Archive for October, 2008

It’s out today, unless i’m very much mistaken. And as you all know i rarely am. [smug grin]

I happened to catch the tv series of The Clone Wars on Sky Movies last night.

It’s shite.

It’s really fucking boring. Who’s going to enjoy this tosh? It’s set between Ep 2 and Ep 3. You know, the really boring part that no-one gives a crap about, before Anakin turns evil. So it’s all talk about trade federations, seperatists, and loads of boring clones. Plus a scattering of the annoying droids that say ‘Roger Roger’ a lot. The entire thing is like watching a half-hour cutscene. You’re waiting for the action to start. Which it doesn’t.

Ok, George, listen to me now:

We. didn’t. like. the. first. 3. films.

They were a bit shit. Not utter shit, some parts in each film was good. Duel of the Fates in the first one, Yoda/Dooku in the second and the last 20 minutes in the third, but they were overall a bit shit. Diet Shit you might say.

So why set the story in between this storylines that no-one cares about?

It would have been just as easy to set it between Ep’s 3 and 4. The whole building of the Empire, the modifications of the Clone Troopers to Stormtroopers. The gradual construction of the Death Star. The birth of the Rebel Alliance. Now that would have been real good shit, not shit shit.

You could even centre the story about a bounty hunter working for Jabba who gets a pang of conscience and learns about the Rebel Alliance. A real slow burner. Spread it out over a bunch of series.

You can have that one, free of charge. Just get rid of this Clone Wars rubbish, take your bulbous frog neck out of your arse and give the fans what they want to see.

Looks like Garth Ennis is the latest to receive the movie adaptations. First it was ‘The Boys’ that’s getting the hollywood makeover, but it’s just been announced that Sam Mendes (director of Road to Perdition) will be directing a movie version of……. [deep breath]

Preacher.

This is brand new news as James Marsden was supposed to do it with a script penned by Kevin Smith, but this is all tip-top spanking new info. The producer wants unknowns to be in it.

Discuss…

I watched the first episode of ‘Dead Set’ last night. In case you’re not aware of it, it’s a 5 part drama on E4 showing all this week about a Zombie outbreak, but, and here’s the twist, it’s centred around the Big Brother house.

And you know what? It was really, really good.

Zombies are always brilliant but this put a great spin on it. It centres around a production assistant who ends up in the BB house when there’s nowhere else to run to. The amusing part is, all the housemates cheer coz they think they have a new housemate, regardless of the fact she’s holding a large pair of scissors and covered in blood.

If you think about it, the Big Brother house is probably going to be one of the most secure places you could be, but you still have to put up with all the wankers that inhabit it. You’ve got the mouthy polo-shirt wearing northerner, the mouthy camp queen with a silly name, the mouthy black woman, the dumb blond who’s a bit mouthy, the grumpy old git who sits and sulks and other irritating spanners.

Oh, and these are the fast buggers like in 28 Weeks Later (arguably the best zombie film in the world ever), not the slow lumbering fuckers a la Dawn of the Dead.

I guess the question that’s going to arise is: Is it hell outside with all the zombies running about or is it stuck inside the BB house with all the dickheads who were specifically chosen so they’d hate each other.

If you get a chance to see it I would highly recommend it. In fact, doing a bit of nosying around here’s the link to watch it on Channel 4′s website. You’ve got just over a month before they remove it.

So i tried Guitar Hero: World Tour last night. Only did about 9 or 10 songs but i feel i can give my usual pre-empted opinions from that.

So, um, it’s Guitar Hero… What’s there to say…

I used the Rock Band guitar on it so i didn’t have the slidey thing in the middle. Although from the handful of songs i played, that slidey thing only got used in a couple of bars of 3 of the songs. Everything else seems to be the same.

The good: Today by The Smashing Pumpkins with fully mo-capped Billy Corgan.

The bad: Livin’ on a fucking shitty Prayer. (I despise this song)

I’ve only played it with guitar so far and there seems to be a beginner mode which is nice for the very small children and all the women who are inherently rubbish at all games.

The animations of the performers don’t seem to be as good as Rock Band. They don’t seem as lively and active and it still uses the same old camera angles they’ve used since the first game; Guitar string cam anyone?

I’m sure it would be nice playing with the new instruments but i’m buggered if i’m shelling out another £umpteen again. At the absolute minimum it’s another track listing with some new fun songs to play on guitar and drums. Which is what it’s all about for most of us. Unless you’re an obsessive Rubberdave, you won’t be practising every single song so you can get 100% in Extreme mode, simply for that one special Achievement.

Coming Soon: Kwontumm of Sollis.

Jim? Jim Beeer? Jimbeeer, I thought that was you!

Hi, thanks for reading.

Hey now, don’t you tell me you don’t remember me ’cause I sure as heckfire remember you.

Not a chance.

Ned… Ryerson. “Needlenose Ned”? “Ned the Head”? C’mon, buddy. Harmonix. I’m the one who brought out Guitar Hero World Tour last week and made it region-free? Bing. Ned Ryerson, also made the Rock Band drums work with it? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson, given you the ability to play it either this evening if the missus will let you, failing that, tomorrow night, Well?

Ned Ryerson?

BING!

Bing.

I’ve come to the conclusion this weekend that:

• Fable II is really, really boring and dull. There’s no button to wait like in Oblivion so i have to stand there scratching my arse or fiddling with my flange (as i am a girlie in the game) for 15 minutes waiting for the bloody shops to open. I’ve fallen asleep 5 times playing the damn thing so far so why am i still playing? Dog only knows, maybe i’m just expecting to uncover this absolute marvel of a game that everyone else seems to be playing.
• Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is better than i first wrote. I would still only recommend renting it for the average person who (as DM so eloquently put it) doesn’t want to bum Spider-Man repeatedly.
• Fallout 3 is great, but pretty damn tricky.
• Potfest will be the greatest movie ever made. I watched Beerfest on Saturday and it was a lot better than i expected it to be. At the end they encouter Willie Nelson, who’s just about to go into a big pot smoking competition but his team mates, Cheech and Chong, have pulled out, so do our heroes want to stand in for them instead. Cue the text on screen: ‘Coming Soon: Potfest’. At first it was a joke but they’ve had loads of people wanting to know when it’s coming out so they’re most likely going to make it.
• Sky are fucking snidey bastards. They make you buy the equipment that’s totally useless unless you rent the service to use that equipment from them. But they have no competition, so you have absolutely no choice other than to pay whatever they say(Well, you could go with with Virgin i suppose, but ask the dog at the top of this page what he thinks of that). Here would be a perfect time for an analogy, but i can’t actually think of one. Oh hang on, here you go. It’s like signing up for broadband from an ISP, but you’re only allowed to use their browser, and you have to buy it from them. Bollicks innit?
• Amazon are only good if you have an Amazon Prime account, which my boss does. So i use theirs. Bingo, free next day delivery on everything no matter the final price
• The Marvel/Top Cow crossover book looks really good, and i look forward to reading it this evening
VN:F [1.9.2_1090]
please wait...
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

I have played the best game ever made and the star of the show is ol’ webhead himself. The missions are varied and interesting, the controls are complex but very rewarding. The voice work is great, the animation fluid. New York is great fun and feels very alive.

Unfortunately I’m talking about Spider-Man 2: The Game and NOT Spider-Man: Web of Shadows which, in reality, is a bit wank.

I am royally fucked off.

I’ve been looking forward to this game for about 8 months now. How can it go wrong? Spidey 2 was fantastic and my favourite game ever made, so this can only improve on it, right?

Nope.

The controls are too simple. There’s all these fancy moves you can do, but you don’t need them. Spidey does too much with the push of one button to care about anything other than button-bashing. Press Y and you’ll jump on the baddie then jump back, then zip a line at him and pull yourself to him, then just press a button before you hit him, usually X, Y or B, and repeat. Absolute piece of piss. Which just makes the combat tedious pretty damn quickly as it just descends into Y, X, Y, X, Y, X, etc.

The padding out of missions is just frigging ridiculous. Your first main boss fight is against Black Cat and you go through 6 (yes that’s SIX!) fights with her, one after the other.

You know when you have a boss fight in a game and you’ll get his energy down to 20% or so? Then you get a cutscene then the action switches to the second part, the boss gets tougher and his energy goes back up to top. Well there’s six of these fucking things against the first sodding boss. And every time her energy jumps back up to full again. Jesus, it’s dull.

At another point you have to do the zip line jumping thing combo (Y, X, Y, X, etc) against 2 separate waves of snipers around buildings. Jump on the first one, jump off, auto-target the next, jump on that, jump off, and so on. The first wave is 10 of them, then for some bizarre reason 20 more spawn up at the points you’ve just jumped through and you have to do them as well, all in one big long chain. It’s really easy and really bolliks.

Press Y, wait til you get to them, press X, repeat.

On the voice acting everyone else is fine but Spidey is the whiniest little bitch ever. The story is a bit foggy, especially at the beginning. That’s just weird.

It just makes me want to go back to the Spider-Man 3 game, which in turn makes me want to go back to the Spider-Man 2 game as it’s the best one ever made. How the fuck Shaba games haven’t learned from Treyarch is beyond me. Games like this normally get better and more refined. But this hasn’t. It’s just got shitter.

In Spider-Man 2, the swinging is pretty complex to do it well. You swing with the RT, then at the bottom of your arc you hold LT to get the speed to a max, then a fraction of a second after that you need to hold A to build up your jump so you can jump at the end at the optimum angle to shoot forward. It’s pretty tricky to do well, but once you can do it, boy does it feel good. Then later on you unlock wallrun and swinging through the city is just the coolest thing in the world.

In Web of Shadows, you press RT to swing, then you let go at the end. It’s shite.

I am so fucking annoyed about this game. I’ll probably play it to completion as it’s still fun, but i know i’m holding it together because of the fact that i’m a huge spidey fan. Your average layman isn’t going to be as impressed.

There are good things about the game. It saves often so you never get put back too far when you die. Plus you can flip in and out of the black costume with a quick press of LS. Only problem about the black costume is, there’s no major difference in the fighting between the two. Or least none that i’ve seen.

This is essentially 'Pull', which is just B. That's it.

You can pull down other heroes to fight alongside you and they’ll only help if they agree with your ‘alignment’ at the time (red points, black points, etc). Moon Night will only help if you’re a right do-gooder and Black Cat will only help if you’re a little bit of a bastard. Great idea. Unfortunately, they’ll drop in, slap a couple of baddies around and basically do fuck all while you get seven shades of shit pummelled out of you. You won’t even notice if they’re there or not. They’re not so much of an aid to your fighting, more of a distraction.

At the end of each cutscene you get a choice with you want to take the good red route, or the evil black route. IE, do you shag Black Cat or do you decline like a pussy bitch. Apparently at the end, after you’ve fought Wolverine, if you take the black route you rip the little Canuck shit in half. So it’s not all bad

In order of bestness:

Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man 3
Ultimate Spider-Man
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

I won’t even bother mentioning Friend or Foe, least said about that, the better.

So, right, give Dead Space a go last night, yeah. And i faught i’d let yall no wha it’s like.

So you’re this geezer and you got to go fix this spaceship that’s, like, orbiting this planet but the planet’s all blown up and that and there’s bits of it flying off all over the shop. It’s like that film with baldy man out of Matrix and that pretend English fella off Jurassic Park where the spaceship’s bin to hell and they all get fucked up and that. Can’t remember what it’s called, The Manchurian Candidate or summat.

The first weird fing i saw was that your guy’s not in the middle, he’s, like, off to left but it only teks yer bout 10 minutes to get used to i’ and then you’re all, knowing where yer running to and like, wivout boverin that yer not in cen’er.

I dint exactly shit meself playin it but it did mek me jump sumtimes. Like when one of the thingies drops on yer ed or jumps ou’ ov a vent and that. That does mek you jump but only coz yer not expectin i’. And then yer all like, fuck me i just shit mesen, leg it.

I fout the game itself was pretty well cool. Want that impressed wiv it when it was been med, coz it just looked like the same old bollicks, but playing it now it’s all like, wow that is well impressive.

It’s all the little fings that meks it better than all the other games that are like, like it and that.

Fer a start, there’s none of that hud biznes where you’ve got yer life in the top left and a map and shit like that. Everything you need is on yer fella, you got a health bar on your back and a little round thingy that tells you how much stasis an pulling thingy (like the gravity gun in half life) you’ve got left. Then when you aim, yer gun tells you how much ammo yiv got left.

Another thing is, you’ve only got limited thingy slots like in Resi Evil so you can’t bomb around grabbin everyfing you want, coz it’ll, like, fill up yer slots too fast. So you get to the store and you can actually dump stuff in the bank but i just end up selling all me crap.

The weapons are well nice. They’re all, like, normal tools for fixing things and that but they’re also used for wasting the baddies. This meks them more better than normal stuff like shitty guns and shotguns and that coz wiv all seen them a million times before, ant wih?

Wasting the aliens and that is pretty new coz insted of blastin shit ou’ ov em wiv a gun and that, you just aim for their legs and spindly things that come out of their ead, so you can aim for their knee and shoot em and this sideways laser shoots out of your gun and chops like both their legs off or summat. But, like, they’re not dead yet and they keep crawlin towards you, and you’re like, shit, fuck off will ya, so you can waste their arms and then run up and stomp on their eads. Which is always pretty men’al a do.

You’ve got this slowy-down ability that, like, slows shit down, which you have to do to get past these electric cable thingies that are woozing about all over the place and these stupid banging doors that you’d get crushed in if you just legged it through. So you slow em down and then you can just walk past ‘em. It’s pretty cool but i reckon it int that needed and that they’ve just added it into the game for the sake of it. You wunt a missed it if it want there, that’s what i’m sayin. Same with the gravity gun style pully-throwy thingy. It’s just for like puzzles and that. But what it does do, is mek the game a little bit more fun and it’s this kinda stuff that meks better than the other games that are like that.

The bits where yev got no gravity are pretty trippy, but they’re also cool at the same time, yer na wha’ a mean? Coz you can, like, jump from one bit to another so your jumpin abou on the walls and that and the aliens are jumpin all over the place and it’s all like, shitty dick, where did that thing go to, it were in front of me a second ago and i’m all like, Woah, and alien’s like, Raarrrr. But you dun know where it is so end up pegging it about all over the shop.

In conclusion i reckon the game’s like, well cool, and it’s proper well worth buying and that and i even reckon i’ll complete it which’ll be the first game ah will a comple’ed since the Star Wars one where yer chuckin around lightsabers and zappin all the at-ats and that.

What are ya buyin’?

Blend in with the crowd