Rental Magica started very well, like a combination of Elfen Lied and Full Metal Alchemist. Unfortunately the magic is a lot more benign and not founded on anything interesting like in FMA, and the only connection to EL is the fact that the lead character is a nice guy surrounded by children looking female girls that have a crush on him.

Other than that, I've only watched the first 10 episodes. There was the potential of greatness, while the series explored the taboos of magic and what happens to mages trying to break them. Also there are a homunculus and a mechanical archenemy present. However, someone decided that it is better to fight evil with goodness and that in the end goodness should win, making the whole thing really silly.

I would recommend it to children only.

I got this game from a colleague of mine, something she labelled as strategy. Well, it was actually an RPG, and a pretty good one, too. Considering that it is rather old, it certainly goes up there in my games top. It is one of the games in the Vampire the Masquerade series, codenamed Redemption and released in 2000 by Activision.

Ok, the idea is that you are a crusader, left behind by your company due to severe battle trauma. A helpful and kind nun takes care of your wounds and makes you better. However, you soon find out that the city (of Prague) is plagued by monsters and undead creatures. As a devout follower of God's path (infidel! I kill you!), you get your mighty sword and crusader expertise and proceed on a debug mission. It would be pointless to go further from here, as the story evolves until you get in the year 1999 and in the cities of Prague, Vienna, London and New York.

The fun of the game is that you use both vampiric attacks and magic and a bit of strategic thinking in order to attain your goals. Starting out with a single character, you get to have up to four.

Now about the fast lane: how to finish the game as soon as possible. First of all try to equip your characters with the best armour and weapons you can find. At first you don't have a lot of money, but you find all kind of stuff when you kill monsters. Second of all, you will get to find a lot of rings and necklaces and bracelets that only improve APP(earance). You might think that wearing them will pimp your vampires, but Appearance is very important for one of the most crucial spells in the game: Enchantment. The other very important spells are: Feed, Blood Healing and Ice Statue. If you master these four spells you can defeat anyone. Unfortunately, Ice Statue will not be available until you defeat the Tremere, which is quite advanced in the game. Any spell that makes the target not attack will be as good, though. The next important spells are Awaken (wakes up a dead member of your group) and Walk the Abyss, which allows you to instantly transport to your save game place (the Haven) and store your objects and increase your stats. A good secondary spell is Spirit's Touch, which will identify the unknown objects you find.

Another important thing is to go to Options -> Controls and remove all spells from your group except auto healing. Otherwise your vampire buddies will gobble up blood like it's 12 years old Whiskey. And talking of control, near each character's picture there is a green light. Click on it and the guy will not follow you around like a dumbass, killing the people you are trying to feed upon or do magic tricks on.

And back to the fast lane: use Enchantment to control an enemy to fight the others around him when there are more than one foe. Then run in front of him with one of your group, so that he follows (or do that from the start if you can separate him from the others or if he is alone), then wait with another character with big Feed rating and, of course, Feed until the foe dies. In order for this to work, the little green lights must be off, otherwise they will follow and attack like idiots. In the case of monsters and non-blooded creatures, freeze them and kill them.

Also to note is that Christof's AI is more violent than for others. Even without his little green light, he will still attack stupidly. Another thing to note is that using the middle mouse button, the characters will attack with a slower, but stronger attack, optimal for frozen creatures or when they are fighting someone else in the group. Remember to keep your Feed guy empty by letting the others feed on him!

Ok, that's it. The game has a multiplayer option as well, but I haven't explored it yet. The movement AI is the worst part of the game. Also the story could have been more interesting. At some times I managed to enter unfinished portions of the game, where characters would just sit and not interact or where the dialogue would have been replaced by general options like "Threaten" "Leave Alone". Other than that, it's a pretty smooth, though linear, game.

If anyone is interested, there are three possible endings, and here are the YouTube links. Just make sure you want to see them before you finish the game or not.

Good Ending
Neutral Ending
Bad Ending

Hey, a long time since I posted a song. Here is a Japanese rock+hip pop video for one of the soundtrack songs of Naruto.



And if you like it, listen some more on this MySpace site.

He did it again! Or would it be better for me to say he has done it afore, as I am kind of moving backwards in the Peter F. Hamilton writings? Night's Dawn is a huge book, about 9Mb of pure text, divided into three parts purely out of paper formatting reasons, I am sure. So far, this is the best thing he has written, at least in my opinion.

Maybe the guy is the kind of writer who writes his best work first, then tries unsuccessfully to follow up. Not that any of his followups could be called a failure, it's just that Night's Dawn is really cool! I mean who can seriously deal with possession, necromancy, devil worship, witch hunting, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons, all in a future world in which humanity has conquered space an tries to attack the situation with science and rationality? Seriously! If this guy would have written the Bible, there would be no Muslims! (Ron Hubbard, eat your heart out!)

There isn't much else I can say. I certainly cannot summarize a book that spreads over about a dozen inhabited planets, all with their own history, socio-economic situations described and own characters to add plot (real plot) to the story. Right now I am terrified. I need to find the Greg Mandel trilogy, which is the last of the Hamilton big stories, and there are only two outcomes: a) I hate it, which would have wasted my time and trust in humanity; b) I love it, and then I go into withdrawal waiting for the last two volumes of the Void trilogy and whatever else he brilliantly writes in the future.

Bottom line: if you like Sci-Fi, you need to read this. Hamilton and the ReSharper guys are the only people I ever felt the need to send money to in order to apologize for my shameless Internet piracy.

Links:
Peter Hamilton's official site
Wikipedia's entry on the Night's Dawn trilogy
Peter F. Hamilton's entry in Wikipedia.

There are a lot of people in the world having problem with lateral parking. It is not only difficult to manage when you have nothing to go on but the little tiny images in the car mirrors, but stressful as well, as normally the procedure is done on a crowded street with drivers behind you urging you to do it faster.

Not a problem anymore! The Chinese have found the perfect way of parking in under 5 seconds! Here is a video tutorial on how to do it:



Here is an alternative solution.

Two months ago I wrote a post about the exotic fruits I found in a hypermarket in Sibiu, now it's time for additions, taken from the Bucharest Metro.


So here are the fruits I bought today:
the Maracuya
. It has the same feel as a fruit from my first post, the Kiwano. The taste, though, is very sour, like a lemon, and a little spicy. I could eat it, but I think people don't really eat it raw. The outer skin is hard, inedible and thick.
the Kaki fruit. It is very tasty, although it has a peary texture that I didn't quite like. It is a sweet banana tasting fruit.
the Cactus fruit has a sweet coating around the hard inedible seeds inside with a texture of baby food and taste like a not aromatic cantaloupe, similar to the Pepino. The seeds, though, make it less than pleasant to eat.
the Pepino mellon has a similar texture to the Kaki, but it has the taste of Cantaloupe, yet not so aromatic.
Now, the Papaya is an interesting tasting fruit. I am afraid my best approximation is still the cantaloupe, but the papaya also has its aromatic properties and the texture. Its aroma, though, is slightly different, more like banana. It has a big core of inedible seeds and the skin is also inedible. That makes the useful part of the fruit rather small.

In conclusion, one must definitely try the papaya and the kaki. The maracuya is the weirdest taste among all, not entirely pleasant, although I can try to eat it with sugar or something. The net suggests mixing the seedy content with water and sugar after letting the skin wrinkle.

I went to one of the Metro hypermarkets in Bucharest and I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of stuff one can find there, as compared with other hypermarkets that seem to be supplied from the same sources. Also check my next entry, I will write about exotic fruits there.

In this post I will talk about calamari! There is an entire store dedicated to fish in Metro, filled with a lot of nice looking and/or packaged treasures of the sea. My picks were swordfish stakes and one big calamari. Well, not that big... it's no architeuthis, but it will do.

I went home, made a longitudinal incision, threw away the awkward looking organ inside (which I suspect had a digestive function) and the eyes and beak, then threw it in boiling butter after putting a bit of spice over it. I removed it after 2-3 minutes and ate it. Yes, it's that simple! The taste is not strong, but really special and it was totally worth the buy.

Warning, as read from the googling on calamari: Calamari is either to be cooked in 2-3 minutes or in more than 30. Everything in between turns it to rubber. So, if you are like my wife and you want to spit it after you taste it, you might want to try the long cooking calamari recipes out there. :)

I saw this chick sing "They" on Mtv. She was stripping in space in that video, a thing that I found a bit distasteful, even if it did link to a Jane Fonda scene in a film called Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. But that's the MTV world: strip if you want to get noticed. True enough, I haven't seen any other of her videos on any music television since, but then I stopped watching them.

Jem (real name Jemma Griffiths) is a Welsh singer and this is (I guess) the original video of "They". She is young, beautiful, but also has a nice voice and sound. Check her out at her official web site or the MySpace site.

I remembered today of a song that I liked to listen to called Everything for Free, by K's Choice. Back then (oh, my tired bones) the Internet was not yet as... evolved as these days and you couldn't really get all the discography of an artist in a few minutes, so I only listened to this one song that was also on MTV.

I am putting the video clip here, but really do look into the singer, Sarah Bettens, who also has a solo project beyond K's Choice and has a lot of videos on YouTube. Here are some sites you can visit:

	K's Choice	Sarah Bettens
Official Site	X	X
Myspace Site	X	X
Wikipedia Site	X	X

[youtube:AxY6KrqGnCw]

This song is one of my latest favourites, even if the sound itself is a bit too much like country music, the lyrics are really funny. I wasn't able to find the video for the song, so here is a random video one.



Poe, by her real name Ann Danielewski is the daughter of the Polish director Tad Danielewski and is singing since 1990. Look for her other songs as well, some are really smart and they sound pretty cool.

Yes! A message for women everywhere :) Garbage has better songs, but this one is with dedication ;)

New video from Foo Fighters. In case you are wondering why I am posting music videos in my blog, it's so that I can click on the little 'music' label and listen to whatever music I like, wherever I am. So if you want to see all music posted by me, use the labels!

Now this is a Russian band with a male+female vocal. This is by far the best of their songs and they have a nice video clip on it. Enjoy!


Official Slot site (Russian): http://slot.ru
MySpace Slot site (English): http://myspace.com/theslot

Can you imagine 1922? It was 85 years ago. That means that almost certainly all the people that worked on this movie are now dead! But it is still a masterpiece of cinema. They did that with no previous inspiration. After you watch this, you can only ask yourself how come people have 85 years of example and they still screw movies up. So here it is: Nosferatu

Am I turning metal? I used to hate songs played by long haired guys barking aimlessly on a heavy and repeating guitar riff. But I really enjoy listening to Sonata Arctica. Maybe because they're Finnish? :) I am developing a taste for Finnish music, apparently.

Anyway, here is a live performance of the song Broken, which I like best so far. I did look for an official video on this song, but drowned in home made crap videos. I did find official videos for other songs, but the band seemed even less charismatic in those, trying to seem really upset and managing to look like a shampoo commercial.



Another song of theirs I like is Replica.