Hangmen’s Birthday Party (celebrated a day earlier)
No. of Attendees (Human): 7
No. of Attendees (Waifu): 1
No. of Attendees (Other): Approx. 522 (Facebook List + Twitter Follower)
No. of Cakes: 0 (It’s a lie!)
Social Proficiency: +50%
Actual Fun: 9/10 (minus 1 for Sunway Pyramid’s management being a complete arse towards cosplayers during Animax Festival)

YES, that’s right! Unlike previous birthdays, my birthday this time was celebrated with real, actual people!

Tl;dr: Nothing wrong with being single, and Christmas cakes are always nice. And to all my frequent visitors as well as those passing by, thank you for giving me a reason to keep this website alive and kicking!

Japanese airsofters playing a Ghost Recon-themed survival game last 15th of July 2012 (yeah yeah, slowpoke), all sponsored by Ubisoft. Perhaps the main highlight of this event weren’t airsoft players donning the signature half-skullmask featured in the latest Ghost Recon game, but rather the dual-wielding ‘battlemaid’ (seen around 2:59 of the video), who stylized herself to Black Lagoon’s Roberta. Participants of the event were also given free t-shirts, Ghost Recon velcro patches, and barbecue as well!

Ever wondered how it feels like to be reincarnated as a pizza? The recent video ad showing the president of Domino’s Pizza promoting a Hatsune Miku-themed Domino’s Pizza app had spawned this rather sensuous MikuMikuDance parody featuring none other than Hatsune Miku herself (in her Miku Append outfit) eating a pizza in a manner that left everything else for the imagination. And they say it’s rude to play with your food!

Kudos to RocketNews24 for their in-depth analysis upon a topic of extraordinary mystery for every Level 30 virgin paladins out there: the difference between the lawfully governed real bounce physics and the healthily exaggerated anime bounce physics. I think you guys could write a thesis for that! No, I’m not kidding, seriously.

Dead Space 3 is a much longer game than I thought. I’ve been marathoning through the past three nights (nighttime only, for obvious reasons) and I’m still about six chapters behind the finish line. In actuality, most of the time spent is on exploiting the ‘resource glitch’ where resources in certain areas (rather, MOST areas) respawn everytime I exit the game and reload from the latest checkpoint. One hour and a half spent resource mining had left me with a pretty overpowered Necromorph Sushi Maker™, enough Medikits to run an intergalactic pharmaceutical company, and more than enough ammo for a moderately sized platoon of stereotypes by the time I reached the sixth chapter.

Without doubt, as the last game in its series, it does feel tirelessly overstretched, noticeable through its gameplay prolonging attempts which seemed deliberate rather than a complement for the game (obvious collapsed paths and forcefully blocked exits aside). The inclusion of sidequests are nice, but if only they’re not causing the checkpoints to bug out on occasions, and that the areas themselves are not copypasted from other rooms and halls of other previous sidequests. Making the second character John Carver only available for online co-op is a pretty dick move; who would want to play a ‘scary’ (no. 3 is a quote unquote kind of scare) game where there’s another living person with a BFG-9000 holding hands with you? And some sidequest forces you to have the aforementioned babysitter present before you can proceed through. It seemed as if 21st century gaming got ‘too far ahead of time’ that game developers forget there is a more sensible game mode for a second protagonist like “Scenario B” or “Separate Ways”, which CAPCOM had done with the Resident Evil series back in the late 1990′s.

But really, it’s not like any criticism against games churned by gaming industry powerhouses such as Electronic Arts would affect its profit a significant lot, because all of you would still happily purchase it, right? It’s like refusing to vote for any party in a particular election, and you’d still have to settle for carnivourous raptors and ancient witch doctors sitting on the thrones of Babylon regardless who won the rat race.

And I still enjoyed the Dead Space series overall no matter what I said.

CREDITS

Image via Pixiv

January and February of 2013 had been a month dominated by action-packed movies starring the stars of The Expendables in their own separate, unrelated misadventures full of God Mode and infinite ammo. This is, for most parts, a summarized impression and less of a full-fledged review.

BULLET TO THE HEAD

Hard-boiled and tense, it’s Stallone at his best playing the popular archetypal character that we commonly relate him with: reclusive antihero, in this case an assassin with a heart. Character development between Taylor Kwon’s idealistic ‘good cop’ and Stallone’s ‘cold business’ veteran assassin are nicely fleshed out, and despite the presence of a ‘plot’ (quote unquote) involving some sort of highly influential antagonist who could hilariously be substituted with 300′s Xerxes, the movie never lost its focus towards the two main cast of this movie and remained consistent throughout. I’m also very impressed with Stallone’s ability to keep up with a lot of rough fight scenes despite his age; a far cry from what became of his nearest rivals Seagal and Arnie (do scroll down for my impressions on Arnie’s The Last Stand). This is one bloody good standalone Stallone movie in recent times outside of the other infamous franchise movies (The Expendables, Rambo, Rocky) we’ve come to as asssociate him with.

A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD

It’s numb, it’s dumb, it has Russians. It’s the kickass John McClane and his equally kickass son. It’s got absurd car stunts, all-you-can-eat lead buffet, and moments seemingly ripped off from one of Call Of Duty’s scripted sequences. I don’t think I need to say anything more about movies within the Die Hard franchise, which has never disappoint me with its straightforward premise of Bruce Willis playing the good bad cop in situations beyond comical absurdities. In case you’re celebrating Single Awareness Day with several other (un)lucky bachelors, this is the movie to watch on the 14th of February. YIPPIE-KI-YAY!

PARKER

What does Parker, Chev Chelios, and Frank Martin have in common? They all sound the same, they all feel the same, they’re all played by Jason Statham, and they’re all in the hate list of every nitpicky movie reviewers. Statham is one of the few rare cases (save it for the aforementioned) in which an actor who barely has any dimension in his acting could easily pass off with the audience’s seal of approval through his rugged mannerism and undoubtedly macho British accent.

Like any movie with Jason Statham in it, it will not surprisingly have Statham’s character angrily chasing after and wanting to tear the ballsacs off from the people who wronged him and getting them into fifty different shapes of “OH FUCK MY ARMS, LEGS, AND UNBORN CHILD ARE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE FUCKING BALCONY AND HE’S STILL STOMPING ME IN THE FACE!”.

Everything’s in this movie seems to be rolling in the right direction until Jennifer Lopez shows up. Her appearance is akin to Shia LaBeouf’s inclusion in the Bayformers franchise. It’s too goddamn forced and I’m sure others who had seen this movie are dumbfounded over J’Lo’s actual purpose of getting stapled onto the movie with the relevance of a ‘One Dollar off!’ discount coupon for a brand-new Aston Martin. Statham’s character already had a competent female companion who’s already an established love interest in the movie. Why would anyone want to chuck in another female character with a crush on Statham by the time the movie covers 60% of its total runtime? J’Lo’s character serves as a comic relief for most parts, which awfully contradicts the movie’s serious theme of violent revenge, with blood and bodycounts to match.

Parker is still nonetheless a decent movie to watch so long as the audience kept their eyes on Statham, ignoring there ever was a forcefully injected acidic irritant with two pairs of inflated balloons present in it.

THE LAST STAND

How would you feel about watching a Schwarzenegger movie where Arnie is barely relevant until the action starts near the almost end? That sense of absence is exactly what I felt when I watched this movie. It’s almost like a sad prank by the movie director to push Arnie into the background until the point of insignificance was reached, where supporting characters actually took centre stage and played far more crucial roles than the main star of the movie ever did. No, killing a barely developed side character does not add to any emotional drive in the story, and neither is juggling forced gags here and there, where moments that the humour does actually hit right at the funny bone are few and far in-between.

Arnie’s an old, tired dump truck on its last leg, which is surprising considering how other Hollywood action movie veterans around his age range (Stallone, Willis) could physically keep up and perform better than he does. Perhaps it’s about time the rusty, vintage Terminator himself gets deactivated and scrapped for good. Voice acting career and thirty-second commercials from now on? I doubt it. Ask Steven Seagal.

PS: I gave myself a good laugh because I kept naming this movie as “Last Man Standing”. Not like action movie titles mattered that much.