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much wasted potential

Posted : 6 days, 21 hours ago on 28 June 2008 03:17 (A review of The Pretender)

i'm currently near the end of the third season and i really have to say that this show could have been so great... all the mysteries, interesting characters like jarod and angelo, also the interesting relationship between jarod and sidney

BUT...

there is one character who is so far behind all others that it sometimes really hurts me watching this show - ms. parker. with her intelligence (which is at the level of about a seven year old... and i hope seven year olds who might read this aren't insulted by that...) i bet she still uses her fingers for counting. the only character that manages to surpass ms. parker is brigitte. what the hell were the creators thinking?! "we need a character that competes with ms. parker but it still needs to be clearly visible that she's even stupider than her. ha! i know! let's stick a lollipop into her mouth!"

luckily, jarod has more than 50% screen time... and he hardly ever does something stupid. which is why i still rate this show higher than 5/10. but who knows - maybe i'll downgrade it once i get to the very finish. i just needed to vent and writing a review to warn people who still haven't watched the show and are wondering if they have to bear ms. parker and brigitte for long - you do. so if you don't like the rest as much as i do, better stay away from the show.

-----

having just watched the last episode, i have downgraded my rating from 7 to 6. the whole ms. parker stuff gets even more annoying in the very end and the quality of the dialogue also gets worse - right to the level of some van damme action movie.

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if you enjoyed "adagio" ...

Posted : 3 weeks ago on 13 June 2008 08:38 (A review of Death by Design)

... don't get this album.

apparently, george sarah was into techno before he decided to give trip hop a try. i can't even rate this thing since it would be stupid to give it a bad rating just because i don't like techno in general...

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worst of the series...

Posted : 3 weeks ago on 13 June 2008 03:01 (A review of Tony Hawk's Proving Ground)

..by far. and i've played through all of them. also, in contrast to the many gamers who got bored by the series, i've enjoyed every part a lot - up until this one.

i don't know what the people at neversoft were smoking while they were designing this game. it's like they thought "hey, we'll just throw away all the great basic functionality that made our games great and replace them with crappy stuff that makes for horrible gameplay".

take for example the camera... why don't they just glue it to the ground? the fact that it's not centered behind and - more importantly - above the player any more makes finding e.g. markers on the ground and hitting targets precisely much more difficult than it used to be.

then there's the new balancing scale - what's that all about? that damn thing is all over the screen. i guess the old one was too subtle and easy to handle.

they also figured "ah... who needs a special meter... we had that since... [ can't remember any more - i'm guessing part 2] but who cares about that anyway?" and for taking this one feature out they've thrown in like ten new ones about which i don't really care for.

and just on a side-note - the overall design of the city is incredibly boring.

and on another side-note - keeping all those huge changes in mind, what do you think about the fact that neversoft says that with the tony hawk game they will release this year, they want to do something completely new, in order to keep up with the competition (skate)? what was THPG then? that thing featured more changes than ever before and it turned out to be crap - so what will a game be like when the developers actually set their mind on creating something completely different? but well... back to this games.

what i have to give it credit for is the huge amount of goals and the great-as-always soundtrack. but that's it. if i wouldn't be so addicted to tony hawk games, i probably wouldn't have played it longer than an hour or so.

so if you're a fan of the series like i am, you might still enjoy it, even though you might feel like a masochist at the same time - to other people i'd strongly recommend playing just ANY older part.

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fantastic trip hop album

Posted : 3 weeks, 2 days ago on 11 June 2008 07:41 (A review of Love in the Time of Science)

this is one of the rare trip hop albums, i now and then find that manages to blow me away. not that there's a lot of trip hop i don't like listening to, there just isn't really a lot of trip hop around to begin with.

but anyway... i discovered torrini because i was listening to "summerbreeze" (which was played on buffy) and figured "let's see what else she did". i think i listened to samples of her music once before and didn't get a good impression and now i know why - this is her only trip hop album. pretty much like every other trip hop artist i know (take e.g. portishead), she abandoned that style. instead, she decided to only do pop/country-sounding stuff afterwards (except for collaborations).

it's really a pity since i was amazed by this album right from the first time i listened to it. beautiful und melancholic sounding instrumentals and just as beautiful singing... this is probably what björk would sound like if she would sing in a "usual manner" (a lot of people have mistaken emiliana for björk in a song that was played at the end of a part of lord of the rings) and use instruments not quite as experimental. because also in "love in the time of science", there are some strange sounds thrown in... but they integrate very nicely, they don't produce too much chaos within the song... which is the feeling i mostly get when listening to björk's songs.

to sum up: if you like trip hop, you just have to at least listen to samples of this wonderful production :)

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not the great show i remembered it to be

Posted : 3 weeks, 6 days ago on 7 June 2008 04:32 (A review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

buffy used to be one of my favorite shows ever and i rated it 10/10 but now that i'm watching at once more after a couple of years, i can't help but realize that i probably got way too sucked into it back then.

the stories are mostly really great but buffy is pretty annoying, dawn is probably the most annoying character i've ever seen in any tv or movie production and the "big bads" of season at least season 4 and 5 seem ridiculous (i haven't watched 6 and 7 yet, can't remember the finale of season 7 any more).

i don't know why they added that stupid "hyper-girly" character or why they couldn't see that neither adam nor gloria were interesting, it's really a pity because that show had such huge potential. but at least angel mostly succeeded where buffy failed.

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Adagio review

Posted : 1 month ago on 3 June 2008 10:55 (A review of Adagio)

this is one of the best trip-hop albums i've ever listened to. beautiful slow melodies and haunting female vocals... well... just the way trip-hop is supposed to be - at least in my opinion ;)

unfortunately, george sarah and sarah folkman split up after the release of this album (which was in 1999...). so there's no chance whatsoever to get new material by THC.
george sarah did start a supposedly (i don't know enough about it) successful solo carreer but his sound developed in a more experimental, less melodic & emotional direction.
as for sarah folkman - she did additional vocals for some other bands but it seems like no more trip-hop lead singing for her: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Sarah+Folkman

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And All That Could Have Been review

Posted : 1 month ago on 30 May 2008 04:36 (A review of And All That Could Have Been)

i have to say that nine inch nails usually is not my cup of tea - except for their ballads. which is why the second cd on this album is very important.

even if you're sceptical about NIN, give this one a chance and try to find samples or something of that second cd. it features some of the most beautiful piano ballads i've ever heard. i really don't know just how many hours i've spent listening to them and they still touch me.

to me, it's really a pity that NIN doesn't do more songs like these, i'd buy every album they release...

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very enjoyable but lacking in some respects

Posted : 1 month, 2 weeks ago on 21 May 2008 12:05 (A review of Dark Sector)

a friend of mine compared this to "gears of war" when he recommended it to me. while he might be right about that when it comes to certain aspects of the look and the controls, i think it can't compare at all when it comes to story. with "gears of war", even though the story isn't exactly the pinnacle of storytelling either, you always have a feeling of how the plot constantly progresses. not so with "dark sector"... you run and run and run and then maybe there's a cutscene here or there. and some of those cutscenes don't even seem to be particularly relevant to the story.

but it looks great, it has nice features (although e.g. the weapons upgrading feels more like "well... it is in there" than something they really thought a lot about - feels a lot better in e.g. resident evil 4), hacking away at those monsters is a lot of fun, which is why i would still recommend it to action fans. just don't expect it to be a game that gets you hooked immediately until you finish it.8/10

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highly overrated indeed

Posted : 1 month, 2 weeks ago on 21 May 2008 11:22 (A review of Amélie)

first off, i want to preface my review with some quotes... only one has an actual source, the others are pretty much just sayings which i still find to be very true:

"OPTIMISM, n.
The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong." - ambrose bierce

"pessimists are optimists who have reflected on things"

"optimism is simply a result of lack of information"


that said, i suppose people who know the movie already are by now probably able to tell why i think that "amelie" fails in every way it can when it comes to transporting relevant messages about life. no, not everything is dark and bad but not everything is just cute and cuddly either. those who don't know the movie yet but think that above quotes are quite true - well, better stay away from "amelie".
apart from this shallow attempt at a story there's amelie herself as character. she is portrayed in such an awful way that i started avoiding movies featuring audrey tautou fearing she might once again have that frozen cocky smirk that makes me more aggressive than... listening to the spice girls. or something in that category.
that was until i saw her in "dirty pretty things" and didn't even recognize her without that stupid grin - but that's another story (and a great film - go see that instead!).

i think there is only one positive aspect worth mentioning (which "doudouce55" also already has in her review) and that's the decent photography - which is why i give it 2/10 too.2/10

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just say 'no'...

Posted : 1 month, 2 weeks ago on 17 May 2008 11:51 (A review of Sonic the Hedgehog)

this game is utter crap.
now to back that up with some reasons:

.) the amount of detail in environments is almost the same as in "sonic adventure". the character models are a bit better but still not nexgen-worthy. damn, sega should look at some of their other games - like virtua fighter 5!

.) the camera is horrible. once you jump high up in the air, it doesn't seem to know what it's doing any more and starts to jump all over the place like some raver on speed.

.) tails throwing "ring bombs"?! give me a break, this is really the stupidest new character feature i've ever seen in a sonic game. you don't even have a crosshair for aiming those damn things! and controlling the flying tails feels like... i can't compare it with anything else, i never had to control a flying something in a game which felt this bad.

.) incredibly long loading times. i was even doing some stuff on my pc in the meantime but still couldn't stand it.

maybe this sonic part has even more crap to offer but i didn't even want to finish the first level!
until after sonic adventure 2 i loved almost all sonic games - which makes the disappointment just bigger.

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