Last tuesday, which was the 3rd of october, we had a little theater show planned by our school which was mandatory, so we had to visit and watch.
Before the actual show, we (a few friends/classmates and I) decided to walk into the city center and stroll down some shops, maybe even buy something and so i did. I bought 3 DVD movies and a bargainbin videogame.
Movies

• The big Lebowski
• The Blob
• Nacht van de Wansmaak 2

Videogame

• Project Snowblind, PC DVD ROM

The theater show

We all expected it to be crap, being politically correct and all that jazz, but it was actually very enjoyable. The set was really minimalistic using only a white curtain, a white floor, 3 white blocks and 3 actors (2 acting students and the 3rd was probably a teacher) in completely white clothing. But despite the very minimalistic dress-up it was actually pretty detailed. They used a camera to stylize the show and also to interact with the crowd as well as displaying the storytelling by drawing with a marker on one of the blocks which was really cool. In another part one of the characters was asking questions (speaking) and the other one was writing down the answers on a block which was being filmed by the third actor and displayed on the white curtain in the back which gave a really cool effect and really added something to the athmosphere of the dialog.
The entire piece was about intimidation, which can be quite relevant in the lives of many people. Many kids get bullied, which is a kind of intimidation. You can get threatened by someone for some reason, which is also intimidation and I think you can think of many other examples as well. The school board wanted us to be aware of that and that we will seek help if something like that might occur, beit inside or outside of school and I kind of like the way they chose to make us aware of that.

Movies

The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski is a movie about a guy named Jeffrey Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) who is a real slacker and prefers to be called the Dude instead of Jeffrey or mr. Lebowski. He actually has 2 friends called Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Theodore Donald ‘Donny’ Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi) and they go bowling all of the time. On a sudden moment some gangster type barges into the Dude’s home and starts beating him to a pulp to get some info he needs to get from Jeffrey Lebowski, but not from him, from another, very rich, Jeffrey Lebowski. This other Lebowski is the Big Lebowski and then the adventure begins. For anyone who hasn’t seen this movie I won’t say any more about the plot of this one. I’ll only say that this is a must see, one of the best movies ever with 2 of my favourite actors (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi).
Now I think of it, there is another movie with Steve Buscemi I still need to get, but I can’t find it anywhere… Ghostworld, starring Scarlet Johanssen and Thora Birch as 2 of the most pessimistic people ever, got to love it! Steve Buscemi has a pretty important part in that movie as well, but not as prominent as the 2 just named ladies.
The Blob

The Blob is a horror flick about an alien lifeform which resembles most to a gelatine pudding than anything else. And… Ofcourse… It feeds on human flesh and with everything it eats it gets larger and larger and larger and larger etc. One of my friends (Janko) said that this movie was so bad that it was funny, so I couldn’t pass up on it as it was a real good bargain. Together with the Big Lebowski it was the second one for half the price and they were €6,99 each, so together it was just below €10,–.
I haven’t watched The Blob yet, but I think that I will do so soon, can’t wait to see it.
Nacht van de wansmaak 2

This isn’t actually a movie, it’s a compilation of bad stuff. De Nacht van de Wansmaak (night of the terrible taste) is an event that shows mostly the rock-bottom of the movie industry with movies like Rabid Grannies (splatter horror with 2 grannies as the killing monsters) and Lethal Weapons (the huge boob spectacle) and ofcourse much much more. This is the second DVD that was compiled of all the terrible stuff they have shown there in the past few years and when you see all that stuff it really cracks you up. How can a moviemaker think of something like this? What were they thinking? Cheap rip-offs of Starwars that resemble so much to the original but just miss everything the real one had, like good camerawork, decent actors and a storyline. Too bad it’s only available in Dutch, so all you non-Dutch speaking people won’t be able to understand the commentaries.

The game

Project Snowblind

Project Snowblind was firstly supposed to be the 3rd installment of the Deus Ex series. Allthough Mobygames does list it in the series, Project Snowblind isn’t really a part of the series. It doesn’t incorporate any of the story elements that the other 2 had and it doesn’t follow up either and it’s not a prequel either.
This game was started by Ionstorm and when the Ionstorm division it was being developed by went bankrupt it was transferred to Crystal Dynamics by Eidos Interactive to be completed. At this stage the game was thrown into a bit of another direction which completely cut it loose from the Deus Ex series.
In Deus Ex: Invisible War almost all RPG like element were allready gone. The only things that were left were the body upgrades (augmentations in the original Deus Ex and called Biomods in Invisible War) and the conversation system. All this is now gone too. There are still biomechanical upgrades, but the game has turned into a full fledged shooter and does in no way incorporate any RPG-like elements anymore. I don’t think this is a problem, but as a Deus Ex game this wouldn’t have been acceptable, but I accept the fact that it is not a Deus Ex game, it just resembles to one in some ways. The visual style, the characters and all that kind of stuff. But the gameplay is more of that of a traditional shooter than that of a story driver RPG/FPS combo.
Some things that it did inherit from Deus Ex (especially from Invisible War) are certain abilities the player has. Abilities like remote control of robots, camera’s and automated turrets, cloaking abilities and balistic shielding through biomechanical upgrades.
I’m sure to install and play this game sometime soon and maybe I’ll add a little something about how I like it, but for now I only have the covershot displayed above.