Rihards Unplugged

It’s official! Well sort of official. According to Independent Entertainment News David Duchovny himself has said that they are in the final phases of negotiations for a second X Files movie. The talks should finish up this week and they are expecting to start filming sometime next year.

The only thing which slightly disappointed me I guess is the fact that the movie will not have anything to do with the alien conspiracy storyline, but instead will be a standalone supernatural horror flick. Let’s just hope that it won’t be one of those cheap ass direct to DVD horror movies that no one really wants to watch, but are eventually won over by the bargain price.

Well, season three is over now, the last episode aired last night, and I have just finished watching it a few hours ago. I’m not going to go and spoil it, because I know that quite a lot of people who read this blog and watch the show, still haven’t seen the last episode. I’ll say a few non spoiler things about it instead.

For one, I didn’t find this to be the best season finale that Battlestar has had, season one for example, had a much nicer finale. Secondly, and this is probably just me, the episode felt a bit rushed, or rather they tried to put in so much into just one episode it was getting insane near the end already. But still a very good episode, certainly much better than most other episodes from season three.

For those of you who have seen it, what did you think of it? Do try to stay away from spoilers though if you are going to comment, at least for a week or so.

Just got back from a three hour game of “Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl” and I’ll admit that I was pleasantly surprised and the game is really good. I won’t comment if it was well worth all the delays, I’ll only be able to do that once I play it some more. But the signs so far are good for that as well.

In the game you the player, assume the role of one of the artifact hunters that inhibit “The Zone”. “The Zone” is an area of land around the Chernobyl power plant after an explosion rips it apart. The surrounding land is contaminated by the radiation, in some places so far as to bend the laws of physics and biology.

The game itself is a hybrid of FPS and RPG. More so FPS. The RPG elements concentrate purely on the storyline and character interaction, so there are no levels, no experience, no stats or anything like that. I wish more FPS games were like Stalker actually, imagine an FPS where you can go anywhere you want to, talk to people, get jobs/missions from them, or just go around killing things if that’s your sort of thing, and all that with a compelling background story.

No more running down a single possible path to the end like in other games. No more, enter room one, kill everything that moves, and move on to room 2, and repeat. In Stalker you’re free to wander around, and when you feel like it, you can return to the main storyline and continue that.

Oh and another great thing about Stalker is that it looks great, even better than the last Might and Magic game, and all that without the horrendous saving and loading times.

After watching quite a lot of Naruto, and then Bleach, I realised that I’d like to watch a grown up anime instead. Don’t get me wrong, both Naruto and Bleach are great animes, and an excellent way to spend some free time, but both of them are aimed at children and young people. So I had a quick look at what else has been released over the past few years and was aimed more at grown ups.

Black Lagoon is definitely the answer to that. An anime for grown ups doesn’t mean that it’s all serious and that there is no humour, far from it actually, there’s plenty of humour in Black Lagoon. But what makes it for grown ups, is the setting, the concepts and ideas, as well as problems that they handle, and of course specifically in Black Lagoon’s case, all the violence that comes with the place and storyline that it is set in.

Another interesting thing about the series is that it doesn’t draw a line of what is morally right or wrong. Instead it shows the situation, or the problem from different perspectives, because of what the main characters are. Be it a tough, murdering gun(wo)man or a caring person who does not want to kill.

I’m not going to spoil anything by saying what’s it about, other than it is about a group of mercenaries who sometimes brush against the law to do their job as delivery men. So I’ll just say that you should go out and get it instead, it’s well worth it. And as with almost every other anime, the original Japanese version with English subtitles is a lot better than the English dubbed version.