Weekend was fairly standard, spent that at a mates party which was, to say the least, interesting. Started off fairly standard, some guy who smokes a pipe turned up and gave me a set of small explosives (which are still in my pocket, for some reason) – standard affair really. There was this one girl though who, I believe, was training to be a teacher, and had let it get to her head a little bit, as she was barking out instructions during the “party games” (whoop de frickin do) – despite having only a vague ideas of the rules herself. So she was patronizing –  and then the night ended in the usual standard way, everyone else is far drunker than I am because I don’t really get drunk very easily at all, and a rather expensive taxi ride home at 3am.

So that was relaxing.

Not to let it get me down, I woke up this morning at the leisurely hour of 1pm – and settled down with breakfast for a nice long day of chilling. That lasted until Ginger Ben turned up, who has become the newest vigilante of B&M bargains, and then I ended up getting dragged around Morrisons supermarket with the world’s most indecisive individual, which isn’t really the way I envisioned spending the morning, but shit happens.

Then I got back.

I always love it when Norweb or whatever they’re called these days leave a letter on my door, but this wasn’t a letter. It was a fucking parcel. I opened it up thinking “Shit, maybe it’s really high. Maybe it’s even triple figures…” – little did I know.

£643.22

Yes, that’s right, six ton. You can imagine the look on my face, can’t you? Any and all chances for relaxation this holiday are now completely blown out of the window. It’s going to be me, sitting around, fretting about how the fuck I’m going to pay £600 in electricity – so I rang them up right away to ask what the hell was going on.

Author’s note : At this point in writing the blog, my Opera session randomly ended. No real rhyme or reason, no error, nothing. So even writing this blog is turning out to be more stressful than relaxing.

Norweb can’t explain it, so they’re sending someone out to check my meter and some other technical stuff electricity companies do. They told me not to pay it just yet, and said they can’t set up a payment plan since they can’t explain the discrepancy, so I should just sit back and watch the final reminders come in. Reassuring, that, being told they’re going to threaten me for payment, but not to worry about it.

Day 1, this. I’m going to end up going back to work next Monday in an even worse state than I left in, I can just feel it.

So, the famous blue blur is 20 years old. Makes me feel younger in a way, since Sonic is the first thing I really remember about being a child, it feels like it’s my 20th birthday too. Meh, who am I kidding? I’m turning into an old fart. Sonic, on the other hand, is looking better than ever, and this title is the final return to full form that has been building now for the past few years.

The turn-around for Sonic came in 2008′s Sonic Unleashed. Moving away from pointlessly complicated storylines, overbearing new characters and glitch-filled gameplay, Unleashed showed us that Sonic could be cool again. It introduced the new standard Sonic gameplay which has been carried through to Sonic Colours, and now Sonic Generations:  apart from that nasty ware-hog business, Unleashed was amazing.

Then came Colours, taking the Unleashed daytime formula and making it even better – with levels designed around an interplanetary theme park, we saw a return to the crazy, colourful level styles of the original Sonic games. Not to mention Wisps, those guys are so cute.

Now we have Sonic Generations – which is the good, the bad, and the rather ugly outings  of the past 20 years rolled into one. On paper this sounds worrying, so, does the game correct the past 10 years of Sonic mistakes?

The answer is, sort of.

The storyline for this game is almost entirely absent, there is a vague plot that runs through the game about the “Time Eater” and whatnot, but there are 12 cutscenes in the entire game, and most of them are short and inconsequential.  In a way I’m a bit disappointed by this, since Sonic Colours had a fairly okay plot, that progressed the story and had lots of humor in it. There is humor in this game too, but there’s so little done in the cutscenes and they’re so few that, really, they feel out of place even being there at all.

The levels themselves are largely great. You play through one level from every major Sonic game, both as “Classic” Sonic (the cute round one) and “Modern” Sonic (The tall retarded one) – Classic plays pretty much 1:1 as he did in Sonic 1 through Sonic & Knuckles, while Modern plays as he did largely in Unleashed, with a few minor tweaks. The actual level designs are largely faithful to the originals with one or two little new bits thrown in, but overall, nothing substantially new here.

There are two main reasons to play this game;

1: Playing classic Sonic levels in awesome 2.5D
2: Playing Dreamcast & Sonic 06 levels with gameplay that isn’t totally fucked.

The further you get into the game, the more recycled things seem to become, with obvious reasons. Playing the classic levels was a total joy and you feel like these levels  have the most effort put into them. The Dreamcast era levels feel like they’ve been upgraded but, since the original versions where 3D already, you can’t help but feel it’s the same stuff presented in a much nicer way. The modern era levels, apart from Crisis City (it was nice to play this one in a less broken way, shame though, just shows Sonic 06 could have been decent) – just feel like harder versions of levels I’ve already played.

A nice touch is the fact that you can unlock music tracks to use in different levels – including remastered and remixed tracks from classic Sonic games. This adds some nice little touches, for example, playing Speed Highway as Classic Sonic with Starlight Zone as the music does feel like you’re playing the latter instead. There’s a few other nice matches in there, i.e. playing Toxic Caves from Sonic Spinball over Chemical Plant or Marble Zone over Crisis City. There’s also a ton of artwork to unlock which is quite a cool thing to have, as it spans the entire 20 year history of Sonic.

Each level comprises of one main act and five side mission acts for each Sonic. There are also rival battles between Metal Sonic, Shadow and Silver. We also have the Red Ring hunt returning from Sonic Colours – but despite all this, I am afraid this game is far, far too short. This game takes, roughly, from putting the disc in to completing everything the game has to offer, one weekend. Compared to Sonic Colours, this game falls completely flat in this department.

Infact, if you removed the nostalgia element from this game, it would be a rather poor outing when compared to Colours, which had far more to see and do. Each level in Colours had it’s own set of red rings to collect, and each level had 6 full acts and a boss to complete. The side acts in Generations are normally quite short, mission based and take place in the same level as Act 1, unlike colours where each act was completely unique and mostly of a decent size. Colours also had the Sonic Simulator for even more fun.

The bosses in this game are also stupendously easy to defeat, even on “hard” mode. The final boss was hard, but only because I was expecting something harder and was trying to figure out what I had to do – imagine my surprise where the aim of the final boss is to just boost, and thats it. Infact it’s completely fucking appalling, and that isn’t a phrase I should be using for this game.

The Good;

• Great graphics and music
• Great levels to play
• Gameplay is spot on in main levels

Tbe Bad;

• Storyline isn’t very in-depth
• Cut scenes are rather badly rendered
• Game is very short, takes no time at all to 100% it

The Ugly;

• Shockingly easy boss battles
• No real love or attention to the menu system compared to colours
• Online play is rather basic and suffering from the usual leaderboard hacking rendering it worthless.

Yeah, it’d be unfair for me to say I’m totally disappointed in this game, it does bring joy to the 5 year old who played the Classics, and the 15 year old who had a Dreamcast, and it brings some closure to the disturbed 20 year old who was forced to suffer through Bestiality and Silver the Hedgehog a couple years back. I’d be lying, however, if I said I didn’t expect more. This game is over far too soon, it leaves you wanting for more. God, I hope there’s more. I hope there’s some cracking DLC levels coming out for this in the future.

Sadly, however, I doubt this will be the case. Shame.

Lets focus on the positives first. The game is incredibly interactive, Duke can interact with almost any item in the environment, often with hilarious consequences. This isn’t just a gimmick, using items boosts your overall “Ego” (Duke has ego instead of a health bar) – the game starts off teaching you how to piss in a urinal and draw on a whiteboard (start as you mean to go on, that’s what I always say. This is the level we’re working on here, folks).

Duke’s one liners are as classic as ever. All the classic lines are there, but a lot of new material is in there too, keeping funny. That’s about all the positives I can think of, though. The rest of the characters in this game are dull, lifeless and boring. They also have a tendency to look in one fixed direction when talking rather than facing the player. The non-playable characters in this game feel like they’ve been through several engine changes, a lot of them seem retextured several times. In fact, a lot of the textures in this game seem poor by modern standards, you can’t help but notice how pixelated and grainy they can be. Weather this is intentional or not for the “retro” feel, I don’t know.

The storyline isn’t exactly a classic either. Okay, I wasn’t expecting much in this department, but the storyline is neither engaging nor particularly funny. Duke’s lines are the only real source of humor, but the setting, situations and characters merely exist for the sake of it. In many ways this makes the game feel like it was born out of the 90′s (which it was) – games have moved on a lot since then, and this feels different from any game you’d expect to pick up these days.

For anyone looking for a classic style First Person Shooter, this game will be worth getting. It’s been a while since a decent FPS that was simple and fun to play like this was created, and the old mentality of levels that have small puzzles of where to go next and what to do next are something that you seldom get in games these days, which seem to increasingly play themselves with set pieces and cut scenes.  What this games does is bring nostalga value, and that isn’t a bad thing.

There’s one unforgivable sin, however, one that this game cannot and will not be allowed to live down – the loading times. When you look at games like Fallout, you see a game where you have massive scale environments and activity with minimum loading screens and loading time – this is the complete opposite. Levels are relatively short and loading times between them excessively long. This would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that, every time you die, the entire level loads again. When you’re on a high difficulty setting, this means you can spend 30 seconds playing and 75 seconds waiting for a load. This is frustrating beyond belief.  There is no need in this day and age for a game to reload the entire level for a checkpoint.

All in all then, this game does not even remotely live up to the hype. It never could, but it falls a lot further flat than I ever expected it would do. As a famous reviewer once said, “Duke Nukem Forever is going to have to cure at least two different types of cancer to live up to the hype after all these years.” – crying shame. If only it were 1999.

Why have I stopped taking my medication, well, good question. Primary reason is I ran out of them. Contributory reasons are that the only doctor I trust has disappeared somewhere, and I’ve just not booked an appointment with another one. I also felt fine at the time and assumed that this random brain melting of mine wouldn’t come back.

No idea why I’m writing any of this for the record. Just makes me feel better I guess.

Anyway, begin weekend.

One of the many amazing web designers out there.

If you’re going to steal it, at least re-upload the images.
There’s very little point in hotlinking to the images of the site you stole the page from. It leads to two problems, firstly you’re going to light yourself up all over the victim’s referrer stats like a Christmas tree, so you’re going to get caught quite easily. Secondly, you’ve left your content in the hands of someone else. If you’re going to do this, don’t be surprised if you wake up to find that I’ve relocated my images and plastered photos of giant penises all over your website.

And while you’re at it, change the url’s in the menus.
Much like the first problem, this one also makes you stick out like a sore thumb. It’s also redirecting traffic back to me, so, apart from making you look like a douche, it actually lets all your visitors know you’re a thief. And a douche.

Oh, and the JS files. You really don’t want to hotlink my javascript.
Because much like the images, I’ll just change the location and bombard your users with dialogue boxes informing them of how retarded you are.

CSS files, you might want to make your own.
Hotlinking my CSS files is also a bad idea. Believe it or not, quite a few people have done this and all of the above, and they’ve all ended up with bright pink pages full of cocks, and messages informing their users that the webmaster is a child molesting baby murderer.

But if you’re smart enough to avoid all that, at least change the text.
Because copying my text not only hurts your search engine rankings, it makes it incredibly easy to find you. A good resource for finding stolen content is http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/ – if you’re a thief, why not bash in your website’s URL with your retarded sausage fingers and see how obvious you are?

But most importantly, if you’re going to get caught, admit it. Don’t blame your Indian web designer.

“Dear Daniel King, Sorry for any harm caused by this as this was not our intention and had instructed the Indian web designers not to use any copyright material but appears to have still have occurred. We understand that the copyright issue rest with us and is our fault for not keeping on top of this.”

Making statements like this isn’t going to get you off the hook.  In fact, this statement is amazing on so many levels. Apart from being blatantly racist, it’s also incredibly transparent and absurd. Why would you, a man who lives in Pontefract, hire somebody from India to design your website for you, when there are plenty of low-cost web designers right here on your own doorstep?  Since you’ve rather foolishly decided to develop your website in a live environment, however, the only hits that are relevant to points 1-4 must be yours and your Indian web designer, who also lives in pontefract. In your house, as a matter of fact. I can see why you hired him! He’s cheap and close by. You might want to fire him though, apart from being a bit crap, he’s rubbish at following instructions.

For the love of god, if you’re going to do this, at least don’t fuck it up.
I’m sick and tired of seeing people take my website and then replace the logo with some shitty MS paint text and dumping a load of clipart in the main body. If you’ve not got the skills to at least make my work look good, then please, stay the fuck away from it.

Alternatively, just ask me.
If you like my work, how about a revolutionary idea? Rather than just stealing everything, why don’t you ask me to design your site for you. I promise to beat the price of your nearest Indian web designer, even if he does live in the next room, and I might even let you use some stuff for free. I’m not an utter douchebag (well, I am but I’m an accommodating douchebag) – so I really wouldn’t have a problem helping you out if you just asked. I may say no depending on the request, but it’s common courtesy, and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you’re not a complete and utter mongoloid.

Time to sweep the yard a little, a lot has changed since I was last online in the blogosphere (that’s what they call it, right?) – the sad passing of MyGamerCard means my Xbox Gamercard has gone for a burton. I’m going to have to rummage around the web and see if I can find a new one, although I have a feeling whatever I come up with will look like  a turd on a tugboat, MyGamerCard really had it down.

In other news, the goatee has returned. It has also gone again, so that works out rather well when it comes to updating my photograph. But things may change once again in the near future, and of course, I’ll keep you all apprised to the important topic of my facial hair.

Speaking of blogs, I’ve spent a lot of my time away (apart from the usual sleeping, eating, drinking, and smoking things) working on another blog. TWO BLOGS, I hear you cry, how on earth are you going to manage that? Well, I don’t know yet, but we’ll just have to see how it pans out. But this new blog is for matters of a serious nature.

SERIOUS NATURE, I hear you cry, how on earth are you going to manage that? Well, I admit it sounds farfetched, but it’s true. You can check out The Hosting Folk’s Web Hosting Blog over here. You can read all my fasinating tips into webmastery, SEO, hosting, domains, industry news, and other exciting offers and deals.

Anyway, time to update WordPress, update the menus a lil’, and…. WRITE AWESOME BLOGS!

Anyway, I’m wondering weather to bother with a blog site page anymore. I had a fan once who used to read it but, I have the feeling she probably isn’t bothering anymore. Frankly I don’t blame her.  Apart from the distinct lack of content, there’s also, ultimately, the inescapable fact that I am a complete penis head. That and she actually has far better things to do with her time than look up little old me I imagine.

So, assuming I do bother to stop bothering, where does that leave my presence on the world wide web? Well, I’ve got a couple of exciting web projects on the go at the moment, and recently I’ve been putting all my free time into those.

The Hosting Folks, my web hosting company, has recently gone through a major overhaul. Year on year our product offering, website, systems and customer base has been increasing, and this recent update gets us ready to launch into something (I hope) much bigger. As well as a major site overhaul, bringing what I believe is my best web design to date together with a much improved ordering system and control panel – we’re also now launching a new advertising campaign on various internet sites and – for the first time – Facebook.

I was skeptical of using Facebook ads for a long time – I wasn’t sure that there was enough of a target audience, however since launching the campaign a week ago, the result has been phenomenal, with a 20% increase in sales traffic generated via the social networking site. This is quite exciting and hopefully with substantiate in some growth to the company.

We’re also running some exciting offers at the moment, for example, you can order a .co domain name for just £6.99 during February – which is a pretty amazing price considering everyone else is selling around £30 right now. In my opinion, .co is the future for the internet, as .com domains become more and more sparse – they’re shorter, just as meaningful, and now, cheaper. Just use the discount code CHEAPCO.

We’re also doing 20% off all web hosting products – which you can now pay for on a yearly basis for a further discount – meaning huge savings. You can get professional, unlimited bandwidth hosting for around £17 a year that way, that’s just £1.40 a month. Check it out at http://www.thehostingfolks.com/

The other exciting project of course is FileSheep – a project by Dom “Sheepeep” Lamb and myself to create our own php based forum software. We’ve really gone to town over the last few months, and I  honestly believe it’s the best looking, most intuitive, and most importantly, the fastest forum software out there.  We’ve also got a nice community of folks, so come check it out at http://www.filesheep.com/

My next project is to re-launch my rail website, using the new domain uklo.co – I plan to create a mini social-networking site for rail enthusiasts, as well as providing a platform for my own rail videos and photos, as well as for others.

Remember folks, I do web design for anybody so, if you need a site creating, get it touch and I’ll see if I can accommodate you! I do cheap rates and, most of all, I’m frickin amazing at it. Well I think so, anyway.

Until next time?

I’ve decided to celebrate the new year by looking back at the post I made last year, and seeing which of my predictions came true, which did not, and which were so hilariously off the mark it now looks silly! You can click here to view the blog I wrote last year.

The first thing to note is that, at the top of that post, I do give Matt Smith a hard time as the 11th Doctor, calling into question his jawline and the bow tie. I now feel very silly as, having watched the series, I do love Matt Smith as the Doctor and, of course, now realise that bow ties are cool. I really should learn not to make snap judgments like that.

Anyway, let’s begin!

Manchester City might actually win something.

- Well, uh, didn’t happen. We bombed out of the only cup we had a chance of winning. But things are looking good for the premiership this season I understand so, there’s still time, just not in 2010.

Michael Jackson will return Tupac style and release a new album.

- Sadly not, but as predicted, every single type of re-release, remix and even a new Kinect video game did come out, but until he walks amongst us again, this one is also a “didn’t happen”.

Woolworths will return to the high street.

- Eh, uh, again, nada.

Sonic The Hedgehog will return to his #1 spot as the king of all Video Game time.

- Sonic 4 did happen. And then it came out. There’s still time for the situation to be redeemed however, and Sonic Colours is doing really well so, this one sort of happened, but perhaps not as strongly as I had hoped.

Star Trek II will be properly announced.

- More rumors but nothing substantial yet. This year is turning out to be a real letdown, huh?

Red Dwarf Series IX will air on Dave, over a decade since Series VIII aired. Rejoyce.

- ……ditto. Filming begins NEXT year now. God how you must make me wait for all my favorite things.

Nothing at all will happen with the Afghanistan situation.

- DING DING DING, WE HAVE A WINNER! I sware we’ll be having problems in that country for the rest of my lifetime, just last week there were more deaths involving our troops over there. It’s just all so sad.

President Obama will improve the lives of all working class Americans, and in return they’ll remove him from office.
George Bush’s new son, Bushdroid, will take office.

- Yup. In comes new healthcare reform, and in return he’s now a hated character. Joy. Thankfully he’s not out of office yet and the democrats managed to defend their senate seats earlier in the year. No sign of Bushdroid thankfully.

GLADoS returns to extract revenge, and ensure that she triumphs in huge success.

- Portal 2 indeed announced and, it does look rather awesome.

The Conservative Party will return to power for the first time since 1997 and privatise the last remaning public services.

- Oh boy, where to begin? David Cameron has indeed managed to grab power thanks to Nick Clegg and his Liberal Pussycat party, and we’re all now feeling the devastation of that decision. As a nice new year present, welcome to 20% VAT.

David Cameron will stop riding his bicycle to work.

- Yup. Like that kid gives a shit about the environment. Have you ever seen him go NEAR a bike since he took residence at No. 10?

The New Doctor Who will either Flop or Fly.

- He flew. By God he flew. What an awesome series it was. And Karen Gillian is so hot.

Bioshock 2 for Xbox 360 will be made of epic win.

- And it was. Not to mention as an added bonus. Bioshock Infinate was announced and that looks to be made of even more win. Win all round!

Finally, as a footnote, none of my predicted deaths occurred except perhaps for one. I made reference to the following; “Smithy from The Bill will be killed off in a freak handgliding accident.” – while this did not happen, rather ironically The Bill itself died as, after 20 years, ITV canceled the show. Yes, ITV sucks. The Bill, you will be missed.

And that’s it for this year. Coming soon: more fun and frolics in 2011!

Happy New Year everybody!

Ah, where to start, it’s been a funny old week. I think the most random event was the tram derailment, which suffice to say was “interesting” – never before have I witnessed such awesome stupidity, it was, my friends, truly epic. If any of you have any budding aspirations to become a tram driver, I seriously reccomend reversing on spring loaded points and hitting a overhead stantion. It’s hilarious fun.

I could go into a full blown rant about this but, eh, I don’t think I care anymore. I just love the fact that millions of our pounds were spent on a pointless new branch line that runs 650 yards, adds 10 minutes to my journey, and results in derailments on the second day of opening. This must be that “better Metrolink” that was coming. I really enjoy having to derail, then take the 33 bus, over the old system.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m sure everyone was excitied to learn that the Sheepeep, Darkclone and I met up this past weekend like the internet nerds we are for Mr. Clone’s epic birthday party doodar. There have been many frequently asked questions about this event so I thought I might summerise them here for the sake of nothing else to write about;

• We don’t call each other our usernames in real life.
• Sheep really does have pointlesly long yet awesome hair.
• I really do have none.
• Darkclone also has hair. Infact I’m quite bitter about the hair. I WANT HAIR.
• I get on with Sheep about as well in real life as I do on “the interweb” – in other words, not at all. =P
• PRECIOUS EGG-O-MATIC HOVERCRAFT
• It was a good lulz.
• Yes, every reader of this blog was together the same time, except McDermott Cube.

Finally, I need some answers on a postcard. I actually went to the trouble of purchasng an iPod some time ago (second hand, of course) and now I can’t seem to charge it. I think it’s been charging off USB for the past 3 hours but it still won’t turn on. What the hell do I do with it? I want to listen to choonz in the office. We have an iPod dock, you know. We’re a cool section.

For the record, this does not indicate any affiliation to Steve Jobs or his faulty products, I merely purchased it as a favour to someone. The fact I can’t get it working should speak volumes about it.

FOR THE CAUSE XXX

~Danny

Without a deadline, the human body seems to go into some kind of “chill-out” mode. Whereas my life before was wake up, shower, change, grab my lunch and quickly run to the train station for a full day’s work, I now wake up after midday, and don’t leave my bed until gone one.

There are other strange symptoms to this, too. For example, I find myself distracted by things which I would otherwise consider relatively trivial. Not content with reskinning the FileFront Forums completely, or creating threads like this, I caught myself trying to partition my hard drive so I could install Ubuntu onto my computer. I have no idea why I wanted to do this, because it’s a shockingly poor operating system these days that doesn’t work with a single device that I own, yet I nearly did it. I then moved onto trying to install Mac OS X. I figured this too much effort to do, so I then thought about installing Windows XP, so I could reskin it to look like Mac OS X.

I finally snapped out of it and did something useful, but for a moment I was nearly going to throw away an entire evening on something meaningless and stupid.

Despite all this free time, I also find myself even lazier than I was before. Rather than going out to the shops to restock when my fridge is empty and I feel hungry, I keep going back every 10 minutes or so to see if there’s an uneaten sausage that I’ve somehow missed. I then return to the living room to play more Fallout 3 before realising I am hungry again, and going for another look.

Ultimately though, isn’t this what holidays are all about? Relaxing? Being able to take your sweet old time about everything? Who cares that I’ll never get anything done, I’ll worry about that when I go back to work.