Golden Compass

My initial response to the movie was - "Another fantasy movie, again?". Ever since LOTR & Harry Potter burst into cinema screens, it seems all the production houses are now wanting a pie of the fantasy epics.

This movie which is based on a fantasy book as well sees young girl, Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), an orphan who is given a fantasy ride & runaway with Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman), while her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), is embarking on a trip to the Arctic Circle to investigate a mysterious element intriguingly called Dust.

The movie focus on Lyras world of wanting to save her friends & fellow children who are missing, and apparently being used as experiment objects. Lyras confidence, good negotiation skills & intelligence sees her banding together with the Gyptians, the mysterious witch Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green) and Texas airman Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott).

This young kid is flung into an adventure that took her to the wilds of the icy north, where she allied a polar bear named Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), who pledges to serve her in her campaign until she prevails.

True to the fantasy movies, this movie shows talking animals and flying ships. But the best part of the movie is not from these fantasies, but more so the the lessons from it - like how a young girl gets people to be her allies by doing smart intelligent & courages moves. The part whereby each character has an animal as their daemon, or more like an inner voice & soul, also shows how we constantly have other thoughts running in our heads for every move we make.

Though the movie has an original plot, some new different ideas from other fantasy based movies - like the daemons, & good lessons, however, the overdose of these fantasy epics has raised the bar much more, and somehow the Golden Compass fall short of it compared to its peers. Unlike the other trilogies like LOTR or Matrix, which each episode can end on its own, the Golden Compass part 1 seems to leave a bad hanging ending, despite good acting from its casts, especially Nicole Kidmans with her evil looks and her evil blue eyes.

Still, Golden Compass is a decent movie, and will be a good watch for fantasy epic fans.

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Last Chaos – awesome MMORPG game

Site: http://lastchaos.aeriagames.com/
Last Chaos is a free-to-play, 3D MMORPG with cool graphics and nice gameplay. The game looks incredibly similar to the popular pay to play MMORPG Lineage 2. More or less most of the free to play MMORPGs have problems with its gameplay. They sure look good but after some time the player finds no depth. In contrast, Last Chaos doesn’t have awesome graphics but its gameplay is ways above. I really was amazed to find myself addicted to a game so fast. 

Graphics
The game has somewhat beautiful graphics with large castles, vast territories and strange monsters. There are also a lot of different pets and mounts with bright and cool graphics, they create part of the magic atmosphere in the game. The horses maybe are a bit to colorful but the overall impression isn’t bad.

Gameplay
One drawback of this cool game is the poor customization options of the game characters. I really prefer to have bigger choice.
When I play MMO games I prefer to play magic damage dealer so I created a mage character. At the beginning my mage was thrown in something called private dungeon – there you can fight different monsters (zombies and similar) and learn the interface. At the end of the dungeon I was teleported to the first town. What made me an impression was that the game has good number of players – many players were selling different goods and some number of newbies like me was fighting low level monsters outside the gates. There were also many players leveling their pets with low level mobs. The pets are something cool – with many different shapes and colors – not your usual stupid (or cute) looking pets but fantasy creatures with nice and eye-catching design.
The monsters also make an impression – they are not grouped by types and you can see many different kinds in one field. The foxes at the beginning look too much like the keltirs from L2.
The game offers large maps with many places for exploration and different mobs. You are actually free to do what you want, you are not bound to different quests like “run to point A, return to B, then run back to A”. Of course you can do quests as you want and they bring a lot of experience (I usually go and take all available quests before hunting but I don’t like to do quests only).

Classes
Last Chaos has six playable races – Knight, Healer, Mage, Rogue, Titan and Sorcerer.
Knight - The knight is your usual tough guy with sword and shield or two swords.
Healer – She is a surprise, she actually can use bow and arrows and she can become an archer or a cleric at her first job change.
Mage – I like characters with high damage, especially high AoE damage.
Rogue – fast and deadly character she can use dual daggers or a crossbow.
Titan – rough guy with high HP and sword or axe of course. Do you like barbarians? My brother always plays this type of characters.
Sorcerer – something like summoner, maybe strong character. I need to try this one soon.

PVP
I haven’t tried it yet, my character is brand new, but I prefer to play on PVP servers. I was surprised to see a bunch of high level, bored people at the town gates in the middle of PVP battle.

The story
Actually I spent some time reading the story – war between gods of course. Good against evil, light against darkness and we, the humans were always the good ones, blessed with many abilities. Now you can choose a side and fight for it. So cool, I wonder who writes these stories and why game creators or publishers won’t hire a professional writer to do the job. Either way, the game is cool, maybe the best free to play game out there.

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