2007....... THE LOL-TREES AWARDS!!!

It's what you've all been waiting for. Seeing as every website (mainly videogame related) is doing awards, i thought id jump on the bandwagon...

Best Episode of TV
Lost Season Finale - Many YEAH NICE! moments, and a killer ending that reminded us why, despite all the filler, slow pacing and crap flashbacks, we still watch lost.

Runners up - Heroes: 5 years gone - Aahh this was awesome. Pointless, yet awesome; incredibly well made for a tv show - Greys Anatomy -That one with the Bazooka shell... - The episode that made this show go from a fun little hospital show to a real good drama

Worst Episode of the Year
Doctor Who - Christmas Special - jesus, why would anyone voluntarily watch this bullcrap?? Awful in every way, and, as ive been forced to watch them before, even worse than previous years.

Runners Up - lost - That one with Jack and the tatoos... - Any Episode of Big Brother this Year; it was even worse than normal...

Game Of the Year (GOTY YAY!)
Super Mario Galaxy - In the words of Reggie, 'the true successor to Super Mario 64'. Textbook platforming at its finest, imaginative worlds, bosses, and the best music and graphics seen on the wii... its just awesome fun!! Still, i havn't actually finished it yet...- Then again, i haven't actually played a whole load of the games in this 'golden year of gaming' - Bioshock, COD4, Orange box, i all need to be buying...
Runners up - Okami - great painty-wolfy-Zelda released early in the year - Assassin's Creed - Come on admit it, it was good fun

Pre-2007 GOTY
Resident Evil 4 - Thought id add this catagory as i spend half the year playing old GC and PS2 games. Anyways i just got to the final boss of this today, and by god its so damn good!! Kicking Zombies heads off, kneecapping and cutting at their heads, and the kick ass 'WOTCHA BUYING.... STRANGER' Dude

Runners up - Pokemon Yellow, Shadow of the Colossus

Album of the YearKlaxons - Myths of the Near Future - Well it shouldn't have beaten Bat for Lashes for the mercury prize, but this was a good exciting album with some pretty cracking tunes. And wow good keyboards in rock music!!

Runners up - Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worst Nightware - Good 'tricky second album' - Enter Shikari - Take to the Skies - Bloc party - Weekend in the City

Anime of the Year
Death Note - Probably the easiest choice of all these awards, Death Note a brillaint twisty turny plot, well thought out, intricate and clever from beginning to end, and with some of the most memorable characters - ok mainly L - which i have ever seen.


Runners Up - Baccano!, Nice Pulp Fiction-esque mafia story, kinda confusing - Darker than Black - Stupidly erratic in quality, that nonetheless had some of the best episodes i have ever seen; episodes 13 - 14, aswell as a fantastic ending and beautiful soundtrack.

Virtual Console Game
Gunstar Heroes - Now my friend was very much unimpressed by this in co-op, but really he's mental; the game is crazy, a kick ass run and gun shooter with some crazy weapons that you can merge together. Pretty hard aswell and and awesome board gameish final level.

Runners up - Lylat Wars, Pokemon Snap

Art Exhibition
Andy Goldsworthy in the Yorkshire Sculpture park- Don't really feel like writing about this since writing 10 pages on it for an art thesus, but trust me he makes some incredibly interacate natural sculptures, out of raw materials; sticks and stones.

Runner Up - Millais at tate Britain

Best Surprisingly good thing
Mario Strikers Charged - Just fun gameplay and great 2 player per console online made for surpising amounts of fun and swearing on the wii earlier this year.

Runner up - Extras Christmas Special - Not only was this 10000x better than fucking Dr Who, but it was all very moving in the ending - nearly made me cry - and was actually close to Office quality

Nicest thing i ate
Fish in San Fransisco - Aahh it was so good. Went to the same resturant twice in a row cause most the rest were always full. the waiter remembered our drinks and everything. Anyways the meal was gawjus

Runner up - Clam Chowder in Monterey

Oh yeh, and i'm annoyed; nearly got 1000 (unique) hits on this blog, but nearly all of them have come from a measly 3 line post moaning about fireworks. Maybe i should just not bother doing good posts anymore...

Woo lets steal some links!!!

Stolen from other blogs... (Im far to lazy to find stuff myself)

the Excellent Thule Trail

http://www.thuleroadtrip.com/thule_trail/thuleTrail.html

Basically a road trip simulator, which is way more fun than it sounds. Use names of people you know for extra amusement. I got 2495 final score...
(thanks to www.screwyouhippy.com for finding that)

And a Brilliant survey - How many Five year olds could you take in a fight?

http://www.howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com/

This short survey will tell you approximately how many five year old children you could fight at once. Results are based on physical prowess, training, swarm-combatting experience, and the flexibility of your moral compass. Here are the ground rules:

You are in an enclosed area roughly the size of a basketball court
There are no weapons or foreign objects
Everyone is wearing a cup (so no kicks to the groin)
The children are merciless and will show no fear
If a child is knocked unconscious, he is "out." The same goes for you.

I can apparently take only 19. I think i could take way more than that.... gee...

Which leads me to talk about the excellent Dead Rising, which is practically Dawn of the Dead: the game. I picked it up cheap today, as part of the huge backcatalogue of 360 games i need to get, and from the moment i picked up a bench and tore through hundreds of zombies, i knew it was brilliant. Plantpots, Kitchen knives, coat hangers and teddy bears can all be used for comic amusement to make this a great game.


Aaahhh yeaah

Christmas and other such awesomes. And some shit.

The Awesome

- Pulp fiction, Kill Bill, and (surprisingly) Love Actually
- The ending of extras - surprisingly close to office quality.
- Macbook rules the roost in every way
- Gift vouchers and the like to buy Bioshock and Dead rising in the sales
- A cardigan, heh
- Classic stocking... Chocolate and satsumas alike.
- Heima - Sigur Ros Dvd

The Shit

- Forgetting your fucking passwords. Can't use the same godamn one every time cause differnt things have different rules about password lengths. 7 characters is enough alright!!
- My fucking cousin. He has a wii, an elite 360, a ps3, a psp, and a ds. Oh and a laptop. Did i mention he's about 12?
- Msn on leopard
- Having to transfer everything over from pc to mac. Errggh...
- Being forced to watch Dr Who with family... man that program is shit!!

Also, this amused me about the Safari browser...

'When private browsing is turned on, webpages are not added to the history, items are automatically removed from the Downloads window, information isn't saved for AutoFill (including names and passwords), and searches are not added to the pop-up menu in the Google search box. Until you close the window, you can still click the Back and Forward buttons to return to webpages you have opened.'

They may aswell call it 'porn browsing'

Oh yeh and...

Promo for lost season 4...



Looks fucking MENTAL!!

There was some people who didn't like the ending of season 4(cough screwyouhippy cough) But i myself thought it was about the best 2 hours of TV i seen for years. Roll on 31st of January, it's going to be immense. So long as it's better than the first few episodes of season 3 anyway...

And unrelated, i'm playing resi 4 again now, god it's good...

Futurama and other thoughts

Bender's big score is out?? Since when?
Oh wait, thats right, it's not in UK cause we never get anything on time.
Still, it looks good, i expect i'll watch on veoh within the next few days...

Also i now have pokemon snap on the virtual console. it's awesome :D



Also, someone needs to invent a website which lists average playtimes of games. Cause i can't be bothered with long games these days, and also i wanna see how long left i have in the numerous games i need to finish see below

And since yesterday, i have a new favorite film in Fight Club. It' so fucking awesome, if you havn't seen it yet go buy the dvd. I'd always thought it was just about two blokes who form, well, fight club. It's so much more...


Ain't a huge amount i can say without divulging the mega-twist, but believe me it's amazing. And The Pixies' Where Is My Mind fits the ending perfectly.

Meanwhile, theres a hell lot of good films on TV this xmas. Motorcycle diaries, Amelie, Pan's Labyrinth, the Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction, all among the goodness. Oh and theres the Extra's Christmas special, which hopefully will be alright. Not a patch on the office though, obviously.

Top 10 games i never finished playing

Looking though my fairly large libary of games yesterday, i realised just how many of them id never got round to finishing; a bad habit mainly due to getting bored of them.
So heres my favorite games-which-i-never-beat. Maybe this'll convince me to get round to finishing soma them off...

(not counting games i have recently bought)

10 - Jak 3 - This first one wasn't so muych my fault, as my ps2 decided to cock up and die halfway through playing it. I kept the game but gave my memory card to a friend, to get it back a year later, when i bought a new system. But i'd lost all my saves for all my games and didn't much fancy playing through it all again
9 - Dark chronicle - Sequel to the awesome Zelda clone Dark cloud, this was a pretty good game that was for much of the time essentially a dungeon crawler; something i got bored of before the end. Nonethless, fish racing was pretty sweet.
8 - Link to the past - Just kinda forgot what i was supposed to be doing and gave up.... QUITTER!
7 - Final Fantasy X - The only Final Fantasy i have owned (apart from tactics), and as i bought it a for a tenner a couple years after it was released, i just couldn't be bothered with seeing the 50 and whatever game through... Looked good though, from the tenish hours i put in.
6 - Zelda Majora's mask - I'm now waiting for this on VC. I was fairly youngish when i got this, and not the fully fledged gamer that you needed to be to beat this, the hardest Zelda evaarr
5 - Lost in Blue - I actually really enjoyed this game, and got so close to escaping before i gave up. Think it's cause i couldn't be bothered to trek all the way across the island and back, and prepare food and ect. And all with that slow blind girl aswell... (sexism in videogames!!)
4 - Legend of Zelda - Wind Waker - Hey wow another Zelda! Thats right, i couldn't be bothered with the shitty, crappy, bollocks triforce hunt...
3 - Resident Evil 4 - Yeh, thats right, i never finished this. In fact, again, i bought it on the cheap years after it's release, and was damn glad i did. But somewhere on the 4th chapter i got meself a 360, and got distracted by that instead. I'll finish one day though...
2 - Tales of Symphonia - Ok this game was f***ing awesome; if ida finished it woudld proably be one of my top 5 games of all time. The combat system was real fun for an rgp, great cel shaded graphics, and the characters where great (if cliched). But it was another game that i bought years after it's released, and i relaised that i'd probably never have time to finish it when i remembered that, after 30ish hours in, i was still only on the first disk...
1 - Shadow of the Colossus - Regarded by many as the ps2's best game, GOTY and so on, whilst others are completely oblivious to it. For those who don't know, its a game where the only aim you have is to track down and defeat 16 enormous beasts, of 'colossus', in a bid to rescue your girl - and i got stuck on the sonofabitch 11th. No towns, no mundane quests, no sidequests, just killing em. Now this is another which i really, really need to go back and finish playing through, as it again is potentially one of the best games i have ever played, epic and beautiful in every way. It also has apparently one of the best endings ever in a game, though i have been partly spoiled...


Fuck yeh

Heroes season 2 roundup

As you might have noticed, i didn't bother with reviewing the last heroes of season 2, mainly because to be frank i was a little disapointed. Not to say it was bad, but after a friend kept describing it to me as if it were the second coming of jesus, it was abit of a letdown.

In fact, it made the ending of s1, which was shown last week on bbc, seem pretty good, and i remember thinking it rubbish. Still corny though... 'all you need is love'...


Yeh i know, irrelevant image.... but it's cool.

They tied up the Adam storyline nicely, but not very interestingly, and, again, too predictiably. His plotline was pretty sucky anyway. And i still think he'll be able to dig out of that grave, i mean what else is he gunna be doing in there? Expect him back mid season 4 (hopefully not)

They've given us some nice stuff to theorise about aswell; was Noah the killer? Why did he suddenly become 86% less of a badass? And yeh, sylar's baacckk...

Anyway, season 2 was average to poor in comparison to the first, but im still looking forward to volume 3, whenever it will be coming out...

Baccano! - Impressions

Well as you might but probably don't know, i been looking for a decent anime to watch ever since i finished Death Note, but nothing has come close to being as good as it, and i kept giving up on shows after the first episode. But the other day i remembered about this one that id been meaning to watch; Baccano! (yes, the ! really is part of the name)

Anyways its freakin awesome, i mean how can it not be, its an anime about the fucking mafia!!

It has great animation and character design, fitting Bebop-like jazzy music, and decent action scenes, with not shortage of blood and gore. Most cruicially, though, it has an interesting and dynamic plot.

There is a huge ensemble of characters; especially for such a short show of 13 episodes, as you can see from the OP below. The plot cuts between them frequently, as they cross paths and shiz.



So then, Bacanno! seems to, unlike many certain other animes i have watched, have a plot that every episode seems to be contributing to; rather than just a bunch of mini arcs; it almost seems more like live action drama shows like 24 or the sopranos at times than your average anime.
It revolves around this bunch of dudes who have the power to regenerate, this giving some awesome scenes as people are literally ripped apart with miniguns, only to get up, unphased, just a few minutes later.

I shall have to see if this greatness can be retained through the rest of the show... i shall most probably finish by sometime later this week... (!)

Why Opera > your internet browser - Review of sorts

Opera is pretty much the one thing that keeps me from picking up my computer and chucking it accros the room on a regular basis. Heres a screenshot of me running it and a list of 5 awesome features it has.



1 - Tabbed browising - Actaully works, brilliantly, unlike ie, which dies once you have more than about 3 tabs open. Also it had it before ie and hence they copied it...

2 - Mouse gestures - (not seen) Just hold right click, move the mouse to the left, and let go, and voila, you go back a page!! So much easier and quicker than pressing back, or backspace. Also you can clone pages to a new tab just as easily.
This feature warrants the download in itself; saves so much time, becomes invauable.

3 - You can customise EVERYTHING - I made mine red with this nice theme. You can have it looking like ie / firefox if you prefer, or download whatever theme you liek on the site.

4 - Speedial - main page shown - opens when you click a new tab. Practically like having 9 homepages

5 - Add shortcuts to sites on the toolbar; incase opening a new tab wasn't quick enough

Of course there are many more great things; saving sessions, widgets, much more, and it just seems generally faster, and in every way better than internet explorer. Do yourself a favour, ownload it, NOW

Ha, wikipedia

This website shows the top 100 most viewed articles on wikipedia in november

Here are my favorites
8 - Deaths in 2007 (Why are so many people searching that?
17 - List of sex positions
18 - Sex (evidently many people are unsure what this is and need to read up on it
29 - Masturbation
32 - Sexual intercourse
43 - Anal sex
68 - Pornography
75 - Penis (again, people need to find out what this is?)
98 - Vagina

Bear in mind that these all got at least 2 million hits
Basically the internet is full of a bunch of freaks