CANADA

I am currently in Canada, which is pretty awesome. I have just visited Ottawa, the capital, after visiting Quebec City yesterday and Montreal for the first 3 days. I have a few rants about travel that are too short to post as a full post (I don't want to flood my blog with posts that are bitty) ,so here they are:

• First off, tour groups. Tour groups are the scourge of all independent travellers, because they make all the lines longer, bunch together in front of the site you're trying to take a picture of and generally make everyone else feel uncomfortable. The people who take tours seem to instantly revert to a primitive herd mentality and bunch together like Armageddon will happen if they don't stick with the group. They travel around in big buses that really destroy the atmosphere for everyone else, they make loads of noise and the guides are so boring you want to commit suicide. I hate them.
• In underdeveloped countries, all the hawkers really get on your nerves.
• Other things that annoy me when I travel:
• Tour guides.
• European waiters.
• Screaming children. Everywhere.
• Pompous security guards.

That's all I have for now. Apart from that, travelling is awesome.
Shipping out to NYC tomorrow\:D/

Check out Black Rebel Motorcycle Club-Beat the Devil's Tattoo.

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Movie Review: Super 8

JJ Abrams' newest movie,Super 8, is a fun blend of alien and youth adventure movies. It is set in the 70s sometime, and 6 kids are trying to make a horror movie about zombies.  They are filming a scene at a house next to a railway track and a crash occurs, which the director (probably a semi-analogy for Spielberg) thinks is fantastic for his "production value", but has disastrous consequences for his town.
Watch the movie if you want to know the rest, I don't want to spoil it.

I was, however, surprised at how unoriginal Super 8 was. It seems a bit like a tribute to E.T. with bits of Indiana Jones thrown in (not that this is a bad thing), but it is slightly disappointing that Spielberg's nostalgic film tribute doesn't have a great original plot.

Abrams stresses the importance of kindness and understanding for when humans have First Contact. This may seem like a corny idea, but as we progress, we have to keep that in mind... anyway, backt ot the review. There are quite a few tropes of both the alien and youth-adventure genres in Super 8: The bad authority figure (an evil, sadistic USAF colonel), the hopeless parent who is good at heart from the youth-adventure genre and the protagonist who saves the day. The movie is not original in most aspects, as you see, but what saves it is the nostalgic feel and the 70s setting.

Super 8 is not a masterpiece, but it's a fun movie and definitely worth seeing. Peace.

7.5/10

PS: I saw it at the IMAX \:D/.

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Review: Plague by Michael Grant

Hey everyone.
Mull over this review of Plague by Michael Grant.

Plague is the 4th in the FAYZ series. You'll need to have read the first 3 books or you can get a basic outline for the first three books from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_(series) (only read the synopses for Gone, Hunger and Lies). It's a good series.

Plague continues following Sam and Co, however several important characters do die in Plague so when the next book (Fear) comes out, the character pool will be slightly diminished. The new aspect introduced into plague is of serious diseases, one is a cough that makes you cough out your guts, and the other is a parasitic infection in which bugs eat at you from the inside. Nasty.

As you'd expect, Sam and Co have to save everyone again, however the problems do escalate and are more serious than in the previous books. I liked Plague, but I think it's time for Michael Grant to pull the plug. He is going to drag it out if he keeps writing.

7.5/10

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Karma

First off, I'm going to start posting a lot more regularly, even though I will be away for my entire school holiday.

Secondly, I am now going to rage about "karma" in video games.

I don't really understand what most game studios are thinking when they put the idea of "karma" in games (except for Naughty Dog, who made inFamous). If you don't know, karma is basically the type of personality you choose to have in games, be it good, bad or neutral. The thing I don't understand about karma is that no matter which karma you choose, the storyline stays extremely similar.

If karma only makes the NPCs go :o (shock) and run away, what's the point? Game studios need to make karma have a bigger effect on the environment (again, refer to inFamous), for instance being chased by the law, or having underworld connections. I really don't think giving someone horns or a black aura is satisfying. Also, I'd like karma to evolve out of the RPG genre, because, frankly, after a while RPGs get very boring and monotonous.

I understand that studios have a deadline and can't always finish and buff all the details of the game, but I'd rather have no karma aspect than a bad one. I'd particularly have liked Lionhead (the creators of Fable) and Bethesda (the RPG masters) to have taken karma into serious consideration. Mull it over.

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