Archive for July, 2008

Well this morning started with me wanting to stick on The Slip by NiN onto my iphone, of course the iPhone doesn’t allow uploading from different iTunes, so i did a little research and found that WinAmp with ipod plugin will do it.

So i install all that, copy it over, iphone doesn’t see the album, then i do everything else carefully that it tells me to do, including restarting the iphone when i’ve copied over the album, then the iPhone doesn’t see any music, so i start iTunes and it now can’t read the iPhone at all and wants me to restore. Which means losing EVERYTHING in my iPhone, all my contacts, all my bookmarks, all my installed applications, everything. I’ll even have to jailbreak it all over again. Pain in the fucking arse.

So now i’m using a program called WinSCP that lets me get into the directory structure of my iPhone to back everything up apart from the songs and (hopefully) the music database.

If Apple weren’t such a bunch of tossers and locking everything left, right and centre then i could have just copied it through iTunes like you can with the iPod.

Rather annoyed now

And no, this has absolutely nothing to do with having Jailbroken my phone so don’t even start with that shit.

Procured Soul Calibur 4 last night, although i haven’t played it yet as i was doing the unenviable job of attaching covers to all the albums on my iPhone, yes i really am that anal.

On another note i would heavily recommend a comic book series called ‘The Walking Dead’, it’s (so far) 8 books all about the classic zombie uprising, but the best thing about it is that it’s trying to chronicle the entire story from beginning to end. In the authors introduction he explains that whenever he’s watched zombie movies he didn’t want them to end and he was always left wondering what happened next so this book is the whole story. It moves along at a brisk pace too which makes it immensely easy to read and you really do care about the characters. It would certainly make a good tv series.

And ‘The Boys’ by Garth Ennis is even better than Preacher. It even has a character modelled on Simon Pegg and any book that opens with a superhero telling a psychiatrist ‘Doctor, i can’t stop fucking things’, well, you just know it’s going to descend into the foul language, partial nudity and blood and guts that we all love.

Come on, not one person can deny that Spider-Man: Web of Shadows looks buggeringly good.

“Not any more”

Yeah, i know it’s really shitty quality but it’s still well worth watching.

*edit* fucking dailymotion has removed the video, you’d think the studios would be happy to generate such hype for it. Still, here’s a youtube one of it, not as good quality but you still get the idea

Ok, spotters, let’s get spotting…

So Harmonix have done a new drumkit for Rock Band 2, i haven’t seen a picture of them yet but apparently they look like the old ones but with less noise.

But this is the one i’m interested in, this is the ‘other’ drumkit sold by a separate company called Ion but in conjunction with the game, this kit will be rather pricey, like $300 pricey. The ONLY thing it seems to be missing is a hi-hat pedal. That would have been lovely.

You can also unplug it and use it as a midi kit. But if you’re delving into using it as a real kit you may as well get a proper digital kit like the Yamaha DT-Xpress, it’s far more versatile and is a fantastic kit for practicing at home with as you can put headphones on.

So this may just be the first and only thing that makes me jealous of the ShitStation 3.

So i was playing it all last night and i finished a full campaign so here are my thoughts.

Well, it’s okay. There doesn’t seem to be much depth to the game. I’m used to pc games where you have the smallest micro-management and this game just seems to do it all for you. There’s no stats you have to weigh up before you start doing something. I didn’t really care which of the evolution trees i was following. I just did the quickest one or one of the basics like literacy and it didn’t really interest me what it achieved.

I won by smiting my opponents as it seemed to be the most interesting. Otherwise there seems to be no point to 90% of the units other than defence, and as i was on the easiest setting i had about 3 attacks in the whole of the game.

To beat someone seems to consist of the following: Make peace with someone. Amass a shit load of units outside their borders then steam them all in. Maybe it gets a bit more technical when the game is on a harder setting, it also might be a bit more fun then but at the moment it seems distinctly ‘meh’. It seems like a simpler version of Red Alert 2, where you can always win just by steaming in. At least with RA2 you have to play it tactically, strike where the enemy is weakest and run away when it gets too heavy. In Civ Rev you send them in next to the town, preferably on a hill and click to attack, you might win, you might not but once the battle starts you can’t do anything other than press B to retreat.

When i was coming to end of my campaign of destruction i still kept getting the arseface with the glasses telling me about turns. I know you can switch it off but i kept thinking it may have something new to tell me.

I’ll probably give it another go, it annoys me that there’s no progression to play through, you just have a game of Civ Rev, there’s no beginning or end of the game. I don’t like that. I like campaigns where you have to do different things in different missions and you kinda know how far you are through it.

I read a user comment on ign that said this game was as addictive as crack, that would be the case if it had a silent ‘r’. But i can’t see it holding my interest much longer after the next game, and certainly not until the next decent game comes out.

If this game was a bag of chips i’d initially be impressed by the quantity you got, but when i got halfway down i’d get sick of them coz there’s no variation and all i’ve got it chips, then i’d drop them on the floor and go back in the chippy to get a battered sausage or something. [i think that analogy works...]

You’ll need a program called WinSCP. You’ll also need to install ssh on your jailbroken iphone through Cydia.

Install WinSCP, make a new session. Your host name is the ip address of your phone, look at the wi-fi settings on your phone and that will tell you it’s ip address. Port is 22. Username is root and Password is alpine. File protocol is SCP.

You don’t need to plug in your phone as you will connect wirelessly. Also set auto-lock to never under general settings within the phone.

In WinSCP, Save and login, it may do a few tries to connect but once it connects, it will connect every time no bother as long as the wi-fi is working properly.

The main files you may recognise are in /private/var/media/mobile, especially all the important things like address book, messages, bookmarks, pics and music.

Have fun arsing around with your phone internal files. If you’ve jailbroken your phone then you may have installed the nes emulator, you’ll need to get into your phone to stick in game ROMs.

This is the worst fucking idea since WiiFit. What fat lazy 360 gamer is going to bother getting one of these, looks like far too much effort, especially when you can sit comfortably flicking control sticks about while your sofa grafts itself around you.