Ikea

As I am running out of place due to my ever growing collection of games, movies, more games and some more movies, this weekend I went on a little trip to Ikea to hunt down some shelves.

For quite some time now, the lack of space forced me to pile up the movies in a totally unsafe manner. On top of that it's impossible to pull out a movie or game that's on the bottom of the pile. This calls for some new shelves!



Ikea serves you with everything you could ever want. Did you wake up this morning feeling a sudden urge of getting a plastic pig in either red, green or blue? You name it, Ikea has it.



Fancy lamps that always look cool in the store but never fit your interior? They have those too!

Ikea claims to have mastered the simplistic design, and you have to give them that. Nothing more simple than a lamp made of one huge, flat piece of plastic with a white LED inside.



It's impossible to go to Ikea, get what you want and get out. Not if you're with your female partner at least. There's always something to look at and something that's maybe worth having. Maybe someday you'll need a device that can slice up an egg into a star with a push of a single button? You just never know.

Lickily, they serve food inside of the store so you can stop for a second and charge your batteries. Plus you can enjoy the overall school cafeteria feel of the restaurant, complete with plastic trays and everything. What will it be, sir? Chicken filé and fries, please.



After the meal we switch back into the shopping mode. This means more neatly designed furniture, lamps and small gadgets. But wait? Didn't we come here for the shelve? Let's go get it.

It's amazing how Ikea can make you buy fifteen different products just by selling every single thing separately. You want a shelve? You'll need a wooden plank, some screws, some support for the plank and so on. I guess you should be glad they don't make you buy a huge log and all the tools you'll need to carve the thing out by yourself.



I ended up buying not only the shelve but also a pot for my plant, a frying pan, an egg slicer, some napkins, drink straws, potato chips [seriously] and two pillows. And I just wanted a shelve.

P.S. - I shot all the pictures and videos using Nokia N73 mobile phone. I've retouched the photos a bit, adjusting the contrast and saturation, as the N73 photos taken indoors tend to look as if there was smoke in the air. The original videos had a slightly better framerate which got automatically reduced by the software while converting them from *.mp4 format.

Clearly or Darkly?

Philip K. Dick often gets labeled as a "science fiction" writer. But is he really? What role does the science play in the stories he tells? I'd say it's more fiction than science and he certainly puts more effort into character developement than into fancy shmancy techno jibbrish.

Filmmakers like Dick and his stories. And it shows. Starting with a cult classic "Blade Runner", through "Total Recall", "Minority Report", "Impostor", "Screamers" all the way to "Paycheck", and finally "A Scanner Darkly", Dick's stories hit the silver screen.

Making a movie based upon a book by souch author puts great weight onto director's shoulders. Philip K. Dick has a cult following and for there's no director on this planet who can summon all the feelings of every single person who read Darkly. It can however, come close.



If you read the book, you'll be happy to know that overall feeling of the story stayed intact. The movie shot on film, then animated frame by frame to shift the focus from the actors and draw you deeper into the psychodelic world of mysterious "Substance D" and all of its effects.

You can rest assured that this is NOT a Joel Silver flick, with over the top budget, storyline flat as a pancake and Wachowski brothers to boot.



Should you be picking up the movie then? The answer is yes, but only if you keep your expectations low. Now why would I say that if the movie is good? Because you should never expect too much. This way you can be pleasantly surprised instead of dissapointed.

So no "Philip K. Dick movie! Cool effects! Must be good then! Great even!", ok? Now off you go, to the nearest video store.

China doesn't like me.

Or at least so it appears. Recently I've come across an interesting internet site allowing you to test which urls are banned by Chinese government.

Comunists were always very keen on taking the censorship to the extreme and now you can find out what does extreme censorship really mean. Just check out greatfirewallofchina.net and check if you'll be able to access your online email account when you go on a trip to China. You won't be checking out this blog, that's for sure.

Game.com 5 Hit Combo

Game.com might not be the most popular handheld, even among the less popular ones [..what?] but if you think it totally sucks, you're wrong. Partially.

If you have no idea what a Game.com is, it's a handheld gaming platform developed by Tiger, released in second half of '97. It featured a touch screen, and even though it didn't impress display-wise [190 x 108, displaying four shades of grey] it was capable of using rather neat PCM samples. Nice touch in all fighting games, where you actually get to hear the announcer.



So what am I so happy about? I've managed to score five games, sealed, in mint condition, and I got a bargain. Usually Game.com games, even though rather low in price, wear higher pricetags than what I have paid for these titles.



As you can see, Game.com did get some decent titles, such as Resident Evil and Fighters Megamis [also worth mentioning: Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Sonic Jam]. And all would be fine if it wasn't for the terrible refresh rate of the screen. Graphics are really cool, sound rocks, but the refresh rate makes you feel as if you were playing a Game & Watch title. And that's not good at all.

However, if you do come across one of these, give it a try. Game.com systems can be extremly cheap these days, since noone will have them. A nice addition to your collection, especially if you're into handhelds of all sorts.

『 Virtua Cop 3 - where art thou? 』

Sega must hate the consumers and they must hate themselves aswell. How long has it been since Virtua Cop 3 had its premiere at japanese arcades? You don't know? Then let me tell you. It's been FOUR YEARS!

I sometimes wonder if Sega executives scratch their heads and ask themselves "why do we suck so much?". If they aren't they damn right should.



Virtua Cop 3 in its arcade form runs on the Chihiro hardware, which basically means it runs on Xbox stuffed into an arcade cabinet. Out Run 2 conversion was a given, so it got ported to Xbox [of course], PlayStation 2 and even PSP. Decision makers at Sega must be a bunch of opium junkies, since they refuse to port one of the best lightgun games ever, still, they published the half assed conversion of Spikeout. We're still waiting, Sega.