The World's End Review

So, much like most of the movie seeing world, I could only see The World's End starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and a load of funny English people after it's official release. I have to say it was good, very good. Now before I go any further I'd like to warn you that there may be spoilers, I'll try not to, but I may include them, and thusly, if you haven't seen the movie and you want to see it, please stop reading now and continue after you have seen watched it.

Seriously, stop reading, go see The Worlds End.

Okay, back? Good movie huh? Okay, now on to my review.

This movie is very much like the other two films in the Cornetto Ice Cream Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), with over the top characters and story. The story, in a nutshell, without giving up more than what you'll see in the commercial, is that five friends come back together after twenty years to attempt a 12 bar run for the second time. And then something goes wrong, horribly horribly wrong, and that's when the comedy starts. Luckily the cast have gotten very comfortable together,  as they have worked on many many films together in the past, which made the characters very believable, which made the story much more believable. One major difference between this film and the other two in the series is that it is actually a lot darker. While I'll admit Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were both dark comedies, this film has more dark than dark comedy. As with the first two of the trilogy The Word's End deals with the common themes of societal acceptance, conformity, humanity, and balancing the wants of the many with the wants of the few.

The entire cast puts on a great show, but Simon Pegg who plays Gary King, a washed up cool kid who refuses to relinquish his past puts on the best show. While we are more commonly known with his performances in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz where his character plays by the rules, King refuses to do that. King is a much grungier character in comparison, and because of that, watching him play the role, while convincing, is a little unsettling because it is very much not the bubbly Simon Pegg we're used to.

Overal the movie is a very well done movie that will make you laugh, cry and wish that there were more than three in a trilogy.

Bart in Trouble

     Hey everyone, so I have not been on this blog for a while, like a year and a half long, so I decided to start back up again with a very important topic for us in the Bay Area, the Bart Strike and everything that surrounds it.

     From my understanding, Bart employees want more pay and better pension plans even though they're one of the better payed agencies of their type in the nation. The pay increase I don't think is the issue, it's actually fairly justified with the increased cost of living in the Bay Area as well as the fact that they haven't had a general pay increase, what I don't understand is how the unions can believe that getting a pension without putting a penny into it is reasonable.
     Unfortunately, because all the talks between Bart and the Union Leaders have been behind closed doors, we have no idea how much progress is going on, but from what I've understood, little to no progress is actually being made.
      Luckily the governor of San Francisco has made it so that the workers cannot strike for 60 days, which I don't think they should be able to do in the first place. All the others transit agencies in the Bay Area CANNOT strike because they are such an important part of the infrastructure of peoples lives. While our systems are not as comprehensive as New York City's, Bart striking, in my opinion, is on the same level as part of the New York Underground deciding to strike.
     Overal, I feel that the Bart situation is being mishandled by both sides of the table. The union needs to understand that what they are asking for is too much and Bart needs to realize that the pay increase is not unreasonable.

     If anyone has anything they would like to contribute about the subject, please, share them in the comments. 

Campus Movie Fest

Hey Everyone! So a couple of weeks ago I entered into the Campus Movie fest, unfortunately I did not get into the top 16, but it doesn't end there, if I get the most views I get to go to Hollywood, so it would be awesome if everyone could watch the video here

Sony's 'Welcome Back' Program Officially Launched

On the morning of June 4th Sony finally released their welcome back program for their users. The program has both it's positives and negatives. On the upside the Sony is letting users who joined before the outage two free PS3 and PSP games, a total of 4 games to keep for good. While the game choices are very limited, the games are some of the more popular ones so most people should be able to get something they enjoy. Also, everyone gets a free subscription to the PS+ service, those who weren't previously enrolled get 30 days, those who were already subscribed get 60 days. And everyone has one month to redeem these products.

There are also a few things that I'm a little peeved with. For instance, Sony is also giving free weekend movie rentals, but only for this weekend, and there are some people, such as my self that aren't able to get them since we're away from out PS3s for the weekend for one reason or another. While I can't complain much since it is FREE it would be nice if they allowed the movie rentals up for a full week as so more people get access them.

In any case, all loyal fans that stuck through the extremely long outage get a decent welcome back gift, which is very appreciative since Sony didn't really have to give anything out, though it was good PR to do something. What most people are happy about is the fact that we can once again use the Playstation Store, and that, hopefully, Sony will be taking a more affirmative plan to their security measure.

UPDATE:

I forgot to put what games are available for each system.

For PS3 you can choose two of the following:

• Dead Nation
• inFamous
• Little Big Planet
• Super Stardust HD
• Wipeout HD + Fury

For PSP you can choose two of the following:

• Little Big Planet (PSP)
• ModNation Racers
• Pursuit Force
• Killzone Liberation

Note: To read Sony's official blog posting on the welcome back follow the link below:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/06/03/welcome-back/

Persona 2: Innocent Sin Announced for PSP

On march 24th Sony announced on their official blog that they will be releasing a game that never made it to North America, Persona 2: Innocent Sin. This is very exciting news for Persona and Atlus fans in North America. For many Persona fans this is the missing chapter to their collection. With the momentum that the Persona series has gotten since the North American release of Persona 3, it was only a matter of time that Persona 2 come around.

Luckily for fans of the series, we will not be getting a re-release of the 1999 game merely ported to the PSP. Atlus will be making many improvements to the game, such as 16:9 ratio, revamped animation, added gameplay, and remixed music.

The reason why Innocent Sin is so important to the series is that it was the transition from the first person games that focused dungeon crawling, to a RPG that focuses more on story and character development that made Persona 3 the hit it was.

As with all persona games, the story will be dark and twisted, but will have a story that will keep you wondering what will happen next.

According to the Playstation blog we can expect Innocent Sin to come out fall 2011, both in stores (which'll probably have an added bonus) and PSN

For more details and to see my source:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/24/lost-persona-chapter-persona-2-innocent-sin-coming-to-psp/

Opinion-PSN Downtime

As many know, it's been about a month since the downtime (which officially went down April 20th) and only over the last weekend did the network finally have a partial restoration, while we still wait for the playstation store service to come back online. This has possibly been the worst catastrophe to happen to date to sony's playstation line since it's inception. Generally speaking, the playstation line has done rather well. It has had good exclusive games, a strong system, and has never had much of a hitch, excluding the grinding start of the PS3, and now the downtime caused by hackers.

Never, in my experience with sony's playstation, which has been since the original PS system, has anything that has ever happened to the playstation been as frustrating to the users. It wasn't so much as the fact that the network was down for almost a month, or the fact that PSNs nearly 77 million users had their information possibly exposed (though that was pretty darned frustrating), but what was frustrating was the lack of communication to the users and developers. After the initial estimates that sony gave on when the system would be up, which they failed to stick to, sony completely gave up on giving any sort of ETA, or any information on what they might be doing, or what users might be able to expect. Being left completely in the dark left their users frustrated and questioning whether or not sony actually cared about it's gamer customer base.

Another major frustration is that the whole situation could have been prevented. Reports from various sources that reported to G4TV and 1Up said that the security system for the PSN's servers were weak at best. according to those reports, these servers had no firewall, which any computer system built in the 2000's should have. Sony hardly ever updated their console systems, unlike their PSP systems, which seem to get a software update almost every month or two at minimum. Had sony taken such security measure with their PS3 systems as they did their PSP systems, they could have prevented, or at the very least made it much more difficult for hackers get into their servers, or possibly Sony, with updated security, could have possibly detected and prevented the hackers from getting into their systems.

Overall, sony did not handle the system as well as they could have. They should have taken preventative measure, such as regular updates to the PSN and PS3's system, as well as the fact that they could, and should have kept users and game developers in the loop, at least enough so that they have some sort of knowledge of what's going on. Hopefully sony will learn from this event, and prevent something like this from ever happening again. It will take a long time for sony to reinstitute an image of a company that has a strong system and has the users safety in mind.

Survivor Finale-Caution Spoilers

So tonight was the season finale of Survivor: Redemption Island, which has been one of the stranger Survivor seasons I have watched. For the fourth time Boston Rob came back to survivor (most returns of any Survivor participant), and for the first time he won the million dollars grand prize, and honestly I believe he deserved it. He played everyone perfectly, and got people that would normally stick to their guns, backstab others for Rob sake. Rob was able to get Matt to go to redemption island for almost the entire time he was on the show, which was extremely taxing on Matt.

Matt probably the hardest time on the show this season. Constantly in exile, alone and unable to make bonds with the other players because everyone on redemption island is pitted against each other. If anyone was more deserving of the million dollars over Boston Rob it was probably Matt, but unfortunately he lost the last duel challenge on redemption island before reentering the show, which put him on the jury.

The new addition of the twist of redemption island which gave people voted off a second chance to get back in the game at the end of the show was an interesting twist, but I wish they had implemented differently. If, for instance, the winner of each duel had been able to enter the game the next day instead of at the end of the game, they may have had a better chance of surviving the game. If, for instance, Matt had been able to reenter the game earlier on, he may have been able to rekindle relationships and possibly made it to the final three.

Overall, the season was an interesting, and the twist of redemption island made it more suspenseful, but could have been done a little better and given those on redemption island a better chance. Like the introduction of the jury several seasons ago, redemption island is both hated a loved by the fans and completely changes the game.