Archive for February, 2009

So this is my last post before i head off to the wild blue yonder of sensible laws, like legalised Cannabis, prostitution and euthanasia.

And I’m rather excited.

The only dampener is that I’ve got a bloody filling to be done at half 2 this afternoon. So i’ll be leaving around half 1 so i can go home and clean my teeth first (You gotta do it when you go to the dentist haven’t you).

But through the miracle of modern technology i can still enter a post while i’m abroad. Dunno if i can attach pictures but you know they’ll be of either saucy tarts jiggling their wares around or the finest gungie known to man.

This post is dedicated to the strange enigma that is Julian Meteor.

This is how i see you when you’re writing your weird little comments:

Pretty accurate in my opinion...

Fancy a game of Quake III using nothing more than your browser? (Though you’ll need to install a plugin first but that’s understandable)

Then you may want to visit the website where the game is launched on Tuesday (next Tuesday, not today Tuesday).

http://www.quakelive.com

Certainly worth checking out next week.

Finally found a destination for my honeymoon so i’ll be booking that tomorrow when wages come through.

We’ll be going for 3 nights to the Affinia Dumont in New York. It’s short because we’re leaving the boy with his grandma for the time and the missus has never left him for so long before.

So I’ve done the dutiful thing and purchased Marvel Comic’s Guide to New York.

Quite excited to see where Gwen Stacy died (It’s a comic thing, you’re not cool enough to understand).

On another note you may want to hear about Ninja Blade. It’s a hack and slash game with a shit load of quicktime events thrown in to keep the action going. It doesn’t seem too bad. There are certain shades of God of War in there where you battle big massive beasts and the action keeps moving at a swift pace. But the fighting isn’t half as good. You can’t zip around between creatures as much. The story itself is entertaining enough to not press A to skip, all about big massive bugs and zombies attacking the city or summat.

It’s had a good go at making your character nimble giving him parkour style abilities, these aren’t as fluid as Mirror’s Edge but it’s still a bit nicer than just jumping around platform to platform.

The quicktime events are plentiful but they do follow pretty fluidly from the main action. The best thing about them is they’re grouped into 3 or 4 moves so if you fuck it up, you don’t go too far back. Also if you do fuck it up, instead of going through the whole dying and ‘Play again from the last checkpoint?’ crap it just rewinds time a little bit and lets you quickly have another go.

Yes i know, i moaned about Prince of Persia not doing any deaths but that was bollocks, this is a point where you don’t actually want to die as quicktime events are normally a pain in the arse.

The only problem i have is with the bosses, they massive, epic and take about 20 minutes to kill at 3 separate points . And if you die, you have to go all the way back to the frigging beginning of it. Which would get bloody annoying come the tougher bosses.

Blood and gore: 3 out of 10
Combat moves: 6 out of 10
Story: 8 of out 10
Difficulty: 6 out of 10
Buyability: 4 out of 10
Rentability: 9 out of 10

Rush, rush, rush.

Haven’t got time to write a big old post today. Spent most of the day sorting out this sodding wedding that i’m supposed to be having in just over 3 weeks. Been trying to find a nice hotel in New York and accompanying flights. Then had to go see Mrs. Woman at the venue to sort out final numbers and whatnot. Then, this afternoon I’m sorting out some piddly little village website.

Then tomorrow evening i’m going to see Mrs. Cakey Lady to sort out a site for a cake. As in, she makes us a wedding cake and I redesign her website. Then Wednesday i’ll probably be working on it. Then the bitches are all down on Thursday to start the stag do early.

Then, Friday, ho hoooo…

Friday is playtime to nirvana where the weed gets freely sold in shops and the knockers jiggle up and down in the red-lit windows.

Hey, it’s not all play, play, play you know.

Up, up and away, flying really high. Up above the clouds.

But before that, i’ll have to take the plane to Amsterdam for my stag do. (You see what i did there?)

*cough* Anyway, it’s been a fun week as the missus has been working every single evening this week so far. Obviously i enjoy her company but i also enjoy my own company that little bit more so i’ve had a week of Warhammer Online, more porn than you can shake a stick at, Rock Band 2, Dollhouse, Skate 2 and F.E.A.R. 2.

Dollhouse – The new show from geek god Joss Whedon starring Eliza Dushku. It’s about a lady simply called Echo who has had her memory wiped as some kind of punishment that we are, as yet, unaware of. Now she lives in the dollhouse, a highly exclusive and illegal recruitment building where you can literally hire any type of person you want, they just implant the knowledge and skills of multiple people into their ‘dolls’. You want an assassin, Echo gets the characteristics and skills of multiple assassins and literally becomes the best assassin in the world. Afterwards her memory is wiped and she goes back to the dollhouse docile and blissfully unaware of anything she’s just done. The first episode was pretty good. It wasn’t brilliant, but it didn’t suck. And there’s been plenty of successful shows that had really shit pilots (Battlestar Galactica, Buffy and Firefly just to name 3). I’ll stick with it for a while and i’m interested to see where they going to go with this. Look out for it making waves over here in a few months after it’s picked up pace.

Rock Band 2 – After Sunday’s very enjoyable practice with the band i had a major hankering to play drums on this again. Found a wonderful little tip that also works on the first game; build up your star power as early as you can and then don’t do the overdrive for a long long time, that way you only end up having to play two thirds of the song as you can sit back and do nothing when it comes to the fills, and it’s normally the fills that are the tricky part. It works pretty well, especially on songs like the Sonic Youth one.

Skate 2 – I’ve come to the decision that this is the most addictive, frustrating, fucking rock solid game i’ve ever played. How frigging hard do they want to make it? You can’t beat the other players on S.K.A.T.E. as they never fucking bail, ever, and you never get to go first, which sucks sweaty balls. One challenge i did about 60 times before i eventually gave up, it’s just manual to manual hop up a ledge, then a manual to manual jump over a gap, but where they put the gap just makes it nigh on impossible to build up any speed and line yourself up. But i did finally do the San-Van-a-Slamma last night, so i’m pleased about that. Took me a frigging hour to do it though.

F.E.A.R. 2 – I’m undecided about this one. There’s something wrong here but i can’t quite put my finger on it. Absolutely loved the first game, i’d even say it was one of my favourite games of all time, certainly in my top ten. One bit in the first one where you carefully making your way around a 3″ rim in the inside of an elevator shaft and suddenly the elevator screams past you; I actually did a little poo.

So i was rather excited to see the same development company doing a sequel. How could it go wrong? I’m still not sure why or how, but it has. The scary bits are just trigger points*, now obviously they’re trigger points but really, really obvious trigger points. Gotta make your way around a villa’s swimming pool to progress, oh you can’t get around the pool and have to jump into it, hmm, wonder if anything will happen when i drop in, yep it did, woooh that’s scary. And flicking the image of a character in a corridor on and then off so it looks a bit like a ghost when you’re running forward does not make a game scary. Neither does someone walking across the end of a T-junction as you’re running down it, then, oh my god, you turn the corner and they’ve sodded off. Bugger me, where the fucking fuck did they go??!!!! There seems to be more scares in Hello Kitty Adventures. Now maybe it’s because i haven’t played it long enough as i’ve only clocked up a couple of hours so far, but if it stays at this level of excitement all the way through i’m going to end up chopping off my own head just to liven things up a bit.

* Trigger Point – a specific thing happens in a game when you get to a specific point so the developers can make sure that you, the player, see it happen. e.g. Alone in the Dark – You get to a bit and a school bus falls off a ledge. If you’d have stayed where you were that bus would have balanced precariously for an infinite time.

The swedish chaps in charge of The Pirate Bay website are up to their 3rd day in court and amazingly, it’s them that’s looking “impish and interesting” according to ars technica.

The media and PR companies are whining the same old bullshit over and over again about why can’t people pay their way while the defendants are sticking with the fact that they are just a search engine and you can find the same results on google or yahoo. It will be very interesting to the entire internetting world to see what the outcome of this trial.

It’s interesting that, strictly speaking, no-one is to blame, but at the same time, everyone is. The media companies are complaining about loss of sales, especially the gestapo-like RIAA, but they then conveniently forget to admit the proof that people are spending their money on other things, like gaming, cinema and going out. In fact gaming purchases enjoyed record sales last year up 25% on the previous year.

And the torrent search engines are happily sticking with the story that they don’t host any copyrighted files, just provide links to them.

They’re far from in safe waters though, their undoing could easily come from their ignoring of cease and desist letters from media companies to remove links to their movies/albums, preferring instead to post the letters online with mocking comments like the head of the messenger on a pike outside the front gate. Plus it doesn’t help that their name is ‘The Pirate Bay’ replete with the old 80′s tape and crossbones logo designed when people were copying games for their Spectrum and Commodore.

Meanwhile the RIAA and MPAA take action the only way they know how; by sticking on their jackboots and goose-stepping their way through the general public fining young teenagers ludicrous amounts for downloading the latest Girls Aloud song. On an offshoot this then brings up the age old question of whether DRM helps or damages media. I guess people like Peter Molyneux could answer that question after Spore was released.

It’s nice to see Amazon are taking a good step forward by releasing albums for around £3 with no DRM at all. But it’s still either £3 or free for exactly the same thing. And they’re both just as easy to obtain. To be honest the free one is even easier as it doesn’t require you enter any card details. So which would you choose?

I for one will be reading about this case with very interested eyes. After all, it’s events like this that will shape the world my son grows up in.

I’m going to tell you a little story now. Bear with me coz it is actually interesting.

About 3 years ago our company employed someone to take over a magazine about Golf Courses. That guy was a chap called Geoff Baker. Now, i found out later on when i was speaking to him that he used to be the PA for Paul McCartney for about 20 years. He was essentially Paul’s right-hand man, he was the one who sorted out his gig at Glastonbury. Then Paul spectacularly fired him. It boiled down to him and Heather Mills hating each other and really not getting on. Here’s an interview with him.

Anyway, he pulled me aside one day and told me he’d got a band together called Purple Melon, they were going to throw a shit load of money at it, get them a regular gig at a club called Barfly in Birmingham, get them signed and make it big. Proper big. And they were thinking of kicking out the drummer coz he was a cock so he asked me if I wanted to go down to his house one evening and discuss it further.

I went down and we had a chat while he rolled the biggest, strongest bifta i’ve ever fucking smoked in my life. He played me their demo and I was pretty impressed. He’d heard me drum and he liked what he heard so we finished the evening with him going to talk to the band and get me an audition on Saturday.

I had also just found out a few days before that the missus was pregnant so i went home and we discussed it at length. Essentially she said if this is what i wanted to do then i could and she wouldn’t stand in my way. There’s my free ticket to go off, tour the country, possibly the world and be a fully fledged rock star (which is something i’ll be grateful for, for the rest of my life).

Friday night Geoff rings me and tells me that they want to hold off on the auditions for the moment until they can get a few more to audition for them. So time passes and a couple of months down the line I hear that they’ve decided to keep their drummer. Bang, there goes my dreams of fame and fortune and back to my 9-5 job. Jus tlike that. It was so difficult to carry on with everything when it was that close in my grasp.

I’m bitter about it for a long while afterwards. Can’t bear to read or hear anything about them. Of course, curiosity starts to eat up inside and google beckons. I read amusing reviews of their gigs in Birmingham where the lighting guy will apparently suck anyone off in the bogs for a fiver. They even have a large article in Q magazine asking can you make a band by throwing a million pounds at them. Then i hear they’ve gone to LA to try and make it big over there as they’ve become a bit of a running joke over here; gigging for ages and no record deal or even interest.

Today i’ve heard they’ve actually moved to LA coz it’s obviously easier for a British band to make it big in America than it is in their own country! (that’s sarcasm in case you hadn’t noticed).

Geoff has given up on the band despite them owing him a shit load of money, and he was the one with all the contacts in the industry to make the whole thing work.

But the most amusing thing, the thing that makes me feel better all the time about it, is little things like this review of their EP. Absolutely brilliant.

I guess some things are just a blessing in disguise. But I still can’t help wondering what the ride would have been like…