So, I watched Shutter Island today in the movie theater. I have to say that I enjoyed it, though I disagree with one review that says “the twist will keep you guessing until the end”. If you keep a close eye on everything (and I don’t really watch that many thrillers; I’m more of an action/comedy man), the twist kinda makes sense. I had it figured out about an hour in…well, half of it, anyway.

WARNING: Thoughts and plot spoilers below.

Click to read more…

Category: Movies
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: shutter island, spoilers, twist endings

I’ve played through about half of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom thus far, unlocking 13 of the characters’ total endings (I may pick a team of Frank West and Zero, just to see how well they’d work together; I didn’t have much success with Karas and Casshern).

After you complete Arcade Mode, there’s a mini-game that you play during the end credits with Yatterman villain Doronjo, and you have to ride across a series of bumpy hills on a bicycle with her and her henchmen in order to collect all of the gold letters that are placed in the credit names (they spell out “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING”). Accomplish this, and you unlock another mini-game called Ultimate All-Shooters, which is a fixed-scrolling shooter (kinda like Commando) where you control Ryu, Ken the Eagle, Tekkaman Blade, or the PTX-40A mech suit and shoot down Akrids (the beasties that infest the Lost Planet universe) and other bug-like creatures through four stages. So far, I’ve beaten it with Tekkaman Blade, but I’m not sure how the path selection works, so I guess it’ll be a while before I achieve 100% completion in that mode.

My next goal is to finish Arcade Mode with all of the secret characters (Frank West, Zero, Joe the Condor and Tekkaman Blade – the last one I think I already finished with) in order to unlock Yatterman-2, Yatterman-1’s girlfriend and partner-in-buttkicking. This journey should be…interesting, to say the least.

Category: Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: mini games, tatsunoko vs. capcom

The weather’s looking nice for the next few days, so I feel like it’s time to take a trip out of the house. Tuesday is the big release of Final Fantasy XIII, though I doubt I’ll be able to get my hands on it because I haven’t been able to get out to any store to preorder it. If I do get a chance, I may go down to the movie theater near the GameStop down there and watch Shutter Island while I wait for the smoke to clear (at the moment, it’s the only movie in theaters that’s supposedly “worth seeing”). However, there aren’t any showtimes posted before 3 PM for any of the movies, so I may have to wait and order this one through Amazon.com.

Category: Movies, Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: amazon.com, final fantasy xiii, gamestop, shutter island

And all I had to do was answer some trivia to win this...

This figurine (called a Trexi, after the company that distributes them) was given to me yesterday as a prize for a trivia question I answered on Gamespot when Dark Void was released two months ago. I don’t even remember whether I answered it correctly…The e-mail that I was sent notified me to expect my prize within two weeks. It also came as a pre-order bonus for anyone who bought the game. Since I didn’t (and probably won’t, because I wasn’t very impressed with the demo), scoring this figurine didn’t cost me a thing.

The figurine is supposed to be Will in the jetsuit that he uses throughout the game…though with the round head and stubby arms, it could easily be mistaken for a miniature Strong Bad. The head, arms, and legs can rotate, although they’re a bit too stiff to be used for advanced poses. I think these Trexis are meant to be collected rather than played with (note the “This is not a toy” warning on the bottom of the box). Figurines like it sell  for about six to eight dollars – I don’t know whether that’s in U.S. dollars or Singaporean dollars, so it probably won’t go up in value. On the bright side, it’ll go nicely with the Ryu figurine I got when I pre-ordered Street Fighter IV.

Category: Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: contests, dark void, gamespot, prizes, toys

It seems Sony is having another one of those “Strongbad techno” moments. A great number of the old-model PlayStation 3 units (the ones released before the high-capacity “PS3 Slim” models) experienced an inability to connect to the PlayStation Network, and found out that a bunch of other items had been bugged (namely calendar dates and trophy data). Many suspect that it’s a date programming bug, similar to the big Y2K kerfuffle, but with a bad leap year count instead of a bad end-of-the-year count. New-model PS3 Slims and PSPs seem to be unaffected by this glitch.

Yeah, I’m aggravated by it, but I’m not getting too worked up about it. I do have a few other consoles, after all, so I’ll just keep playing with them until the smoke clears. The  SonyPlayStation Twitter is posting updates, and recommending that all users of pre-Slim PS3s (myself included) not turn on their consoles until a solution is found.

Category: Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: glitches, playstation 3