Everywhere I’m looking now, I’m surrounded by your embrace, baby I can see your halo, you know you’re my saving grace.

I, uh, mad this. To commemorate the great man himself.

So Hikki’s song for the Evangelion 2.0 movie turned out to be a PlanitB remix of Beautiful World. Based on the 45 second preview on her site, I think one fan described it perfectly – “tolerable”. It truly is a mess. People were expecting a new song, and with no announcement from EMI either way, how should we have known it was just going to be a remix. Hikki though hasn’t blogged in a while, hasn’t promoted her American album This Is The One (it reached #69, then failed), in fact the last we heard of her was that she was ill. This has led people to come up with two conclusions: she’s ill in hospital, or she’s pregnant. Personally, I don’t think either of these things are right, she’s just incredibly lazy. She did this before, and it turned out she was living up iun the mountains in some distant region of Japan, helping cultivate the rice fields or somethnig.

In other news, HMV apparently posted my £4.49 copy of Death Proof on the 15th June, it’s now the 27th and I still haven’t had it. They say after 10 days I should contact them, they will investigate and I can either have a new one posted or ger a refund. However, I am equally distrustful of the local postal authorities, although HMV have now earned a track record with me for being utter shite. I shall be using Play.com in the future.

I watched The Ring Two last night, the American remake on Ring 2, which is itself a pretty awful film.The American one isn’t a direct remake of Ring 2, sharing little storyline (the storyline of the original being opaque at best), but I could still guess exactly what was going to happen, for example, before it started I knew it’d start with a shot of water, (being the main theme of the film), then perhaps a big short of the city, then a family situation. Boom! We get about a minute full of about 7 different shots of the sea, then it expanded into a town scene, then some guy and his girlfriend talking on a couch – and I’m not guessing this based off the original film, I’m guessing purely down to the awfulness of the director. The acting was terrible, the boy completely unsuited to the part, maintaining about as much eerieness as a…a carrot. The woman was awful, but this was probsbly exaggerated by the way she’d been told to walk (entering dark buildings very slowly, going down staircases carefully and looking around with a constant freaked out look on her face). I could also predict the most awful cliches – she walks into her dark old house, what does she do? Of course, she picks up a nostalgiac photo and stares at it longingly! The special effects were gimmicky, didn’t make sense, and were awful – there’s some really horribly animated deer in this film. The story tried to squeeze some sense out of the original, but sadly chose to acheive this by ignoring every sing aspect of the original. Sadako Samara and her mother’s back story also seems to have been changed – but surely they discovered all of this in the first film? They go to the little island and see the volcano where she killed herself, meet the old dowctor, learn of that guy’s magic tricks? No? Jesus, I dread to think what the first The Ring film must be like. Regardless, there was a mildly disturbing scene where some woman pumps her neck fill of air – a completely unnecessary addition. The ending is awful, with the woman shouting “I’m not your fucking mommy!” because of course, swearing just adds dram to any situation. The final scene is something like they all live happily ever after. So there. Although The Crazies is still technically the worst film I’ve ever seen, this was by far the most annoying. I can’t wait for The Ring 3 (which is a prequel, the original was called Ring 0, which makes sense numerically, and also 0 is a bit like a ring, which is nice. But no, The Ring 3 has to do for the Americans.)

I would also like to offer my condolences to Harrison Ford.

Ha I beat Phil and Jamie too it. Wacko Jacko is dead.

Also apparently Harrison Ford is missing and some other guy is dead. Although these may be hoaxes.

Does anyone care about David Carradine anymore?

Meh.

This blog has been re-imagined for the 22nd century, and now features 3, yes 3, people who shall be writing things on it. I am one of these people, Phil. Now look at this picture of Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice In Wonderland:

So I suggest you enjoy it now whilst you can.

Today I did CH4, a Chemistry paper which was a whole load of fun, buckets even. I had revised thouroughly, or so I thought, as everything I didn’t want to come up came up. Section A was crazy. Section B was okay and grew better the longer I stared at it. I may have beaten my score the first time I did this exam. Tomorrow I have Bi4, it’s groovy Biological equivelant. I haven’t revised for it, like, at all, and am expecting the worst. The thing about Biology is that it’s very wordy, and as uneducated scientists these people have no idea how to manipulate the English language to make sense, and so the questions are often quite abstract, most of the time making no sense whatsoever. The entire naming system of science is also to blame, picking randomly from Latin and Greek, words often having double meanings and most words not meaning anything at all.

The new Sherlock Holmes movie looks mildly entertaining, not an epic, but possibly being a bit interesting.

Good-bye!

Gran Turismo PSP really does look amazing. That’s going to be incredible. I had a History exam today. I probably got 100%.

Other Stuff

• Operation Valkyrie is in effect – I’m watching Valkyrie on DVD tonight.
• I’ve decided not to watch Big Brother this year. I know I was going to dedicate my time to watching it, but it’s another group of completely uninteresting people, and I really can’t stand Big Brother’s Little Brother without Dermot, and I can’t stand Davina no matter what she’s doing.
• Apparently Hikki won’t be doing the theme song for Kingdom Hearts III as she ended the contract because Disney wanted too much money. However, this confirms that KHIIImay actually exist. Hikki is doing the theme song for the new Evangelion movie which comes out soon. Meanwhile, apparently in a song on Rie fu’s latest album she writes about getting high on drugs.
• I’ve entered a competition of the UK PlayStation Forums where I could win a sttelbook edition of Killzone 2 (they have 17 to give away) by drawing a picture of peace between the two main warring peoples whoever they are. I’ve entered, and persoanlly think I have a good chance of winning.
• I’ll be getting a proper camera soon so expect lots of photos of me pointing at things in my garden, etc.
• Fallen Angels is a great film, perhaps even more so that Chungking Express, but then, probably not.
• Three great David Carradine films: Kill Bill Volume 1, Kill Bill Volume 2, Death Race 2000. In Death race 2000 he has a grenade attached to his hand (to kill the president). “Is that a greanade?” “A hand grenade.” You probably had to be there, but it’s the best scene in movie history. It may be on YouTube.
• The Conservatives have won Wales, in a UFO catcher.

I’ve decided to make this into a giant E3 post which I will update as the show progresses.

Microsoft Press Conference

Last year I watched a lot of live press conferences on IGN, but this year they demand that you install their new video player, which doesn’t seem to work at all, so I went to Gamespot. The countdown reached zero and nothing happened. G4TV rewarded me with 30 seconds of some guy talking about skating, then fizzled out. I went back to Gamespot to see that it was working.

The conference was full of celebrities, I missed Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono and Harrison’s wife, but they were only promoting a Beatles version of Rock Band so who cares. Then the director and some other guy from Final Fantasy XIII appeared, reminded everyone that FFXIII is coming to 360, then showed us a clip from the already-released-in-Japan demo, albeit with English voice acting (although Lightning and Sazh (pronounced “Suds” by the translator) only said a few words each), and a clip of Odin being summoned. It was less than earth shattering.

Then some guy comes on talking about Forza 3 and how it’s the definitive racing game of this generation. He’s entitles to hi own opinion, but backs it with a lie, saying that it’s the “biggest” racing game this generation as it has “400″ cars, despite GT5 suspected of having more than 600 cars. Physics looked unrealistic and stupid, and the interior view looked poor, a tell-tale sign of a poor game. He brought an Audi R8 on the stage with him, something the Gamespot live update blogger called “an Audi RA”. Fool.

Next Hideo Kojima came on, showed us a teaser trailer for a new Metal Gear Solid game, implied Snake wouldn’t be involved, then buggered off. Sony fans seem to think that this is just a spin-off action game starring Raiden and the real MGS5 with Snake will be a PS3 exclusive. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but I’ve never played a MGS game in my life so I don’t care.

Then they showed off their new controller, which I think is just a camera. Whether this actually works or not who knows, but if they’ve gotten rid of hand-held controllers, well done. The thing where the woman was talking to that Milo boy (or whatever his name is) seemed extremely…sad? It looked okay, interesting on a technical level, but frankly I don’t want to talk to Milo and draw pictures for him. It was kinda freaky.

Spielberg then appeared, I missed what he said, but he went away again which was thoughtful of him.

All in all, a good press conference, interesting to watch, upsetting many MGS and Sony fans I’m sure, but ultimately still showing not many good exclusive games. Forza 3 for example will fail compared to GT5, the Halo series I’ve never played and so don’t care about, and Final Fantasy XIII, the new MGS and COD:MW2 will be coming out on PS3 anyway (COD:MW2 will have exclusive 360 DLC though, but again, I’ve never played it, so I don’t care). Microsoft seem to be pushing for downloadable HD video content, which is fine for people who don’t mind not having something physical, but Blu-ray still appeals to those who do, and is already too well established to be endangered by downloads. There’s no reason why the two strategies can’t sit side by side.

Nintendo Press Conference

Gamespot allows people to comment on their live video feed, something which I found a saviour as this dragged on. Most of the comments were hilarious, mainly because what we were watching was hilarious. All Nintendo seem to do is talk very slowly, emitting empty words and patting themselves on the back for how much they’ve sold. They talked about how they changed gaming with Mario in 3D, the comments board lit up with hopes they were going to reveal something ‘4D’, or at least something mildly futuristic, and then they fabulously showed a new Mario game, in 2D. I couldn’t tell whther this was a DS or a Wii game, I instinctively though it was for the DS, but then somebody suggested that it was for the Wii. If the latter is true, then that’s the most pathetic game announcement I’ve ever seen. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days was shown, with some English voicing, and Utada’s Sanctuary playing in the background, proving that wherever you go there is no escape from Hikki. 358/2 Days was recently released in Japan, and from what I gather from both the trailer and gameplay I’ve seen, it’s crap. A Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game was also shown, looking equally as terrible, although having said that it was probably pushing the Wii to its absolute graphical limit. A thing which you attach to the end of the Wii-mote was revealed, the crowd stayed silent. I found the presenters both boring and patronising, and stopped watching a while later.

Sony Press Conference

I didn’t watch the Sony conference because I was busy “being really busy”, but I went on IGN.com Wednesday morning and found a Final Fantasy XIV logo on the front page. ZOMFG! Oh, it’s Final Fantasy XIV Online. Well, it’s still interesting that a new numbered FF should be announced before XIII is even out. And it’s only for the PS3 and PC. I’ll get it if it doesn’t have a subscription cost. A long new FFXIII trailer was shown with English voices. This trailer hasn’t been released on the Store yet, which is disappointing. The trailer was okay, I generally like the voices, but the trailer was a bit lame as far as trailers go. All the characters talk about is the l’Cie, and what is supposedly the evil guy has silver hair. The trailer ended with Snow saying a rather random and pathetic “…Lightning.” However, Advent Children Complete was released in America and has a 7-minute long subbed trailer, mostly comprising of demo footage, but it ends with Lightning punching Snow in the face a few times, which was great. Snow seems to be a personality void so far. Sony also showed their PS Eye motion controller thing, the presentation of I thought was interesting and entertaining, and looks very fast and more versatile than Xbox’s Natal, which seems to work fine so long as the game you’re playing requires no buttons, which is quite rare as far as games go. The PSP Go doesn’t have an OLED screen, but will be £179.99. There was no announcement regarding how you should go about getting your UMD games on it.. An epic trailer for GT5 was shown, demonstrating damage (on rally cars at least), the inclusion of WRC (the WRC franchise of games being dead) and NASCAR. It was awesome of course, but Gran Turismo on the PSP wowed me. This gameplay footage is by far the best looking thing I’ve seen on PSP. It has 800 cars and 35 tracks with 60 variations. 800 cars. Best of all it comes out on October 1st in Europe and will be available on UMD. An updated trailer for Team Ico’s next game, now called The Last Guardian, was shown, showing about 10 seconds of new stuff over the leaked trailer – the gameplay is very Ico-esque, but the creature is now a lot less cuter.

On Wednesday morning my copy of This Is The One (the American version for £6.99 from HMV.com) arrived, as did the latest copy of Autocar and the Official PlayStation Magazine, and I had just had a Chemistry exam, and later I saw Terminator Salvation, probably the first time I’ve seen a film on it’s opening day. The first half was better than the second half, it descended into lots of random explosions. Eseentially it was a movie I’ve seen a thousand times before. Helena Bonham Carter’s role as the grand leader of Skynet was a bit confusing. Sam Worthington’s acting was good, all Christian Bale did was shout. Kate was a completely pointless character, as were the leaders of the resistance who went around in a submarine. There was a random girl called Star who didn’t speak. Nothing was really resolved in the film. I won’t be getting the DVD. Well I probably will, but not for more than £8.

Anyway, Final Fantasy VII is out now on the Store, which has been given a makeover, making new sounds now and is a lot faster. Unfortunately not all the E3 trailers are on the Store, and the entire Sony press conference is only available as a stream in Home.

Song Of The Week: Wake Me Up At E3