Rihards Online

Just got back from a three hour game of “Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl” and I’ll admit that I was pleasantly surprised and the game is really good. I won’t comment if it was well worth all the delays, I’ll only be able to do that once I play it some more. But the signs so far are good for that as well.

In the game you the player, assume the role of one of the artifact hunters that inhibit “The Zone”. “The Zone” is an area of land around the Chernobyl power plant after an explosion rips it apart. The surrounding land is contaminated by the radiation, in some places so far as to bend the laws of physics and biology.

The game itself is a hybrid of FPS and RPG. More so FPS. The RPG elements concentrate purely on the storyline and character interaction, so there are no levels, no experience, no stats or anything like that. I wish more FPS games were like Stalker actually, imagine an FPS where you can go anywhere you want to, talk to people, get jobs/missions from them, or just go around killing things if that’s your sort of thing, and all that with a compelling background story.

No more running down a single possible path to the end like in other games. No more, enter room one, kill everything that moves, and move on to room 2, and repeat. In Stalker you’re free to wander around, and when you feel like it, you can return to the main storyline and continue that.

Oh and another great thing about Stalker is that it looks great, even better than the last Might and Magic game, and all that without the horrendous saving and loading times.

After watching quite a lot of Naruto, and then Bleach, I realised that I’d like to watch a grown up anime instead. Don’t get me wrong, both Naruto and Bleach are great animes, and an excellent way to spend some free time, but both of them are aimed at children and young people. So I had a quick look at what else has been released over the past few years and was aimed more at grown ups.

Black Lagoon is definitely the answer to that. An anime for grown ups doesn’t mean that it’s all serious and that there is no humour, far from it actually, there’s plenty of humour in Black Lagoon. But what makes it for grown ups, is the setting, the concepts and ideas, as well as problems that they handle, and of course specifically in Black Lagoon’s case, all the violence that comes with the place and storyline that it is set in.

Another interesting thing about the series is that it doesn’t draw a line of what is morally right or wrong. Instead it shows the situation, or the problem from different perspectives, because of what the main characters are. Be it a tough, murdering gun(wo)man or a caring person who does not want to kill.

I’m not going to spoil anything by saying what’s it about, other than it is about a group of mercenaries who sometimes brush against the law to do their job as delivery men. So I’ll just say that you should go out and get it instead, it’s well worth it. And as with almost every other anime, the original Japanese version with English subtitles is a lot better than the English dubbed version.

While reading another blog post at The CinemATTIC I realised that not only did that list have too few Arnold quotes, but also that Arnold could easily have all the spots in a top 20. But let’s not get carried away and pick just the top ten one liners that have come from this great action hero over the years.

• 10. “Run! Go! Get to the chopper.” from Predator. You really have to see this on video to understand why it’s so great.
• 9. “Let off some steam, Bennet.” from Commando, after tearing a piece of piping from the wall and throwing it through the bad guy, Bennet, and into a steam vent.
• 8. “So you cooked up a bullshit story and droped the rest of us in the MEATGRINDA!” from Predator. Another timeless piece of acting by Arnold.
• 7. “Well I hope you left enough room for my fist because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” from The Running Man. See above for reason.
• 6. “You’re luggage!” to a dead alligator from Eraser. Funny scene, witty one liner, something that Arnold is extraordinarily good at.

• 5. “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” from Terminator 2. Quite a bit similar to the one from the first Terminator, but there he only demanded a motorcycle.
• 4. “Hey Benny, SCREW YOU!” while he thrusts a mining drill through the cabin in which Benny is sitting. From Total Recall. Doesn’t get any cornier than this really, but still a great laugh.
• 3. “You’re a funny guy Sully, I like you. I’ll kill you last!” another one from Commando. This one liner is then later followed by: “Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last?”, “That’s right, Matrix. You did.”, to which Arnold just cooly replies with “I lied.” and drops Sully over a cliff.
• 2. “I’ll be back.” from Terminator. No Arnie quote list would be complete without having this one.
• 1. “Who is your daddy, and what does he do?” from Kindergarten Cop. I’m willing to bet that you weren’t expecting this one to be the number one. But everytime I hear him say that line, be it while watching the movie, or just an mp3, or even on one of his countless soundboards, it just cracks me up.

So there you go. My top ten favourite one liners from Arnie. I’m sure that I’ve probably missed quite a few, because this guy is a living and walking book of great action hero one liners.

According to a recent study, most online free blog hosting services actually host blogs that are used just for spamming, also known as splogs. And this isn’t even any particular group of hosters, even Google’s Blogspot is basically one big pile of spam blogs. It’s not as bad as blogsharing, or sitegr, which are basically nearing(or already are) 100%.

This is just nuts, so much money is probably spent on hosting all those blogs, I wonder why they don’t anything about them? Or maybe google actually profits from the splogs?

While we are on topic, I noticed yet another part of my site getting spammed. This time it was the custom signs section. So I had to go clean it up, and code up some anti-spam measures. Very annoying and not exactly something I’d love to spend my free time on. Luckily enough, I think that that was the last user submittable form that wasn’t yet protected from spammers in some way or form.