The Red Dead Redemption Trailers have started coming out thick and fast with another trailer from Rockstar that goes into further depth regarding the harshness of life in the Wild West. Unfortunately it features no giant mechanical spiders like in Wild Wild West but its still worth a watch.
As the long Easter weekend draws to a close here in sunny South Africa I realised that I haven’t kept any of you loyal readers up to date with my gaming exploits over the past few months. Rest assured that I haven’t been complacent into putting some game time in when I’ve had the chance and there have been three reviews I’ve had the great pleasure to write in 2010:
- Bayonetta – An action game from the creator of Devil May Cry that aims to bring the action genre back to what made it great in the first place: over the top action scenes and crazy characters all wrapped up in a story that seems to have come from the mind of a delusional madman.
- Bioshock 2 – Coming after the first game which was based in the underwater city of Rapture and saw you taking on an army of mutated freaks who had tried to attain perfection through genetically altering their bodies, Bioshock 2 sees you returning to Rapture but this time as one of the Big Daddies who is out to find his lost Little Sister.
- Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening – A fantasy RPG that manages to tick all the boxes required of it to be seen as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate franchise, Awakening sees you steeping into the boots of a mage, warrior or rogue to rid the land of an evil. so far so meh I’m sure you’re saying but rest assured that once you start playing Dragon Age you’ll soon come to see that its story and characters are out of this world.
Long weekends are meant to be enjoyed in the company of good friends and that is precisely how my weekend went from start to finish. Right from the off I was off like a shot to Gordon’s Bay on Thursday evening with Lize in tow to visit Craig and Chantelle in Gordon’s Bay for a small braai and some chit chat which ended up with Craig managing to convince the girls to give 30 Seconds a go which led to some hilarious moments as we sometimes struggled to even know who the person was that we had to describe to our team mates!Friday saw me return to the Gordon’s Bay / Somerset West area for the third day in a row as I went through to Craig’s place for a day long visit which consisted of ample amounts of gaming, good food and bad Jackie Chan action movies in the form of Rush Hour 2. I’m sure that Chantelle must have sighed in frustration as she came back from work only to discover deep in the throes of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.
Saturday was of course the day of the top of the table clash between Manchester United and Chelsea to see who would come out with the advantage towards the end of the season. Unfortunately Chelsea managed to come away the victors after a fortunate Drogba goal that was awarded to them despite Drogba being blatantly offside. Being a Manchester United fan I was of course in a dour mood for the rest of the evening and ended up watching Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly for the remainder of the evening. The film is still a remarkable piece of work even after all this time and has made me even more keen for Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.
Easter Sunday saw me slaving away in front of my PC to crank out my Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening review which thankfully didn’t take too long and left the rest of my Sunday open to be spent with the family and finishing off Making Money by Terry Pratchett. The evening saw me try to get through Alien by Ridley Scott but in the end I chickened out due to exhaustion and I hit the bed rather early.
Monday was a day of nothing but rest and relaxation only broken by an afternoon walk and an early morning viewing of Shutter Island at Tygervalley which I found rather enjoyable despite some weaknesses in the film.
All in all it was one fantastic weekend and hopefully I can mange to get a few more good weekends organised in the near future. I’ve got to try and organise a board games evening at my place sometime if only to satiate Karl’s desire to try out my now water filled pool! So to all my friends a big thank you for a wonderful time and much laughter and fun. Here’s to all the good times! 
Great news! If you’re a local 360 gamer looking for a great place to meet fellow gamers with a passion for the 360 then you need look no further. Xboxgaming has just launched their very own web forum dedicated to promoting the wonderful art of gaming among the local community. so if you’re looking for a place to organise a multiplayer COD fest or just looking to promote your Master Chief fanfic then head on over to the XG forums and join in the discussion!
Taken verbatim from Sipho Hlongwane’s original post:
SpeakZA
Bloggers for a free press
Last week, shocking revelations concerning the activities of ANC Youth League Spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu came to the fore. According to a letter published in various news outlets, a complaint was laid by 19 political journalists with the secretary-general of the ANC, against Shivambu. This complaint letter detailed attempts by Shivambu to leak a dossier to certain journalists, purporting to expose the money-laundering practices of Dumisane Lubisi, a journalist atCity Press. The letter also detailed the intimidation that followed when these journalists refused to publish these revelations.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms the reprisals against journalists by Shivambu. His actions constitute a blatant attack on media freedom and a grave infringement on constitutional rights. It is a disturbing step towards dictatorial rule in South Africa.
We call on the ANC and the ANC Youth League to distance themselves from the actions of Shivambu. The media have, time and again, been a vital democratic safeguard by exposing the actions of individuals who have abused their positions of power for personal and political gain.
The press have played a vital role in the liberation struggle, operating under difficult and often dangerous conditions to document some of the most crucial moments in the struggle against apartheid. It is therefore distressing to note that certain people within the ruling party are willing to maliciously target journalists by invading their privacy and threatening their colleagues in a bid to silence them in their legitimate work.
We also note the breathtaking hubris displayed by Shivambu and ANC Youth League President Julius Malema in their response to the letter of complaint. Shivambu and Malema clearly have no respect for the media and the rights afforded to the media by the Constitution of South Africa. Such a response serves only to reinforce the position that the motive for leaking the so-called dossier was not a legitimate concern, but an insolent effort to intimidate and bully a journalist who had exposed embarrassing information about the youth league president.
We urge the ANC as a whole to reaffirm its commitment to media freedom and other constitutional rights we enjoy as a country.
It feels strange to say this but Alice in wonderland seems to have an awful lot in common with James Cameron’s Avatar. Its a visual spectacle that is wonderful to watch but dig a bit deeper and the beguiling visuals hide a plot that is rather threadbare and unsatisfying.
I had high hopes when I went to my local cinema a week ago or so to watch Alice in Wonderland. The concept art had blown my mind and left me chomping at the bit to finally catch the film in all its glory. The start of the film showed a lot of promise with a story that followed on from the well known stories on which the movie was based. It follows an older Alice as she is proposed to by Hamish Ascot, a man for whom she has no love or feelings. Feeling the pressure of her mother and friends to accept his proposal she suddenly spots the White Rabbit and chases after him only to fall into the hole leading to Wonderland. Arriving in Wonderland she is greeted by many of the characters she met all that time ago in her childhood and finds out that she has to fulfil her destiny of killing the Jabberwocky and freeing Wonderland from the tyrannical rule of Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen.
It was thereabouts that I felt that Alice in Wonderland strayed a bit too far from its original roots. What had been a crazy and madcap story of a girl’s journey into a strange and wonderful world soon degenerated into a film more concerned with the battle between the White and Red Queens which I found far less interesting than Alice’s journey and exploration of the world of Wonderland. Well loved characters such as Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter are present and accounted for but are strangely less interesting when transported to a Narnia style world of fantasy battles and dialogue.
The visuals are astounding though with a world that looks as strange and unique as Lewis Carroll surely intended it to be when he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The characters are all unique and wonderful to watch with many of them being expertly voiced and / or acted by their respective thespians. Stephen Fry’s Cheshire Cat and Sir Christopher Lee’s Jabberwocky performances being the standouts in my mind.
Alice in Wonderland is one of many recent films that has opted to go the 3D route as well although in this case all the opinions I’ve heard have been top skip the more expensive 3D experience as the film was originally filmed in 2D and only transferred to 3D afterwards making the experience less effective than Avatar and other films which have been filmed primarily to be screened in 3D. For the record I watched the movie in 2D myself and was more than pleased with how it looked.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a mixed bag that delivers on the visual front with the weird and twisted atmosphere that we’ve come to expect from a Burton movie but it doesn’t deliver the same on the character and plot front. Rather, it presents the movie goer with a wonderful world that seems far more influenced by its contemporary movie peers in the form of the Chronicles of Narnia and similar films. The weird and wonderful characters from the original stories seem far more plain and ordinary and almost lost in a more mature story involving political bickering which seems rather out of the ordinary for both the world and Tim Burton. Be assured though that if you’re looking for a wonderful film in terms of spectacle then you’ll be more than content with the world of Wonderland that is in offer in Burton’s latest film and you might even be tempted to watch it two or even 3 times should the mood strike you 
Rockstar has just released yet another gameplay series video for Red Dead Redemption that focuses on the general tasks and challenges that await players outside of the mission structure. The video also gives a brief look at the history and different areas found in the game. The more I’m seeing of this game the more excited I am for its release. Unfortunately its been delayed from 27 April till 21 May but until then sit back and relax to some Ennio Morricone inspired tunes in this latest video:
As you may very well have guessed from the title of this post, I am posting this from my new Blackberry Bold 9700. Nifty hey? Expect a review soon!
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