Prawns are Aliens!

District 9 is one helluva fresh alien movie. Aliens here are not as adorable as Steven Spielberg's E.T. nor a battling robotic lifeforms from outer space nor energy forms to save the human beings. They're like 6-foot tall walking and talking prawns. If you like eating shrimps and the likes, you should be ashamed of yourself after watching District 9.

In the Philippines, a hipon (shrimp) is a euphemism for a fugly-faced hot bod – you eat the flesh but trash the head

With alien movies, I expect gore. I fear that everytime a human had a contact with a "prawn", the aliens would just decapitate and obliterate humans with their awesome weapons. There are still those kind of gore but not too much like in Aliens and Starship Troopers. In District 9, I'm siding with these gigantic ugly malnourished shrimp-looking aliens over humans or that puppy-eyed Kokey.

I'm actually more afraid of Kokey than with prawns, seriously

The movie is great. It's like a mixture of different alien movies where there is gore, action and mushiness of E.T. It's a thrilling rollercoaster ride of "ooh", "wow", "eww", "woah" and "aww". After watching District 9, it stopped me from eating that Wendy's Shrimp Sandwich. Prawns have feelings too. Thank you Peter Jackson and Director Neill Blomkamp for that realization.

I can keep on yakking how great District 9 is and spill some spoilers here. Or watch it for yourself.


Ratings:

• Visuals: 5 out of 5 stars
• Intellect: 5 out of 5 stars
• Plot: 5 out of 5 stars

Battlefield Heroes… enough to keep me busy

I always wanted to play an online game that doesn’t give too much toll on my computer hardware. I want it no more than 2 GB, doesn’t need a high-end videocard to play it and doesn’t require a big RAM. Something I can play with my laptop which is not that powerful.

I’ve read a plurk from Jayvee and tried Battlefield Heroes on my laptop. Battlefield Heroes is an online first-person shooter game from the Battlefield series. It’s free to download, free-to-play and distributed by Electronic Arts. All you need to do is signup for an EA account, install the browser plugin/game launcher and play it.

The graphics for Battlefield Heroes is cartoony, which is very different from the Battlefield series. There’s not much details (or maybe I’m just playing it at the lowest setting for the graphics) since it’s an online game. The only downside of Battlefield Heroes for me, it doesn’t have a stand-alone game launcher. I have to open my browser to launch the game. Since it’s still in open beta, players will still experience downtime with servers. Players can’t choose the servers because the game does the matchmaking for them. Avatars are not that customizable, but they’re appearance can be modified by their clothings which are only limited from a week to a month usage. There are also items in store that can be used for unlimited duration but it requires Battlefunds to purchase it; real cash.

It’s fun to play and has features to keep the player busy aside from shooting and killing other Heroes. Be it for customizing your own heroes, achieving missions or plainly doing some player-kills. It kept me busy alright. I haven’t updated this blog regularly since I started playing this game.

Register and download the game at www.battlefieldheroes.com.