Category Archives: Fun

Things I’ve found fun.

Films, Fun, Interesting

Paprika and Appleseed

Hmm, while I still have a few games to post about, there were two Japanese anime films I watched today (not in ideal situations, but there we go). Might as well report on them 🙂

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The first, Paprika, was a very fun film to watch. A wonderful look at dreams, and how they reflect or act on reality. A little muddled in the story department because you’re never quite sure if the entire thing is a dream at one moment or the next (that’s no spoiler, this happens in the first few minutes of it starting), so highly entertaining – the characters themselves, and their dreams, are equally both amazing and sometimes more then a little confusing 🙂

I’d recommend seeing this, since it is both polished and an amazing experience to take on board – much deeper then most films to be honest in many ways. This is the intro which hosts one damn catchy song which I have no idea what it is saying showing off the titular character, I’ll say no more. It gives you a good general idea about the films theme without going into some of the spoiler scenes I saw when I watched the trailer.

[youtube width=”320″ height=”264″]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xqg3Sw3s9Wg[/youtube]

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The second was Appleseed, a sci-fi action film. Yeah, that’s about it to be honest. You are best to usually ignore the bits which don’t make sense (unexplained things abound, and serious troubles getting me excited about a climax due to a keyboard fault) and go along for the ride. One unique thing is that rather then traditional flat animation, it’s 3d cell shaded animation. It’s a bit unnerving (no uncanny valley, but everything is quite shiny).

The action throughout is good, if a little random and pretty atypical of many action tropes. This, with a story where you’ll likely see the ending a mile off. I’d say give it a shot only if you like sci-fi action and have some time to spare.

Possibly I’m giving Appleseed a bad rap, but I’ve seen good conversions of books and comics to films, and this suffers (possibly a lot was left out, certainly a lot of the explaining if anything!). It does have a sequel, and is defiantly more of a “series” film, so if it does interest you I guess the sequel would be interesting too.

I watched both with subtitles, since that’s what I had available, and I suspect for Paprika it fits a lot better too, to be honest (Appleseed I doubt it matters as long as the dub is reasonable).

Fun, Videogames

Technology and Videogame Podcasts/shows

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I’m half interested in promoting that I listen to these, and also half wondering what other ones I’m missing out on – but I’ve been listening to weekly podcasts for a while now and having some more for when I travel and so forth would be awesome. List any you think are good in the comments please 😀

I personally listen to, in no particular order (and with RSS and usually iTunes links on each page):

  • One Life Left – which has irrelevant humour, some surprisingly good discussion randomly, and mostly some great features and the odd bit of music. Is also an hour long, which is nice.
  • Tech Weekly by the Guardian’s team. Yes, I still dislike the the “Videogames shoved into technology section” part, but I’d likely listen to it anyway (in addition to a videogame one. You listening Guardian?), since it has a good mix of technology news and discussion, and with some good comments about what is in each episode I have missed the ones I don’t want to bother with.
  • Idle Thumbs now has 2 podcasts – a UK and USA one. I’m going to listen to the UK one this week, and the USA one is good – rather random discussions, and also a big bonus in the form of funny songs 🙂 There’s some good writers and people who do the shows, despite the very American “Well, you know” thrown around a lot. Worth a listen!
  • The Rock, Paper, Shotgun Wireless Show is a nice if a little hard to hear one, randomly produced whenever the RPS guys get together. I’m a PC gamer so it’s all good for me.

I’m also going to see what the Mega64 podcast is like, although I’m looking for more to listen to. I’m willing to expand my horizons, simply because there’s barely a few hours of regular content in the ones I currently listen to since some are so happenstance (with One Life Left and Tech Weekly being the most regular).

Fun, PC Videogames, Videogames

Rough Guide to Hydro

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I decided on a whim to enter The Guardian Gameblog’s “Rough Guide to Videogames” competition, and I actually won one of the prizes! I decided to not to a typical “guide”, but a classified report on Hydro. Since they couldn’t include all my snapshots from the game (with real letters on them and everything!), I decided it’d be worth posting here.

June 1968 declassified US Government Intelligence Report
Area codename: HYDRO
REF: ZYZZY/01304

Located in the Nevada desert, the Alpha Electric Dam (Fig. 001) powering the local farms is the front for a Builders League United (“BLU”) run intelligence gathering facility (Fig. 005) located in the engineering area, where the vast majority of the hydroelectric power goes to BLU radar operation (Fig. 002).

Reliable Excavation Demolition (“RED”) instituted a underground base (Fig. 006) hidden at the main entrance used to stage a take over the facility. RED had previously detected BLU's spying activities, and so tunnelled a secret entrance without their knowledge to counterspy before attacking the facility outright.

Constant fighting to take control of the entire facility took place once RED attacked half the facility, the Dam (Fig. 001) and Radar (Fig. 002), cutting off the main entrance to the facility in the process. BLU retained control over the Turbines (Fig. 003) and engineering area (Fig. 004).

Special security doors (Fig. 007) were put into action by BLU to stop RED's access to all areas apart from ones BLU wanted to retake, although they also stop their own movements. Access to each of RED or BLU's hardened bunker facilities is only allowed once the rest of the facility is taken due to the power required from the Dam to force open the entrances to the intelligence bunkers (Fig. 005, 006). Even once the facility controlled, reinforcements from the opposing side airdropped in to retake half the facility again, restarting the battle afresh.

The entire facility was finally destroyed when the Dam was blown in a espionage activity by both RED and BLU personnel simultaneously (Fig. 008) leaving the area flooded (Fig. 009).

Intelligence pictures obtained from BLU and RED agencies, contracts SPY/083875 and SPY/083876.

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Hope it sums up well the general feel of the map, since it hasn’t got much “backstory”, and obviously nothing to interact with as such in it, I made up what I felt was right. 🙂