wednesday. I kinda knew nothing about the game – all I’d watched was the Two Best Friends Play video of it, and didn’t think much about it. Saw it for rental and thought “why not.” It’s the perfect game for a five day rental!

Garcia F. Hotspur is a demon hunter. The demon overlord Fleming kidnaps his nondescript love interest, so with the help of Johnson, his talking British skull / gun / torch / motorbike / snarky sidekick, he sets out to Fleming’s castle to get her back.
Am I actually talking about a video game’s story in my review? Heavens above! Not that you can really call it much of a story. When I say “he sets out to Fleming’s castle,” I mean the characters basically romp through a series of increasingly disjointed locations with no bearing on geography or sense. There’s a lot of dialogue and a fair amount of movie scenes, but there’s not a lot of actual story going on.
Not that I’m complaining.
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Chimp my ride

Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 10:51 pm Comments (1)

I’m like half a month too late to offer a punctual response, but the blog’s up and running again. Flying Omelette tells me Dreamhost had been upgrading their servers, and that must’ve prompted some crummy coding in the WordPress database to screw up… we think. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but it’s up again, so that’s as far as I’m concerned.

I really haven’t been up to anything exciting this month, and thus haven’t had anything worth saying. I may as well just play catch up with what I’ve watched recently.
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Stars and stripes!

Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 12:49 pm Comments (4)

I watched Captain America last night. I’d liked the trailers, but for whatever reason I was in no particular rush to see it. I’m glad I did, though! It’s no masterpiece of cinema, but as a dude who likes superheroes beating the crap out of Nazis, it thought it was thoroughly entertaining.
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Metroid: Mother from another Mother (Mother)

Monday, July 25, 2011 at 12:40 pm Comments (4)

I rented Metroid: Other M last week, and finished it yesterday. In the past I only got rentals for three days, but it seems Xtravision now allows you to rent stuff for a whole week. For £4, that’s not a bad deal, as a week is usually enough time to finish a modern game, or at least sink enough time into it to get a good feel for it.
For the curious, despite what the Games I Own section implies, I don’t own Metroid: Other M – my brother does! … yeah, maybe I had a good reason for listing it at the time, but if I were to continue keeping track of all my brother’s games that’d be a bit tough, especially since we’re on different continents now. I might quietly drop those listings sometime in the future unless I eventually own them myself or at least have some comments to make on them. (You gotta sit down and write a review on Other M, bro! You waffled far too much about it through email and on the phone to back down now. =P )

I split the review into headers mostly because I’m a lazy writer, but I guess it could serve as how disconnected the two elements are anyway.
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My stick is nicer than yours.

Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 4:20 pm Comments (5)

It’s been a quiet month. I dedicated practically all of May into the grunt work for it, and since then it’s been a slow, tedious grind to fill out the rest of it, but the Puchi Carat shrine has been revamped. It’s one of those things I was really excited about working on, and now that it’s over, I’m struggling to remember what my aim actually was. I think my plan was to include just as much information as I possibly could, even stuff like the locations and the map and so on, but I ended up either not having much to work from, or lacking the patience to work with it, so I dropped a whole page and spread its content across other pages. Oh well. Let me know if you enjoy it! (I’ll be interested to hear if people think the design should be less pink, or even more pink)
Also, game music. It’s just stuff I left over from last time, I’m afraid.
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