kroniq reviews

Extreme Indoor Karts

A friend of mine organised for a group of us to go karting the other weekend. He rang around a few places and tried to hustle a good plan to get us on the track for longer than any of their advertised rates. After negotiating with them all we decided upon going to Extreme Indoor Karts in East Tamaki. None of us had been there before.

We arrived at the track and were told that the guy we had negotiated a price with had gone home and so the offer originally agreed on was not going to be honered. We managed to get an extra 10 minutes track time for free but this wasn’t as good as we had originally planned for.

Not spending as much time on the track probably worked out for the best. The karts were in very poor condition. During my time there I swapped in and aout of no less than 5 karts. The first one had very stiff stearing, not allowing you to turn easily to the right. The kart after that was good… untill the break cable snapped! The following kart was an older generation and had a full steal frame which made it much slower than everyone else on the track. Each new kart presented another new problem, and before I knew it I was back at the first one. I think we calculated that they probably had 2 good karts.

Putting the actual karts aside and looking at the track it was well laid out. It had plenty of good passing opportunites. It included split option to either go quicker on the outside or cut inside with an extra turn, both ways had a similar time but it was nice to be able to out-manouver a slower driver. It also had a small upper level section of track with added a little bit of extra interest.

Overall the experience was let down by the lack of quality karts. The guys there were flat out trying to keep them up and running but were fighting a losing battle. I probably wouldn’t go back there again as there are lots of other options available in Auckland.

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The Losers

I usually don’t go to the movies unless it’s one I have really been looking forward to. Last night though we got cheap tickets to see a mystery movie, you don’t know what movie it is until you are actually watching it! I went there with low expectations as to what I was going to see but left feeling pleasantly satisfied.

The story line was fairly basic, it didn’t take much to understand what was going on and the biggest twist you could see almost a mile away. That didn’t worry me though. The story moved at a good pace with lots of action and a few funny bits. It wasn’t a long movie and I could have even watched another 30 minutes so they could build more into the ending, not that the ending was left short, just that they could have exploited it a bit further.

Character depth was also fairly shallow. This isn’t the sort of movie to induce much thought. What you see is what you get. None of the performances were outstanding but the story was never going to challenge the actors in any way. After getting past that you will enjoy the small moments where they do something amusing and execute it well.

Usually with an action film comes big explosions and a few impressive graphics. This movie had that without going over the top. I think they balanced this well. Some movies try too hard and lose focus on what makes a good movie. I especially liked the use of camera speed. At times they would use a slow frame rate to emphasize some action or skip frames in time to music to help get you in the mood.

As mentioned earlier, we got cheap tickets to see this movie. If we hadn’t I probably wouldn’t have gone to the cinema to see this film. It was fun but not worth paying full price to go and see. However, it is worthy of renting from your local DVD store.

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