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Former Reviews
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
-Inglourious Basterds
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Paper Mario

Info about the movie
Title: Magnolia
Year: 1999
Genre: Drama
Duration: 180 minutes

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This movie was recommended to me by a friend of mine. It was a great recommendation in my opinion. I really loved this movie from the beginning to the end.

In this movie, there are NINE main characters who all have a storyline of their own. These characters are:
- a police officer
- an old, dying man
- the old mans nurse
- the old mans famous and lost son
- the old mans much younger girlfriend
- a TV quizmaster with cancer
- the quizmaster's drug-addicted daughter
- a wizkid
- an ex-wizkid

Although some of these characters have direct connections with each other, altogether they do not seem to share that much in common. However, during the course of this movie you'll see that their stories slowly start to intertwine. I expected it to go to a personal confrontation between all of them, mainly because the introduction of the movie focused so much on 'coincidence'. But that's not really what happens. I'm not gonna say what does happen, because I think I'll spoil it too much for you if I do.

The ending is a bit surprising and gives something to think about. I didn't quite get it myself at first and thought that it was weird. However, after looking it up my opinion changed drastically and although I'm not even sure if I completely get it right now, I think it is actually a brilliant way to end the movie. So my advice to anyone who does not get what the ending means: Look it up! Otherwise you're really gonna miss something and that's gonna be such a shame.

Technically I don't think there is much to complain. The acting was good enough, but nothing too impressive as far as I could see. Nice role for Tom Cruise though who won an award for his performance here. The soundtrack was very nice. There aren't many songs included in this movie, but the songs that are in it are used very effectively. I remember somewhere between the first and the second hour of this movie there is this loop playing for a long time. You see the camera switching between characters more often and the pace starts to pick up. It is as if some master plan has been set in motion and everything is going a bit too well for everyone. I really loved that personally. Also, there is this scene where "Wise Up" by Aimee Mann is played. All characters hear this song and start singing along with it. I know it may sound a bit cheesy, but this is probably the most crucial scene in the movie and I think it's wonderfully done.

Overall I think Magnolia was a unique and awesome experience. It is definitely one of the best movies I have ever seen. To anyone who hasn't watched it yet: I strongly recommend it.

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Info about the game
Title: Paper Mario
Console: Nintendo 64
Year: 2001
Genre: RPG, Adventure

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This is an RPG that mostly characterizes itself by its simplicity. And the simplicity is really the strength of this game, but perhaps also its weakness.

It's pretty clear that this game is mostly aimed at children who do not have much experience with big RPG's yet. There is no complicated plot-line, no big dungeons, no complex characters, low damage and HP/FP numbers and in battle there are only five options (of which only two types of attacks). There is also no big equipment and statistics system, a low amount of status effects and most items simply heal Mario or attack the enemy.

The story is basically that Bowser (who else?) has stolen the Star Rod, a legendary rod with unlimited power, and imprisoned all the star spirits. With the power of the Star Rod, he kidnapped Princess Peach and lifted her castle up to space. In order to save the princess, Mario has to free the star spirits that are held imprisoned all across the land. There are seven star spirits in total and finding them is a pretty standard procedure: You got to a new area on the world map, solve a problem there to get access to the dungeon, solve the puzzles there, fight the boss and free the star spirit. Simple. I personally always like this set-up since it's clear at what point you are in a game and what lies ahead of you.

Usually the puzzles and problems that you have to solve along the way are quite simple and obvious. You see a crack in a wall, you know you have to blow it up etc. At one point you have to use buttons to elevate platforms in order to get across a gap, but it doesn't get more difficult than that. Personally I would not have minded a bit more difficulty, but since it's aimed at children I could forgive that. Not having to use a walkthrough on an RPG was also nice for a change.

Which brings me to another point, one of the biggest pluses of this game in my opinion. Like I already said, there isn't much of an equipment system in this game. All you have is a hammer which can be upgraded, boots which can be upgraded and you can collect badges that do favorable stuff like raising your HP/FP/Attack/Defense and such. Every other RPG that I've played so far had miss-able items and equipment in them and I HATE THAT. Honestly. It simply forces you to have a walkthrough next to you in order to get the maximum out of the game. Paper Mario on the other hand doesn't have any miss-able items in it as far as I know. So I could finally play through an RPG without having to worry about such things.

The levels and statistic systems in this game are also quite simply as I already mentioned. As in most RPG's there is a level system based on experience that you get from battles. After you gained 100 so called "star points", you gain a level. Once you gained a level, you get to pick an upgrade which can be upgrading your HP, FP (Flower points = MP) or BP (Badge Points allowing you to wear more badges). These numbers don't go up that high, by the end of the game I was level 23 with 55 HP, 50 FP and 30 BP. This was another nice thing in my opinion. No worries about whether to upgrade Attack, Speed, Magic, Stamina, Luck. Just three simple stats that can easily be balanced.

The battle system in this game might be one of the best in an RPG I've ever seen. Unlike most turn-based RPG's, you actually do have some extra influence over the amount of damage you deal during an attack. What you gotta do in order to do that differences with every attack you use. For example, in a jump attack you gotta press A just before hitting your enemy to do double damage. For Mario you can only do a Jump and a Hammer attack, but in the course of the game you get several 'partners' who all have different and more complicated attacks. You can only have one partner on your side during battle though. Anyway, these partners can be upgraded in the game using 'upgrade blocks' which you can find in every dungeon and major areas. By doing this, the partner becomes more powerful and learns new moves. It's nice that they did this, because I think otherwise the battle system would be a little too simple.

Technically this game was also good. I didn't really liked the 2D-characters in a 3D-world thing, but everything looked very bright and colorful and the special effects were alright. The soundtrack of this game annoyed me a lot in the beginning. Mostly simple tunes that really got on my nerves. But I had a feeling it got better later on. Especially the theme played during the battle against the Ice King was great in my opinion.

But as I said in the beginning, the simplicity might also be its weak point. The game had a very low difficulty level example. I never had any trouble with any of the bosses and I died only once at the hardest enemy of the game (Kent Koopa) because I came unprepared. Even at the final boss battle I wasn't even close to dying, even though the battle lasted quite long. Also, you can rush through this game and have it completed within 20 hours which is not long for an RPG.

Overall I think if you're a hardcore FPS player than you shouldn't play this. However, if you're not too bothered with the low difficulty and feel like wasting some time, than I think might get a lot of enjoyment out of this game. I certainly did at least.

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Info about the movie
Title: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Year: 1998
Genre: Drama, Drugs
Duration: 120 minutes

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I watched this movie late last night with a bunch of friends, and I think late at night is not a very good time to watch this movie.

During the entire two hours this movie lasts you see the two main characters, Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), stuck in a bad trip. You see them hallucinating, vomiting, getting panic attacks, talking gibberish and all kinds of other things that could be associated with having a bad trip. At first this idea appealed to me a lot since I'm a big fan of psychedelic, mindfuck movies. But this movie turned out to be a bit of a letdown in the end.

One of the reasons is that it is very hard to stay focused while watching this movie. Most of the events that occur are very random, there is almost no linearity in the plot. So you really gotta keep paying attention constantly because otherwise you'll probably have no idea what's going on, if you had any in the first place. For the first 30 minutes you can probably do fine, and I think that was when I enjoyed it most. After that the movie started to lose me. It really seemed to be going nowhere with the plot and all I saw was the two main characters wandering around aimlessly talking gibberish to themselves and each other. The occasional hallucination scenes were interesting though, but I've never had so much difficulty in watching a movie through until the end.

Then I was hoping for and expectation a very awesome ending to all of it, but I think this is where the movie disappointed me most. The ending did not satisfy at all, and to me it only showed how thin the real storyline of this movie actually is. The actual plot could probably be summarized in two or three sentences and that is not very impressive for a two-hour mindfuck movie in my opinion.

Technically the movie was pretty good though. The acting by Johnny Depp was very good (as expected) and I loved the soundtrack. A lot of classic 60's and 70's music passed by like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Also, everything was filmed very nicely and the special effects were effective. Effective enough to make you feel spacey yourself.

To summarize everything: Technically the movie was very good, but the thin plot line and the unsatisfying ending ruin it. But it could very well be that I simply missed the big picture. Anyway, if you are planning this movie in the near future, I would advice you to watch it alone. A few shots of vodka might help with enjoying it to the fullest.

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Info about the movie
Title: Inglourious Basterds
Year: 2009
Genre: Drama, War
Duration: 153 minutes

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When I went to the cinema, I went in with very high expectations. After seeing the trailers for this movie, I have been eagerly waiting for it for months. It turned out that the movie was nothing like the trailers at all. On one hand this was a bit of a letdown, on the other hand this was a pleasant surprise.

The movie opened with a rather long scene involving Hans Landa doing his SS-job on a small farm in France. You could feel a lot of tension in this scene and the end of it was quite satisfying in my opinion. This scene was also pretty much the ONLY background-story that you get in this movie. All new characters that are introduced after this scene just seemed to 'be there'. Of course they have their reasons to be where they are, but those reasons weren't really worked out. As a result, a lot of characters came over as caricatures. None of them really had a complex personality. Some viewers might not like that, but I wasn't really bothered by it. You didn't need to think much about who is who and who did what.

After the first scene you get to see the Basterds for the first time. This was definitely one of my favourite scenes from this movie. This was what I expected the movie would be like. We see the Basterds doing their job, which is 'striking fear into the heart of the Nazi's'. Of course this goes in a very violent and cruel way. I loved it.

The point where this movie felt like a letdown was the full hour of dialogue after dialogue without any action at all that followed the former scenes. I know Quentin Tarentino is really good with writing brilliant, funny and clever dialogues, but I had a feeling they weren't so interesting in this movie. So from the first Basterd scene until the big night at the cinema, I was getting pretty bored and disappointed to be honest. There weren't many scenes with the Basterds either. It was mostly focused on the story of Shoushanna and her struggles with the high officers of the nazi army and them allowing her to show Goebels movie in her cinema. Hans Landa also played a big role in all this. But the Basters mostly operated on the background, which was too bad. I would've loved to see more of them. Especially more of their methods to scare the Nazi's.

From the start of chapter 5, the big night in the cinema, the movie got way better though. The pace seemed to pick up and you could see all the story-lines coming together, like in a real spaghetti-western. The scene opened very nicely with David Bowie's Cat People playing loudly as Shoushanna was preparing herself for the big night. The ending of the big night was just awesome, as in really awesome. The final scenes with Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and Hans Landa ended in a hilarious way. It was the first time I ever heard an audience applauding in a cinema when the credits started rolling.

The acting in this movie was pretty good, even though most of the cast was pretty unknown to me. Especially Hans Landa was superb. He really stood out most between all the other actors. This guy was able to speak four different languages fluently and still managed to act well in all of them. Which is a very difficult thing to do I've heard. I wouldn't be surprised if Christoph Waltz got an Oscar for this role, honestly.

The soundtrack of this movie was also really good. Cat People was awesome as I already mentioned. A lot of the other music was composed by Ennio Morricone. The man who also took care of most music in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West (also Spaghetti Westerns). I really love his work and he does another great job here.

Overall I think this movie is probably the best movie of this year (so far at least). If you're a Quentin Tarentino fan and don't have trouble sitting through an hour of dialogue, then I think you're gonna like this movie.

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Info about the movie
Title: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Year: 2004
Genre: Drama, Romance
Duration: 108 minutes

Won an Oscar for Best Script

------------------------------

When I first heard about this movie I did not expect much from it. I could hardly imagine a romantic movie with Jim Carrey was any good. I´m not such a big fan of Jim Carrey movies in general and I simply hate the romantic comedy genre. But some friends of mine told me that this movie was really good and that my expectations were far from the truth. It turns out that they indeed were.

Plot summary
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In this movie, a doctor Howard (Tom Wilkinson) invented a certain machine/therapy with which he can erase parts of peoples memories. After breaking up with his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet), Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) finds out that she underwent such a therapy. Not being able to deal, emotionally, with the idea that his girlfriend does not know or recognize him anymore, he decides to erase her from his own memory. However, during the therapy he finds out that he still likes her a lot and he does whatever he can to resist his memories from being erased.

There is also a sideplot involving doctor Howard, Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Mary (Kirsten Dunst) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) playing mostly in Joel's house where Joel's memories are being erased. You could say this sideplot mostly focuses on the bad ethical side effects of erasing people's memories.

----

The erasing of his memory is filmed in an interesting way in my opinion. You basically see Joel walking around in his own memories, going back and forth all kinds of important events in his life. Mostly his moments with his girlfriend. Often he 'replaces' himself in the memory and tries to figure out a way to stop the deletion of that particular memory. It is all done quite well.

As for the technical aspects, the acting was pretty good in this movie. Everything came over very natural and I was honestly a bit surprised to see Jim Carrey not playing a lunatic for once. Kate Winslet was also very convincing as an ... impulsive, alto-girl. The soundtrack in this movie was NOT very memorable. I didn't recognize or remember a single song, but I believe there was not much music in it anyway. One big plus of this movie, in my opinion, is the length. It is only about 100 minutes long which is quite short for movies these days. Most movies I see/have are at least 2 hours long, which often makes me lose my interest in watching that movie. Unless I really have nothing to do and still have a whole evening ahead of me.

Overall I thought this was a very enjoyable movie. If you're looking for a lot of action/scares/thrills etc., this is not the movie for you. But if you're also a fan of cleverly made movies which require some thinking to fully understand the plot, then I think you're gonna love this one as well.

For the past few months collecting movies has become sort of a hobby for me. And often when I watched a movie, I feel like writing down my opinion or say a few words about it. I didn't feel like going to some official movie sites like imdb to drop my opinions there. Mostly because I feel that I really gotta do my best to write something good. So I decided to put them here instead.

Beside movies, I'll probably also do game reviews or whatever else reviews occasionally.

On a sidenote, I'll try to spoil movies but I can't guarantee the reviews are entirely spoilerfree. So if you care too much about spoilers than you probably shouldn't read them.

On a second sidenote, I don't really play modern games anymore so most of the games I review are probably gonna be from the N64 / Playstation 1 and earlier eras.

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Movie Reviews
09/30/09 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
09/30/09 - Inglourious Basterds
10/03/09 - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
10/12/09 - Magnolia
10/15/09 - Hero
10/30/09 - The Pianist
11/17/09 - Up
12/19/09 - 01/03/10 - Christmas Holiday Films Reviews

Game Reviews
10/08/09 - Paper Mario (N64)

Other Reviews
07/21/09 - U2 / Snow Patrol Report (live concert)

First off: If you don´t care about U2's music, care too much about spoilers or are only gonna comment something like "U2 sucks", you better stop reading now. I´m open for discussion about how good/bad U2 is, but retarted one-liners are gonna be deleted as soon as I get to them. So don´t bother writing them.

If you have anything else to say to me, chit-chat or whatever, you can also comment here if you like. You can still recommend me some DVD's if you want to for example (see my former blogpost).

Yesterday I visited one of the two concerts U2 gives this year in the Amsterdam ArenA. I went together with my parents, brother, my girlfriend and my brothers girlfriend. My gf was pretty excited since it was her first time at a big concert and all. I just hope I haven´t ruined all her future concerts with this. Since once you´ve seen U2 live, you really stop being impressed by most of the live performances you see after it :) At least, that´s how it goes with me.

Anyway before I get started about the main act, U2, I´d like to say a few words about the supporting act which was Snow Patrol. Snow Patrol is one of favourite bands and I was really excited that they were also gonna be there. I´ve seen them earlier this year and I was very impressed by their live performance back then. But since they were only a supporting act this time, there wasn´t such a big show with animations and videos and all. It was just a dry performance without much spectacle and it only lasted about 45 minutes. I was slightly dissapointed by this to be honest, but it was still a good supporting act overall.

I´d say, if you´re very much into hard rock and metal you might not like them, but otherwise I recommend you give them a listen sometime :)

Alright, on to the main act. First, here´s the setlist for those who are interested. Including a bunch of high-quality vids of the performances I found on youtube. To give you a better idea of what it was like.

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Setlist
intro: Space Oddity (by David Bowie)
Breathe
No Line On The Horizon
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Beautiful Day / Blackbird (snippet)
Mysterious Ways
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For / Movin' On Up (snippet)
Angel Of Harlem / Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough (snippet)
In A Little While
Unknown Caller
The Unforgettable Fire
City Of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
Let's Dance (snippet) / I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Pride (In The Name Of Love)
MLK
Walk On / You'll Never Walk Alone (snippet)
Where The Streets Have No Name
One

Encore:
Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
With Or Without You
Moment of Surrender / 40 (snippet)

------------------------------

Starting with Breath was a bit of a suprise for me. I was pretty sure they were gonna open with Get On Your Boots, like they always opened with Vertigo and Elevation on their former shows. I was glad they did it this way though, since I don´t like Get On Your Boots that much and Breath is one of my favourite songs from their new album.

But obviously they were gonna play Get On Your Boots somewhere, it being the promotional single for their latest album and all. It came right after No Line On The Horizon as the third song performed. I must say, GOYB does pretty well live and the show they build around it was nice. Lot of light effects and epilepsy stuff and all, gave it a lot of energy.

After that Magnificent came and that concluded the opening of the show, which is probably the same in every show of their current tour. During these four songs, I was fairly overwhelmed by the whole event. Even though this is my third time at a stadium concert, it´s still very impressive to see such a large stage, crowd, show, everything.

Anyway, now the suprising part of the show came and after some vague singing by Bono (couldn´t make out which song due to the bad sound in the ArenA), Beautiful Day started. I was a little dissapointed by this, because Beatiful Day is one my least favourite U2 songs. At the end of the song Bono did a snippet of Blackbird (by The Beatles). My gf is a Beatles fan and I told her they might cover something from The Beatles because they do that sometimes. So that was pretty nice, even though it wasn´t a full song :)

Then Bono said something like "Let´s get some funk in here". I was a little worried for a moment they were gonna play Stand Up Comedy, a terrible song from their latest album in my opinion. Fortunatly he meant Mysterious Ways. I was really happy when I heard The Edge strike the first notes. I really wanted to see this song performed live and not from a video. People around me also seemed to like it. Everybody started dancing and moving and cheering, it was really nice.

The next song was Still Haven´t Found What I´m Looking For and again I got a bit dissapointed. It was performed in almost exactly the same way as they performed it four years ago. With a speech beforehand while the guitar is already playing and all. SHFWILF was followed by Angel of Harlem. Not such a great song imo, but it was a nice performance. The Don´t Stop Till You Get Enough-snippet afterward was kinda funny.

A little speech by Bono came which again I couldn´t understand due to the bad sound in the ArenA. I think he wanted to dedicate In A Little While to some friend, but I´m not sure. Anyway, In A Little While is a nice song and perhaps my favourite non-single from their ATYCLB-album. But like the former two, it is a slower, more relaxing song. So the energy I had after the first six songs faded a bit at this point.

The next song, Unknown Caller, was introduced with a short scene where they made contact with the space station. Unfortunatly the microphone of the astronauts didn´t work, but they showed some papers where they quoted the line "The future needs a big kiss" from Get On Your Boots. "Okay" was all I thought. Unknown Caller had a bit of karaoke-ish performance and it was a nice wake up call to me.

Next up was The Unforgettable Fire. I was glad to see this, since the last performance I saw of it was from 1987. The big screen above the stage started to stretch making it look like a whirlpool (see City of Blinding Lights video). It looked nice, but weird. Anyway, it was a good performance of this song.

City of Blinding Lights then started, a good song from their last album, but since I already heard and saw it on their last show I was hoping for something different. On top of that, I thought the Vertigo Tour performance was better. The same goes for Vertigo which they played after.

Then my favourite part of the show came (see video). The whole arena started to turn into one big discotheque. Larry grabbed a Bongo and Adam got himself a fancy, sparkling, golden bass guitar. I had no idea what song they were playing. I thought it was gonna lead to Discotheque from their Pop album, then I thought it was a Pop or Zooropa song that I didn´t know about. Turns out that they a discoïfied I´ll Go Crazy If I Don´t Go Crazy Tonight from their latest album. I really loved this part and I wish they made a similar version on the album.

Unfortunatly after this, all the usual songs started to pass by. The songs of which I told my gf that they were definitly gonna play them. Sunday Bloody Sunday, Pride, Where The Streets and One with Walk On and MLK as a change. I was hoping that they were gonna skip these for once and in my opinion the show kinda died here. I noticed that people around me started to sit down and everybody was getting a little tired. Where The Streets Have No Name always does really well live though, I can´t really get tired of that one.

After those songs, they said their farewells and left the stage. But obviously they were gonna come back for an encore. I was really glad to see them come back on stage with Ultraviolet. A song that I haven´t seen performed live since 1993 or so. What I especially liked about this live version is that it was sung in a way where it reminded me of MacPhisto in the ZooTV era (U2 fans probably know what I mean when they see the vid).

When Ultraviolet was over, With Or Without You started. Another song they almost always perform on their shows. I wasn´t very interested in this song, since I must´ve seen at least 30 live performances of it by now in reality, on youtube and on DVD's.

The final song was Moment Of Surrender. A pretty good ending in my opinion. They finished it with a snipped of 40. At that point I knew it was the end of the show. They again said their farewells and left the stage. The nice thing was, they walked off stage and walked through the gate almost directly below us. So I got to see them from up close, about 10 meters away from me. It was a bit dark though, so I couldn´t see them too well.

Conclusion
I thought it was a really good show again and another very nice experience to be at such a big event. A bad point I´d like to mention though is that beside Ultraviolet and Crazy Tonight, none of the live performances sounded that special this time. Most songs performed sounded very similar to how they sounded on the other tours of this decade. I was hoping they were gonna change the sound and performance a bit more, but alas.

Another bad point in my opinion was the lack of Boy, Zooropa and Pop songs and the relatively high quantity of All That You Can´t Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb songs. Like I mentioned earlier, I´ve already seen a lot of recent live performances of those songs. I´d much rather hear songs from the earlier era´s.

But all in all I really enjoyed it and I´m glad my girlfriend loved it as well :) Both of us sure had a great experience.

To finish this report, here´s one of the pictures I took:

So I just got back from my 9-days-holiday. This year I went to France on a 'surfing'-vacation with a bunch of friends. Let me tell you, I can not recommend to go surfing.

Most important reason being that it is a very tough sport. Carrying the surfboards to the surfspot alone is already a big trouble and annoyance. The surfboards are just too large for their weight. They catch a lot of wind and water so that if you don´t point them in the direction of the currents, they start rotating and it´s hard to get them back to their original position.

Then once you´re at your surfspot, getting in sea is another big trouble. That is, if the waves are good. With low waves, it´s not so hard, but you can´t do much surfing either. With good waves however, it can be really hard. On one day for example, the waves were about 2.5 meters high, which looks very nice for surfing. But it was almost impossible to get into the sea with waves like that. Every time you thought you were finally at a decent distance from the beach, you´re board got taken by a wave and that took you all the way back to the beach ("square one"). In a whole hour, I think I caught about three waves. Which was pretty good considering some people couldn´t even catch one. Luckily, the other days weren´t that bad, but it´s always still very heavy.

Anyway, once you´re finally in a good position and you start pedalling to catch a wave, the most diffecult part came: Standing up. You gotta do this pretty fast and it´s so hard to keep your balance while you´re being pushed forward by a wave. After a whole week of lessons and practicing, I´ve only seen 2 people of our group of 10 managing to stand on a board for longer than 1 second and go for a few meters before falling off (myself included). I know someone else had lessons for three weeks a couple of years ago and even she couldn´t manage to stand up. So you really can´t learn to surf in less than a couple of weeks, but I was hoping that I would be a decent amateur surfer at the end of the holiday.

To summarize my opinion on surfing in one sentence: It´s a whole lot of trouble for very little fun. Still, the deal we had wasn´t bad since we paid less than 100 euro´s for a full week of lessons and material hiring. And I´m still glad to have done it once in my life.

The rest of the vacation was nice, beside the fact that our friendsgroup was split up and put in caravans on either sides of the camping. That was just ridiculous, but the arrogant French dick who owned the camping thought that foreign youngsters always caused trouble so he wanted to have them separated. Ironically enough, it were a bunch of French guys behind us who made the most noise in the middle of the night. Anyway, the rest was nice like I said. We had good weather, the food was good and cheap and our trip to the Spanish harbour city San Sebastian was awesome. If you´re ever on the north coast of Spain, I can recommend you pay San Sebastian a visit. Even a non-city-trip-fan like myself enjoyed it there and the food there is really good and relatively cheap.

Anyway, now I´m back home after a long bustrip with a whole month of absolutely nothing to do. First thing I´m gonna do today is go to the local DVD store and buy a shitload of DVD's. There are so many movies I still wanna watch, but I never had the time to do so. So I thought now would be a good time.

My wanted list currently consists of:
-Goodfellas
-Slumdog Millionaire
-Snatch.

Movies I have/bought:
-Requiem For A Dream
-Fargo
-Kung Fu Panda
-The Big Lebowski
-The Shawshank Redemption
-No Country For Old Men
-Scarface
-LA Confidential
-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
-The Dark Knight
-Full Metal Jacket
-The Prestige
-Office Space
-The Wall
-Reservoir Dogs
-Wall.E
-Saving Private Ryan
-Space Cowboys
-Vanilla Sky
-Unforgiven
-The Aviator
-Magnolia
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
-V for Vendetta

If anyone else has any recommendations for great movies, I´ll be glad to hear them :)

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Pilgrimage

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Actually, you shouldn´t need any help with this game since it all speaks for itself. But if you feel like you need a guide, here it is:

Abstraction
Beat the game

Simple, just follow the game all the way to the right until the game becomes extremely blurry and and pixely. Continue until the medal shows up.

Imagination
Read all the signs

Just walk by all the signs. It will count as read when the text pops up in a purple box. There are 16 signs to be read in total.

Appreciation
Get all the coins

There are 200 coins to be collected in total. Collecting them all requires some backtracking although you can cleverly make use of the fact that you can jump much higher after you jump on an enemy. This could possibly save some time.

Predestination
Kill all enemies

Kill all the enemies by jumping on top of them. There are 45 enemies in total.

Juxtaposition
Don´t take damage

Don´t get hit by any enemy during the game. Just try to avoid as many enemies as possible. In that one part where many enemies are walking on one platform, simply wait until they walk in line and keep bouncing on top of their heads until they´re all gone.

Just a tip: When you have missed a certain medal, you can always walk back to collect all the stuff that you were missing. This way you can avoid having to play the game all over again from square 1.

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A Small Favor

If this medal guide isn´t clear to you, I suggest you take a look at
A Small Favor; Medal walkthrough from 7794
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I know there is an official walkthrough on the game, but that walkthrough does not tell you how to collect the medals. Therefore I made this blogpost to help you guys out.

A note beforehand: You will only get the medal AFTER completing the game. Not during the game. And you can only get ONE MEDAL AT A TIME since the medal you get is based on your rank after beating the game. The only medal that can always be obtained along with another one (except blind ambition) is Pink Massacre.

ALSO VERY IMPORTANT:
Do not do anything more than what is stated under the medal you want to achieve. Sometimes doing different stuff might give you a different medal. This is the case for Homicidale for example when you decide to do all the favors as well. You will then get the Elite medal instead of Homicidale.

The Guide

Relentless
- Complete the game without doing any favors.
- Just kill Milos without getting the green vial.

Reliable
-Just do the basic walkthrough that involves killing Milos
-Kill Milos immediatly after you walk into his room (iow, don´t get green vial)
-Do the bodyguard favor
-Do not kill any bunnies

Professional
- Complete all the four favors (check walkthrough on how to).
One warning: You have to make sure the characters you need to help have ASKED you for the favor. So do not complete the favor before you have first talked to the character, because the game will ignore the completion then.

Elite
-Do all the main objectives in the game, except "Eliminate the Worm"
-Do all the favors in the game
-Kill all the characters in the game, except the Worm
(Video-walkthrough by jmalouin7)

Homicidal
Kill every character in the game except for the Worm. In other words:
-Kill the bodyguard when he´s in the bathroom.
-Go to Milos, get the green vial from him and kill him
-Go to the scavenger and let him make the bomb for you. Then kill him.
-Go to the trade guy in the hallway and use the bomb on him
-Kill the senator at the end of the game

Ruthless
-Get green vial from Milos
-Take it to Scavenger to create the bomb
-Use bomb on the Worm
-Go to Milos and receive the yellow badge
-Kill Milos afterwards

Blind Ambition
- Kill Milos after he gave you the green vial
- Go to the scavenger and let him make a bomb for you
- Use the bomb on the Worm (and DO NOT do the chip quest first!)
- Go to the room with the coffeemachine to get shot by a guardrobot

Pink Massacre
- Kill 60 pink bunnies. (the number might be lower)
Note: Besides outside, there are also bunnies in the middle locker of which the code is '1977'

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If you don´t know where to find what: Here´s a map made by Caraboo