Unfortunately the Nigerian scammers have taken over Craig’s List Toronto now too.  Oddly with all this money at stake for their scams, they never seem to realize how obvious it is.  Check out these emails.

I had three different email addresses email me basically the same bad spelling, which I didn’t find odd at first.

Example real email:
“s the items still for sell and i wanna know the condition and did you accept
paypal as your payment”

The PayPal question was what really helped me tie it together but here are two second emails which have so many similarities that it was just too odd.

“Thank for the mail, my name is john i should have come for the pickup
of the item but am presently out of state. am sending the item to my
son that is managing our store. do you accept paypal? all because i
have money in my paypal account, kindly get back to me with your
paypal email so i can transfer the money from my paypal account to
yours. i will be adding $150 for the shipping cost of it directly form
you to her. and i will be giving you $600 for the item”

And

“Thanks for your swift response,,,i could have love to come for the
face transaction but i just receive i transfer letter from my
company,,,while i want to make this big  surprise for my son who is
just out of college…..i will really appreciate you if you can kindly ship the item to him at MD 20720 United States,,why i will be paying you through Verdi PayPal Email Account and i will be adding an additional $80 for the shipping fee,,If you are wiling to sell kindly get back to me with your
PayPal Email Account so i will be able to make the payment
asap…Thanks”

I love that the first guy doesn’t realize his son isn’t a “her”.

The points to watch out for are:

1. Bad spelling in grammar including odd phrases normal people just don’t say like “I could have love to come for the face”.

2. Oddly fake names where the first and last name seem like phonetic spelling of North American names.

3. They want to have you ship the item and pay for it with PayPal, I’m not exactly sure how this scam works, either they are doing it for the chance to steal your PayPal account, or maybe they give you some money, get the item and claim they never got it so they get the money back.  It seems an odd scam all in all.

4. For some reason they are always too busy or are out of the country and can’t meet face to face.

Now the only thing I need to figure out is a quick way to get rid of scammers so they don’t waste too much of my time.  If you call them on the scam they will respond with something like “what you say?” as if they can get you back as a believer.

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Ghostbusters seems like it should be a very good game, all original voice actors, fairly good digital rendering, and new gadgets added on to the standard proton pack.  The game plays fairly well, and the story is decent enough to keep you interested.

I just quit the game in frustration and I really doubt I’ll put it on again, let me explain why.

I’ve heard a lot of other reviewers remark on how the game is basically a montage of all the good parts from the movie with some new parts that don’t make a lot of sense and don’t flow well.  This wasn’t a big concern for me, the story moved along well enough that I didn’t dislike capturing Slimer, or destroying the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

One of my big problems with Metal Gear Solid 4 was that you basically are playing a movie, you walk down a hall, 15 minute cut scene, you jump down an elevator shaft, 15 minute cut scene.  After playing it for 5 or so hours, I really would have preferred just watching an animated mini-series, and I think it’s mainly because of my lack of investment in the story.  Ghostbusters does a very similar thing, run into a hotel lobby and you get a short cut scene, capture a few ghosts and another cut scene, but the difference is I like the story and I understand what’s going on.  I might have felt the same way if I’d never seen Ghostbusters (the movie) because there is no real attempt to explain what is going on.

There is a setting in the game (the lowest difficulty) which basically says “just watch the movie”, which for the most part it did.  The fights weren’t that hard, I didn’t die a lot, and the fights were short.  I was happy with that and if I’d reached the end of the game on that setting I’d probably give this game a better review.  Unfortunately I came up against the fight most people are complaining about – near the end there is a fight with a dozen or so flying, flaming cherubs shooting flaming arrows at you while different little creatures attack you on the ground.  You have to use one proton pack setting to quickly get rid of the ones on the ground and the normal setting for the flying cherubs.  You must also tether the cherubs and slam them into a gate to open it, unfortunately the slam mechanism isn’t all that precise and as soon as they slam into anything they explode, which means you need to grab another one.  The entire time you are trying to fling these things into the gate, the rest of them are attacking you and if you get knocked down, Ray can save you, unless he gets knocked down, at which point you restart the fight.  I tried this a half-dozen times then decided the end of the story isn’t that important to me.

Summary: The game was sort of fun while it lasted, but as soon as it got a little frustrating the fun wasn’t enough to keep me playing.  If you are interested in another story of the Ghostbusters, rent the game and see if you make it past this one super annoying part.  Otherwise you could skip it.

Edit: I got up this morning and decided to give it one more shot, and also to take a look at the extras on the disk.  I’m never a big fan of cross-promotion, because a couple months down the road and the cross-promo seems antiquated, like seeing “coming soon” trailers before a 1985 movie on VHS it’s a bit laughable.  This disk has a promo for “Year One” which I think is because Harold Ramis directed it.

There is a really good “Restoring the Ecto-1″ video on the disk though that I’m glad I went back to watch, amazing job.

Here’s my new biggest problem with the game, last night when it asked if I wanted to try again or quit, I chose quit, went back to the main menu and turned off the PS3.  This morning when I went to career mode, my only option was “New Career”.  I guess it deleted my save game, so I definately didn’t want to play all the way through it again.  The worst bug you can have in a game is accidentally deleting the only save game it allows.

I also wanted to mention that this game has a great engine, I had forgotten until I watched a vignet about it that at times there are what seems like hundreds of items floating around the screen with realistic physics.  Some creatures are made up entirely of real world items stuck together (like books, etc.).  This is not something to be overlooked, nor is the particle system, which is fantastic, you really feel like you are playing the movie.

I just wish the game played a bit better.

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Unfortunately for me, what I dislike about most of those angsty movies with that awkward kid is very prevalent in this show.  Everything goes wrong for what appears to be the only sane guy in the bunch.  Everyone other than Jason Bateman’s character are charicatures, acting in a way no one would.  There is basically zero believability in their roles.

Keep in mind I’ve only watched the first 3 episodes, so if it gets better please tell me because I’m thinking about giving up on the other 50.

I think the people who love this show are the same people who love Ben Stiller movies like Duplex and Meet the Parents.  I just can’t stand watching everything go wrong for someone who just needs to take control or any one thing and it would probably work everything else out.  Maybe that’s what is supposed to be good about the movie, that it evokes this not-in-control emotion.

An example of this is that the character’s sister has a spending problem and is not interested in working.  To fix this he asks her to cut up her corporate credit card and get a job, then he invites her to stay in his house and doesn’t do anything when she continues to spend all the money in the corporate account.  Simply cancel the cards and she’ll have to get a job to afford things!

It must be the complete absense of logical thought that bothers me the most, it’s the one thing that ticks me off in an arguement, using some irrational “logic” to prove a point and ignoring my facts to the contrary.

Summary: I’ll give it a few days cooling off period and maybe try the show again, I do find some parts funny, but for the most part it’s too frustrating for me to watch.

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Great addon!

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The movie is the mostly fictionalized story of Domino Harvey (Keira Knightly), the child of a movie star who supposedly gave up modeling to become a bounty hunter.  There are some ridiculous things in this movie you could explain away as being mildly possible, considering pretty much every boy tries to learn to use nunchucks and throwing knives at some point it’s not too out there to imagine this woman succeeded in mastering both when she was 12.

The rest of the movie is a typical pulp story about a bail bondsman trying to steal some money and blame it on some patsies, but unfortunately gets wrapped up in the mob and the FBI.  It’s straight out of 1995… sadly it was written and filmed in 2005 without any sort of irony.

The implausibility was actually one of the least awful things about this movie, as it turns out, the directing (by Tony Scott, Top Gun, Man On Fire) and editing leave a lot to be desired.  In fact the whole movie is probably ruined solely by the editor, who cut in such an odd way with lots of repeating of lines and scenes (sometimes flipped, sometimes in reverse).  In fact the editing bothered me so much I’m going to look up his name right now and attach it to this movie.  Wow, William Goldenberg and Christian Wagner are to blame.  William Goldenberg may have edited some crap like Coyote Ugly and Miami Vice but he also did Heat and Pleasantville.  Christian Wagner did movies like Mission: Impossible 2, The Island, and Fast & Furious, but also did Bad Boys, Face/Off, and Spy Game.  Maybe editing is not as powerful a position as I assumed, but the movie could have at least been shorter than 2 hours.

The rest of the movie equalled itself out, the awesomeness of Christopher Walken helped diffuse the awfulness of Mo’Nique and Macy Gray.

Summary: This was a waste of 2 hours, and I might not have disliked it as much if it was shorter and had a lot less flashing scenes and repeats.

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This is where the movie basically begins…

So the “fresh” inner city youth who is all about popping and locking has to some janitorial work at a school trying very hard in the first 10 minutes to be the school from Fame.  Walking through the hall Tyler (Channing Tatum, in three movies this year: Fighting, Public Enemies, and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) passes by people carrying artwork, dancing in the halls, walking down the hall singing “A Capella” in groups, and playing violin, all in the one stretch of hallway.  We get it, it’s a school for talented people.

Through some creative plot devices, Nora (Jenna Dewan) is forced to ask Tyler to practice with her for her big senior performance.  This of course leads to Tyler adding just enough street into Nora’s routine to make it really stand out so she isn’t forced to go to Cornell like her mother so desperately wants her to, phew crisis averted.

The story is very derivative of many other movies where a prissy ballerina learns something from a rough kid from the streets.  In fact I really thought this movie was Save The Last Dance when I started to watch it, but realized when Julia Stiles didn’t show up that it must be a different movie.

Overall the movie isn’t terrible, the dance scenes are well choreographed and the scenes between Tyler and Nora are believable enough.  There are just some nit-picky things that movies like this always seem to think the audience will not just forgive, but actually expects.

For instance, when dancers go to a club a spontaneous ultra-choreographed d, ance number will be performed by what seems like total strangers.  Also everything works out in the end… except one person dies, but that is just the sort of push the secondary characters need to move on with their life and stop boosting cars.

Basically the entire friends from the hood storyline should have been dropped, along with most of the foster parent strife which doesn’t add much to the movie after it’s established Tyler’s life isn’t all that great (which I guess is what you need to explain why a nice young Irish boy would fall into trouble with inner city hoodlums).

One thing I thought was very interesting and different was the credit sequence.  Instead of a simple credit scroll, it waved back and forth and in the free space that was created they played what appeared to be audition video’s (possibly from all the people who didn’t make the cast).  I found that very interesting and caused me to stay until the end of the credits, I think more movies should consider the credits as part of the movie, not something tacked on at the end to show while people are leaving the theater.

Summary: Don’t go out of your way to see Step Up, but don’t go out of your way to miss it either.

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The movie is as good as a cheerleader type movie can be, about on par with Bring It On.  The wit in this movie was something I wasn’t expecting, about as good as any witty comedy I’ve seen lately.  Judging by the outtakes at the end, they were given a chance to show off their comedic freestyle.

I legitimately laughed out loud a lot during this movie, and I think it’s worthy of watching a few times (like when people come over who, no doubt, haven’t seen it).

Sarah Roemer, who plays the cheer captain and love interest, is great as the only girl at the camp who sees through the guys’ bullshit.  This role could have easily been cast to someone less talented and it wouldn’t have hurt the film, but luckily this woman was chosen (she’s super sexy too).

After looking up Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D’Agosto (The two jocks) I was shocked to see they are 32 and 29 years old respectively.  I honestly assumed they were in their early 20s and was going to extoll their virtues, as it is I’m a little surprised I haven’t noticed them in other movies before.  They were fantastic and it makes me think I look older than I am, seeing how young they look.

Summary: This is definately worth renting, especially if you have some people over.

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I don’t know, anyway long story short the game blows.  I started as an autobot, which means you play as Bumblebee (fail already).  Literally within 5 seconds of playing the game, all the cars in town got into a huge pile up, and I was no where near them (bad game AI).  I eventually tried out the Decepticon side, you play as Blackhawk, it was a bit better since your basic goal is to shoot and blow stuff up, but ultimately that got old very fast.

Regardless of which side you choose the game is basically this: turn into a vehicle, race to a destination, turn into a robot and shoot stuff, repeat.  That wouldn’t be a bad formula is racing was fun, it’s not much different from a bad racing game or GTA 3; or if the shooting and blowing stuff up was fun, which it isn’t.  The targeting system is busted and only targets things when they are very close and basically run past your reticle, and the weapons are boring, either a fast shooting weapon or a slower rocket launcher type weapon.  Basically everything you need to kill is vulnerable to one of the two types, it doesn’t take long to figure out which.

I got this from GameAccess.ca today, played it for an hour and will ultimately send it back to them tomorrow.

Summary: Not really even worth a rental, I’ll probably see if they fixed the problems in the sequel, it’s in my queue.

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I just finished the Prince of Persia game for PS3, it was a fantastic game, right up my alley.

The game is basically a platformer/puzzle solving game, with a little battle thrown in to add some variety, and the free running and platforming play really well and are forgiving enough to not be annoying.  For instance when you run past a ring, you can press O before, during or after it and it will not penalize you, but if you don’t press it at all, you will falll down.

In the game you have a companion who will save you whenever you fall and drop you off at the last bit of solid ground you were standing, this may seem like making it too simple and never having the fear of death, but it’s always an unrealistic fear anyway, better to focus on the fun aspects.

One of the best parts of the game is the writing.  The story plays out with great twists and story arcs.  The voice acting is fantastic, with some humour mixed in with great delivery of witty comments.  This will make a great movie someday (they are currently making one based on the Sands of Time) if it has the same great writing.

Summary: I rented this game, I probably wouldn’t play it a second time if I owned it, but it is definately something to play.

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