It’s quite surprising, then, that I’ve titled this post the way I have done. When the third installment in the BioShock series was announced, I took a few moments to consume what I was seeing, and I immediately expressed concerns. This has surprised a few people, but I’m going to take a moment now to explain just exactly why this game, or rather, it’s title, is a mistake.

Rapture, the setting of the previous two titles, is a very distinctive world. It’s been very carefully thought out by Ken Levine and his team, and it’s probably the most impressive playing environment I’ve ever experienced. I’ll be the first to admit that most FPS games are the setting and storyline equivalent of a very poor B movie, with notable exceptions, but if BioShock was a feature film, it would probably be one of the best of all time (there is actually a film adaptation in the works, but it remains to be seen how it compares. I don’t need to bring up the disastrous track record of game to movie transitions).

The game is set in the floating city of Columbia.

The one thing that does strike me about the universe, however, is that it seems somehow plausable. I know the concept of an “underwater city” built on 1940′s technology is impossible, but it does somehow feel believable.  Suspension of disbelief comes naturally to Rapture, at no point have I ever questioned it’s setting. It feels natural and, I suppose if you had unlimited resources, I’d go so far as to say it’s plausable. Infact the idea that there might be a secret city in the ocean like Rapture is very alluring.

This new title is set in a city called Columbia.  Apart from being a pretty unimaginative name, there is one major detail about it that is in total contrast to Rapture. It’s floating in the sky on giant hot air balloons.

This is a problem. It’s completely implausible on many levels; it makes no sense to fly a city in this way, the ammount of fuel required to keep such a city in the air makes no sense. Bad weather would destroy such a city in a moment. Everyone’s going to know it’s there because you can see it from the ground. It’s just bonkers in every single way.

The idea behind Columbia is that it’s a sort of “death ray” – fine, but you wouldn’t build an entire city. It lacks that feeling of “hey, you know, this kinda feels real” that rapture gives you, and that is the mistake. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is going to be a bad game. I’m not even saying it’s a bad setting, or a bad storyline, but the problem is this: BioShock Infinate.

Now if the game had been titled something else, I wouldn’t be typing this. I’m a fan of steampunk and, stand alone, I like the concept. But, even if the stories are not linked, the titles are. By putting this city in the same universe as Rapture, the former has now been tainted. I’m worried that this game will take away some of the magic Rapture gives me, by shattering the illusion, and that would be very sad.

When it was first released with Vista, it was actually quite impressive, however, a worrying amount of time has passed since Vista went RTM (I really, really feel old) and, as Opera demonstrated to me this past week, Internet Explorer has fallen behind again.

There are three key things I look for in a browser, appearance, functionality, and speed. You may question appearance as something trivial that isn’t important, however, the web browser is the one application that is open on my screen more often than any other, by a mile. If I’m going to spend a fair chunk of my day with something, I want it to look good.

Internet Explorer delivered this, using the Windows Aero interface to great effect. FireFox has never really hit that mark for me, although it is functional, it’s a slow and fugly browser, and even though it’s skinnable, slapping a coat of paint over a dog turd is still a dog turd. Chrome is a quick and pretty browser, however it’s functionality is severely lacking. Internet Explorer was a nice middle ground between functionality, speed, and looking cool.

I was convinced to give Opera a second chance this past weekend, and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. I have used Opera as my main browser before, many years ago, and while it was a decent browser, at the time it wasn’t free, and wasn’t quite up to the level of FireFox at the time.

Opera today however, particularly this 10.60 beta version, hits all the spots perfectly. It’s interface is very pretty, using Aero glass to great effect, and making efficient use of space to create a logical interface that is very easy to navigate. The program is also skinnable, and various excellent skins exist including the “Z1-Glass” skin, which makes even better use of the Aero Glass interface and makes Opera possibly the prettiest browser I’ve ever used.

It’s not all eyecandy though. Opera is serious about speed, and this latest build has had it’s code streamlined so well that it outperforms Chrome by nearly 20%, making it offically the fastest browser available right now. It’s speed is really impressive, and you really do notice a difference compared to other browsers. With a small system footprint, quick page loads and excellent rendering, there are no complaints in this department either.

Finally functionality. Opera has always been a functional browser, innovating many of the features that FireFox is wrongly credited with introducing. Opera actually comes with more useful tools as standard than any other web browser, yet still manages to maintain a clean and minimalist interface. Some of the best features of the recent versions are the Sync feature, which allows you to keep your bookmarks, speed dials and settings across not only all your computers, but your handheld devices running Opera.

IRC chat is built in as standard, as is a spell checker, advert blocker, “Widgets” (Opera’s answer to Sidebar Gadgets, which stay open even after Opera is closed), a notepad, a fully fledged download manager, an e-mail client, and some impressive social networking tools.

In conclusion, Opera is most definitely a serious contender in the Browser Wars and anybody wanting to try something a little bit different, I urge to download Opera 10.6 and see for yourself just how good a browser this thing is.

So, Bioshock 2 came out last Wednesday, and as I’m now on my second playthrough, I have to admit, this game is just as good as the origonal. The story is class, the character development still there, and the atmosphere and attention to detail in the underwater world is just, well, amazing.

So the single player portion delivers in buckets and spades. The gameplay upgrades feel natural and enhance the game from the previous title, and the new weapons and plasmids are pretty awesome.

Couple things wrong with the single player mode though; there seems to be a Gene Bank station on every wall;  and as such there are a lot of Gathers Gardens around too. One of the challenges of the first game IMO was coming across these things. There are also Ammo Bandito machines sprinkled liberally, moreso than the first game, where they weren’t very obvious at all. The Circus of Values were always all over the shop, so that’s no surprise though.

Health stations suffer from the same problem, actually. There are also aren’t a great deal of security cameras, auto-turrets or other electronic defences compared to Bioshock 1. Multi-part quests don’t even pop up until the very end of the game. When a box pops up to teach you a gameplay element during the final boss, you know it’s been underused.

Big Sisters on the other hand a goddamn hard and fun to fight. There’s nothing better than a nicely sculptured female body in a diving suit doing extreme parkour and using telekanisis to throw doors at you.

The multiplayer element, though, is not so good.  The fact that everyone essentially spawns in the same room at the start of the match, and subsequently respawns in the same room 90% of the time, means that the fighting generally concentrates in one small area, with large bits of map not very inhabited in smaller games.

This also means that this game is a camper’s dream. Just sit in the corner with your granade launcher, and wait as person after person appears in the same general area.

The idea of having to use research on bodies to do well in multiplayer battles, and the story driven level based gameplay, is actually a fresh idea that I like. But unfortunately the sides are let down by the core product.

The spawn points need spreading out. Like, srsly now.

But all in all, a brilliant game that I really can’t fault. A 9 out of 10.

Now, Sonic & Sega All Stars racing…. the demo for that game is pretty awesome. I’ll be picking that up next week too…. stay tuned.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the iPaper.

It’s a new, ultra-soft, lightweight toilet paper, that looks really pretty. It’s exactly the same as our larger rival’s silky-smooth bog-roll, you know, the one they released four years ago, except it looks a bit prettier. It also fits on less toilet roll holders than our competitors, and it’s kinda restricted to people with an arse the size of a cat’s, but don’t worry; the price tag won’t let you down!

The new iPaper retails for just $599USD, that’s nearly $598 more expensive than our nearest rival!

So, the new Apple iPad. I had the chance to see one of these things in the Apple store the other day, and I really had to restrain myself from kicking the nearest dog. Or Apple store regular.

For you see, the iPad isn’t a “new” or “revolutionary” idea either, folks. I appreciate that nobody who orgasms over these stupid things will listen to that, and they’ll just drink Steve Job’s kool-aid until it makes them giddy. Frankly they can do, there’s nothing wrong with the iPad as a product in theory. Infact, it’s very good. It’s stylish, functional, and it does the job it’s designed to do very well.

The problem is the fact that one, it’s mis-sold, and two, Applefans are going to find every Windows laptop owner in the land and wave their iPad in their face like a spack, not realising that Windows users have had tablets for years now.

As you can see, this Tablet PC here is exactly the same size as the Apple iPad. It’s about half the price of the iPad. And it actually runs a proper operating system, the full version of Windows, bells and whistles, rather than some limited iPhone interface derivative, that probably only exists so you can spend money on downloadables.

Oh, and it came out four years ago now.

I really want to know what this fucking revolution Captain Job’s is waffling on about actually is. I really don’t understand how you can just take existing technology, not even make it that much prettier than what’s already there (lets face it, the Tablet PC pictured is pretty sexy) – then just slap a stupendious price tag on it and watch the kids and middle aged people like Stephen Fry lap it up like Jelly Babies made from pure platinum.

Now, bets until one of these things sets someone on fire, anyone?

The first thing to note about the TV series of Geordie Racer, is that it’s almost impossible to understand what any of the characters are bloody saying. Trying to decypher the random dialect of Geordie people is nearly impossible, so to save the embarassment of trying, we’ll just assume for the rest of this review that the programme is filmed in a forigen language, and subtitles are required to fully appreciate the plot.

Oh, and what a plot it is. Setting the scene of Geordie Racer, the townspeople are currently 50/50 split obsessed with one of two things, either, the Great North Run, or the Great Pigeon Race. Now the reason for this, I can only assume, is that half of Newcastle is stupid enough to run through the North of England, and the other half are stupid enough to try and get a pigeon to do it for them.

The main protagonist is named Spuggy Hilton, a name that has all sorts of dodgy connotations throughout the series, the many references to “Spuggy in his bird, like” – which is Geordie for “Kevin is with his pigeon” – well, the sexual inuendos speak for themselves really. Anyway, Spuggy is the only person in his family who takes an interest in the Pigeon race. The rest of his family are nutters obsessed with long distance marathon running, and the thought of “The Great North Run” is making them “spuggy” in their pants.

As a keen Pigeon fancier, Spuggy (or the Spugmiester as I shall now call him), manages to aquire a pigeon all of his own, named “Blue Flash” – one of the best birds in Newcastle. Then some random bitch called Janie turns up, and along with the Spugmiester witness a spate of local art robberies, (I know, it’s hard to figure out what the fuck is going on at this point). Just how Bonnie and Clyde here managed to witness several acts of people stealing paintings, and what that has to do with racing people OR pigeons, ugh, I don’t know anymore.

The fact they had to witness these people stealing paintings on THREE seperate occasions to cotton on to the fact they were stealing them speaks volumes.

So rather than call the police, like most sane people, they decide to go and spy on the crooks themselves, using their pigeon and other stupendously dangerous methods. This is such a good message to give out to kids, isn’t it? I really gave up trying to decypher the plot at this point so you’re just going to have to make up how this thing ends in your own head.

BUT WAIT, there was more to Geordie Racer than a bad television show. That’s right, there was GEORDIE RACER, THE GAME, FOR THE BBC MICROCOMPUTER.

The game was released on a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk, you know, the kind that actually flopped and took ten minutes to load, the video game version of Geordie Racer actually was kinda cool, but purely because it beat the endless handwriting and Italian lessions that my primary school forced upon us.

The BBC Microcomputer had the graphics of the old style Teletext, and this is pretty much what this game offers. After a very badly rendered title screen with one-bit rendition of the theme tune, players are treated to the main game, which consists of…. “Part 1″ and “Part 2″.

Comprehensive.

After selecting one of these, you can choose to go to a “Metro station”, which is funny, because Newcastle-upon-Tyne has no form of underground or overground tram system. It barely has bus routes. It’s also funny how this tram system conveniently has stations named “Home”, “Shoe Shop”, “Chemist”, “Bank”, etc. – I sure wish that the GMPTE would build me a tram system that only went to the places I went too!

After you visit the bank to get “£20″, the chemist to get “Foot Cream” and the “Shoe Shop” to get shoes, you can start the race. This involves answering questions, each one you get right progresses you 1 mile, each one you get wrong earns you a blister. Too many blisters and you’re out!

The questions are basically asking about things that happened in the TV show, so without watching it, you’re pretty stuffed to actually complete this game, and as such, I have now eaten the floppy disk.

Well, that was painful. Time to tally up.

Danny’s Retro Rating:

First up, as per the title, David Bellamy’s Endagered Wildlife, for Windows 3.11, 95, and Macintosh Whatevercrapitwastheyhadthen.

For those not familliar with David Bellamy, he is a large bearded man who, for many years, fronted some namby-pamby shows on the TV about pandas. He later went on to do these very disturbing advertisements about Dettox disinfectant. Of course, with the Bellamy bandwagon at full roll, a video game release was inevitable.

Now the first thing to mention about this game is that, rather unpredictably, David Bellamy has absaloutely feck all to do with it. His voice, photograph, not even his name appears at any point except on the Compact Disc cover. This is, of course, something of a major dissapointment.

The plot opens up with a poor quality video of a pod crashing in what looks to be the surface of Mars. Then a video message is beamed into your brain, of two really cheesy actors in bad Star Trek costumes. They claim to have come from the future using some mumbo-jumbo technology, and have come back in time to warn us that the Pandas are all dead in the future.

Oh fucking n0es! – it’s now your job to meddle with the timeline and save all the forest-life from extinction. Now, to acomplish this task, you have to partake in one giant wordsearch puzzle for each endagered species that requires rescue. Now call me crazy, but, I’m not entirely sure what they hope to accomplish there. Now if we could sort Afghanistan out by doing a wordsearch and some really stupid mini-games, then the world would be a far better place.

Along the way you have to partake in various wordsearches, jigsaw puzzles, and watch various video clips of monkies randomly eating Bamboo. Once you’ve completed each puzzle, you move onto the next animal until eventually Bill and Ben pop back up on the viewscreen and say “cheers”. They then fuck off back too the future without so much as offering a cup of tea for your efforts.

Overall then, this game is severly lacking in any real substance. Duke Nukem it is not, with it’s cheesy MIDI soundtrack and total misrepresentation on the front cover, this game is bound to bring hours of sheer boredom too any household.

My grandparents love this game, by the way.

Danny’s Retro Rating: 

Sky and Microsoft announced last week that Sky Player would be making it’s way to the Xbox 360. This means that on-demand content from all Sky’s major channels, including Sky Sports, Sky Movies and of course Punjab Radio, will be available for viewing on Xbox 360 any time of the day or night.

I guess the best part is the fact it also allows live streaming of channels, so, the first thing that jumps to mind is the fact I can take my Sports channels with me when I move out later this year (subject to 1001 things) – which is nice.

The other neat thing is the new EPG (or Electronic Programme Guide to all you lay-people) that has been sent to my Sky HD box. Anyone who has Sky will know that the current (well, now old) EPG dates from 1998, and has many flaws and problems.

The new EPG is much better than the old. The first, and most overdue feature is the “Mini TV”, which is actually a very clever solution to a major handicap that Satalite TV has always suffered from. It caches the EPG data onto the hard disk drive, so that a tuner is free to provide the Mini TV.

This also means that the now and next banner can show programme information for programmes up to 24 hours in advanced, so there’s no longer any reason to miss any part of a programme.

The search feature is also quite cool, being of the Google style “enter a word and we find it” box, which I always find useful because I could never find a thing otherwise. I can now type in, for example, “Apprentice”, and get all the Apprentice shows for that week, and indeed I’ve found many shows this week I would have totally missed before.

The best bit, though, is….

NO MORE EPG MUSIC!

So, just excuse me a seccond while I grab a glass of water.

That’s better.

Anyway, as I was saying, that’s how the generic non-descript football team ended up loosing in the undefined sports league. Back to the more important matters at hand though, namely, how can I have written two blogs in the same minute. Well the answer, shortly, is I have not. I’ve been cheating. I’ve been writing my blogs in notepad and then uploading them when the moment permits, and that moment hasn’t permitted for nearly two months now.

Time is the problem see, I know absaloutely nobody cares but you never know, do you? For all I know there’s a search party out there right now, looking to check I didn’t fall over the white cliffs of dover, a landmark I have never visted.

I bought a brand new Jaw-Dropping Highly Obscenely Expensive King-o-Tron 6000 in High Definition projector, since my old projector went absaloutely tits-up due to a power surge or an exploding bulb or something. Considering it was second hand and the menu was in Japanese, that was on the cards sooner rather later though. Still, I bought my new one new, hence the term new one, and while it only displays 720p rather than 1080i or 1080p (though it can scale these down, naturally) – it does provide a fantastic picture, at a size of over 100 inches no less. Infact, just to illustrate the size, and to make the page look more interesting, here are a few photos.

I also finally got round to getting a new watch, since my old one went kapoodle. I managed to get one of those System One do-dar travel passess too, which is nice. My photo looks awful though – I figured I’d remember something funny while getting the picture done so I was naturally smiling on the picture, and it’s turned out looking like I was crack.

Funny story I was remembering, see, someone who I know threw his TV out of his window in order to claim on the insurance. He didn’t open the window first, though, and being on the 35th floor, this didn’t really end very well. He was evicted rather quickly and I don’t believe the insurance company bought the fact that he was out at the time, as his story naturally conflicts with the police report.

I also won at the Pub Quiz this week, first time I’ve won anything really, even if it was just a bottle of white wine. No, I didn’t use Google, and I resent the implication. Really. I didn’t. Honest.*

Anyway, better call it a day, supposed to be doing work here.

Anyway, moving on to Red Dwarf, the old Sci-Fi sitcom from the 90′s that everyone loved. Well, apparently it’s making something of a comeback – BBC Worldwide (aka Canada, for fucks sake..) have commissioned a one-hour special episode. Details are sketchy at the moment, it’s either going to be on BBC2, Dave, Direct to DVD or according to the ever reliable tabloids, a sketch-drawn slideshow on QVC. Either way, exciting times.

First have managed to top themselves yet again, with a new revolutionary on-board heating system for passengers – fire. Yes, I did just say fire, as in the flaming red burning stuff that kills people. Trials have been sadly unsucsessful, as the picture to the right aptly illustrates – the 100 (which, worryingly I do occasionaly use) set itself on fire outside B&Q in Trafford Park. Lovely, eh?

Still, September is here and you need all the heat you can get. All the students and kids are back in school clogging up the roads with SUV’s and boring you to death on the bus with innane and retarded conversations about what becky said to her, and what she said to me, not to mention the weather.

It’s a good thing I invested in a brolly, frankly, because even though I had one I had to be ringed out when I got home from work yesterday. And the day before. My phone’s weather gadget thing always predicts sunshine with half clouds – which is correct when I’m in the office – just when I leave it, it changes it’s mind.