Archive for the ‘Gadgets & Reviews’ Category
In the Garden we are growin'….
Obligatory thoughts & views on Bioshock 2 follow. Please stand by.
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.
The start of a revolution…
Today, ladies and gentlemen, is the start of a revolution in wiping your arse – for you see, my hip, trendy new company, Tangerine, has released it’s latest and greatest product today, and it’s going to turn the world of bottom cleaning upside-down.
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?
Retro Review: Geordie Racer
Welcome all to the Retro Review, the column that likes to take the past by the balls, pin it up against a British Rail lavatory door and give it a bloody good buggering. Today (or whatever day this was written), we’re looking at Geordie Racer, a BBC Look and See (educational programming) series, which involved Geordie’s (people from Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Pigeons, and strange noises, in no particular order.
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 o
nly 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:
Retro Review: Microsoft 3D Movie Maker
Welcome to Issue 2 of the Retro Review, the column that loves to take old software by the balls and give them a good shake. Today, we’re looking at that no doubt memorable classic:
The game allows the user to choose from a wide range of scenes, then place 3D characters into those scenes and animate them in any way they wish. They can add speach bubbles or, with a suitable 16 bit sound card and microphone, record their own dialogue. The completed movie could then be saved and even shared online.
Now, of course, during 1995 the third dimension was still very much in it’s infancy. The Playstation was just about starting to make some inroads, but most 3D games still consisted of sprite-based bad guys in limited perspective environments. This was especially true for PC games, which lacked the gaming hardware that computers today take for granted. Back then, if you had more than 64mb of ram you where considered the elite.
For the time, then, the graphics and features available on this game are quite impressive. At first glance, anyway. The scenes are actually pre-rendered, and the 3D models have about three polygons each, but this is of course forgiveable. It still looks quite pretty.
Then shit starts to move, and the whole thing falls apart. Any attempt at walking by any of the characters results in some bizzare stepping motion while the entire upper body remains motionless. Any other form of movement is erratic and somewhat strange, and it’s all too easy to use the motion tool to make the characters appear to hump each other.
Infact that last bit is the most realistic animation on there. Then there are other issues, like the ability to make the characters randomly hump their way into the sky and off into no-mans land. The scenes are set in place so the characters just seem to wander off forever. Combine this with a frame rate of 8, and you can see why this game is probably a bit strange.
Now I do love the fact I can make a fat old sailor shag a Japanese lady at complete at total random at 8fps, but this does bore after a while. You can, if you want, make a proper movie with this thing I suppose, although I doubt it’ll become a timeless classic.
Strangely enough this game has a bit of a cult following, though. As recently as 2005, modifications and expansion packs have been released for it, as well as new tools and things of that nature. That’s a whole decade of unleashing terror on unexpecting kids of all ages.
This game then is, for all its faults, random quirky fun, and the ability to make anything have sex with anything from the street to a telephone box is nothing short of win.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
