Rihards Unplugged

This pretty much sums it all up, and it’s not that I hate the game, or the previous installments. I just find it average and all the hype makes it worse.

Just finished watching You Kill Me, and holy cow is it a great movie or what. Really loved it. Shame that it’s probably not going to come to the cinemas here (Austria), or even as DVD. Even greater shame that there will probably be more people who have seen say, Doom movie, or Fantastic Four than this movie.

So what’s it about? It’s about an assassin from the Polish mafia in Buffalo. It tells the story of Frank Falenczyk, a member of this mafia, who has an alcohol problem which starts getting in the way of his work, and he botches several big jobs. So he gets forced to attend AA meetings in San Francisco, and work part time in a funeral parlor.

Don’t want to spoil the rest of the movie. So just going to say that it’s an excellent movie. It’s smart, funny, very dark, but mostly it’s really different and fresh. If you have a chance to watch this, don’t miss it.

Hard science fiction is a sub category of science fiction, and as the name already implies, hard science fiction puts an emphasis on scientific or technical detail as well as the accuracy. And no, that doesn’t mean that it’s dry technical manual. Quite the contrary, some of the best books, and shows that I have seen are hard science fiction.

Planetes, is more or less the only anime that I can name that is hard science fiction. It does stray here and there from time to time, but most hard science fiction does that. Most science fiction anime has things like mecha, huge robots, technology that just seems very silly, or technology that just plain doesn’t make any sense.

Of course there is nothing wrong with that, but at some point, one wants to watch an anime that isn’t filled with fourteen year olds piloting twenty meter tall robots. And this is where Planetes comes in. Planetes takes place in the near future, and follows the story of “Space Debris Collection Section”, a unit of a large corporation.

Yes, that’s right, it’s a hard science fiction anime about space garbage men (and women). And no, it’s not boring, far from it actually. One could say that it’s a hard science fiction comedy, but that wouldn’t be quite true, as with a lot of other animes, it’s light-hearted and easy going, but it confronts many serious issues that people still have to deal with in the future. Death, terrorism, love, hate, camaraderie, betrayal, and much more.

As with all fiction, it’s the characters that make or break it. In Planetes case, the characters are one of the major things that contribute to making this anime a great anime. It’s a very interesting bunch, each with their own personalities. Their own strengths, weaknesses and history.

Another place where I think that Planetes really shines is the quality of artwork and animation. Being true to its hard science fiction setting, the technical details, like small valves, tubes, circuitry and other such things are very detailed. By far surpassing other science fiction animes that I have seen so far, even ones that are newer than Planetes.

As for the soundtrack, well, I’ll say this much, there has been better. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very good and solid, but it could be even better. Just to name a show where I think that the sound and music was handled better in a similar setting, Firefly. And just as with Firefly, Planetes deserves praise for not adding sound to space. Instead they use character dialogue (via suit speakers), and sometimes music.

Overall a very good anime, well worth watching it. If you like science fiction and animes, then Planetes is one of those must watch animes.

Spent quite a sizable chunk of my weekend playing Fable and CoD2, mostly Fable though. Don’t know why I really started playing it again, as there are quite a few things that annoy me to no end, but somehow I just keep going back to it. Always just saying, one more quest, to myself and then playing about five or six through.

Mind you, most of the quests aren’t that exciting and offer very little in variations, or ground breaking things. Quite the contrary, a lot of them are either go from point A to point B, and/or rescue someone from somewhere. But there have been some really cool quests, like gathering books for the local school (it’s actually a lot better than it sounds like), or the chicken kicking competition quest.

One of the really cool things about Fable though as I have already mentioned in previous posts is the character customization. Lots of choices for various things, each armor piece looks differently on your character, and you can combine various armors. Then there’s of course hair styles, beard and mustache styles, and of course tattoos. So you can basically play with a completely differently looking character each time. Especially considering that the scars that your character gets from fighting are unique each time as well.

Overall a top notch game that could have done with some better storyline, storytelling and some more varied quests.