Mr-Moriarty's Den

Pack up guys, were moving!

2009-02-05T08:28:00.001-08:00

So, after running the den for what feels like forever but really is only about 4 months I’ve decided I need a change of sitting and thus, the blog is moving!

Why?
Moriarty’s Den was always meant to be a place I could rant under another name and thus no repercussions for what I said but in recent weeks I’ve realised it doesn't really matter if people know who I am, close friends and family already know my opinions on the world and strangers, well I hope you all have better things to do than give too much of a crap about what I say. There is also the fact that the site feels too impersonal, partly due to the persona but also because since day one it’s been more about my views on video-games than me, I’m not saying I want it to all be about me, god no, that’d be horridly boring, What I’m saying is political, religiously and other big topics in life I’ve voiced in no way though my blog, and I’ve hardly touched on my other work and with new comics planned for the future I need somewhere to call home on the net to pitch them from.

What’ll Change?
The posts I’ve made over the last 4 months will stay here, I’ve also imported them into the new blog for future readers to look back though if their so horridly bored that sticking forks in their eyes isn’t entertainment enough. As for changes, I’ll no doubt end up talking about video-games too much as it is a major part of my life (not a big part, just pretty much the only part that isn’t stuck in cryogenics) but I also wanna do more rants about life and what pisses me off and what makes me smile. I might also start breaking out the camera a bit more and I hope as the reader base grows (if it grows) who knows, maybe spark a debate or two as well as flame wars in the comments section :-D

Where?
The new blog is called:

When?
Now. The sites up, I’ll be making a post or two on there asap just to get it warmed up, so remember the change your bookmark!

See You On The Other Side! <3

twitter

2009-02-04T10:34:00.001-08:00

Ah twitter, I mentioned this little web 2.0 tool a while back and in fairness I tried to play it up but I just didn’t care. It seemed like someone had taken the status update used in Facebook and built a site on that and nothing else. Integrating it into your blog seemed like the only logical use, hence I stuck it on here, over there >>>. Anyway, yesterday, after using twitter for a month I finally tried checking out the twitter community, how? I subscribed to Stephen Fry’s twitter, instantly the site became a whole new thing to me, fun, interesting, and insanely nosey! I found that my TV hero was updating his twitter almost constantly, including his epic adventures getting stuck in a lift, I found this weirdly interesting, and the more I red the more I began to fall in love with Twitter. I’ve heard it being described as the ultimate news feed but always took that as marketing bumph but yesterday I realised it really is. People can update their twitters a lot faster than a news crew can report something. People who were these when something happened will “tweet” which will then spread across the…I’m gonna be cool now and coin a term…Twitter-Sphere in moments!

Alas as cool as this all sounds though I enjoy twitter because it goes back to basics. Pictures are in links, no fancy flash animations, no blinking text or pimped out posts. It feels like the IRC equivalent of Web 2.0 which has a real charm for me, a lover of the simple…no I don’t mean I take advantage of mentally ill people…well, not often but I’m getting off topic. I love the setup, the style, the community, and the popularity of twitter and would recommend everyone gives it a try at least for a few weeks and if you do, subscribe to me and I’ll subscribe to you, and together we shall take on the tweets of others!*

*I probably wont talk to you, but we can pretend right?

Ferrets

2009-02-01T15:06:00.001-08:00

sorry for the sucky lack of good updates this weekend, till next time I hope this puts a smile on your face <3

2009-01-31T13:07:00.001-08:00

Guess who got a Golden Cart version of The Legend of Zelda for the NES today? Oooh yeeeeah! :-D Anywho, I’m unable to find my NES (sods law) so I’ve opted for running it on an emulator (legally!) and I’m looking into a way to mount the cart in a frame for my wall. Sounds OTT but this was the first RPG I ever played and my god I loved it even if I sucked at it. Anywho just thought I’d share. Updates soon darlins.

Silent Hill 2 Walkthough

2009-01-25T12:33:00.001-08:00

I’m feeling too meh to really write a long winded update today, but I did find this awesome guy on YouTube who records walkthoughs for games. Might sound pointless but I’m the kinda person who’ll buy horror games and make my house mate play them cause I’m a wimp. So if you enjoy watching horror games more than playing them, or your stuck and walkthoughts in text don’t help, check this out :D

More Coming Soon

Half Life in 60 Seconds

2009-01-25T05:54:00.001-08:00

5 Scary Games

2009-01-23T14:34:00.001-08:00

So today I’m trying to get a few updates out as you know, so I thought instead of writing a long winded review of one of the few games I’ve completed (that list consists of Castle Crashers) I’d do one of my ‘randomly list 5’ things, and recently horror games have been catching a lot of my attention so I thought why not do a list of scary games? I checked YouTube for scary game lists and realised all of them had listed the same games, and a lot of those games were ether not very scary (Doom 3…wtf?) so here is my list, not all main stream games ether, enjoy:

1. F.E.A.R
F.E.A.R (a bastard for me to type) is a rare hybrid, mixing not only action and horror (which fails 99% of the time) but also first person action. The result is actually very good. Sudden scary moments come just as the games action elements are getting dull and normally the fact it’s a horror game has slipped to the back of your mind and thus the scare is so much worse. I just finished the F.E.A.R 2 demo for 360 and I don’t think I have any clean underwear left now, so the series isn’t losing its ability to scare even after 2 expansions and a stand alone online game.

2. Penumbra/Penumbra : Black Plague
I’ve listed the two games because in fairness Black Plague isn’t so much a sequel but more part two and thus both come recommended. Once again you get thrown into the first person mode but this time with NO weapons. Instead of action this is a puzzle game pushing you to work out what most of the time are not overly complex problems, what makes it hard is the fucked up creatures stalking the hallways trying to find and kill you. When something chases you down a hall screaming and laughing and you know you need to hide trust me you’ll wish you’d setup your laptop by the loo.

3. Condemned
Yes it’s another first person shooter, but this one just like the previous two manages something weird and new. The monsters? Their not monsters, just fucked up people. The scariest enemies don’t even move and aint even enemies (you’ll understand in the shop) and your arsenal? Any pipe, axe, hammer, or bit of wood you can get your hands on. This game is all about close combat, so close you can see the madness in the eyes of a drug addict who’s blinded by rage and just wants you dead. The use of a very crappy torch with very small area of sight gives you an immense claustrophobic feel too. This game had me scared shitless and I wasn’t even playing!

4. Resident Evil 1 (GC)
Wehay finally one that's not action or first person! So, what’s so scary about resident evil? Admittedly it’s kinda like the older brother of Silent Hill which was never quite as good at sports as his little brother but in the GameCube remake of Resident Evil it wasn’t the graphical upgrade that made it scary, it wasn’t the addition of stuff left out of the original, hell it wasn’t even the voice acting. No, it was the Bronze caps. An evil concept by which if you don’t destroy the head or burn the body of a zombie within a set time it would rise again but this time stronger, faster…and able to now not only use doors but stairs. There is almost no escape from one and it’ll keep coming till you kill it for good. This being chased element will make you shit yourself, well worth a go.

5. Clock Tower
Now Clock Tower is an odd choice, for starters its on PS1, it’s graphically shit and it’s about as heard of as me in a hot woman's bed. So, why’d I pick it? Well recently I picked up Clock Tower 3 on the PS2 for my house-mate (I was too scared to play it myself…what? I’m a wimp!) and was horrified to find the game was bogged down by horrid voice acting, happy-happy-joy-joy, a plot which made me wanna kill my friends and family it was so bad and characters you wanted to die. In truth it was still a scary game, but you can’t measure the merits of a horror game just on it’s scariness. Scream scared me, I still think it’s the worst horror movie I’ve watched since House of the Dead. So, I’ve picked Clock Tower 1 (or 2 if it catches your fancy) because I think everyone who can should give this game a chance, it’s truly fucked up and scary putting you in control of a powerless teenage girl being stalked by a serial killer you have to uncover the truth behind what’s going on while not getting killed. Same concept as Penumbra but from a point and click adventure game point of view. The game had me scared before anything had even happened. Get it if you can.

So, before I finish I’d like to make clear, the game that scared me the most ever was Silent Hill 2, and there are plenty of other scary games out there, this wasn’t a list of my top 5, it’s just 5 I’d recommend, so no complaining that I’m wrong or something ok?

Sims 3

2009-01-23T10:17:00.001-08:00

Ok, I’ll admit my shame. I’ve been a fan of the Sims since the first game, I even would have picked up MySims on Wii if I hadn’t gotten rid of my Wii (or if my laptop could run the PC version). I’ve enjoyed both games and all the expansions but in truth I haven’t been looking forward to Sims 3. Why? Well the graphics in the early screenshots looked like they’d finally slipped into the uncanny valley, and beyond the open world and the graphics it looked like there was gonna be little else to offer other than higher system specs and a new £30 price tag. That was till I finally bit the bullet and watched the Developer Game Tour on the sims official YouTube channel. I gotta say it’s won me over big time, looks quite fun. I do wish they’d somehow brought a basic version of the creation tools in Spore into the game to allow some basic customisation for people without the ability to model but even without that the game looks vast, fun, and the iron bladder perk sounds like a god sent if I can unlock it. All the more reason for me to start saving for that new PC a? Enjoy:

Been A While

2009-01-23T09:04:00.001-08:00

Hey dudes and dudes-with-bewbs, if any of you are even still checking this thing. Sorry for the long silence, works been taking up a lot of my time and life's been crushed into the weekends I’d normally use to update. Once again sorry. I’ve been off work for two days ill though so fingers crossed my concentration is here enough to churn out a post or two but I promise nothing!

So, I’ve finally begun to get used to this NetBook although it has presented me with some issues.

1. Even though it’s exactly the same specs as my crap-top and even runs WoW better, after spending 4 days downloading a copy of FFXI (because my copy is on CD and NetBooks don’t have CD drives) I discover it runs it about as good as I run marathons, same goes for a few other games, but no major kick in the knackers, gaming isn’t the reason I got this little thing, interwebs is! Which leads onto problem…

2. Even though this little thing is designed for web use, you know, MSN, Blogging, and browsing the net, due to it’s…hell I dunno what flash consumes but I’m gonna pretend I know and say due to it’s RAM flash heavy sites (so most sites with banner ad’s by fucktards like Sky or O2) cause IE and FireFox to both throw hissy-fits on a scale which will probably force you to ctrl+alt+delete your way out killing any downloads you had on the go as well as any sites you was looking at…really spoils a porn-a-thon you know!

3. This is a Netbook, as I’ve said, their designed for net based stuff, one of those being Blogging. It comes with a basic webcam for Vloggers but that I have no issue with. My problem is that Windows Live Writer isn’t designed for the international Netbook resolution of 1024x600, this means I can’t access some options due to the lack of a tiny scroll bar someone who should be fired at Microsoft (I pray their in the cutbacks) didn’t put in. Not the NetBooks fault in all fairness but still, it’s bugging me and making blogging less enjoyable.

So yeah, needless to say there isn’t any reason for this update, I’ve just got a headache, I’m bored, and don’t fancy shouting at people on Halo 3 so I thought I’d just rant on here :-)

Anywho, I’ll try getting some updates out soon my lovelies <3

Fear the Netbook!

2009-01-15T09:34:00.001-08:00

So, my laptop is about to crap out so thanks to my mum who bailed me out with a £279.95 loan, I am the proud owner of an Advent Netbook :-D

The next few updates may be…shittily written? cause the keyboard is TINY but eeee! New computer!

Microsoft CES 2009 Keynotes

2009-01-12T10:36:00.001-08:00

For all my readers who are as nerdy as me:

Final Fantasy XI

2009-01-10T10:27:00.001-08:00

So, I've done the shameful thing and gone back to Final Fantasy XI :-( if anyone else plays let me know, I need friends in it :-D

Ta-ta for now darlings <3

1 Down, 1999 To Go...

2009-01-09T11:06:00.001-08:00

Well, I've finished my first week of work for the DWP and I'm ready to curl up into a small ball and die.

But alas there is no time for that, for there are things to do! What? I hear myself ask (I'm so alone), and in reply I answer "Play games little guy! For we shall review plenty and fill this blog with more articles than you can shake a stick at for no one to read!" and I'll be all like "Wow, your my hero" and...*ahem* sorry...

ANYWHO! I promise nothing but I'll TRY and get some updates done this weekend my lovelies :-)

Less Than 12 Hours...not that I'm counting...>_>

2009-01-04T15:17:00.001-08:00

So, I start my new job tomorrow. I am pooing myself! Anywho, it dose mean I'll probably be way too tiered to actually update this week, maybe next. So till the next update, good luck in life :-)

Mirrors Edge

2009-01-03T00:09:00.001-08:00

Right it's been a while since I've done one of these, an actual review of a game! For Christmas my parents picked me up a copy of Mirrors Edge, now I know any long time readers of the Den will know I ripped Mirrors Edge a new one based on the demo but to my shock, surprise, and a little bit of sexual joy, the game is VASTLY better than the demo! So, what makes it so good? Read on and find out :-)

Visuals:
Mirrors Edge is one of those games that even at the quickest glance you know what game it is. It's use of white with blocks of vibrant colours is nothing short of beautiful and paints the picture of a perfect city, at the same time it can be a bit of an issue though as so much white can be a bit overwhelming at times and leave you lost, or blind if the brightness on your TV is too high. The game suffers from texture resolution jumps but less than most games (and these days with every game pushing the fold of graphics it's become so common for resolution jumps in textures it hardly seems worth mentioning), I also found that although the levels were amazingly good looking, the human characters...well they didn't so much feel like they'd fallen into the uncanny valley, but more that they were made of clay or something. They looked weird. Even with the graphical floors though Mirrors Edge is one of those games you should get for the visual experience alone.

Audio:
Sound is very important in Mirrors Edge even though it hardly feels like a factor. All of the music is soft and ambient and even the combat music feels so soft the fart of a mouse could drown it out. Beyond music there's a lot of use of background sounds like cars, planes, running water and so on, other than that most of the time the main sound you'll hear is of Faith running, jumping, and grunting in a way which would make any man cross his legs. It might all sound a little pointless but I played a little bit with the sound muted and the world just felt wrong, even though the sound is so discreet, it's vital. Sadly there is an issue with the audio though, the voices over the comm system can be hard to hear at times causing you to miss information which might be useful in the level or plot, which leads us onto...

Story:
The story in Mirrors Edge is...well...pointless. Seriously, first time though I skipped all of the plot it would let me and enjoyed the game just as much as when I played with plot. The fact almost all the cut-scenes are done in 2D feels wrong, kinda like the plot is disconnected from the game it's self, it also felt pointless as 3D in-game videos would have looked and worked better and as far as I can see, would have been easier on the team at Dice. Anyway, the plot follows Faith (you), a free runner in a future city in which the government rules absolute and the world has entered a more pretty looking version of 1984. As all lines of communication are monitored your job is to transport information via the rooftops from one person to another without the cops catching you. The basic idea is very good and I hoped for some form of side-mission which would push you to find ways across the city to deliver information, alas this doesn't exist as your thrown into the main plot when you finish the tutorial. The main plot sees your sister framed for the murder of a government official who wants to relax the control on the city, you set off to prove her innocent blah blah blah. Seriously, if your looking for a deep plot this isn't the game for you. This one is much more about its...

Game Play:
This is truly where Mirrors Edge becomes a good game. Games like Prince of Persia, Assassins Creed, even Shadow of the Colossi have all tried to implement an element of free running, but although some have done it well, none have truly captured the flow and feel of true free running, Mirrors Edge has and has perfectly. The controls are mapped to only a few basic buttons (LT to Duck/Skid/Drop, LB to Jump/Pull Up/Wall Run, RT to Punch/Kick, RB to turn 180 quickly, Y to take a weapon, and B to show where your meant to be heading) which is impressive for such a complex game. The flow of your free running can vary from smooth and speedy if you hit the right jumps at the right times and judge things quickly, or painfully slow and embarrassing when you fall off the same drop 10 times, but beyond a few glitches in the system this is all based on your own skills in the game. One issue I did have was with some places in the game where your free running suddenly became 'slowly climb up these pipes for the next 5 minutes' which broke the flow. The game doesn't really give you 100% freedom but dose give you the feel of it which can be just as good if done properly like it is here. The combat admittedly left a lot to be desired but this is a free running game so I shouldn't be complaining about that, and I happily wouldn't except the fact they force combat down your throat at times which is truly a shame.

My Opinion:
Mirrors Edge should NOT be judged on it's crappy demo, the game is good. It has gotten a bit of a negative press but in fairness although it's not a perfect game, it's a good one and finally dose something new with the First Person system. Admittedly I was let down by the number of loose ends in the story and total lack of a character history for Faith beyond a short sum up which didn't really do her justice. I also felt a little let down by the lack of boss battles (there only being one which wasn't a 1 button quick time event) but Mirrors Edge feels kinda like how Jak and Daxter felt the first time I played number 1; a good game but more importantly it setup for an amazing franchise.

To Sum Up:
I'd recommend this game to anyone, it's learning curve is slow and steady, it's fun, and has a lot of reply value with the time trials and upcoming downloadable content. It has it's fair share of issues and floors but so dose almost every game but at least this one has the excuse that it's trying something new. If there is one reason I'd recommend playing Mirrors Edge it's because I do think this could become a major franchise in the future of gaming, so you'll wanna know where it all starts when your playing later and much more solid titles.

Well...good start to 2009...

2009-01-02T23:18:00.001-08:00

So yeah, if you kept an eye on my Twitter over there on the right you'd know that I got hit with a nasty computer virus yesterday, disabled my ability to access any anti-virus sites, or run any on my system then slowly started to pull apart my laptop. So after a total system wipe I'm back again! I'll try to get an update or two out this weekend because I'm gonna be MIA for the next week as it's my first week in the new job, wish me luck!

5 Sites To Poke

2009-01-01T00:13:00.001-08:00

So, here we are in 2009, feels kinda...2008ish huh? Anyway, I thought instead of making you guys wait days for a review of one of the many games I got for christmas I'd quickly update with a 5 Sites to Visit list like the good ol' days long long ago in 2008. So, here we go:

1. OCRemix
OCRemix (Over Clocked Remix) is a music remix site that's been running longer than I care to remember now. So what's so special about a remix site? Well OCR is dedicated to remixing video-game music. There are countless Final Fantasy battle theme remixes, more Mario Bros remixes than you can shake a stick at, and even a damn sexy Zelda remix which caused me to bump into the site long long ago. If your unsure about checking the site out (because let's be honest, most remixes suck ass) OCR is such a well respected and recognised site that they were taken on to do the music for Street Fighter II Turbo HD! Worth a check if your into a bit of gaming music but your bored of the same old tunes.

2. Twitter
So, my first act of 2009 was to finally join Twitter! If you don't know what twitter is, it's kinda like...well know your status on Facebook, MySpace or MSN? That little bit after your name where you tend to be silly with something like Moriarty : Has Big Balls, or emo and pissy like Moriarty : Hates you for your lies Peter Molyneux! </3. Anyway, Twitter is pretty much a site based around those little updates. I think it's referred to as an on-the-go mini-blog. You can attach Twitter to a mobile device (one vastly better than my chunk of crap) to update on the go too. The idea is that you and all your friends get it and connect up so you can see who's doing what and make plans based around it. Good idea, but for someone like me...well...don't expect a lot of updates in the ol' Twitter feed to the right there >>>>

3. Good Old Games
GOG is quite a new games portal on the net that only sells old games...sounds crap right? Well it's not! GOG specialises in classic games that the new generation won't have a clue about, from the Fallout originals to Broken Sword and from Simon the Sorcerer to the original Oddworld games. GOG not only brings you the classic titles of yester-year but also at the prices of ether $9.99 or $5.99 (so no major mark-up price on old games). Now you may think 'phhh why pay for these games? Their ripping me off on abandonware titles!' but in fairness to them their not. They only sell titles that are not free on the net, they do have 2 titles that you can pick up for free but you can get them from GOG for free too (with walkthoughs and other goodies). All of the games are Vista and XP compatible and GOG will only release a game when they have the rights to release it for the whole world meaning no 'out in the US now but out in Europe in 2 months'. It's rare I support an online shop but GOG seems to be the kinda shop we need more off, they seem to actually give a crap about their customers. Good on them :-D

4. Go2Web20
G2W20 is the ultimate Web 2.0 directory. Not much else to say really...it's got a nice design, easy to use, runs a little slow on crappy computers like mine but for most people it should run ok. If there is some kind of web 2.0 service you need, if it exists, it's most likely there :-)

5. MYRL
Bored of Second Life but hunger for more online social worlds? Why not check out MYRL! MYRL is a small directory of the "best" in social online worlds (personally I'm yet to find one I like so "best" should be based on your own opinion really). What I like about MYRL is it isn't just a link-block. Each button takes you to a small info page on the world and some screen shots to give you a good idea of what your letting yourself in for before you load up what can sometimes be hefty sites with way too many graphics than are needed. If your new to the whole social online world thing this site is for you because you can read up a little on each world without the feeling that your being bullshitted by the worlds own website trying to sell it's self on over played features.

2008-12-31T06:29:00.001-08:00

Well the year is almost up. Only a few hours left before 2009 begins. It's been a good year, admittedly the Den has only been alive for less than half of it, but in about 4 months I'll have updated 68 times, that's not bad considering previous blogs have only lasted a few posts and about a week before I lose interest.

Anywho, this isn't gonna be a long a wordy post, I've got a few posts in the works but with it being new years eve I probably won't get them online till Jan 1st now. So this is just an update to wish everyone a Happy New Year, I hope you all have luck and good will in it and fingers crossed this time a year from now we'll all still be alive and going huh?

Oh the good ol' days.

2008-12-30T06:23:00.001-08:00

Hello!

2008-12-30T00:14:00.001-08:00

So Christmas is over and New Year is only days away. It's been a full year for me with lots of stuff going on. It's kinda peaked in the last few weeks with Christmas rushing, being social (a rare thing for me) and a lot of illness going around (and although I've managed to escape the two major bugs everyone I know seems to have caught, I've found out I have asthma and a heart murmur...joy). Anyway, that's pretty much why there have been no updates for about 2 weeks. Sorry about that.

Theirs a little good news though. With Christmas comes Christmas presents! I've gotten quite a few games to review as I find time as well as a few rants brewing and not to mention some small plans to change how the Den works.

Anywho, I'll try to date soon.

Till then enjoy the new look :D

Dragonica

2008-12-16T19:09:00.001-08:00

I wanted to update with something long and wordy today with at least a few pictures. Sadly I was distracted by being lazy so no major update, sorry. Although I did do my rounds of the MMO websites earlier to see if there was any news on the Open Beta of Runes of Magic (as my download is gonna take over 24 hours thanks to the 3 gig install...I know...scary huh?), no real news on RoM but I did spot an update on Dragonica. This games been mentioned on a lot of MMO sites for a while now but for some reason it caught my interest today and I checked out the new trailer...gotta say the game looks bloody fun!

Anyway, pointless me trying to sell it based on a single trailer, better off showing you the trailer and letting you pick for yourself. Keep in mind it's gonna be hosted by the evil behind FlyFF and Space Cowboy...bastards...

Katy Brand's Music Videos

2008-12-14T15:50:00.001-08:00

Ok as a sorry for no updates this weekend I give you a collection of the spoof music videos by good ol' British born and bred comedian Katy Brand. She's starting to feel like the UK's long over-due answer to Weird Al. Admittedly if your from outside the UK you probably wont get most of the people she's spoofing sorry. Enjoy

XNA, The Future of Homebrew, or Evil Tool for the Retarded?

2008-12-13T10:13:00.001-08:00

So, recently I've been enjoying my 360 more than normal. Why? Well partly because I wanna get my gamer score up (I dunno why, it's as useless as the score in Super Mario Bros. 3 on NES), and also because I've been enjoying the growth and development of the NXE. I must say in general it's going good, but there are a few exceptions. I won't go on about them all today because I wanna focus on one.

The Community Games...

Microsoft released a bunch of tools a while back called XNA, this was to allow small time indy developers to make games on their PC then port it to Xbox 360 and if it passed moderation it would be sold on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Awesome huh? Well I think so.

Anyway, with the launch of the NXE came the launch of the Community Games shop, finally everyone could enjoy small time games for the average price of about 400 points. This appealed to me endlessly because I've always taken the view Homebrew causes creativity beyond that of a major games company. Sadly this isn't so.

There are about 20 games on the community shop right now and almost all of them suck. I know these are small time developers with no real budgets, but I used to be part of a small time MMO project, although we never finished our game, by posting for help on sites like Deviant Art we got some decent 3D modeler, some amazing artists, and some good writers as well as some impressive concept and think-tank members all working for free just because they wanted to be part of a game development team. So how come games like this get into the Xbox Live Community Game Shop:

I downloaded this game cause I thought the cover must be a joke...it's not. This is the quality of images you can paint with the tool. I am in NO WAY joking when I say MSPaint that comes with your copy of Windows, or whatever you get with a Mac and Gimp if your using Linux is VASTLY better than this pile of crap and doesn't cost 400 shitting points!

This is what truly concerns me. The game got though the moderation and put online for people to buy...why? It's the kind of thing freeware sites don't even put online. This shows some serious issues with the moderation and rating system which leads me to believe that within a few months the Community Shop is gonna be filled with horribly badly made games with no visual, gameplay, or audio quality at all. If you don't believe me, and have a 360, download the trial of RPaints and try questioning me then.

Seeing that this can make it onto the shop though has made me realise even I should be able to make a game...so, if you can code C++ and your bored, let me know, let's make a game where a stickman has to jump over lines...we'll be freaking rich!

Actor In Neck Slash Stage Horror

2008-12-10T18:31:00.001-08:00

An actor portraying a suicide bid accidentally slashed his own throat on-stage following a prop mix-up.

Daniel Hoevels, 30, collapsed with blood pouring from his neck after using a real blade instead of the blunt stage knife.

He was taken to hospital after the dramatic scene at Vienna's Burgtheater in Austria.

The audience had been in raptures, unaware the actor was facing his own demise for real.

But when he failed to greet their applause for the show's spectacular special effects with a bow they separated fact from fiction.

Police are now investigating whether the mix-up was murderous.

Full Story Here

Sorry guys and gals for the no-show on an update today, busy day. I did bump into this story on my rounds of the news web sites today though and thought I'd share. Kinda scary huh? I'll TRY to update tomorrow with my real update (got a bit of a rant on the go ) so see you then <3

Blinko - Real Time. Real (Special) People.

2008-12-09T19:41:00.001-08:00

I'll make this quick cause I need sleep bad. So today I was looking around the net when I noticed adverts for a site called Blinko. As far as I can gather without giving them my details it's a social network site aimed at mobile phone users. The site it's self isn't important. What's important here is their advert. Check this out;

Now am I alone in mistaking their horrific little character there for a mentally ill possibly down syndrome kid? Their even worse in the animated adverts (but I couldn't embed the flash into the site to show you the horrors sorry). It's nice to see special people popping up in adverts and other places, but seriously...no ones gonna like me for saying this and the terminology I use, but are they trying to say their entire user base are retards?

Anywho, I might be able to update tomorrow with something a bit more substantial than a YouTube video or a random little thing like this, so check back then you sexy peoples (and the ugly ones too I guess).

...And Yet I Bet He Sucks At Guitar Hero

2008-12-08T12:56:00.001-08:00

Bored? Enjoy!

2008-12-08T11:06:00.001-08:00

The internet is a big place full of wonderful things, weird things, amazing things...if you know where to look. If you don't, the internet is a sodding boring place with nothing to do. Because of this I've been collecting random sites in my favourite menu just to give to you guys to keep you entertained. Today I thought I'd give out a few links to what truly prove the internet is a weeeird place. So, as I can't be bothered to go on and on anymore, here are the sites:

1. The Zentai Project
For anyone worried there might be Hentai (as it's only a letter out) in this site, as far as I can find there isn't any. Instead this site is dedicated to the Zentai movement, a weird form of dressing up. I won't say any more than that because I don't wanna spoil it for you...but seriously, what the hell?

2. Zombo Com (requires sound)
This is Zombo Com...Welcome To Zombo Com...You Can Do Anything At Zombo Com...Yeeees...This...Is Zombo Com...

3. Leekspin (requires sound)
Don't worry, it's not Meat Spin *shivers*

4. You Fell Asleep Watching a DVD
Quite literally the ability to pick a movie from a list and see it's DVD menu on loop in a dark room as if you've just woken up at the end of a DVD...why? Because it's the internet and it can.

5. Clearly Closed
Seriously...I'm all for collections...but what the hell?

R.E.M - Munich

2008-12-06T18:32:00.001-08:00

Cover of Editors Song

Out of the Red and into the £££!

2008-12-06T16:17:00.001-08:00

So, good news! I have a joooooob!

Until recently I've been working on a voluntary basis in a local Charity Shop, but yesterday I got the sexy news that a job I went for a good 2 months back has accepted me. This is good on a few fronts, for starters I get to work in a place with heating. Secondly I no longer will be under the control of A4-fucking-E! About sodding time! Those slave drivers waste my time, and the tax payers money under the false claim of helping people to find work. Thirdly I'm gonna be in the money! This means getting games more up to date meaning reviews about the same time as everyone else. A better PC meaning better gaming, and I finally get to blow some money on doing things I've always wanted to do and no doubt I'll document them here!

So, wehay for me. I hope everyone is sexy good. I'm off to drink Pepsi (ta Del) and eat Yorkie Bar (once again, ta Del). G'Night!

Zombie Master 1.2.0

2008-12-06T07:23:00.001-08:00

So, it's been a long time coming but finally version 1.2.0 of Zombie Master is out! :-D Joy!

So, what is Zombie Master? Before you go shouting rip-off this games been out for longer than Left4Dead's been in the works. Zombie Master is a Mod for Half Life 2 in which a group of online players take on the rolls of survivors in a zombie apocalypse. The twist on this game compared to games like Zombie Panic and Left4Dead is the fact one of the players dose not play a survivor or even play in a first person mode, Instead they take on the roll of the Zombie Master (kinda like a Dungeon Master). The Zombie Master gets an RTS view in which he/she can summon zombies, setup traps, or arrange ambushes of one of 5 different zombie types (all quite similar to the zombies found in Left4Dead, that's your Valve original thinking there). The game, being a mod (and a popular one) has a lot of player made maps, ranging from the shit (Tetris) to the bloody amazing (Asylum). The game has it's fair share of glitches and like any online based game, a lot of arse-holes and people who abuse the Steam in-engine audio system (you get sick of people blasting sound clips or Rick-Rolling you ) but it's a solid mod with fun varying maps and has kept me and my friends amused for a long while.

So, for people who DO know what Zombie Master is and haven't heard about the new update, what dose the update change? Check out these sexy new things:

- Molotovs
- Revolver
- Immolators
- Banshees clinging to the ceiling
- Load-out map entities, letting survivors start out with equipment
- Overhauled spawning menu and system
- Late-joiner autojoin
- Lag compensation: Banshees can now be hit
- Zombie-view spectator camera
- Lots of balancing tweaks, and a lot of bugfixes

I mean, if your getting bored of Zombie Master all I should have to say is "Banshees clinging to the ceiling" and you should be back on there in a flash! It adds a whole new element of tactics for ZM's and a whole new scariness for survivors. Also a new anti-spam system stops people like me spawning a shit load of zombies anymore, meaning some of us need to rethink our tactics.

Check it out : HERE

3D-Bit Awesomeness!

2008-12-06T06:56:00.001-08:00

If your a reader of Kotaku you already know about this, but I bumped into this site though the lord of gaming news that is Kotaku and loved it so much I thought I'd stick it up here for people who don't spend all day trolling though updates on game sites like me and other lifeless people out there.

The site is in Japanese but it's not about the text, however insightful it may or may not be. No, this is about the sexalicious pictures. They are simple but amazing, it took me a while to work out if they were 3D or actually models someone had made and photographed. I love crap like this, if you know of any good sites for stuff like this why not tell me, I'll credit you and stick it up here for the world to see...and by world I mean about 3 people...including me...and you.

Dotter Dotter

2008-12-03T17:24:00.001-08:00

The CrapTop Strikes Again!

2008-12-02T17:47:00.001-08:00

Well I downloaded the 1.3 gig install file. Bypassed the patchier because there is a glitch in it and ran Shin Megami Tensei : Imagine Online. So, how'd it go? Crap

Sadly due to some bizarre programming decisions they decided to code the game to fall back on processor power more than RAM, because of this the game can be run on sucky ram (512mb) but the problem is no computer with 512mb or RAM has a 3.0mhz processor, In truth only new computers do (although I'm not taking into account Korea and other eastern countries from where this game originated's technology levels in comparison to us). Because of this I can't run the game very well at all. On an 800x600 resolution with everything set to low in the graphics menu the game still lost frame rate to depressingly low levels whenever more than about 3 people were on screen, the thing practically died when I entered a patch of monsters.

This is a kick in the balls for me because I've been a fan of the SMT series ever since playing Nocturne on PS2 and soon after discovering Persona 2 on PSX (oh and dieing to get my grubby little mits on a copy of Persona 3). It's also annoying because from what I did get to play the game it's simple, beautiful in it's own basic-graphic way, and actually has a plot that interests me (I've never played an MMORPG and been driven by it's plot before, not even Final Fantasy XI and that has little else too it).

I have passed my Closed Beta account onto a friend though who also loved the Shin Megami Tensei series and is if anything a bigger MMORPG fan than me (you'll find out more about him soon with a new project I'm part of). Fingers crossed I'll get enough feed back off him soon to pass on in a quick post to let anyone out there who's interested (and for some reason reading my blog o_O get a life) if the game is really worth a big download and a slow tutorial.

More news on this soon

Oh Fable II, You Bitch...

2008-12-02T15:05:00.001-08:00

So, I finished Fable 2 a few hours ago. I've gotta say sweet Jesus that sucked. I wanted to tell you how the epic ending topped off a good story but it really didn't. Which brings up a whole new issue in my mind which I think we'll all start to see more and more. I won't say how Fable 2 ended but it ended in a really open way. I know the whole point is that you carry on living after the story, but Fable 1 did that but still ended the story well and gave us an epic battle with Jack of Blades first. Fable 2 doesn't have a final battle...seriously, no big bad boss...and considering up until now their idea of a boss had been throwing trolls at me, I was hoping for something good to make up for laziness but nothing...at all. After the fight you get to pick one of 3 wishes, but unlike in Fable 1 where it was true power or the life of your sister, in Fable 2 it's between bringing your loved ones back to life (which somehow excludes your sister), bringing thousands of people back to life, or lots and lots and LOTS of money. Nothing TRULY evil, just greedy, and whatever you pick the characters try to make you feel like shit for it.

So anyway, you pick one of them and get pretty much the same result with more or less money and more or less loved ones or random people. Then there is a moment in which you realise the story isn't really over and evil isn't gone. I won't say what happens, but you can tell this (unlike Fable 1) is setting up for a truly connected sequel. But then I realised something, it's not...it's setting up to make us wanna fork out money for downloadable chapters, just like GTA IV. These days not only is quality control going out the window on the basis of "we can patch what issues the public find" but also we are paying top money for less than a full game and having to pay more for the rest. Downloadable content like new items or quests is fair enough but whole new chunks of story, that's taking the piss.

But still no matter what I can't over look the fact the ending to Fable 2 sucked balls. I mean a friend warned me about it, but I kinda brushed it off as 'oh he was just let down because we waited so long for this game' but after seeing it...I mean no boss battle? That makes as much sense as Neo going to face Smith at the end of Matrix only to find he'd topped himself...HUUUUGE anti-climax.

Who Rules? I Rule!

2008-12-02T14:47:00.001-08:00

Oh yeeeeeeeeah, I got into the Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online beta with Aeria Games! That's put a smile on my face, I'll let you know how it goes when I've played it a bit.

December Look

2008-12-01T16:31:00.001-08:00

So as you can see the sites got a bit of a new colour design. Why? Well a few reasons really. First of all I get bored of one look very quickly so I like to change the design on my sites every so often just to give it a fresh feeling, keeps me interesting in the project and keeps me updating Secondly I'm starting up a new little idea, I dunno how long it will last but instead of a total redesign of the site every so often which has been known to lead to disaster before (I've deleted entire archives by accident) instead I will stick with the current setup but each month on the first (or second) I will update with a new background, title and colour scheme, nice and simple. Third and finally I have some web-space coming my way soon with a domain and everything, it's been over 6 months since the last time I owned real estate on the interweb so it's been a long time since I last got to fiddle with PHP and HTML so I'm trying to get back into it enough to get something respectable made with my fancy new web-space (no, I wont be closing down the Den, this is my own place where I can talk about what I like how I like, the site will be for a project with a team I hope).

So, fingers crossed the snot-green look will be here till January now and then what colour next? Only time will tell!...if you find that at all exciting you should probably kill yourself.

2008-11-30T19:37:00.001-08:00

Well, thanks to my two updates tonight it's now 3:35am and I've gotta be up at 8:50am...shit, gonna be a fun day in work. Night people and hope you enjoy your December

Pinch, Punch First of the Month, No Backsies!

2008-11-30T19:30:00.001-08:00

So, today is the first day of December, the final push before the new year, kids are starting their advent calendars, I've gotta put up my trimmings, and the stockroom at work is gonna be filled with the sound of Xmas songs for the next 25 days (which sounds good but as I'm the only one who enjoys Xmas in the stockroom the music is followed by the grumps and grumbles of old men).

Being at the end of the year always causes me to look back at the year and think about what I've done. Each year it's pretty dull, normally consisting of stuff like survived another year in school' 'finished school and started college' survived another year in college' 'finished college' and so on but this year I realised I can be more proud of myself, in a single year...

I've moved out, made new friends, reconnected with old ones, I've taken up a job for a charity, I've finished more video-games in this year than any year before it, I've opened a blog and kept it running, I've handled some hard times well (or at least well enough to mean I'm still alive and sane...ish) and had a few good times too. I've learnt new things including electricity costs a lot, life sucks without a TV licence, and money doesn't grow on trees. I've taken on the responsibility of two tiny lives in my Hamsters Mog and Mindy, I've rediscovered Tetris though the wonders of Facebook and I've discovered the horrors of being stuck in a small room with 15 chavs who all wanna mug me at best and kill me at worst. I've found new enjoyments like the AG Podcast, Kotaku (yes shockingly before 2008 I didn't know what Kotaku was), and a Cheese Burger at my local Cafe, Bettys. I've started more projects than I can count on my hands and fingers crossed I might actually get one to the point where I can show it off before I shelf it. I've gotten back into my online gaming (Gamer Tag : Ch0vY if you wanna say hi) and challenged myself to read a real book (not a comic book or a kids book) and it's slowly moving alone well. I've loved, and I've lost. I've sparked conversations with total strangers and discovered things I'd never have known otherwise. I've taken small steps towards a more healthy lifestyle (less crisps, more fruit and working in a stockroom always helps), I've discovered music more beautiful than anything I could imagine and I've seen sights more horrific than I'd ever want to imagine (no more 4chan for me!). I've made jokes about cripples to people in wheel chairs and made them laugh, I've made stereotypical references to an Asian guy and been thanks for it. I've been offered pills to extend my penis, keep it up longer, I've won the Spanish lottery at least 300 times, my 20 of my long lost cousins have died and left my over 1 billion dollars in total if only I had my credit card details at hand to give them...oh and I've broken my spam-filter. I've laughed, I've cried, I've even thrown up twice. I've acquired an original Nazi coat (don't ask...I just think they were sharp dressers), two walking sticks and a new hat. I've tried (and failed) to grow facial hair, and I've also discovered shaving over a mole causes a lot of blood. I've discovered new things about friends, I've moved on from old events. I've tried stuff I shouldn't have, yet still I've remained T-Total. I've stood my ground, and I've voiced my opinions. I've been told I should be a writer if only someone would invent a spell checker that can correct the wrong use of 'there', 'their', and 'they're'. I've been called Ugly, Fugly, Disgusting, and an Asshole (love you Mum...I'm kidding incase she's reading). I've watched Wall-E 4 times. I've been told off by the job centre for looking for too many jobs. I've been turned down by too many jobs. I've been accepted for a job, but may not start till May 2009 if at all. I've pissed everyone off by going though phases of using the term 'slappy wag' in every sentence. I've been mistaken for a girl countless times. I've gotten the chance to be there for friends, and I've actually used over £100 in phone credit (I can normally make £20 last a year). I've found out how good it feels to be the big kid in the park who makes other kids too scared to play on the swings. I've tried Sudoku. I've decided to kill the creator of Sudoku. I've won a game of Scrabble (for a Dyslexic that's a big thing). I've played Guitar Hero on a TV over 6ft tall. I've gotten to meet old teachers and see their disappointed expressions when I say I'm unemployed leeching off the government. I've spent a month replacing any term for 'Penis' for 'Winky'...that was odd. I managed to avoid watching even the smallest moment of the Olympics. I've even (to my surprise) managed to come up with theories on religion which have caused religious studies and religious people to question their views and opinions.

But alas I'm not happy. Why? Because even with all these things covered in just one year there are a million more things I wanna do with my life. People say 'oh your still young' but the truth of the fact is in this day and age (or any day and age) I could die in any number of ways at any time and maybe I won't have a significant effect on this world which will justify my existence in the grand scale of the universe, but I've been blessed with a life a lot of people don't get the chance to enjoy or even experience, so I wanna use it before it's too late. I want things to tell the grandchildren when I'm old. I want to grow wise with time though experiences, not what I'm told by others. I know some people might think not being happy with the past year after a list so long no one will be bothered to read it (can't blame you) is a bad thing, but if your content with what you've done with your life that means you have nothing more to live for, and then what's the point? We should always strive for more, but at the same time never beat ourselves up if we fail to reach our goals. I don't really know where I'm going with all of this, I guess I just wanted to rant but for once not about something negative. There is a lot of shit going on in the world right now, horrible things, tragic things, the last thing the world needs is people like me bitching and moaning too. So, enjoy one of the few times you'll read me being the optimist in life. Then go out there and do something you can look back on when you think about this year in your life and this chapter in your book if your ever rich and famous enough to con people out of a few quid.

Paper Mario & Friends

2008-11-30T18:11:00.001-08:00

No, not the name of the next game in the Paper Mario series, in fact this isn't really about Mario at all, it's more about Nintendo. I am a long time lover of Papercraft, I made my first model about 3 years ago (a paper Prince from Katamari, fucking hard but damn was I proud till I dropped a book on it) although there are a LOT of Japanese sites to sift though to find good papercraft to cut up and glue together. I was browsing the net today though and stumbled upon Nintendo Papercraft!

Nintendo Papercraft is a huge site that catalogs and links to hundreds of different Nintendo based papercraft works for you to make ranging from the simple box characters all the way up to intricate highly detailed models of characters like Ganon or Falco Lambardi. There are also some strange models like the PictoBox from Wind Waker and Sonic pops up in the Others category.

The Categories are simple covering all the major titles from Nintendo and each is over flowing with models to print out.

One thing I liked about this site also is a discreet link under the Category list which will take you to a 16+ Minute Tutorial on how to rip textures from N64 games and turn them into papercraft. With helpful stuff like this for budding papercrafters you can be sure the site will be stocking up on new models for years to come.

So, if your interested in making yourself a Paper Mario Hat to wear or maybe Link's Master Sword to hit people with (will probably bend after the first hit though so go for the heart) or even just a cute little Box Bunny Mario then check out the site!

Website : Nintendo Papercraft

Fable 2 Review

2008-11-29T18:55:00.001-08:00

Right, time to review the game! Now then...this is currently the third attempt at starting this review because Fable 2 is one of those games where you don't know where to start when it comes to explaining it. Let's go for the basic points first starting with Story.

The story in Fable 2 follows you, a hero who doesn't know it yet. You and your sister (who sounds like she's voiced by someone from Eastenders) are homeless orphans living on the streets with dreams of one day living in the Castle. Needless to say life doesn't stay like this for long as something major happens which causes the world around you to change forever. The plot in Fable 2 is just as dark as the first Fable but this time with better voice actors, and the fact your an orphan with only your sister to look after you in the world it feels like so much more is ripped away from your character than in the first game. I'll admit I've not finished the story in Fable 2 yet but think I'm about half way though and so far I'll give it too them, Lionhead Studios have written a long story full of interesting characters, dark moments and some good humour. To accompany the major plot as you move though the timeline you'll also follow the stories of some lesser characters like a businessman who's always asking for help with some idea or another.

So, moving on from Story lets talk about Audio, another area that Fable did right but Fable 2 has improved upon. Although a lot of the world doesn't use music the ambient sounds as well as the chatter of children or the calls of market stall owners really gives the game a feeling of life. Voice acting is all top quality and kudos to LH Studios for using the voices of not only Stephen Fry but Zoë Wanamaker and the man behind Firefly's Shepherd Derrial Book, Ron Glass. When there is music it's very fitting to the atmosphere of the area your in and works very well in battle. The use of audio in this game also includes the wise choice of when to use none at all. A few times I've managed to get though Demon Doors and into the twisted worlds behind them and the lack of any music or ambient sound at all gives a really weird, unnerving but beautiful effect to the areas.

Right then, I think next we'll cover game play...now lets watch Fable 2 fall on it's face. Now don't get me wrong, the basic controls are smooth and work well, but there are so many issues with handling in this game. Your character turns so slowly at times you'll end up looking like a moron as you walk into walls. There is also the issue of your characters inability to swing at small boxes on the floor resulting in you having to kick each box one at a time instead of doing one fine swoop. Using items is a slow and cumbersome process involving you having to pause the game, go to your items menu, find the item you want to use and pressing a, but if you want to use the item twice you have to go though the same process again as the second you use an item it closes the menu. There are hotkey's for the D-Pad to use items but they will only appear when the game feels you NEED them and there seems to be no option that I can find to hotkey items myself. Another control issue which bugged me was spells. In Fable 1 you'd hold down your trigger then press A,B,X or Y based on what spell you'd hot keyed to what button to cast it. In Fable 2 you only have one spell button, you assign spells to it based on how long it's held down, the problem with this though is if you want to use a spell above level 1 you have to hold the button down without being hit for a few seconds, which is almost impossible if there are more than about 3 bad guys on screen. Issues are not just limited to controls though, there are also problems like the lack of an ability to steal anything off shop shelves like you had in Fable 1, the ability to buy items in bulk is gone, and battles jump between stupidly easy to next to impossible. Visually some fights can get so confusing due to the number of bad guys on screen I was left unable to see my own character and just button bashed the X button till everything died. House owning is also an area of game-play which is vastly over rated. You make very little money renting stuff out considering how much you'll put into the house. I've spent well over 50k on houses in the game but for all the houses combined the rent is only 1,300, makes it hardly seem worth it.

Ok what next? How about the online mode? LH Studios bragged about the drop in system for Fable 2 and in fairness I have to admit it works beautifully. One second I was running around alone, the next minute a menu popped up, I picked what gold, experience and so on I wanted to share and my brother jumped into my game, took about 1 minute and wasn't confusing (although we did have some issues with hearing each other over our headsets, but I've put that down in one of the billions of glitches in the game). Sadly though that's about all the praise the Online mode gets. For some unknown reason you cannot bring your own character into someone else's world...this makes NO sense as every item your character can wear is stored on the other persons CD too meaning the information you'd have to send over the net to use your character would be tiny, the fact you can see the hosts character means viewing other peoples characters wasn't an issue for LH Studios so I have no idea why this was messed up, the only logical reason I can come up with is the fact they'd admitted the online co-op may not be out with release but managed to rush it and get it in, maybe they had to cut corners and we'll see this change in a future patch. This isn't the only problem with the co-op mode too. The second someone joins your game or you join theirs the camera switches from the nice smooth good working camera you've gotten used too and becomes a fixed camera, nether players gets control over it and it limits the movement of characters so that they cannot be more than about 10 feet apart. This doesn't sound too bad but numerous times while playing we'd be unable to see where we were going because the camera would get stuck in front of us, or would shift violently without warning causes us to run the wrong direction, sometimes it would even move in a way where one of us would get stuck until the other came running back. The online mode is something that got me VERY excited for Fable 2 along with many friends and we all feel cheated by it.

Ok so how about Downloadable Content? Well there is none. A lot of people would see this as a bad thing but I see it as a good sign. How much would it piss you off if you baught a game brand new only to find content online at a premium price? You'd feel you'd paid full price for half a game. Also to be fair LH Studios have just announced a peice of DLC which will unlock a whole new land with quests and a continuing plot and in a move of kindness will release a patch which will allow players without the DLC to still co-op with people with it, good of them if you ask me.

So, that's Audio, Gameplay, Story, Online Mode and DLC...what else? Oh, visuals!

The graphics in Fable 2 are beautiful, sure the textures are not amazing but everything works so well, the fact plants will move under your feet looks beautiful, the way the lip sync on even the smallest mouths of children are done perfect looks good too and shows a good level of attention to detail. The landscapes are very immersing and truly inject some colour into this brown generation of gaming. Sadly there are areas where the visuals fall down a little though. Almost all the women in the world (and the men) are pretty damn ugly unless their whores, also a lot of the weapons in the game are rehashes of previous weapons with new textures which feels a bit cheap. One of the biggest issues I had with the game though is my classic complaint, it's not very SD TV friendly, and I know a lot of people will say that's a silly complaint to make in a world which is going HD but there are still a lot of us who can't afford HD TV's and as long as there are I will continue to see this as a problem.

God I've written enough for a short book and there's still more to go, almost done now though!

Next the matter of character customisation. This is a major part of the Fable series and what caused it to stand out in a world of other RPGs. All in all it's pulled off very well in Fable 2 but I do have some issues. I played as a woman with the intention of turning her into a hot goth chick (what can I say, if your gonna give me the tools to make a sexy woman I'm gonna do it). Alas this went horridly wrong though because the second I upped her physical strength she turned into a huge butch lesbian bordering on the edge of being a genderly challenged man. To make it worse although I'd only taught her a few basic spells as I wanted to mainly use my sword these spells had caused the magic markings on her skin to appear. Also due to a few bad deeds my skin was covered in some freaky lines which just looked ugly. I know LH Studios wanted to make everything have a reaction in the world but I quite liked Fable 1's system where stuff like getting fan required eating a shit load of food, not having 3 or 4 pies. Things had to be done in excess for the effects to show which worked well, in Fable 2 you have to be careful of EVERY action incase it turns you into some cross-dressing whore look-a-like.

Oh, I almost forgot something unforgivable! The Dog! Fable 2 prides it's self on an IA Dog which accompanies you and sniffs out treasure as well as doing tricks, looking cute and chewing on the ankles of bad guys who are knocked to the floor. He can be useful but half the time he feels kinda pointless, he'll bark at chests which are blatantly in the open and anyone can see, any treasure he finds in the ground for you to dig up is usually crap, and his only REAL use is to get you though 1 demon door and find treasure for the archeologist quests. Maybe if they'd given some more interaction than fussing, scolding, feeding and healing it I'd have enjoyed it's company more but in truth I'm starting to wonder about the mental health of the guy in my local Game who told me by the end of the game he had kinda bonded with his dog. In fairness though he doesn't really get in the way if you can ignore his barking, so he's no major issue.

So, time to end this review by summing up for everyone who skipped the wall of text above. If you did read your probably a bit untrusting of Fable 2 with all the issues I raised but in fairness sure the controls are badly thought though, and 90% of what they promised us isn't in the game, and the online mode sucks, and the golden line that's meant to lead you around will constantly get confused and send you the long or even wrong way, and you'll spend way too long doing timed button tapping games to make money, all of this is overlooked if not forgiven by the humour which will have you at least smiling if not laughing at times as well as the well written plot which will keep you playing and telling yourself 'just 10 more minutes' till it's 6am. For every issue in Fable 2 there's some element of charm or some little nod to the previous title which will cause you to forgive it and carry on Some of the games floors are almost charming in themselves, and if you need more convincing to give this game a shot all I should need to say is Stephen Fry man! Stephen fucking Fry!

TRAILER

Fable 2 Take 3!

2008-11-29T17:35:00.001-08:00

So, yesterday I was in town looking around, avoiding the guy dressed up as a teddy bear, and trying to talk my house-mate into hugging the other guy dressed as Santa when I walked into Gamestation to find Fable 2 for £20...now keep in mind just down the road it cost £39.99, and I'd forked out £39.99 for my original two broken copies. Now I know I had vowed not to touch Fable 2 for at least 6 months due to the looooooong list of fuck ups, let downs, and general butt-fuckery when it came to working CDs, but at £20, and the offer only on for a week I gave into temptation and spent half this fortnights food money on a copy...so back to frozen chips every night for me for 14 days.

Anyway, I got home, stuck the game in and rushed the sloooow intro (I've now seen it over 5 times...needless to say at this point I'd begun to hate the guy selling the "magic" items) and got to the point that my game ALWAYS freezes up aaaaaand...

IT FUCKING WORKED!

Yup, I am now officially a Fable 2 player! About fucking time Lionhead fucking studios!

Anyway, Just wanted to post this I'll get to writing the review now

If Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right, How Many Do?

2008-11-29T17:26:00.001-08:00

So, I was in town yesterday hanging around in the game shop bugging the staff with questions about Fable 2 CD issues and so on when I noticed the setup demo for customers to play on the new Sonic for everything except the little white box that specialises in party-based DVD games (Wii). Now as any gamer will know, sonic went down hill a while back, the specific title he lost his way on is a little mixed up though, some people say it went bad after Sonic 3, some people say after Sonic Adventures on the Dreamcast, others say sonic is still good while rocking back and forth in a dark corner drawing their fan-art and stuffing their faces with Pocky.

Anyway, there is a whole new generation of gamers growing up now without a good Sonic title, lets just say that. Because of this I was more than a bit unwilling to try the demo so I must admit I hung around and watched others play...oh...my...god when will Sega ether put a bullet between the blue bastards eyes or make a chuffing good game?! Visually the game, although quite polished, felt like it was lacking something and cluttered up the screen to horrific levels of ugliness. It was slow...a sonic game...that's SLOW, wtf?! Worst of all was the combat which has been butt fucked and replaced with a warehog hack and slash style battle system instead of just jumping on things or spinning at them...you know...like sonic is MENT to do.

I know I can't give an accurate review of the game based on looking over the shoulder of an uncomfortable gamer lacking the same to avoid the controller of doom, and I know after I've posted this I'm gonna have to wait for the demo to pop up on XBL and try it out just so I can back up my rant here, but seriously, how on earth dose Sega continue to fail at a game which was good for its simplicity?

Sorry

2008-11-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

Whoops, sorry for the lack of updates this weekend, had some planned but instead abused my back changing the setup in my room to make it more Nerd friendly (wide screen TV next to bed and so on). I'm collecting up some stuff for a list-thingy for web 2.0 fans though :-)

I'm also gonna write up my basic + and - of NXE on Friday.

May update soon <3

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly #1

2008-11-21T12:29:00.001-08:00

Bored of doing my usual '5 random things to check out' or reviewing a game that no one cares about anymore or something I thought today I'd start something a little different. The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly will pop up every now and then and in one post I'll give you one game I consider good, one I think should be burnt, and one that's just down right hideous. So, let's begin:

MMO

The Good
Magic World Online
I hate...HATE Ancient Asian MMO's, their way over done, boring and feel horridly unoriginal. Every time I play one it's the same dribble and gets boring, no creativity. Because of this when I'm presented with an Ancient Asian MMO I skip it, every time, this includes Hero Online, Kal Online and plenty more with the word 'Online' after them. Oddly though the other day in a mad fit of 'what the hell, let's give it a go' and because I'd run out of other MMO's to try I downloaded Magic World Online. This is hard for me to do...but I have to admit I enjoyed it I've put a few hours in and although the game isn't without it's bugs, boring bits and grinding (a lot of grinding) it feels like if the guys behind Legend of Mir had made an up to date version of their game this is what it would be like. Sadly there is a huge draw back. Although the graphics are 2D, the word is huge and because of this the download file size is HUGE. 2.28 Gigs for the install pre-patch isn't pretty for a 2D game but in fairness if you want a quality 2D MMO it's worth the download time (provided you have the bandwidth).

The Bad
Atlantica Online
Atlantica Online will strike you as an odd one for me to stick down as 'Bad' because it looks so bloody gorgeous. I'll admit it's up there, way up there, when it comes to graphics, but sadly that's about it. The game play on it is so boring. The GUI is about as simple as brain surgery and the battling although seems awesome at first, quickly becomes a bit boring and over done but unlike every MMO that works like this, at least their one click battles, these are about 25 click battles...joy. The quests are pretty boring, the characters keep spurting out the same single line over and over and I don't mean that in any exaggerated way (every time they attack, every time their clicked on, every time they do ANYTHING they'll say the same line which my good lord will drive you insane O_O) The download is 2.04 gig which is a lot for a game which is needlessly confusing from the start, boring, and will annoy the piss out of you.

The Ugly
4Story
4Story will make no sense to you looking at it, not just in pictures but videos because it looks good, and I genuinely thought it would be my new MMO to play religiously...theeeen I spotted something. 4Story is hosted by the nemesis of the MMO, Game & Game. Game & Game are notorious for picking up good or at least interesting looking MMO's, badly translating them to English, then sticking them on servers as old as I am leading to epic lag causing REALLY shitty game play. Once again they've done the same with 4Story. The game play jumps around constantly, it took one time 5 minutes for an NPC to talk to me thanks to lag. Game & Game have the ability to make ANY game ugly and they've made this one hideous though the fact it seemed like such a quality game before they hosted it. I wouldn't recommend this game for a few years, give G&G time to go bankrupt and someone else to buy up the rights to hosting then give it a go and I'd say you'll be facing a high quality game

So, there we go, that's the first GB&U, fingers crossed I'll be able to make more of these soon and I hope you enjoyed it and your a little curious to try these games. Let me know of any you'd recommend for any GB&U lists too

New Look? I'll Say!

2008-11-20T14:22:00.001-08:00

So, as you can see the Den has a bit of a new look. I fancied a bit of a change after the fancy look for a while. Something that would fit my cool Xbox Avatar (I have to admit I've fallen in love with the Avatar System on NXE ) and something a little brighter.

My weekend starts tomorrow so fingers crossed I'll get some updates out on here soon I'm kinda low on content right now though, might go on an MMO spree, give some short reviews or something unless I find something worth giving a long rant on, but I'll try getting some kind of update online.

Anywho, I'm off to lose against the end boss in Gears of War a few more times, why is he so bleeding hard?!

It's Mii- I mean, It's Me!

2008-11-19T10:43:00.001-08:00

Ok so I just finished playing around with the NXE update and I'm quite happy with it, I'm still getting used to it though cause it is a total over-hall of the original system, there are also a few bugs Microsoft didn't expect on launch day even after a week of beta-testing which is a shame (mostly slow loading content or not loading at all) I'll give it a week then write a short review of the NXE when I'm more at home with it (if I can be arsed).

Till then one thing I'll say is I LOVE the Avatar System Seriously, I know it's a cheeky rip off of the Mii's but you can forgive them considering just how much better than Mii's and how much more integrated they are into the Dashboard. The fact you only get one pre-profile means you feel that your Avatar is YOUR Avatar unlike the Wii where I owned over 100 Mii's and could use any of them.

Anyway, as I'm gonna be a bit quiet for the next few days (as always I'll try to update a few times on the weekend), I thought I'd let my adoring fans see their Moriarty in his full glory!

FEAR ME!

EEEE! TOMORROW!

2008-11-18T16:21:00.001-08:00

Only a few hours till I can turn on my Xbox and see something like this

EEE! *sex wee!*

I'll try to update after I've toyed with NXE a bit but I'm ill and have work and all so I'll probably end up in bed by 7pm :-(

If There Is A God, This Has Condemned All Humanity To Hell...

2008-11-17T09:20:00.001-08:00

Guitar Praise 'Rocking Jesus' trailer

Still better than WiiMusic though

Left4Dead...again?

2008-11-15T17:52:00.001-08:00

Jesus Christ! I just stuck on Left4Dead again to show my house-mate, for starters playing in a dark room at 1am it's even more scary (but you'd have to be a bit weird to not know that) but more importantly I'd forgotten about the director feature in which every time you play a level it will be different. Obviously not the level it's self but the number of Zombies, what types, where their placed and so on.

Good example of this would be just now. I was playing though the demo finding it a little harder than last time but only a few more Hunters and Smokers, nothing major. Then I got to the final push at the end, here's how it played out:

FIRST TIME:
I run into the room, hit a switch and suddenly I'm swarmed by a pack of zombies which I had to fight off till I got to a mounted gun and ripped them to bits. The End

SECOND TIME:
I run into the room and instantly I'm attacked by a few zombies, while working on these I didn't notice the fucking huge monster coming up behind me which hit me though a window and down a flight of stairs. I had to empty about 15 shotgun shells into it before it dies. Then I run over to the button and hit it causing the swarm of zombies, but this time they come out of a second window too blocking off my way to the mounted gun, quickly I grabbed a Molotov Cocktail and set the floor in front of me on fire and picked off the left over zombies with handguns. The End

Not only dose this keep even the demo fresh, but makes every moment potentially cooler. The first time I was bowled over by the game alone, second time I was won by the shear awesomeness of fighting giants and burning zombies. This truly keeps the game fresh and makes the 20 levels in the full game seem like they could last for a long long time before they get even a little dull. This is gonna be a good game.

Then I showed my house-mate Mirrors Edge...she thought it was bland, boring and kinda sucky...Mirrors Edge is losing fans quickly :-(

And Now Something A Little Different...

2008-11-15T15:48:00.001-08:00

This is genuinely someone's 'About Me' on a social network site I'm a member of...

ryt mi name sarah im 19 i live in dirty denaby

im at college doin mechanics

yh im single n wt lvin tho lol

i ant a lemon so dnt ask cuz il av t smash ya lol

lv mi m8s lol

im always up 4 a laugh lol

i ate snobs cnt stand erm

im a chav n wt lol

if ya dnt lyk me get piss ov cuz i wont lyk u eitha

i ant shy im a gobby bitch oh well i tel ya ow it is dnt care if i hurt ya feelin oh well thts me n ant a nice bird im a nasty 1 lol

cnt wait t move art mi mams il b doin a party lol

so really life is shit

if ya mingers dnt luk at mi page

cuz i wont b lukin at urs

if ya want mi msn ask 4 it.

ant got nwt t say so cya bye fuckin gone xx

All I can say to that is I'm now officially pro-abortion right up untill the age of 20...

Mirrors Edge

2008-11-15T15:29:00.001-08:00

Well, I just finished the Mirrors Edge demo...I've gotta say although the game seems amazing, and I didn't find it half as confusing as people made it seem like I would...I was a tad let down by the demo length. I mean Left4Dead's demo felt like a short but full level, this felt like it was just the tutorial. The lack of a skip button making you watch the same boring clip every time you failed a tutorial pointer was annoying too. I have high hopes for the game but in truth I had high hopes for the demo so I feel a little disheartened now

I'll write a real review of this one when I pick up a copy sometime when I have the money for it (which will admittedly be a while off)

2008-11-15T15:06:00.001-08:00

Valve is one of those game-companies I love but hate. I love them because everything they seem to make (over looking the early years of Steam) is classic and also because it's nice to see a small games company doing so damn well considering their up against the likes of EA and Blizzard/Activision. Alas at the same time I hate them because although their doing well, they take the piss a lot. Their only new franchise in years was Portal and they had to bring in a team to simply re-hash their old game concept with a more Half Life style plot and graphics (don't get me wrong, I loved Portal and the fact even friends who hate FPS have fallen in love with it). It seriously felt like Valve were printing money from giving us a fuck you in the form of such classic titles as Half Life Source...what was wrong with Half Life? or how about Counter Strike Source...once again I found no issues with the original.

I'm happy to say today though that Valve have won back a bit of my love to replace some of that icky hate though releasing the demo of Left4Dead...my god...I'm in love.

The demo was about a gig to download so if you have low bandwidth limits you might wanna hope they stick the demo on some magazine's promo-CD or something but if you can afford to download the demo it's well worth the download time!

The graphics are amazing, I mean as a console gamer I've come to accept that what we see on consoles is normally not what you'll see on a high end PC but it's normally good enough to over look...L4D was gorgeous. The environments captured the feel of an 'end of the world though evil running zombies OH SHIT THERES ONE!' city and the Zombies themselves, there was nothing quite as creepy as running backwards loading my shotgun desperately as a screaming female zombie charged at me, her eyes wild and her mouth soaked in blood.

Audio wise the game is...ok I'll admit I have a bit of a gripe here although the sound effects worked perfect, the screams of the zombies scared me silly at times, and in the underground car park hearing the whaling of a child made me wee myself, but all of this was spoilt a little by my NPC team-mates shouting 'reloading' over and over in moments when I was holding my breath in fear of a zombie hearing...kinda, you know, kills the feel of realism a bit.

Game-play is where the game picks back up again. From the second the level starts, after about 3 seconds while the camera zooms into the back of your head (when did games start doing that and why do they still do it? Never made sense of it) your dropped right into the action with a mad dash to grab a gun of your choice and some ammo and for the love of god don't forget your med pack! The second you open your first door the action truly begins with you picking off zombies around every corner as quick as you can before they realise your there and charge at you with a pleasant scream which calls for the need of a change of underwear.

There are so many game-play mechanics I love in the game based on what I've seen so far, the smooth and basic weapon switch is useful because if you go shotgun like me after 8 shots your fucked if there are zombies left so a quick hit of the Y (or whatever it is on PC or PS3) and you have your handgun out. Zombies nibbling on your nipples? Don't worry just pull the left trigger and you'll smack them away giving you some much needed time to empty a round into their heads or run like the wind. There are also little details which although wouldn't have been missed if not there, make the game feel more whole including the fact if you get too close to some cars their alarm will go off which will notify a horde of zombies to where you are to rip off your big toes.

In truth I could go on for ages about the mechanics of the game which makes it spooge-worthy but I don't want to spoil finding out a lot of them for you in-fact I should stop now before I spoil anything more for you, this is the kind of game that no video dose justice (but there'll still be a video at the bottom for you to check out) and you really should discover for yourself...in a dark room...alone. Seriously, I know it's a multi-player game, and no doubt there is a lot of fun in playing online, but you should play level one in single player just to enjoy the scary feel of the game before it's spoilt by some knob who only cares about their game-score stealing all your kills and running though bits that if you haven't played before, you'll be crawling inch by inch though in fear of zombie-rape.

Good Game, Give it a Go!

Been A While...

2008-11-14T03:16:00.001-08:00

Wow, almost a week without updates. Sorry about that, was ill Monday till yesterday and had work which I'm still getting used too so I was knackerd every night but now the weekend is here! I just need to get my room to a slightly respectable state, move my Xbox 360 up to my TV and get it connected to the net and wehay I can get the Left4Dead, Mirrors Edge and Banjo Kazooy demos! :-D That should give me a little to write about.

I can't promise that means updates ahoy because I have a knack for losing motivation 3 paragraphs into a post (It took me 2 days to finish the Dead Set post...don't know why).

2008-11-08T14:35:00.001-08:00

So, I just finished watching E4's Dead Set, now I must admit I didn't know about this show till a few days ago when two of my friends were talking about it, I was totally confused and spent about 5 minutes trying to work out what the hell they were talking about and how much crack they'd smoked. Anyway, soon after I popped down to HMV and found the DVD, the moment I saw the E4 logo I died a little inside but decided to give into the peer pressure thought "if everyone else has seen it I have too!"...now this is unlike me because everyone has seen Skins but I would rather be fiddled by Garry Glitter than watch that televised abortion. Anyway, tonight with the encouragement of my house-mate I finally settled down and watched all 5 episodes of Dead Set back to back, I've got to admit E4 have managed to do something right!

If your from anywhere outside of the UK although the show might still appeal to you if you like zombies and so on, you wont get ANY of the references like Divina McCall, the genuine Big Brother "stars", and this years UK Big Brother House.

So, what's the show about? Well as I've mentioned so far, Big Brother and Zombies. The plot follows the survival of a group of staff and contestants from Big Brother at the dawn of a Zombie Apocalypse, which I'm surprised NO ONE has done before, I mean we've all thought about the concept of the house-mates being stuck in the house and so on, about time someone actually did it. Anyway, the story feels very much like it drew all it's inspiration from the 'of the Dead' series, which of course is a good thing because they are the 'how do to a Zombie right' of the movie world. Of course the plot it's self is pretty slim, and to explain any of the sub-plot would mean giving away spoilers which I'd like not to do, but all in all it's a good foundation for some more British Zombie movies above the humorous tone of Shawn of the Dead.

Of course there are some down sides. While all of the actors play their roles well, it feels like the 'bad guy' of the story was a bit beyond belief which is a same because most of the other characters felt real and at worst a little exaggerated. There is also the issue of a lot left untouched. I mean some of the characters seem to act as if there is a tone of background story to them but you never get to see it, also the Zombie outbreak is never explained, nor is it really looked into much. There is an odd moment in the show where on the radios people start picking up a french repeating broadcast, the only world any of them can translate is something like "shelter", they never translate the rest or even bring the whole thing up again for the rest of the show, I'd like to know more about the world outside this one show, but although I complain as if this is a bad thing it is also a good thing because the world the story is based in leaves so many questions unanswered it screams out for a spin-off show of some sort and I really hope they listen to the screams and make it because the writing and production value of the show were both top notch and beyond anything I've seen on E4 in a looooong time.

So, interested in watching the show? There are probably torrents out there for the whole thing but of course I can't condone the use of illegal downloads, one thing worth checking is 4oD, I don't use it so I don't know if it's on there but give it a check out, if not you can always buy the DVD. If your a Zombie fan I REALLY recommend this, it's VASTLY better than the horrible piece of crap known as Diary of the Dead.

Ooo, I say! Some news! Well I Never!

2008-11-07T08:16:00.001-08:00

No, nothing about Obama and the U.S Presidency, I'm from the UK, I'm happy to say I don't entirely care so long as he stops America fucking up the world for the rest of us.

No, this news is Den based. As you may have spotted there is now a picture of poo on the right hand side of the site...why? Because I'm currently trying to fiddle the site to make it more, I don't know, human? I mean I've been churning out posts but I get the feeling with each post I'm typing as if I'm a wannabe editor, not just some guy posting on a blog. This place is my little corner of the Internet and I feel it should reflect me a little more, hell, some people might even wanna know a little about the moaning git behind the last 41 posts.

I might fuck up and the whole site will go down, me and HTML have a weird relationship which normally results in a lot of stuff being deleted and me shouting at my screen then crying on my keyboard, so brace yourself for a bit of a choppy time with the Den.

So, what have I done so far?

WikiPedia
I've added a little plug-in to my Live Writer so that I can link and word to the world wide wiki for you guys to get a little more info with the click of a link, this will help when I go off on rants about stuff people don't know or care too much about but their curious to understand. It also makes the site look kinda intelligent...kinda.

Profile
That picture of poo is not just there for fancy decoration, no, it's the start of a small profile about me which I'm still writing up. Yup it's one of those god awful favourite movie?' kinda profiles but I can't be arsed to write up one less run of the mill.

:-)'s
As you may have seen in the last post I've removed the :-)'s and the :-('s and instead use and although I don't like the way these stick out and look kinda odd based on the style of the site so expect them to go by the time I'm done editing unless I can fix the black space around them.

Topics
I love video-games, that's been an obvious theme though my blog for a while, but I feel I'm tight casting myself to being a guy who moans about games which feels far too restricting for me so as you no doubt noticed (if you red) my last post was music based, I intend to also post on news topics as they pop up and I quite fancy going back to my old ways of ripping apart movies in the same fashion I moan about games.

Packing Up & Moving
This isn't set in stone but I'm thinking about when I get my new web-site setup moving the blog into the hosting there, although I've become quite settled into my little spot on Blogger so I might keep the Den open as my little hide away from my site, expect some shameless self promotion though.

Art
When I started the Den I had hopes of starting a small gallery on here, then losing motivation I had plans to bring my Deviant Art account back to life, but as anyone who's clicked the link knows that's gone about as well as brain surgery with a brick. I'm hoping to inject a little more art into the blog soon, I can't class myself as a wannabe comic artist and general artist if I don't show my workings. Speaking of which Zom-B isn't dead yet, but A4e and the Charity Shop are taking up most of my time so I'm gonna pick it back up probably in February.

So there you go, a wall of text which is no doubt tl;dr but if you did read it I hope all these updates give you a warm feeling in your belly...because if they didn't give you that feeling, then you might have stomach cancer...might wanna get that checked...

Fridays here, let the weekend begin!

2008-11-07T07:52:00.001-08:00

So, not been an update in a little while, sorry been bogged down with A4e's new training course and working in a Charity Shop. Now though the weekend is here and I get 2 days of relaxation, late nights, too many computer games, and wishing I had a social life Joy For All!

Anyway, beyond Fallout 3 I don't really have anything new thanks to my money being shit right now so I can't promise a lot of updates over the weekend but I'll try my best to bring you a few. In the mean time here's something to give a listen too, I've mentioned the band Sigur Ros before, an Icelandic band who specialise in ambient and beautiful music which they believe musically shows the beauty of Iceland, and although I haven't seen Iceland I can believe them. These guys are the inspirational music I stick on when I'm drawing, writing, or playing a challenging game of Solitaire (and have gotten me out of a few scrapes in Minesweeper too!) so if your looking for some music to get you into an artistic mood I'd recommend giving the play-list below a listen.

Before I embedded a song by Sigur Ros but this time I'm going to embed a collection of my favourite and what I think are their most defining songs in one, give them a listen if you have 5 minutes and pick up one of their albums if you've got some spare cash

Enjoy, I did:

5 Reasons To Get Fallout 3...

2008-11-02T11:09:00.001-08:00

So, I've been playing Fallout 3 the last few days, I've got to say although I HATE it when people over hype a game cause there is no way it lives up to expectations, when it comes to Fallout 3, seriously, I'm not saying it's perfection, but it's the best game of it's kind. So, instead of reviewing the game seeing as every site on the net already has or will have a review up soon, I thought I'd just list a few things I've noticed which I think combined warrant anyone taking a look at the game.

NOTE: I played the game on Xbox 360, I've heard nothing but bad mumbles about the PS3 version so nothing I say below should be applied if you only own a PS3, although the PC version apparently runs just as well as the 360 one.

1. Battle System
I'm the kind of person who doesn't like change in my games. I mean I like new game mechanics but I like them in new games, I don't like it when an old series tries something too new (Final Fantasy XII). Due to this personal stance on change I was a bit nervous of Fallout 3 because the original 2 were VERY different (top down 2D rogue-like games with turn based action) from the new one which uses a real time first person shooter system with your character stats effecting your hit/miss ratio as well as effecting the V.A.T.S (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System), but oddly it works and as you level up as your hits are more well aimed you feel you've truly improved which is quite hard for a first-person shooter to pull off. The battle engine comes into it's own though with the V.A.T.S, I can't really explain it very well, so I'll just say, LOOK!:

2. Visuals
Know when you play a game that's really going for beauty you can see amazing views in the distance and you think 'wow' but really you know their just impressive textures you'll never get to actually explore? In Fallout 3 there are endless times when you'll see something miles away and think 'wow' and then get to run up to it and explore it and find awesome stuff! And some of the structures in the game are beautiful, I mean even factories look amazing standing on top of a hill in the dark only lit by the moon. It truly is a beautiful game but in a grim way because it truly gets across the feeling of a depressing world after a nuclear Armageddon.

3. Humour
As you no doubt know by now the game is set in a future where the a-bombs were dropped, almost everyone is dead, and anyone out side of vaults lives in shit holes and there is no sign of humanity repairing what's happened ever 200 years after the war. Oddly though the game still manages to be funny in such a grim world, but at the same time they've used the right amount of humour so that it doesn't take away from the feel of the game, but also not so little that the game depresses you.

4. Play it YOUR way!
With so many titles out these days that offer open ended worlds with a story you can take or leave and make your own adventure this sounds like a run of the mill thing to point out as a plus, but name me one game that did it well? Oblivion kinda, but a lot of the quests felt a bit boring and with little reward, and they just felt like quests disconnected from the game world, when you finished one people wouldn't talk about you and what you'd done or anything. Fallout 3 changes that. I mean I've been playing for 3 days and done hardly ANY of the games main story, but though sub-quests and so on I've done some world changing things, and not only do I see the effect in the form of peoples reactions to me (do evil things and people fear you or treat you like crap) but also though the radio stations where news stories follow my every move telling people what I've done, encouraging people to treat me good or bad based on my actions. Also though sub-quests I've changed the face of the game. Any fan of the game will have heard the example where you get to pick weather to blow up a town or keep it, well this isn't a main plot device, no, this is a sub-quest that actually effects the face of the game world, which makes quests feel so much better than other games.

5. Messy Fun
About an hour before writing this I went into Rivet City, bought 30 hand grenades and went hunting in the city for super mutants. Trust me there is nothing quite as beautiful as using the V.A.T.S with grenades and perk which causes every death to be messy...true art if ever I saw it.

So, there you go :-D now I'm back off to play my game one last time before I start a Job Centre course tomorrow...joy...pure...fucking...joy.

I'm Not Dead!

2008-11-01T15:53:00.001-07:00

Hey just a quick post to say I'm NOT dead :-D

I'm currently hooked on Fallout 3 which I swapped Fable 2 for after one too many fuck ups and no sign of a fix before Xmas.

I'll try to post tomorrow with a mini-review of the game otherwise some kind of random thrown together 'Top 5' list of something or other to keep the site from gathering too much dust while I'm hooked on Fallout 3 ^_^

So, I'll just bend over, and Peter Molyneux, if you'd like to just insert...

2008-10-30T02:00:00.001-07:00

So, guess what I picked up 2 days ago? I'll give you a hint:

Yup, I got Fable 2! After well over a year of waiting I finally traded in half my 360 and PSP game collection to get the game of my dreams.

Now anyone who'd been following the progress of Fable 2 knows that Lion Head Studio has been dropping the ball on this one, and by dropping I mean throwing it down a well then squatting over the side and dropping a fresh crap on top of it...enjoy that image. There was the issue with the taking out of all the cool pre-order stuff, then the loss of the pre-order download stuff, then some freezing issues...this is where I come into it, and my wonderful tempting karma to kick my ass. I was reading Kotaku's story about the freezing issue a day before it hit the UK so I kinda took pleasure in the fact the US got the game before us but it was still buggy thinking they'd push to fix that before the European release...how foolish of me. I ran home with my copy 2 days ago and put it into my Xbox, and so it began! I was as excited as a small child at Xmas as I sat though the opening video. The graphics although not of the quality of something like Gears of War or Mass Effect were still beautiful and as a change from every other next gen game, colourful! So I began the tutorial when suddenly 5 minutes in my game locked up. "Strange" I thought to myself but noticed the kitten behind the TV and kinda tried to convince myself it must have been him knocking a loose wire or something, so I restarted my Xbox and started playing again, this time the game carried on fine...for about 10 minutes before once again it locked up! The odd thing was that unlike most games when they freeze, Fable 2's snow was still falling, the lights still flickering, but no one could move and the menus were not opening and after a few steps even my character would get stuck in place. I was a bit panicky now so quickly I pulled a wire downstairs and hooked my Xbox up to live to patch, I had to download 2 patched within the first week of launch so I thought this MUST fix it, so I started again, at exactly the same point (when you first meet your dog) it would lock up! I tried literally another 4 times and each time the same bit would crash as the boy or the girl. At this point thinking "oh crap, oh crap, oh crap" I checked my CD but it was perfect. Trying one more time after cleaning the CD (even though it was perfectly clean) I noticed something odd. Remember the days of the PS1, when you took a CD out the game would still play till it needed to load from the CD again? That's what was happening to Fable 2! The CD would just stop in the drive and all would go silent, all the characters would stop moving, any audio files would loop, then I'd try walking a little too far and it would try to load from the CD and BAM! I'd lock up! I tried 4 other Xbox 360 games and 2 Xbox original titles to see if it was my Xbox but no other game ran into an issue. So, yesterday I took my game back to Game Station to get it changed. The second I handed over the case the woman said 'freezing on you?' as if she'd been creepily watching though my living-room window. Within 10 minutes of chatting to the staff I realised I was far from the only one with issues. Getting home with my new copy I quickly played though the beginning and once again, I'd meet the dog and lock up. Getting VERY annoyed I began to dig around the net, soon after I realised the scale of this issue, apparently hundreds of thousands of people have been searching up the locking issues, others have lost entire save files 15 hours into game play, some have serious graphical errors, lots of people had lost their husbands or wives without reason. The game has more bugs in it than an ant hill.

This is when something kind of depressing dawned on me. Think about PC gaming. With the invention of Internet gaming games are released now with glitches and issues patched out over time, Hell even Bejeweled needed a patch! We are starting to see this in gaming on consoles now. Quality control and player testing for Fable 2 must have been at their minimum for this scale of bugs to be left in and probably justified by "oh we'll let the community be the testers and we'll patch any issues their raise" which is a nice idea except I paid £40 for this fucking game so I expect £40 worth of quality! When they finally patch the game a lot of my enjoyments gonna be over clouded by the fear of it's next lock up or losing my files, the first 2 days have sown mistrust of the game which will never be undone and a company which I've hailed as the best game development company since Bullfrog I now have lost a LOT of respect for.

Needless to say tomorrow I'm taking my copy back and exchanging it for Fallout 3, let's hope they wont let me down too...

Peter Molyneux has lost a fan :-(

The Legend of Zelda : The Shadowgazer

2008-10-26T18:49:00.001-07:00

It's rare that I enjoy a fan game. I mean Fan Games are like Fan Fiction and Fan Art, beyond showing your love and appreciation for something, they don't really show off original concepts and normally are badly done and 90% of the time are made by horny fan boys playing out their sexual fantasies.

Thinking about it the only time I've truly given a Fan Game a chance it was a Final Fantasy VII on RPG Maker 2K and sucked pretty badly so I've been burned already, so when I was browsing Game Trailers and saw a trailer for a Zelda fan game I was expecting a suckfest but I must admit, I was genuinely shocked to find this was a bloody good looking game!

Currently there's only a demo up for download but playing though it I found that The Shadowgazer, although a little buggy at times, is in game play and story at a quality which I personally think Nintendo would be stupid not to back as a WiiWare game or something.

So, what dose the game provide other than quality to make it different from other fan-games? How about the two key features:

Two parallel versions of the game world: the everyday waking world, and its nightmarish counterpart, unseen by all except those trained to use the Shadowgazer - a magical totem that protects the bearer from the nightmare realm's maddening effects

A rotating three-day schedule, governed by the comings and goings of the ships in the port town of Hyrule. Record valuable information regarding the nightmares of the passengers and crew in your Cabin Boy's Handbook

The custom sprites, the smooth animation, the classic music, the gorgeous Nightmare world (Silent Hill for those who don't like to be scared! :-D) are all perfect but there are a few issues which are a shame. Sadly the game has a fixed 320x240 resolution (same as the screen shots) which is understandable because no one finds stretched sprites attractive but still it dose leave you squinting a little at times and feels like on the average PC screen its a little lost. I also kept having an issue when walking up or down stairs in houses to different floors that as Link entered one floor he'd walk back down, but I hope this will be fixed soon. Finally the controls are a little uncomfortable using A and Z as the basic two buttons for Zelda games, which feels odd when Z and X are commonly used in Emulators for GBA and so on, also S is for your shield which makes it all feel a little more uncomfortable. Who knows, maybe they'll let you set your own keys in the final game!

Ok, so that's The Legend of Zelda : The Shadowgazer, there are videos on the official site but due to the capture software they run a little slow making the game look bad and I didn't want you passing judgement on the game off those. I recommend you download the demo (it's a TINY file, took me 20 seconds to download, no exaggeration) and give the game a real go to get a feel for what could be one of the biggest over looked indy games for a long while!

THE OFFICIAL SITE

Zom-B Servivor Set One

2008-10-26T13:51:00.001-07:00

Well after finally getting everything set back up the slow process of working on my new web comic Zom-B has picked back up again. I've now finished the designs for the first four survivors (keep in mind I could end up killing off one or more of these over time to keep the cast fresh). More news soon I hope :-D

Fallout's History

2008-10-26T13:37:00.001-07:00

I can NOT wait for Fallout 3 :-D Chances are I won't have the cash to buy it for a while but that doesn't stop me getting all excited about it coming out. Thanks to Kotaku I found this video on Game Trailers though which might give some of you some insight into the Fallout series and could help you to appreciate the games more.

WARNING: This video contains spoilers for Fallout 1 and 2, do not watch if you've decided to play the first two games though ready for the third!

Fan Boys and Fucktards

2008-10-25T22:28:00.001-07:00

There are many breeds of men out there, fighters, lovers, back stabbers, sinners and saints but there's one kind of man that's so immature he (or she) can only be referred to as a boy, Fan Boys

While checking out a trailer for Gears of War 2 today I found this comment by a user who shan't be mentioned on YouTube:

Ppl by now should know BY NOW GEARS OF WAR 2 WILL FLOP!!! RESISTANCE 2 WILL BE GOTY SHOOTER OF THE YEAR FUCK 360 AND THERE GAY ASS FANS LOL! HAVE FUN WITH THE 10 PLAYER FAGFEST, WHILE I PLAY THE 60 PLAYER COOLFEST LOL 360 WILL BE DEAD LAST EVER WONDER WHY IT HAS THE NUMBER "3":D

This is why I hate Fan Boys. Till recently I happily called myself a Nintendo Fan Boy, but due to toss pots like this I say it with shame now. My understanding of Fan Boys were people who were open to the other consoles but truly devoted themselves to one company and would defend them. When the Gamecube failed I stood by and defended it, I did NOT slate the Xbox or PS2 to try and make what was in truth a badly thought though console look better. Even now with the Wii, after selling my Wii and that was after months without use, I still defend the Wii as not a fad or a gimmick although I condemn Nintendo for almost turning it into one, I have not gone on the war path with Xbox 360 or PS3, in fact I've come to gain an element of hope for the PS3.

What is wrong with fucktard kids these days who seem to think being a fan boy is like being in Counter Strike, you don't get respect for being a moron who can't cope with failure so rages. I'm all for a little cheeky banter between fan-boys knocking each others favourite console, but flat out aggressive and immature comments in inappropriate places is just moronic.

Well, just wanted to get that off my chest...

Fable 2 in 2 days! =D

My Desktop

2008-10-23T21:32:00.001-07:00

Well I think my computer is almost to the standard it was before the format and it's nice to have it back! :-D

So, now I'm left with this:

Ok so a rundown of what I've done to get this image!

1. Start Killer - This little tool removes the Start Button from Windows XP and the Windows Orb from Vista. You can open up your menu by hitting the windows key on your keyboard so it's not lost forever. This tool is pretty useless unless you want to restrict someone's use of the PC or your using a file dock such as:

2. Rocket Dock - A funky tool that anyone who's used an Apple Mac computer should be quite at home with. It features smooth animation for minimizing windows and a high level of customisation. I personally have set mine on the left hand side of my screen set to off-screen so no matter what I have open (excluding full screen games and so on) if I press my mouse against the left side of my screen the dock slides out giving me access to all my tools and software. Very handy and works very well with the Start Killer!

3. The wallpaper:

A very snazzy wallpaper that looks quite good with almost any icon on it. It also works well with the icon-titles in Rocket Dock. Sadly I have no idea who made this and can't even remember where I found it, if this is yours or you know the creator please contact me so I can credit you :-) (and yes this is the same wallpaper used in the blog, what can I say? It's grown on me!)

Sadly Windows Blinds (at least a worth while copy) isn't free so I'm stuck with the blue start bar for now but I imagine this would look best on Windows Vista, if you try it on a Vista computer send me a screen of the final result!

Testing Windows Live Writer

2008-10-22T22:59:00.001-07:00

So every time I format my Laptop I try something new, last time it was removing my Start button and replacing it with a pop-up Mac style dock. I quite enjoyed that and have opted for doing it again this time. So this time around I've decided while getting Windows Live Messenger to pick up Windows Live Writer. I thought it was some kind of Windows Vista Notepad but it seems its not as when I opened it instantly I was asked if I had a blog and when I said yes it asked fro my Username, Password and Blog Address. Overly trustingly I handed over the details and after a little uploading and downloading I was presented with a text window, the one I'm typing this in right now. What's odd is that the Title is the same font and colour (as is my text and background) as when it's on the web site, so it appears I'm getting a real-time preview of how my post will look...which is pretty damn cool. If you can see this post then I'm quite happy with the tool and would recommend any blogger pick it up :-D (It also has a built in Spell Checker! JOY!)

Only two major tests though...

1) Can this upload images?

If you can see that then yes...

2) Can it run youtube videos (I normally have to fiddle around in the code editor on Blogger to do this, lets see if we can bypass this)

If you can see this, wehay! :D

PSone Classics / PSP

2008-10-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

Ok so today my Laptop finally did a nose dive into fucksupvill leaving me with no option but to do a full system format. This is a common thing for me because no matter what anti-virus software I have running, no matter how careful I am with my downloads and no matter how often I clean out my computer to stop clutter, something WILL fuck up. So anyway, while waiting for my computer to format (a slow process) I picked up and dusted off my PSP. Realising Silent Hill Origins was in and feeling too wimpy to give it a play but too lazy to get up and go pick up a fun game off my shelf I opted for the more expensive option. Having just upgraded my firmware to version 5.01 (literally days after version 5.00 so god knows what they fucked up to rush out a 0.01 worth of updates) I was keen to try out the PlayStation Store newly added to the PSP menu, so I logged in and dragged myself kicking and screaming though page after page of register information. Finally I had my account so I began to poke around the sore and in fairness it's not a bad little place.

It has some full games, some demos (FINALLY!), even a few free wallpapers for your PSP backdrop. None of this truly interested me though once I found the PSone Classics area...I swear if there was ever proof of a god it would be in the ability to play classic titles on a PSP. So quickly I ran downstairs to get my bank card and bought myself £5 (yes this meant getting up and voids the whole "I'm too lazy to get a game from my shelf" but come on...PSone classics!) worth of spending money in the store, now this is where I start to compare because although I am FAR from a fan boy of Sony they just won themselves some brownie points in my eyes because where Nintendo use Nintendo Points, and Microsoft use Microsoft Points, Sony use £ (or if your American $)! No trying to work out exactly how much a game is in real money instead of silly money like the other two which is actually quite nice, but in fairness what do Sony have to hide? I mean on Wii I paid about £8 for Mario 64, on PSP I paid under £4 for MediEvil! So all is good right? Sadly no...

After buying my game I got to downloading it...this is where things started to suck a little. The game was about 360mb and in fairness over a wireless network (and considering I'm yet to find a console with speedy internet) this was bound to be slow, but it felt slow even with this in mind and finally after downloading the installation took almost as long! By the time the game was ready to play my laptop was formatted and waiting for me to use it.

This was a kick in the knackers but still, MediEvil! So I quickly loaded up the game and in fairness the game ran perfect, I'm yet to see anyone online come up with an emulator for PSX titles with as few floors as the one in the PSP so that was good. Alas though there was a down side, one that could be fixed with a simple peripheral I'd happily buy...there’s no second shoulder buttons! Because of this they have replaced L2 and R2 with the left and right on the joystick (which I had to manually change to the D-Pad cause playing a 3D game with a D-Pad is the perfect way to make your thumb hate you so much) and up on the joystick (or D-Pad) for both buttons pushed together. This on paper seems like a good substitute but it's not when you have to press up on the D-Pad to go into first person view and break a finger trying to press left or right on the joystick at the same time, it simply doesn’t work :-(

There were a few others issues with the emulation, the sound was too quiet, the screen was too dull and the resolution was thumb-nail, but in fairness all 3 of these can be fixed by pressing the Home button and fiddling with the settings but NOWHERE do they tell you this so I didn't discover these options till I hit the Home button with the intention of quitting though frustration and the fact my thumb hated me.

All in all PSone Classics on PSP works well, and if they ever release the Final Fantasy VII-IX titles on it I'll be buying them, but if your interested in getting a game, look though the list and ask yourself "how will the controls work with this title?" before you part with any cash.

Zom-B

2008-10-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

As I said about 2 posts ago, I <3 Web Comics and I've run a few in the past. For the last year or so I haven't really done much, just a BOK strip every now and then when I hear a joke I know I can only get away with telling on the internet, or a few doodles for plans for a future return of Life Of TimmY, but I haven't actually started a comic series with potential and tried to meet that potential in a long while. Lucky for me (and maybe for you) that dry spell is almost at an end! For I give you:

Zom-B is a comic following the funny side of a grim near future where zombies have risen up and humanity is falling. The plot is very simple, a group of characters surviving the end of the world, but the comic isn't entirely about that but more about how the characters, each from very different walks of life interact with each other...but you know...in a less boring way than I'm making it sound.

Right now all I have is the cover page for the comic which has been uploaded to it's future home on Drunk Duck and can be found HERE. As I develop characters and zombies no doubt I'll post images of them here to show them off (till Bit Of Corn is online) but the best thing you can do is check on the Drunk Duck Comic page every few days, I hope to have the comic started soon but with things going on in my life I can't promise ANYTHING right now.

Ps. Oh and no, it's not pure luck that I'm working on this comic close to the release of Left4Dead, in-fact L4D is a strong inspiration and I'm hoping the popularity that the game will no doubt have will help my comic get somewhere :-D it's a sell-out move I know but fuck it, if it gets me readers!

One Week...

2008-10-19T20:20:00.000-07:00

In one week I'm going missing and it would be safe to presume I'm dead, why? Because in one week I get paid...at the same time Fallout 3, Saints Row 2, Farcry 2 and Fable 2 (yes not one original IP, although I have no idea when Dead Space is out) will all be out and within my grasp...I'm going to be dead to the world for a little while. So, why am I so excited about all these games? Well if you genuinely need to ask I'm a bit ashamed of you...FOR SHAME! But yeah, I don't wanna spam my page with a video for each of the games mentioned but here’s the first of some build up videos released for Fallout 3, Enjoy:

5 Web Comics To Check Out...

2008-10-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Since about 5 years ago I've been in love with Web-Comics. Not those piece of crap sprite comics, or ones ripping off anime in the way you'd expect of a rapist. No, I mean genuinely funny or interesting comics. Hell I've even run a few (Life of Timmy, BoK, Chav Town and so on) myself with varying dedication and success. So weather your new to Web Comics or an old fan like me, why not check out these five and see if there are any gems you love, Enjoy:

1. Cyanide & Happiness
A strange comic with no set cast, no artistic ability, no running theme (other than the fact it's very funny) and a few different artists causing a variation in both art and writing. This leaves the comic feeling constantly fresh unlike a lot of comics which after about 20 strips your ready to stop reading. Well worth a look!

2. John and John
A comic not for the innocent minded out there. John and John is a perverse comic which shies away from no sexual topic. The jokes are a variation of funny jokes, the kind of jokes you laugh at cause their gross, and the kind of jokes you laugh at but hide it cause you know the joke was just flat-out wrong. I'd recommend this but remember, it is 18+ and probably NSFW.

3. White Ninja
White Ninja is pretty weird cause just like Cyanide & Happiness the art sucks, also the humour I personally find half the time sucks. Yet when a strip is funny it's VERY funny, it's also the kind of strip you can read for hours without getting bored. Worth a look :-)

4. KinokoFry
Wow, a web-comic by a girl...that isn't anime, a love story, or furry? Something’s not right here...never the less although I'm pretty new to this comic I love it, it's disjointed humour and twisted visuals as well as beautiful at times artwork all mix together for a very enjoyable comic you'll keep coming back too for more!

5. Dueling Analogs
Of course I couldn't do this without at least ONE game related web-comic! Dueling Analogs is a well under rated web-comic after coming out a few years too late to make it's name as one of the big players in the game-comic craze but that isn't to say it's a bad comic! In-fact you wont find any miscarriages, or horrid lack of updates here like two of the leading game-comics and it's also a VERY funny comic if you play games enough to get the jokes!

A little bit of class

2008-10-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

This site was started almost 2 months back now and I must admit I had no real intention to take it anywhere, but I've quite enjoyed it so far even though no one reads it. So, as a mini-celebration I thought I'd add a little drop of classiness to the site in the form of this snazzy new background! I can't promise it looks good on anything bigger than 1280x800 cause that's what I've setup the site using so I can't tell if there are floors or issues but in truth if your running a screen bigger than that, screw you for having a better computer than me!

Enjoy

More posts soon :-)

Mother 3 goes English!

2008-10-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

If there is one game I am quite ashamed to say I’ve never played it would be anything from the Mother series, or as we English speaking people call it, Earthbound. The series began on SNES and in truth I know little about it or what happened to it, all I do know is that the third instalment was released on GBA but only for Japan which annoyed a lot of the fans, but not one who settled down and started painstakingly translating the game via rom and after quite some time has now released the English Patch for the games ROM file. Now I should make clear I have not tried this patch and I don’t own a legal copy and thus it would be naughty of me OR ANYONE ELSE to get this patch and a ROM from some website like mininova.org but in case you do own a copy, here’s the website:

Sigur Ros

2008-10-17T07:21:00.001-07:00

Ok, it's rare I post anything music related on here...hell I don't think I ever have before, but I can pass these guys off as worthy of a mention on two fronts:

1. They were used in the trailer for the new Prince of Persia game and made it 10 times more beautiful and actually make me wanna get a copy of the game!

2. Their fucking beautiful! Seriously, listen to the song below and try telling me that doesn’t just feel amazing to listen too!

I don't have much to say on them but here's a damn gorgeous song by them, and my second favourite but most powerful for first time listeners. Enjoy, I did.

2008-10-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

So the other day I was invited to the Cinema! This is a rare occurrence for me considering I’m about as social as any teen Disney actress is likeable. So, as I wasn’t paying (thanks Morrison :-D) my friend took the role of movie-picker so we went to see How To Lose Friends & Alienate People. I’ll admit this would not have been my first choice because if the trailers were anything to be trusted it was going to be a sucky movie, I also had doubts about how many more good movies Simon Pegg can be in before he dose a shit one. I must say though I was pleasantly surprised!

The basic plot of the movie is one that although not totally original (small timer goes to the big city to become success but ends up selling out morals but finding them in the nick of time) has been done in a way I can’t think of being used before, following a guy in the celebrity journalist role, quite a nice breath of fresh air in well over used concepts that have been bouncing around recently. Something else that was nice was the fact this movie was a comedy, but not a ‘fun for the whole family’ comedy! Why should this be so important? Well because recently I’ve noticed you get 3 kinds of comedy: Teen Movies, which I’d rather die than watch now I’m no longer a teen and realise they are the height of badly made crap. Adult Spoof Movies (no I don’t mean Lord of the G-Strings) which since Scary Movie 2 haven’t been made very well in a long time, and finally Family Fun movies, most of these are horrid all black cast ‘oh no you di’ent!’ bullshit churned out by Disney to justify the use of anyone who isn’t working for Pixar. So in fairness this was a nice change because it was an ADULT comedy (lots of naughty words, some boobies and male-frontal nudity and so on) but didn’t fall back of childishly bad ‘look! I made a gay joke then pulled a woman’s top off!’ jokes over and over which was really nice, it felt like a comedy for more mature people, not 18 year old dick heads.

One thing I hate in almost every movie, it even dragged down some brownie points on Wall-E for me (and I’m a man who loves his Wall-E!), is the sad moments. The bit in a happy fun movie which brings a tear to your eye even though you know it’ll all be fine in the end. Thus I love this movie even more because although it had it’s moments where you felt bad for a character, it didn’t feel sad which was nice. Combine this with the fact I think almost everyone in the cinema laughed at most of the jokes (very few jokes missed the target) and a good cast with believable characters and some very funny bitchy nods towards the celebrity business and you have a very good movie on your hands!

Thinking back over the movie I think the only problem I had in the entire thing was the fact I’d baught a drink bigger than my bladder so for the last 10 minutes I was praying the movie would end so I could go pee. Other than that the movie was genuinely an enjoyable movie and me and my two friends left the cinema with smiles on our faces and were talking about and quoting the movie for the whole walk home. I think my run of bad cinema trips is finally at an end, so what should I see next? Leave a comment if you can be arsed but I doubt you can.

Oh and DO NOT trust this trailer if you think it looks crap:

HE DOSE NOT CALL VINCENT A PLONKER! HE CALLS HIM A WANKER! FUCKS SAKE!

Seven Daaaaays...

2008-10-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

So, exactly one week till Fable 2 hit’s the shops here in the UK and as it gets closer I find it harder to sleep, like a kid on Xmas eve knowing that sleep will cause the morning to come sooner but never the less unable to close my eyes with excitement for the copy of Pokemon Stadium I was desperate for but instead though a misunderstanding got Pokemon Snap which resulted in me wasting a year of my life in a Photography Course in College somehow convincing myself real life photography would be just as fun as snapping Pokemon, take it from me, it’s not half as fun without boobies involved…god I’ve gone way off topic now, where was I? Ah that’s right, one week to go for Fable 2! There is a sad side of this I’m not proud of though because although I’m unable to sleep with excitement for the game I’ve been looking forward too the most this entire year (yes more so that Spore, Metal Gear Solid 4, or the less popular “Jillian Michaels Fitness”) on launch day I will be unable to buy a copy due to the money I was planning on using to buy it not exciting after my Landlord decided to take it in rent…trust me kids, when your parents charge you rent for living with them, appreciate it, cause it’s a hell of a lot better than some stranger charging you double it and doesn’t even cook for you! So yeah, I’m all excited, looking up reviews, previews, feature lists and so on but in full knolage that I wont beable to play the game for a minimum of another week after release. So, as you all begin counting down your last week, remember poor me with my fortnight left before I get to enjoy what may be the best RPG on a current generation console…bastards :-(

Ignore the woman and this is a smexy video game-play wise :-D

It's Almost Here...

2008-10-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

Two Worlds [Xbox 360]

2008-10-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not (and based on my previous game reviews I guess not believing it is more likely) it is rare that I find a game I genuinely don't like. I mean normally I'll slate a game for being crap but in truth I wouldn't blame someone for enjoying it, I mean I don't slap people for paying Counter Strike even though I'd rather get raped by an inbred hill billy with aids than play (a.k.a suffer it's arsehole of a "community" it seems to pride it's self on) it because I can understand how getting your head shot off by some cock with a God complex might be entertaining to someone if they have a thing for throwing PC accessorise out of windows. So yeah, I'd consider myself open minded to that extent, but alas there are games I can't fathom me or others playing, there is a list actually (Killzone, Shadow the Hedgehog, and Evil Twin to name a few) and none of these games are based purely on the fact I didn't like the genera, or the story or something, the hatred for these games goes much deeper than my personal preference and instead is based on bad game play, boring designs, lack of creativity, horrid glitches or just laziness on the development end. So, the game I want to rip a new one today?

Yup, the game is called Two Worlds but I've done some checking and even though the logo makes it look like the second game in a series no game came before it, and in truth if one had there wouldn't be a second.

So, what's wrong with this game? God where to start...

I played the 360 version but apparently the PC version scored a little higher in reviews and the games set for PS3 next year, so keep that in mind if you don't agree with my opinion based on the other platforms, as for 360 players who think it's a good game...seriously...I wanna slap you silly.

Anyway, the bad things! Let's start with the CD sound! As we all know a 360 reading a CD is a little...well...let's just say we all turn the TV volume up. This isn't a major problem in most games though cause most of the loading is done in small chunks, not for Two Worlds though! The CD genuinely never stopped loading the whole time I played it, I thought my 360 was dieing and even tested 4 other games in the drive to check. Every time I turned my character to face another direction my CD drive would die a little inside.

Then we have the issue of frame-rate. Now there is a reason I love console gaming. When I buy a game for my laptop in it's current state 90% of the time even if I have the right specs, I can't run the game very well. On a console if I buy a game I can expect it to run, once again not Two Worlds! Indoors the frame rate must have been running at a good 30fps, but the second I stepped outside the frame rate would die, sometimes I couldn't have been getting higher than 5fps if there were too many monsters on screen, it was like running Doom 3 on Windows 3.1!

The controls next, these were sloppy, and I don't mean not very intelligent positions for buttons or something, I mean to cast a spell I'd pull my trigger and wait up to 3 or 4 seconds for the game to register I wanted to fire my spell, by which point the monster had moved and I was shooting fire at the floor while getting raped by an Ork in the ear! Sword swinging was almost as bad so it seemed unlikely it was some kind of 'casting time delay' and I tried with 2 game pads so it wasn't a hardware issue (one wireless and one wired too).

Audio we'll tackle this time! Music wasn't bad, monster and battle sounds were good too, I thought this would be the one area I couldn't knock the game...then I spoke with an NPC. They genuinely speak like their reading the script for the first name with no real emotion in their voices and use 'Ye Old English' but it feels out of place and at times like their making it up. I genuinely had to turn off the audio at times and just read the subtitles...well I tried but that leads onto our next issue:

GUI! Yup, Graphical User Interface! This for me and a lot of people is a make or break point in a game, WoW and Everquest, both amazing games, but WoW has the best GUI so guess which game I'm currently selling my soul too in monthly instalments? Two Worlds GUI is never really explained in-game and it's one of those games where you NEED it explained to you. The back pack is hard to find your way around, comparing items stats is impossible without a HD TV (and before you complain that I'm knocking a game for it's use of High Def, yes I am, because most of us can't afford HDTV’s yet so fuck off!) as well as most subtitles meaning you have to listen to that horrid audio!

Game play was drab, first they send you into a dungeon, which consists of 2 rooms and about 4 monsters to kill...fair enough. The problem comes when you walk outside after an easy dungeon and even walking on paths you presume are safe you get attacked by everything including pigs which kick your level 1 ass into the dirt and piss on your grave. Equipping higher level stuff is almost impossible without a HDTV or lucky guess work and even if your the best fighter, the game doesn’t pause when you talk to NPC’s meaning you can come out of a conversation with an Imp chewing on your left butt cheek cause your 3 feet too far for a guard to be bothered to walk. Prepare to die...a LOT.

Story...eh...this is where I can't genuinely give you a review...cause the game was so horrid even though I forked out £30 for it, I've played it no more than 3 times cause it's so unplayable. I genuinely thing with a HDTV and the console power of a PS3 or a high end PC (and maybe a few game Mods) it could be fun, but as far as the 360 version goes this is a horrid game though and though. If you want a free roaming fantasy hack & slash to play, pick up Oblivion Game of the Year Edition or something, it's not amazing but hell, it's vastly better than this crap and the best you'll get unless the stick Gothic 3 on 360 one day (you'll hear me singing the praises of that as soon as I get a PC that can run it!).

So yeah...don't buy it...and don't trust this trailer:

Fringe

2008-10-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

What's this? A post? One that has NO video-game reviews, news, or rants? Yeah right, when Pigs fly!

Luckily I found this then huh?

Any who, I've just finished watching the first 4 episodes of the new sci-fi show Fringe. Out of curiosity before I started watching I turned to the wonders of IMDB and checked out their basic sum-up of the show and got this:

A television drama cantered around a female FBI agent who is forced to work with an institutionalized scientist in order to rationalize a brewing storm of unexplained phenomena.

Now am I alone in thinking that sounds like a mildly quirky x-Files? I'm sure I'm not so I went into this show with a bit of a "eh, it's gonna suck" but I was happily suppressed! The show is pretty damn grim and sees no problem in wiping out 140+ people in the first episode in a very disturbing way (seriously, 5 seconds before the intro music you'll get what I mean). The plot is a good one which right away throws you into a dark conspiracy with lots of different characters with no clear good/evil (kinda like Noah from Heroes in season 1) which will keep you watching if nothing else dose. The show is quite evil too because although each episode can be watched as a stand alone show, there is a constant underlying plot filled with questions which I don't think we'll get the answers too in the near future. Quite evil is the last 5 seconds of each show too, where they show a quick image, or a few seconds of something with no explanation of what’s going on but you know it'll all make scenes later down the line.

The characters in the show are all well written although sometimes a little one dimensional (which is forgivable) and the actors play their roles very well. One thing I did notice which was a little odd for a show of this millennium is that the female character, although good looking, isn't some young bit of totty but in fact feels more like a realistic woman within a government agency which is nice, admittedly it seems they've gone for the sex appeal in one of the main male characters, but I guess they had to shoe-horn it in somewhere for the more shallow TV watchers just like they shoe-horned in the black woman (I have to point this out every time I make this complaint about any show or movie that dose it. I am NOT racist, there is a black guy in this show who I think fits in well, but the "personal assistant black woman" thing was done in Sex and the City the movie and it felt just as out of place there as it dose here as she seems to play NO important or even slight role in the show at all).

All in all this is a really good show, I loved it and can't wait for the next episode. One warning though is this is a gruesome show which actually had me looking away from the screen at times (something I've not done outside of a Asian Horror) so if your not a fan of the gruesome world of special effects I'd recommend maybe giving the show a miss, or at least have a pillow close by to hide behind for the yucky bits. Otherwise WATCH THIS SHOW!

Oh...and my god can you feel the hints of Lost in it?

Cave Story

2008-10-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

With my current lack of cash freeware games are becoming more and more appealing too me. In truth though this game has been one I've loved for a long while, even when I first got my 360 and couldn't get enough of smashing the crap out of zombies in Dead Rising, or first installing a copy of Sam and Max Episode 1, I'd still stop and take time to give this game a little play, I've been playing on and off for well over a year now in small 5 minute plays and I'm genuinely surprised a game can be so long. What am I talking about? None other than Cave Story which if you haven't heard of, with it's confirmed Wii Release you'll hear of it a lot more soon.

So, what's the game about? In truth I've never taken much time to take in the plot and only skimmed to get to the game play but from what I remember you play a soldier from the surface who's somehow ended up underground in a village with some cute little dog like things when one gets kidnapped, you take it upon yourself to save the little fella which of course leads onto a bigger adventure. In truth plot isn't what sells this game but I do have to admire it because it's where the text comes in the most and this game has been lovingly translated to a quality you'll never find in a Korean MMORPG or something.

So why did I speed though the plot? Not because I'm impatient or anything, hell, I loved Final Fantasy VII for it's long winded plot, no, the reason I sped though it with Cave Story is because the game comes into it's own in game play. How is it original? It isn't! The game play is pure fun side scrolling action, with an odd 3 level system for each weapon (taken from some horizontal space shooter you'd find in some 20p arcade) and pickups along the way which boost your HP bar (and when your running around with 10 times the HP you had when you started the game you start to feel a little smug about yourself...it's sad I know but trust me you'll feel the same). There are no real puzzles although every now and then a mini-quest to collect some items to get past something to move on in the game. The Boss battles are challenging but usually they'll throw you a save point just before it and a box to refill your HP. It's rare these days to find a game which isn't trying some epic new game mechanic to stand out, and I know in the freeware world you have to normally do something insane to get noticed but although I love seeing what developers come up with, there are a lot more misses than hits, so it's nice to play a game which is simple, old school and most of all fun :-D

Graphics are an odd one to cover for this game. If your looking for a game based purely on the graphics stop reading now...thinking about it leave my blog and go buy a PS3 you chav. Cave Story prides it's self on it's 2D 8-bit graphics and audio and I love it for this. The game genuinely looks like it would be at home on the NES and in one sense I wish it was because I think the only thing that could make this game that little more awesome is if it came on one of those old NES carts and I could play with a game pad from back when having an a AND a b button was quite advanced.

So, to sum up this is a game which I hope with it's up coming jump to console will get the recognition it damn well deserves. It's a high quality game which can be over looked based on it's 8-bit goodness and even though it'd fully free to download for Windows, if it hit's the Xbox Live Arcade one day I'll be buying it. Till then I recommend you download it, but if you need a little more convincing below is a trailer for the game, Enjoy :-)

DOWNLOAD

5 Free MMO's I'd Recommend

2008-10-05T17:41:00.001-07:00

Hello! Tis I! Moriarty!

Sorry I haven't been around much, been very low on content for the site since my landlord has raised my rent for the month (don't ask...) so till next month I'm skint meaning no games!

But alas! Not all hope it lost! Because thanks to this wondrous thing called the Internet there are more free things to play with than you could find at any Nymphomaniacs Anonymous meeting!

I'm an avid fan of the MMORPG and the MMOG and a newbie to the MMORTS but I love them all. Sure their grind-city, and yes their communities suck, and of course you spend forever trying to get to one level just to spend forever to get to the next, but never the less I like them :-D Because of this I thought today instead of some review of an Xbox title or a 36o demo, or even a filler list of one line reviews of my bad taste in games, I'd subject you to a top 5 of my favourite MMO's I've played. I used to run a Free MMORPG List so I've played a LOT of them too :-D don't expect to see any you wont have seen on MMO sites, but here is my view on 5 of them which might help you pick one and if not, might entertain you for a few minutes, so here we go:

1. Risk Your Life 2 [YL2]
Why I've put this game in my list is a little strange. The graphics leave a LOT to be desired. The community is awful. Quests are boring. And the glitches in the game which cause boss monsters to appear in newbie villages and so on are beyond annoying...so why is this here? Because even with these issues RYL2 is FUN! It's the only MMORPG I know where within the blink of an eye you can level, you look pretty cool from the start, and the battle system is quite literally Hack and Slash and fast paced (I'm yet to see ANY other MMORPG which says it's battles are fast paced live up to the claim). If you can talk a few friends into downloading this with you I think you could have a lot of fun, check it out.

2. Perfect World [PW]
Perfect World is one of those games that from the second you run it your quite suprised it's a free game. It's graphics are good, it's gameplay is just right filled with quests, lots of items, armour and mounts as well as an interesting use of the jump ability. One of the cool things about PW is at any time you can pull your character back into the character-creation system and edit them to make them look different, this can be useful for people who get bored of the same look quickly or people into Role Play. There is a draw back to this game though, and it's the one that turns a lot of people off, the translation is pretty damn bad. Still, worth a look, you'll probubly enjoy it if you can look past the one floor.

3. Dream of Mirror Online [DOMO]
I love this game so much :-D it's graphics are just right, it's quests are varied, interesting and even though you into an instance from level 1. There is also something kinda fun about beating the crap out of an adorable pig...I need help. There are a lot of classes to pick from in the game to use with one of 4 races, the only draw-back being you have to get to level 20 before you can change class but when you change class you go back to level 1 again, this meant when I played and became a Swordsman I was one of the only people who dared change class from Basic, although this may seem crap it did mean I was the only one walking around in some pretty cool armour which makes you feel damn smug. The translations are a tiny bit off in the game but not enough to spoil anything and sometimes can be funny (I genuinely saw a Cow meow). I'd recommend this game but due to it's not very chatty community I'd recommend dragging some friends on too.

4. Dungeon Runners [DR]
If there is something that's seriously missing in the world of MMORPGs it's humour. So many serious games about saving the world from a relentless evil, so many depressing and grim looking futures, luckily though DR is a breath of fresh air! Dungeon Runners dose exactly what it says in the name, it's all about running though dungeons in a beautiful 3D similar to WoW but in a Diablo style game play. The game is fast and you'll level up quickly. It's also one of those games where you look cool pretty damn quick kitted out in full armour and a sword bigger than the penis size you lie to girls about in chat rooms. Within a few minutes of playing I'd beat the crap out of a wolf cub with a club and picked up off it's body an Axe that was apparently forged in 'Da Ghetto' (no joking), strait away I knew I'd like the game! Also any game where if you upgrade to premium you get a goblin that eats unwanted treasure and craps out old rocks in my opinion! Sadly though I've just mentioned one of the games draw backs. This is a free game but for a low price you can upgrade to a premium account which allows access to a lot more features as well as the armour you'll desperately need to survive harder dungeons, this means the game will become almost impossible after a few dungeons without paying for a full account, but it's fun while it lasts and worth a poke as the only funny MMO out there.

5. Gunz
Gunz is one of those games which will probably be the only one of it's kind. This death-match guns and melee game lets you look cool from day one...for all of 5 seconds till someone empties an Uzi into your face. The game is VERY fast and not very forgiving but damn dose it let you look cool with wall runs and using your sword to latch onto walls and so on it it one of the few games online which lets you act like Dante from Devil May Cry or something. This game is truly the ultimate in cool as far as MMO's go. Of course though it has a downside. The games community has become similar to Counter Strike where for every 1 nice player, there are 50 morons who just shout stuff and blame every death on hacks and ever kill on skill, it's childish and will put you off playing quickly if you don't remember to not take it seriously. If you can over look this the games quite fun and worth a go :-) good luck, you'll need it!

So there you have it, 5 MMO's you can try if your ever bored and want to play something a little less anti-social. Keep in mind I recommend these 5 out of all the games I have played, not other peoples opinions so please don't leave any comments about how Runescape rocks or Maple Story owns compared to DOMO because I don't care and anyone with an ounce of sense knows Runescape always has and always will suck unless your a paedophile trying to find a retarded 12 year old to touch, and Maple Story is quick to follow and the only excuse I will accept for anyone playing ether of these is because they are female (why the hell do women like Maple Story? o_O I mean...I know women’s taste is different from men, but a sucky game is a sucky game) or their trying to sleep with a female who plays the game.

Anyway, hope this will keep you busy for a while and I'll try to update again soon. <3

Some Quick Reviews

2008-09-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

Been a while but my heads not really in the game today to make a full post so instead here are some sum-ups of the games I've been playing this week:

Painkiller [Xbox]
The PC version was amazing, the Xbox version...all I can say is God Damn Loading Screens!

Whiplash [Xbox]
Funny, Twisted, You'll laugh at times but hate yourself for it, but still the game feels like it's lacking an element of quality you find in Platformers like Sly Cooper or Jak and Daxter.

Dungeon Explorer [PSP]
A week later and it's still boring...

Pariah [Xbox]
Actually a quality game which I wish had been brought over to the 360 for a nice graphical upgrade. the Game only falls short on it's controls when you use a (surprise, surprise!) Vehicle!

Jelly Car [PC]
Bloody hard and annoying game, but so damn fun!

World of Warcraft [PC]
Shame on me :-( I know, I know. Anyway, not a bad game and one of the better built MMORPGs, if your looking for one, don't trust the bad opinions of the game, try it for yourself on the 14 day trial.

Hyperballoid 2 [PC]
So. Much. Fun! It's breakout made how it should have been made but never could before the here and now.

Think Your A Big Halo 3 Fan?

2008-09-21T04:07:00.000-07:00

Some people have too much time, and too few friends...

This actually makes me feel good about my life...

Xbox Avatars

2008-09-19T14:41:00.001-07:00

My god I'm going a bit tigger happy with the update button tonight!

Just saw this and as an Xbox user I'm getting pretty excited about having access to Avatars so this made me squeal with happyness, Enjoy.

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;amp;amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:af0e0dcd-5cff-43a2-bd32-4841fe6a89d1&amp;amp;amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;amp;amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Avatars in the new Xbox experience"&amp;amp;gt;Video: Avatars in the new Xbox experience&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

Euphoria

2008-09-19T14:41:00.000-07:00

Throughout the history of video-games there have been trends or technology that developers have latched onto. Some have been good like real life physics, or 3D graphics. Some have been less good like the recent removal of health bars from all FPS, and my strongest hatred in video games...Rag doll.

Rag doll came out a while back and was hailed as the step forward in gaming with it's realistic death effects as characters slumped to the floor and stuck their arm though their chest or spun their head like they were possessed by the devil. Rag doll has had a lot of glitches since day 1 and I've never understood why no company has taken the time to fix it, but I'm guessing as even people who hate the system (like me) still buy the games, why waste time and money on fixing it?

Lucky for me and others someone has FINALLY made an effort to go up against rag doll! Not only have they fixed the glitches though, they have given the system a total overhaul involving AI, and real-time animation instead of just making their models go floppy. It's already being used in such games as The Force Unleashed and GTA IV and looks amazing. I'm really excited about seeing this popping up in more and more games and just goes to show how technology is moving forward and where once designers would cut corners and cheat to give effects, these days we can actually enjoy the genuine effects :-D

Anyway, me telling you about it wont have half the effect seeing it will, so check this out and enjoy!

The Corpus Clock

2008-09-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

Nothing fancy, grumpy or witty to say today, my brain is currently that of a fine gunk...nice huh? Anyway, instead I thought I'd give you something to watch, this has to be the most awesome clock ever made so enjoy the Corpus Clock:

Portal : Prelude

2008-09-17T12:46:00.001-07:00

God bless the people at Kotaku, without them I'd miss out on about 90% of any games news and any I found out would be about 3 months late, and thanks to them today I discovered what looks to be my favourite game mod next to Zombie Master and Source Forts...Portal: Prelude!

I loved the original Portal, it was funny, challenging, fun, and quite creative. The only problems? It was short and left way to many questions although I'm not sure exactly what the questions are. Luckily a modding group have been working on Portal: Prelude :D a game which takes place before the original game, back when the Aperture Labs are still populated and not souly run by Glados.

In all honesty I'm a bit too knackered to write up a load of crap which wont sell the mod at all so instead check this out:

Portal: Prelude Official Trailer from NykO18 on Vimeo.

and take a look here:

Mimobots

2008-09-15T01:22:00.000-07:00

This is very sad, very nerdy, and to even look upon any of these is to give up any hint of a social life, buy a copy of W.o.W and start screaming down your microphone at other counter strike players about how everything that is your fault is a hack. For I give you, Mimobots:

You might be thinking 'ok, so their weird little models, so what?' and I'd have to reply from atop my epic steed of epicness 'NO FOOLISH MUSHROOM! FOR THEY ARE USB PENS DESIGNED BY SOME OF THE LEAD ARTISTS IN THE VINYL TOY WORLD!' to which you'd hit me off my Shetland Pony for typing in all caps...*ahem*

So yeah, something quite boring, officy and ugly is finally sneaking it's way into the weird and to use an 80s word..."Zany" world of Vinyl Toy Artists, the people who mass produce farting blue Skunks or Ghetto Darth Vader Masks.

Admittedly though it's not the weird ones by the odd artists which caught my eye, it's the even more nerdy one:

Yup, he's finished killing the Covenant and before Microsoft take him off Bungie and put him in a piss poor game he's taken some time to be a USB Pen just for you! Now before any self respecting nerd contacts me with hate mail I'm not a huge fan of Halo, and it's not so much that it's halo based which appeals to me, it's more the fact it's game franchise based. Some people call it selling out or trying to leech a few more £ off us, but fuck them, I enjoy my NES keychain and my Pikachu Gameboy Colour bag (yes you may send me hate mail now).

So, if your curious about nerding it up, why not check out Mimobots website here:

5 Free Games To Try

2008-09-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

As I can't seem to find 5 sites worth looking at this week, a day late, I'm gonna give you 5 totally free games you should give a look. So, due to a serious lack of sleep leading to an inability to waffle, here's the list:

1. White Chamber - Not to be mixed up with White Chamber the online flash puzzle almost impossible game, White Chamber is a horror point and click adventure based in a space-station. Although the whole game is what feels like a bad western attempt at anime fan art, it's still pretty damn creepy and feels like a space-age Silent Hill at times. I finished the game in one night with a little help from a walkthrough as admittedly this game isn't huge but it's a good little game with an interesting, although a little short, plot. The ambient sounds are bloody creepy and the moments when the ship messes up had me looking over my shoulder the rest of the night and sleeping with the lights on. Well worth a look.

2. Notrium - This top down action game is a hard one for me to put my full recommendation behind because I'm yet to get very far into it stupidly picking the hardest class. The basic idea is you've crash-landed on an alien planet. You have a safe house and that's all. Your mission is to survive which involves hunting down technology to build stuff to help you, collecting food, keeping a fire going, and trying not to get killed by the wildlife. For a game with such basic graphics and a clunky GUI it's bloody fun and I sunk hours into the game last night, only true problem I found was a lack of help with keys in the tutorial.

3. Ocular Ink - This bizarre action game feels like it should be on Nintendo DS not PC. This fun but down right weird game sees you taking the roll of an eyeball with a paintbrush. You have to use the brush to attack enemies by swiping at rocks and so on to knock them into the bad guys. The controls can be a bit funky and it's a bit hard to paint signs on the floor, but it's still a down right weird and fun game.

4. Zelda Classic - We all remember Zelda on the NES right? If not leave my blog now and shame on you! Anyway, not all of us have a working NES, in fact most of us don't anymore, but fear not! Zelda Classic by chance lets you play the classic Zelda game on your PC, but the cool thing is thanks to the editor tools the community have made totally new quests, and even total conversions as well as graphic updates for the classic game. Well worth a go weather you know of the orogins of Zelda or not!

5. The Spirit Engine - I've played this on and off for a good few years now and love the game. It's battle engine is original and a bit weird, the plot...eh I must admit, I've never paid much attention to the story. Graphics are top notch with sprites the quality of Metal Slug. Fun, long lasting and a good way to judge if Spirit Engine 2 is worth the $18. I strongly encourage you to give this one a go! :-D

So, To Sum Up...

2008-09-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Hello! I haven't posted in a few days have I? Sorry about that, between my inability to find some good content and my really...REEEEEALLY messed up sleep pattern right now (going to bed at 11pm to wake up at 1am isn't healthy) I've been putting off working on an update.

I'm still kinda low on content, no new or good/bad demo's on Xbox Live, the two games I picked up the other day to review are RPGs meaning they are gonna take forever and a day for me to get anywhere in them worthy of writing anything (plus I feel bad subjecting my housemates to me playing Final Fantasy XII in the living room) and even my own game collections looking a bit drab. I have one article planned but it wont be out till next week cause I need to get paid first.

Anyway, today instead I've decided that all the games I've played in the last week, I'm gonna sum up my opinion of in a single line, oddly sounds easier than it is, so here we go:

Dungeon Explorer [PSP]
The concept of dungeon crawling has been an age old fun thing from D&D to Diablo yet somehow Dungeon Explorer has managed to make it boring.

Final Fantasy XII [PS2]
Feels like they pulled the modem out of the FFXI package and sold it as an offline game with characters as deep as my belly button.

Fable : The Lost Chapters [Xbox]
A sadly disliked game by most because of it's inability to live up to a hype even the next game can't achieve nor any game for that matter, but well worth a go if your curious as to why everyone squeals with orgasm when you say "Fable Two".

Metal Arms : Glitch In The System [Xbox]
I was shocked to find not only is this a good and well built game with only a few glitches, it's also quite funny at times and very very heartless.

Kane&Lynch : Dead Men [Xbox 360]
Fuck you guy driving the truck I'll kill you one day!

Spore Creature Creator [PC]
Apparently Spore it's self sucks donkey balls but weeks after buying it I'm still enjoying the creature creator even after making 50+ creatures.

Maximus XV Abraham Strong - Space Mercenary [PC] (that is genuinely it's name)
I love this game so much, not because it's good but in fact because it's so bad, like a cheesy 80s movie, we love them BECAUSE they suck.

Chav Town

2008-09-08T06:37:00.000-07:00

A while back, god about 2 years ago now, I had to do a final piece of my Multimedia ND in college. Most people were doing promotional posters, or on-screen digital work, so I opted for what I know I'm kinda ok at and decided to make a comic. I was waaaay behind on time and quickly coming up to my dead-line. I had about a week to make the comic including writing and finding a style. Somehow I managed and without sounding smug, the college has continued to display bits of my comic on the walls even now to stop the inspectors from thinking no one works there.

Anyway, while looking though some unmarked blank CDs the other day for my setup CD for Ubuntu I found a copy of the comic and thought I'd share :-D

Keep in mind this comic is 2 years old now, so even I cringe at some of the art/writing elements, it was also highly rushed so the backgrounds behind the characters can be pretty damn shoddy at times. Anyway, I now give you, for the first time in the Den, a non-game related post and, Chav Town:

Lego Indiana Jones Demo Review

2008-09-07T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ok now I know up until now my demo reviews have been a bit harsh, ripped the shit out of Too Human and couldn't even find a point to reviewing the SC4 demo. I don't wanna come across as someone who whines and nit-picks for the hell of it, the internet is full of people like that, you can find them here and here :D

So today I went on Xbox Live (where else?) and downloaded the Lego Indiana Jones game. I downloaded this based off the demo of Starwars Lego I'd tried out a few months ago and loved. Needless to say I wasn't let down by this demo!

The game its self is simple, no epic graphics, no dialog, and very family friendly. This also means it's quite easy, and although you'll find I'm the first to complain games these days are getting too easy, I think games like this should be easy cause if I wanted a hardcore gaming day I'm more likely to load up Gears of War or Kane and Lynch, not Lego. This is the kinda game you wanna sit down and play when you've had a stressful day at work and fancy something with simple, not laugh out loud, but fun humour to it, and the demo provides that from time to time, as well as pretty good controls, a simple interface, and just fun game play.

You wont find any 'all new' features in this from the Starwars game, the franchise isn't about that thank god. This is like switching from Day of Defeat to Counter Strike, basically the same game with a few tweaks, and a totally different look.

But I'm reviewing this as if I've played the whole game, this is just about the demo! So, what can I say about the demo? It's long, a whole level of the game. It's a good level with a key and well known moment from the movies even if you've never seen them. And the 'collect all 10 chests' mini-quest within the level had me replaying the level 3 times! I was told by a friend that the demo even had a co-op mode, but I couldn't find it so I don't think that's true, but you can't condemn them for that considering they've put a nice chunk of the game into this demo to give you a real feel for weather or not you wanna play the rest.

I have to admit after playing this, when I've got the cash I might go out and buy all the games in this franchise :D

Well worth a download, especially if you have kids or are a kid at heart.

Soul Calibur IV Demo...Review?

2008-09-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

Right, I did a review a few days back of the Too Human demo on Xbox Live. I quite enjoyed the idea of reviewing demos as well as games because it's a slightly untapped area, and not all of us have the internet speed or hard drive space to go downloading any demo online. Because of this I downloaded Soul Calibur IV on Xbox Live to write a little review of the demo...this proved impossible...why?

Well after downloading an oddly small file I loaded up the game to find the whole menu! Nothing had been blacked out for the demo...then I pressed A...nothing had been blacked out but quite happily they'd tell you the option would not work in the demo, bit of a kick in the balls. So after poking around I finally got to the character selection screen where they gave me the choice of 2 characters, admittedly they gave me both characters second skin too, that was actually quite kind for a beat'em'up demo but then the game started...they gave me literally 3 matches...wait...did I say 3? 2.1 is more like it. Each round lasted 1 KO (you had to kill 2 people to get a K.O but they were one after enough and the battles lasted all of 40 seconds) and after 2 rounds of boring run of the mill characters seen in previous SC games suddenly I was put up against Yoda! DUN DUN DUUUUU! Yes the series spoiling character who I wish would prove to god that Gorge Lucas has abused the life he gave him. Anyway, Yoda said his bit then...the demo ended...no fucking fight! Why even put him in there, we all knew the shitty little snot monster was in the game anyway! Not as if one person squealed at the sight of him in the demo!

So yeah, then I was shown a bunch of screens of the same run of the mill game play and sent to the main menu...there’s nothing to review. I dunno if the controls were good cause who leans the moves in a demo? We ALL button mash.

So yeah...there’s that down the shitter.

Max Payne

2008-09-05T16:36:00.000-07:00

I just sex wee'd...

My 5 Links of the Week #1

2008-09-04T17:29:00.000-07:00

I love the internet, and by love I mean LOVE. Because of this love of the internet I tend to spend way too much time on it, and thus where most people are happy jumping between myspace and youtube I tend to explore deeper into the vat of crap in hope of finding some gems. From time to time these gems are found, but their normally hidden between an anime fan site and a porn site.

Anyway, from now on once a week (providing I've found enough good sites in the week) I'll be posting a list of a few good sites I'd recommend you take a 5 minute nose at. NONE of these links are here because I know the owner of the site, or I get money though the advertising or anything, these are all sites I've enjoyed or feel others will enjoy and find useful.

Ok, now that's out of the way lets move onto the list!

1. Moshi Monsters - Remember NeoPets? Remember the simple days before they got over run with adverts and become much more about sucking money out of it and just ended up sucking? Well Moshi Monsters is like that only much better. The site is Flash based (so if your on a slow connection you might have some loading time to wait and if your on a crappy old PC this might system-lag a bit) and they use this well. You can interact with your pet as well as decorate their room with stuff bought from the shops. The only real downside I've found with this site right now is that it's so young meaning there are not endless lists of items to buy, and there are only a few pets, but I think this site has the basis for a high quality site in time so why not get in now if your into this kind of thing, well worth mentioning to your kids too if their bored!

2. Ashens Birdhouse - We all remember those old LCD screen games you could pick up in markets for about £5 (or fifty billion Zimbabwe dollars) which to the untrained and quite stupid (or your parents) eye looked like a DS or something, or those 'no console needed' rip-offs of popular computer games? Good cause if you don't this site might be lost on you for I give you Dr. Ashens Birdhouse! Ashens is a strange guy who reviews the lowest quality crap in a humours way and truly is the embodiment of the British way with his attitude to...well...everything. Well worth a watch and if you enjoy his videos he's currently looking into making a DVD!

3. Zero Punctuation - Another video collection if your a gamer you most likely already know of the wonder which is Yahzee's Zero Punctuation. The show is a once a week (updated Wednesdays) no more than 5 minute review of a game. This sounds dull I know but just try watching one video and you'll be hooked, Yahzee's sense of humour is nothing short of wrong and his world and life views are truly what grumpy old men are made of.

4. Nintendo Super Squad - There are some things in this world that should never be questioned and only enjoyed, one of these things is the NSS. This web-comic is nothing short of weird, taking characters from Nintendo games and screwing them up beyond all logic for a twisted story which actually seems to both go nowhere and also everywhere. Trying to explain this bundle of weirdness to you is really a waste of time, your better off taking a peek yourself, if your a Nintendo fan you should quite enjoy this comic...just don't take it too seriously or you'll hurt your brain trying to work out some of the random crap.

5. Weebl's Stuff - If you have been on the internet for more than a few months no doubt someone has shown you at least one of Jonti's cartoons but just in case your new to the interweb or live under a rock here is Weebl's Stuff, a weird site full of the most bizarre cartoons and songs. It's also home to Weeble and Bob a strange cartoon series that's been going for years now. Worth checking out, will fill a few minutes in your life :D

Check back soon for another collection of links!

Songbird Music Player

2008-09-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

I love software. Hardware is to me kinda like getting the minimum grades to get into college and so on, it's just annoying and can spoil something that should be fun. No, for me it's all about software, but I've never been a fan of using the same old software made by Microsoft or another big company, one because it's nice to support the smaller people, but also because they tend to make more of an effort with their software than big companies do. Songbird is a prime example of this.

When you boot up Songbird it looks like a slightly less pretty version of iTunes, but what's this? No iTunes store?! Already a vast improvement, but this can't be all that's good about it right? Right! Just like Firefox is to Explorer, Songbird is to iTunes in the sense that although in some areas it's lacking the facy bits (eg. a smooth album art juke box system, the one you can get on Songbird needs a LOT of work) but makes up for it in cool features like the ability to download pretty good plugins, and I don't just mean new codecs or a new skin, I mean stuff like what you can see in the right hand side of the screen shot for this tool, LyricMaster.

LyricMaster alone sold this to me (well, not so much sell as it's free), when you play a song in Songbird this tool quickly (and I mean VERY quickly) searches all of it's database for lyrics to the song playing and pops them up with the choice also to save the lyrics to your computer. No longer will you wonder what the hell the Scissor Sisters sing in Don't Feel Like Dancing, or if it's his first real sex dream or six string!

This isn't all that I like about Songbird, oh no. It uses a simple selection system allowing you to pick bands by genera, band, album, or some other options including Beats Per Minute. The built in web browser, although a little slow, is useful if your on a computer which takes a while to load up a new program (even if it is FireFox) and you wanna quickly check something. Also let's say you find a tune hosted on a website you like but you don't wanna clutter your hard drive with the mp3, why not just link it up to Songbird and stream it strait from the site though your player?

Little features like this have caused me to fall in love with Songbird and remove my copy of iTunes and only use Windows Media Player when VLC is on the frits (which as we all know, it always is)

I'd recommend picking this up even if it's just for a quick poke!

Too Human - Demo

2008-09-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

So today I was a bit bored, not much to do around the house but clean and as you know, when the only thing to do is work, you somehow manage to find something to do, so I quickly signed into Xbox Live and downloaded the Too Human demo. Now I must admit, I went into this with a bad view. I mean although the rumours that the games been in the works for 12 years are untrue, it has been in development for a long long time. Also the constant bad reviews I've seen and heard don't help you to keep a positive head, but never the less I downloaded the game and booted it up.

Now keep in mind this game was a demo. Now a demo as far as I understand is a way to give the player a chance to try before they buy, but also a means for developers to sell their product to people who would normally be a bit untrusting of just some screen shots and videos. So how do you sell a game? Of course you give a bit of your plot, but enough to leave people asking for more. You also show off your game play and environments to capture the gamer and make them want to buy the full game just to enjoy more of what you've created...Too Human fails to do all 3 of these right.

The demo started with a long and quite boring intro, even when "game play" started, it hadn't as you could only walk forwards (no matter what direction you pushed) so you was "part of the intro movie". After what I'd say was between 5 and 10 minutes of boredom I finally got to the good bit, I got to kill some stuff and try out the game play! And once again the game fell on its face, it felt like Ninety Nine Nights done badly with the same boring bad guys thrown at me over and over and all I had to do was push a joystick in the direction of the thing I wanted dead (and whoever thought 'hey, Blade 2 on the Xbox did well with its battle system! let's rip it off!' should be shot cause that’s the one thing I couldn't forgive Blade 2 on the Xbox for!). Admittedly after a while they threw in a bigger bad guy, but this was only after ANTOHER video which was randomly stuck into the action and seemed to be talking about what I was doing in game as a past tense including talking about the big monster I was about to fight, taking away any shock or surprise. So anyway, after fighting this bad guy for a while (a.k.a Pushing the joystick in the direction he was in) suddenly...and no joke...he disappeared. Unsure what to do i walked up to an alter and suddenly I got another Flash Forward. This one took me into some boring story about how the 3 witches we know from Macbeth and so on are some kind of computer programs in this world god it was just silly. Anyway, the game play continued like this throwing me random cut-scenes I didn't wanna know about and boring game play which after an hour playing felt like I should have finished the game twice! To make things worse half way though killing stuff you'd have to go into a stats screen and read a load of crap to judge which skills you should level up and what armour and weapons you should use, all of which didn't do much for my head on an SD TV screen. They have NOT mixed RPG and Action well at all, do not trust what’s been said about that.

So, moving onto the fancy environments. The demo shows you two. One is a kinda floaty grass covered islands in the sky with forests and so on, the other was a dungeon/temple in a blizzard. Needless to say the dungeon/temple was boring, just a lot of grey, white, and black, the kinda thing you can forgive Gears of War for but not this pile of steamy turd. The forest/grassy-island place I'll admit looked kinda nice, but this was spoilt by random frame-rate lag and the fact even the smallest of bushes was dipped in a vat of invisible walls, hell the entire game was, and in this technological day and age I think we should be able to cut down on the use of these ugly things.

I'm a bit all over the place in this...well I can't even call it a review, let's say rant about Too Human. I literally just got off the demo unable to finish it because it's gotten so horribly boring and I'm a bit pissed off that I've made even a dent this small in my bandwidth for the month for this crap. The game isn't very well polished. The graphics are not amazing and if anything feel like they are lacking a lot (the faces on some of the characters are just horridly low quality, and the main characters face is creepy, like they have just photographed someone and stuck their face in the game, it looks out of place), the controls are horrid with the lack of a good camera movement in place of a bad and boring battle system, the level up process is slow and breaks up the boring fighting with even more boring stat screens which would even made a Dungeons and Dragons player weep, the story is horridly boring and the concept is just silly...thinking about it I think the ONLY thing I can say was ok in this game was the voice acting, which is a nice change after playing a few hours of Two Worlds (ooooh I'll be ranting good about that soon, trust me).

So yeah, don't get this game, hell, don't even download the demo...seriously, get the Castle Crashers trial instead, that's what good games are made of!