Once I'm bothered, I'll start posting a long raving post about how awesome I thought Yakuza 2 is. But for now, have this boring template post.

Where am I?
I was up in David's for a while, had a great bit of fun. XP I got back around 2 hours ago and I've just finished off Yakuza 2.

How am I?
Fucking annoyed. First off, my payment for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction failed to get through for some reason so now I have to waste another ten euro giving money to someone else to pay it for me. Secondly, I'm trying to purchase Cold Fear, but no shop on Amazon seems to be willing to ship to my address. |: |

But thankfully, I've just found a shop that does international shipping for a pittance. Score.

What am I playing?
I've been playing Yakuza 2 for the past few days and I've been enjoying the shit out of it. Lots of nice little plot twists here and there. Like how I got the last boss wrong like 4 times. XDD Before that I was playing Unreal Tournament 3, which I'm really getting back into. I'd forgotten how fun it was.

What am I thinking?
'Bastarding Amazon, why don't you take Paypal?! I could have already paid for Cold Fear but nooo, you don't accept payments from Paypal so now I have to go look for the notepad I wrote all my details on so that I wouldn't forget them. FUCK. YOU.'

What am I listening to?
Hot Mess (Remix) by Cobra Starship. Don't really like these all that much, but I heard this remix on GayInternetRadioLive and liked it.

Last film I watched?
Watchmen, with my mother. ALL THOSE SEX SCENES. It was damn good though.

Last thing I ate?
Toast. >_> Yeah I know, I'm always fucking eating toast, shut up. :U

I've been meaning to do think for weeks, so I thought I'd get on it. Some of these might be inaccurate because half of the shit I played/saw in 2009 I might not be able to remember whether I saw it this year.

( Longer than it should be. )

Hope you actually managed to read this without falling asleep. XD Till next time.

I'm not sure about you, but I've seen the movie for the live action adaption of Tekken coming out on DVD in April. If not, watch this shit.



Other than the disturbingly wooden/shit sound effects in the trailer (although this is supposedly a preliminary trailer so I'll let it slide for now), I'm actually kind of hyped for this. After the RE films metamorphosed into the retarded stepbrother of the main series, I've been looking forward to something that attempts to capture the spirit of the game.

Visually, the trailer seems to show that the Tekken film captures the feel of the game fairly well. The characters all look pretty good, with Bryan, Raven and Eddie impressing me the most. Even if Jin's a little skinner than he should be, I think he's not the worst cast choice they could have got for him. At least he hasn't been turned into some bald chap like Steve was. XD It's really weird to see Kazuya with a beard for some reason, but at least the brief amount of dialogue he has in the trailer ("I remember your mother...she put up quite a fight.") seems to give him that cunt-villain edge. XD The film seems to have that hilarious cheesy tone that made bad game movies so much fun to watch, like Street Fighter. As woeful as that film was, it was comedy gold in how awful it was. So bad it's good kind of thing. Unlike shit like the Legend of Chun-Li. |: |

I'm hoping that this film actually surpasses my expectations and either equals, or at least comes close to, the standard of the Mortal Kombat film. (I mean the first one, not the awful second one. But again, it's forgiveable in that it's Street Fighter like in it's ridiculousness).

I guess we'll find out in April. XP

I bought the obligatory movie tie in game for Saw because I'm a total Sawtard as any reader of this journal would know. It's decidedly average however, but I'll break it down as such.

Atmosphere:
Great. It's got all the feel of Saw but to be perfectly honest it smacks more of Silent Hill than anything, to the extent that I was expecting to see a nurse limp around the corner, grotesquely swollen breasts a-flyin'. 8/10

Faithfulness to the franchise:
It's pretty damn good at sticking to the source material, but it's kind of ruined by not having Shawnee Smith and Danny Glover voicing their characters. They may as well have been totally different characters. The traps are pretty sweet though, my personal favourite being the Backbreaker that Oswald was in. Although I did kind of rage after the bastard died nearly immediately after I let him out of the trap after me doing the MASSIVE FUCKING CIRCUIT PUZZLE. The Furnace was kind of lame though. 9/10

Combat:
Don't even get me fucking started. In the time it took me to swing a pipe at some cunt with a nail studded baseball bat, three quarters of my health was gone. It's not totally game breaking but fuck me, I wish I had a pistol on all the time. It is kinda cool that the blood spaltters onto the weapon and it breaks with use, visually. 5/10.

Longevity:
Not bad. The puzzles can be quite stump worthy at times, like Amanda's Detox Chair where you have to predict where the ball of antidote/toxin is going to land using gravity and mechnical reasoning. I also liked the lock picking, mostly because it's so shamefully easy once you know how to do it. XP But don't get me started on those fucking pipes puzzles. I know how to do them relatively quickly now, but when I was starting out, fucking hell, I really hated them. 7/10

Replayability:
Not very good. You'll probably be lucky to play through it once if you're not already a Saw fan. The trophies you can pretty much get in one run bar the ending trophy, but even then you just need to load the checkpoint. The curb stomping one still has me stumped though. >_> 4/10

Overall:
I think it's a pretty fun game, and with a bit of polish, a slightly lengthier play time, and a better combat system, it could have been a really gem. But as far as movie titles go, this is the best you'll get. I'd recommend to give a bit of a bash even if you aren't a Saw fan, but rent it. Don't buy it unless you're a Saw nut like myself.

Final score: 7/10. (Not actually an average, but after working it out, it pretty much is. )

Long story short: Saw VI is the shit. I'll post some form of critical analysis of it once I get my laptop fixed and I'm not relegated to using a fucking USB keyboard and a PS3 for the most rudimentary access to the internet I could possibly find.

I'll also be planning on doing my 'Top 5's of 2009' list soon enough, meaning I choose my top five favourite songs, movies, games, tv shows, moments and so forth of 2009. Mostly meaningless shit, like half of the crap I put on here but screw it. We'll all get a giggle out of the fact that I'm still in love with Poker Face.

So I saw this on Mo's face book and said fuck it, why not? What would my album look like if I were in a band?


...I'm quite amused that I acknowledge my album is badly written in the album title. XDDD

Below are the rules:

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”... Read more... Read more
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Have fun with this!

So, I've decided to continue my Fahrenheit chapter summaries again, Bizarro style.

( Fahrenheit (Chapter 9-14 spoilers) )

More coming soooon.

 So, I finally decided to write down a few things now that I finally have a bit of downtime during these hectic few weeks (and maybe I'll get to recording my podcast as well). I'm pretty content with life at the moment, loving it actually. I've been having an inexplicable burst of positive energy lately, I don't seem to get upset at all with anything lately (other than a heated argument with my brother over an unused scart adaptor). Too much, perhaps haha. I'm finding it hard to sleep lately, I do be going to bed at 5 am to get up for 11am yet for some reason I'm still able to function and stay up till 5am again the next day. I'd say that I'm not using enough energy during the day but I go to the gym for around 2hrs every weekday so I guess that's out. And I do tend to be fairly mobile most of the time. It's not causing me a major hassle at the moment, but I reckon it's going to catch up on me one of these days. Personally, I think that it's because my room is too bright now that I've gotten it renovated (gloss white door and pale blue paint), where as the doors were darker and walls too before the redecoration. But I'll get over it. I love sleeping with brand new bedcovers. Makes me feel very clean. XD

I've also been going on a massive retro buzz recently in terms of games. It started when I bought Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Spyro 3 for the PS1 off eBay. I fucked about with them for a little while, then I decided to go back and buy a few games that I'd never managed to play before. Dave bought me Silent Hill 3 and that really awful Resident Evil Survivor 2, a hilariously frustrating FPS Light Gun game. It's not a rail shooter so I guess it's more of an FPS but the return of Nemesis = jizz in my pants. Also piss, considering he terrifies me as much as he happy maker. 8U I dug out my old Pikachu N64 not too long ago, and got a Gamecube off my friend, so that I could swap the scart connection between the two depdning on what I wanted to play. I'm intending on going into town one of these days and seeing if that retro games shop on Talbot Street has an expansion packs so that I can replay Perfect Dark again. Also, N64 controllers are HORRIBLE. They're disturbingly uncomfortable, I found I had to almost make my hand into a claw to fucking hold the thing. But the games pretty much make up for that. XD Although Pokemon Snap was far more entertaining when I was younger. Now I just take the piss out of it, such as naming my character ASS. I also bought Silent Hill 2 when I was in town as well as the original Batman quadrilogy, but I'm currently battling with whethere to play Silent Hill(s) or finish off Dead Space again, then I want to actually sit down and finish Yakuza too. >_> So while my to-do list in terms of games I'm trying to finish as well as films I'm supposed to be watching is getting smaller, some of it remains annoyingly stagnant. I got back to playing the  Sims 2 as well, and I've been going through the Ace Attorney series again. With any luck, I'll finish Apollo Justice by the end of the week.

I  hosted a party around two weeks back too seeing as I wasn't able to go to my 'Debs', which is the Irish equivilant of the 'Prom'. And it was a major success to my eternal delight. I was getting massively positive feedback on my hosting and bartending skills, which I was quite happy to hear. One cocktail in particular (watermelon liquer, cherry schnapps topped off with apple juice) went down a treat. I was going back and forth making martinis, serving food, playing music and tending bar that I didn't get to sit down and have a good drink myself until around 12.30AM that night, 3 and half hours after the party had started. XD; The last two guests left at around 4am, Dave being one of them. He likes the fact that he was the first guest there and the last one to leave as well. Very Shawn Michaels Royal Rumble style shit, right there. XD I'm hoping to have another party for New Years, but it depends on whether I can twist my mother's arm or not. Hopefully, anyway. :D

I'm not sure what my plans are for the rest of the week. Hopefully, I'll manage to get myself a job, provided I throw a few CVs around the place once I get them printing up. But I'll probably wait to reply till after next week because I'm going to  a party on Saturday, which celebrates the one year anniversary of my party record, back where it all began.

Hopefully, this isn't too TL;DR. XD I'll post more shit later on the week. 

So, I purchased Silent Hill 3 recently and was playing through it. I was horribly confused playing through it initially because I didn't have a fucking clue what to do and spend around half an hour running around trying to figure out how to get into the fucking office at the top of the roller coaster before I realised that you could actually get onto the tracks next to it using a gate beside the the office. I nearly raged. AND THEN I THOUGHT I DID SOMETHING WRONG COZ SHE GOT RUN OVER BY A CART. But thankfully, I woke up and started tarting about the shopping mall. However, I found the scariness to be very overrated. The atmosphere is pretty creepy but it's not as pant-wettingly scary that most people made it out to be but the game did me have tense enough that I actually jumped after I saw a plant because I thought it was a spider or some shite like that.  That and the camera angles tend to startle me.

Heather: lalala *being blonde* dooododo *camera angle suddenly change
Camera: LADDER
Darz: FUCK

I kinda found it hilarious that like every single lock in the game is broken, however me and Doylie Mo have a theory that it was in fact Claudia's overt BRITISHNESS that broke every lock. But my major complaint is that the puzzles are reaaaallly obscure. Like the fucking coat hanger you find in the clothes store being used to pull down the ladder you find earlier. And all the monsters make noises like me eating spaghetti bolognaise. XD 

But I'm enjoying myself so far, and I'll get back to it after I finish my most recently purchased game, Silent Hill 2.

So, I was innocently burning CDs today when suddenly a GAME LEAPT OUT OF NOWHERE and went OH HEY PLAY ME. So I did. AND DEAR GOD IT WAS AMAZING.

You Have To Burn The Rope is the most revolutionary game since Duke Nukem Forever. My eyes brimmed with tears of awe when I first heard the amazing voice acting in the game, which is so amazing that you can't even hear it if you are not willing to BELIEEEEEEEEEEEVE. YHTBTR lulls you into a false sense of security by pitting you against an empty corridor where even a single false step will cause you absolutely no consequences whatsoever. The feeling of despair washes over you when you see the first (and only) high wall in the game, and poses a seemingly insurmountable task where you lay in a state of oblivion until you realise five seconds like that all you have to do is press UP and carry on.

The lack of instruction in the game allows you to really flex your mental muscles as you struggle to figure out what to do next, do I continue down the only way I can actually go or retrace my steps which will lead me back to absolutely nowhere? Only the fittest of mental gymnasts may be able to figure out the complexity of this game and come out on the other end, smelling of burnt rope. 

Only once you prove yourself worthy by blasting your way through the Gauntlet of Death can you fight a boss three times as epic as the goldfish from Earthworm Jim. You furiously bump yourself off him until you are given a visual clue. FIRE. YOU HAVE TO BURN THE ROPE. GENIUS.

The game is reminiscent of Portal with its witty dialogue, an excellently done song that chimes along when you sit through the unbearably long credits, photorealistic graphics and a well developed and humourous antagonist wrapped together in a sheet of sheerly devious puzzles. The thing that brings it above Portal is that it kicks its fucking ass in every single way.

I give this game an unprecedented score of 184219842094280 + 2/10 

Oh, it's on. So, I was rummaging through my mates room like the good friend that I am, and in between the smelly socks and semen encrusted underpants I found a golden egg. SPYRO 2. I was like 'GIVE ME THIS FUCKING NOW'. And then I forgot I had for around a week. But THEN I REMEMBERED THAT I HAD IT YESTERDAY AND I BEAT IT ALREADY. ...>_>;

Yeah, it was a lot longer when I was a kid. And all the hilarious amounts of polygons was just ridiculous. And not to mention, the disc was kind of scratched so the dialogue would just randomly disappear and skip parts, or on one humorous occasion:

Spyro: Woah where the fuck am I
Elora: Oh hai welcome to avaBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

Like I said, I must have been seriously retarded as a kid because when I was younger, I could never get the orb in Fracture Hills when you have to escort the Alchemist to Hunter so he can unfreeze his shoes or some shit like that. But it took me like 3 goes to find out the route he takes and it was piss after that. Funny thing was I was kinda delaying going back to Fracture Hills because of it and all. Magma Cone was amazing though.

Darz: god i remember this level it was so sh-
Dude: och aye the noo
Darz: OH MY GOD THEY'RE SCOTTISH

Also, I honestly thought that Gulp was a harder boss than Ripto. And the ending was so retarded.

Darz: thank fuck now I get to go to DRAGON SHORES YES
Gnorc: sorry you have not worked hard enough for a holiday fuck off
Darz: WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT

I'm dying to pick up Spyro 3 so I can play it and write a review where I take the piss out of Sheila's hilarious Australian accent for the entire thing. So stay tuned kids.

So instead of doing seperate in-depth reviews for all the films that I saw this summer, I'm going to do a break down of pros and cons for each film. Not to mention, I can't really recall all that many aspects from each of these films to write a cohesive review. XDDD Reviews under the cut and spoiler free for the most part.

( Reviews )

And that's all folks. Hope my insights will give you a few suggestions on what to watch out for.

Yeah, I'm alive. Don't worry. As any reader of this journal will probably know, I've been faced with a few problems over the past few weeks and I've been up to my eyes. So I haven't had the opportunity to update this. But I've been watching a LOT of films, and I've got a lot of reviews to catch up on. So when I get my laptop fixed, I'll treat you all with some steady, possibly daily updates.

It's more likely than you think. And extrememe(lol)ly likely now that I'm not arsed writing up part 2 of my I LOVE MGS4 X3 rave because I have one more exam tomorrow and then I'm off camping. So here we go:



List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.



1. I have to stir my tea or coffee 10 times clockwise, ten times anti-clockwise, then ten times clockwise again after I add the sugar. This is inspired from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince when Harry's using the shitty second hand book. :B Really, it's just an excuse to make sure the sugar's well mixed in so I'm not adding more sugar than I need to.


2. While I'm a massive fan of horror games and zombies, I still get kinda freaked out when I'm home alone at night. I always kind of scurry past my front door because I'm half afraid a zombie'll smack off the window and frighten the shit out of me. 


3. As most people know, I'm a massive fan of drinking because I think it creates a really fun atmosphere. Buuut, I refuse to drink lager, like Budweiser or Carlsberg or Miller. I hate them. XD I drink Cider, mostly. Like Bulmers, Kopparburg etc. I'm also a big fan of Mickey Finns, which you can get in a variety of flavours.


4. When I was younger, I thought that girls had penises. This is why I never understood why my mother couldn't just take a piss on the side of the road like me and my dad could.

5. If a person who's not a member of my family comes close to me, I develop a twitch. It doesn't matter if they just move their foot next to mine or lie next to me or whatever. Just kind of a dislike of unwanted physical closeness I guess. All this is dropped when I'm drunk though. I've been described as 'touchy-feely' in the nicest way, perverted in the most direct. XD


6. Contrary to what most people think, I am actually intelligent. I think it's my whole hyperactive, frat boy-esque hedonistic personality that people make these kinda presumptions but I'm far smarter than people give me credit for. Particularly when it comes to English, in which I've been told I'm a great creative writer. I like writing about kids dying. =D 


7. I'm notorious for not being able to sit or lie still. When I'm sleeping, I will toss and turn to the degree that my bed sheets are ripped off the bed and discarded onto the floor. When I'm sitting down, I'm always tapping my foot or fidgeting with a pen or biting my nails or something.

This is one thing off my to do list, and it's like two in the morning when I'm finishing it off after coming in from Dave's and eating my own weight in granola bars, so let's get this over with. Here's my review of the latest Black Eyed Peas album, the E.N.D.

( Arrrgh, massive review and junk )

Final score: 8/10.