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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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