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.

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.

I’m pretty sure you’re all going to remember this one, today I’m taking a nostalgic look at Theme Hospital. For those who decided they preferred the shade of a large bolder during the late 1990′s, Theme Hospital was a simulation game that, as the title suggests, allowed the player to build and run their own hospital.

The game was developed by Bullfrog Entertainment, who had huge success with an earlier title, Theme Park. Creating and running your own theme park, of course, is a very appealing idea. Theme parks are, by their very nature, creative places. Bold, colourful, musical, loud, and in general, designing a theme park is quite a lot of fun. I’m sure we’ve all at one time or another caught ourselves daydreaming about an idea for a theme park ride that we’d like to create.

So, to build on the success of Theme Park, Bullfrog decided to create a new game in the same vain, and what better place to set your much anticipated sequel than…..in a hospital…. the one place nobody ever wants to go. I don’t think many people daydream about designing their own hospital ward, as a general rule of thumb, except perhaps Katie Price, but there wasn’t a “disastrous plastic surgery” ward in the game, so that doesn’t count.

Despite this initial setback, Theme Hospital does actually provide some fun, with it’s strange surreal humor. Patience who come to your hospital suffer from all sorts of strange illnesses, including Bloaty Head, Slack Tongue, Fractured Bones, Serious Radiation, Hairyitis and Baldness, something I’m suffering from quite badly at the moment.

The layout of this hospital is dumb.

Unfortunately the size and shape of the hospitals in the game are so bloody awkward, I often feel like killing the patients instead of trying to cure them.  All rooms have to be a certain size and shape, and invariably there’s either too much or too little room to fit everything in. The result is strange dead ends, blocked areas and passages that Bloaty Head sufferers get lost down, before they curl up into a ball, and die.

But never-mind, there are some other awesome aspects to this game. Did you know for example, all the competing hospitals in the game are named after famous computers, mostly fictional ones? There’s one called Deep Thought, from ‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and then there’s ‘Colossus’, the British supercomputers used to break German codes during World War II. My favourites however are HAL, named after Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Holly, who is of course the computer in the British sitcom Red Dwarf.

There really isn’t a lot to say about this game. You basically just keep building rooms and treating people, with increasing difficulty, until you reach the final level, where you’re instantly swarmed with 20,000 patients, an earthquake, and have to build a hospital in a building shaped like a hideously deformed penis.

Just incase that isn’t enough hospital fun though, Codemasters and DR studios released their rip-off version, Hospital Tycoon, in 2007.  Basically a Theme Hospital for the 21st century, it features almost identical gameplay, but with fancy graphics, no sense of humor, and a lack of nostalga value. And that makes it worthless. And that’s why you’ve never heard of it before.

Danny’s Retro Rating:

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Branson Troll Face.

When we decided to go with Virgin for our telephone and internet connection, we thought it looked like a good deal.  I was hesitant for quite a while but the cost compared to other providers combined with a landline, phone service etc. was pretty good, plus they could install it quickly, and “going fibre” sounded like a good move.

So now we have a crackly phone line that won’t stop ringing random numbers on it’s own, an internet connection that constantly drops out, and I have to leave work early so an engineer can come and do nothing about the problem – otherwise they’ll charge me £10.

It’s funny really because my friend at work had – and still has – the exact same issue with his Virgin line. I should have listened to him and stayed clear, but for some reason I assumed his problems must have been a one-off. The chances of me experiencing the same problem were slim, right?

They are comics, but I'm not really laughing.

Skip foward to today. The engineer has been round, and disconnected our telephone line, because the cable was shorting out under the ground and causing the phone to dial out random numbers. He said someone would be round to “repull” the cable, but didn’t give a date or time, and nobody has rang to give me a date or time – probably because they can’t – we have no phone. The internet is still on but patchy at best, the modem requires a reset two or three times a day.

Yesterday Virgin decided to bill us for the pleasure of this. £78, of which, £54 is call charges for calls that lasted less than 50 seconds. I don’t make calls that last less than 50 seconds, infact I don’t often make calls off the landline at all. My theory? The phone has been dialing out to random people and we’re being charged for it.

Virgin Media have been a complete and total fuckup from day 1. If anyone is considering going with Virgin Media I strongly suggest you treat them like Asbestos and stay clear.

I’m about to ring them back to try and get the problems resolved. Ultimately I’m about to speek to Pooja Bhuttar in Mumbai, who will fail to do anything useful for me except baffle me with his strange accent. I’m not racist, I’ve got nothing agaisnt the fella, but he won’t be able to do anything  from there.

……Going to Sky as soon as we can get out of this contract. Murdoch, all is forgiven.

But even I have to admit that, in the rush to cash in on this world cup, it’s all starting to get a little bit silly.

I was walking home the other day when I noticed a B&Q truck unloading various items into, unsurprisingly, the B&Q warehouse. Picture this, B&Q are now doing a range of England themed wheelbarrows. I mean really, wheelbarrows. Why the fuck does anybody need a wheelbarrow painted like the England flag?

If you thought that was bad though, check this bad boy out (pictured). Yup, B&Q’s very own range of England garden gnomes. Have you ever, EVER seen anything quite as shocking as that before in your life? They’re not big and they’re not clever. The fact B&Q have released a press statement proclaiming the success of the gnome is rather worrying.

The worst thing however has to be the B&Q England Garden Gazebo. Spending  £40 on a world cup themed Gazebo is just outragous. What are you going too do with it after we loose, again? It’ll look silly in the garden, it won’t make any sense, it’ll stand out like a sore thumb, and it won’t be worth the effort it took to put the thing up or take it back down again because, knowing us, it’ll piss it down during all of our World Cup games.

The problem of course is that a lot of this stuff won’t be used again for the next four years, so not only has some random idiot bought any of these things, but in a few weeks time he’ll have to go back to B&Q to replace it, because otherwise he’ll look like a complete arse clown.

It would not surprise me, therefore, if B&Q are doing a whole range of England themed DIY tools and materials. Red and white “England” paint, wallpaper, powertools… If they’re mad enough to do it to a wheelbarrow, a gnome and a gazebo, it makes me fear what else I’ll find if I walk into Alan Titchmarsh’s World of Wonders. Infact I’d be quite surprised if they haven’t put an England shirt on that stupid cardboard cutout of him.

If you’ve never been to an event like this, you’re basically guaranteed two things; firstly, a plonker called Keith will tell every director, manager or person with power just how much he admires them, how lovely they look, and how much he loves working for them. Keith will then go into a waffle to anybody who will listen about what he’s done for the company this year in the vain hope that somebody will believe what he’s saying and give him a promotion.

Secondly, the directors and managers will give various presentations comprised of 40% jargon, 60% fabrication and 100% propaganda, to put across their company as the greatest thing since somebody took knife to loaf. The Keith’s of this world will lap this stuff up like a kitten would catnip, and stand up at the end clapping like the world depended on it. This two-way street of bullshit is a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time, as the people in the audience won’t retain what the higher-ups said, and the higher-ups won’t pay any attention to what the people who have attended said, except to observe them and their reactions to various things throughout the day and  then make unfair assessments that will go on their unofficial permanent record.

This is where it gets confusing, however. In order to survive in the company I have to follow Keith’s lead and kiss the ass of everyone with power who turns up; because If I don’t, this is observed as a lack of desire to progress within the company. If I don’t sell myself to the corporate system then I am considered expendable and an excuse will be found to expel me from the company.

So with this in mind, I’m bringing two innovations to this conference that I intend to sell to anybody who will listen. I’ve developed two rather impressive online systems that hopefully will catch some attention among those in “higher circles”, and with any luck, somebody will back it and I’ll end up in the next edition of the company propaganda magazine.

Why is that the greatest thing ever? Well, I happen to know that I’m being put forward for a pay rise next week too, and the decision will hinge on this conference. If I slip under the radar nobody will care if they refuse it. If I’m making waves in the water and getting praise from various people in the echelons of command, then they can’t refuse me. It wouldn’t look good for the company propaganda machine to refuse a pay rise for someone doing well.

Ultimately though I can’t help but avoid the fact that this makes me no better than Keith. I’m playing the corporate game to get ahead when I personally detest it, and that is possibly the worst thing of all.

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.

This then is the story of our constitution, arranged in chronological order. There is no reason for this to be analysed as any kind of food product other than that of it’s base constituants and assosiated offspring.

John has 3 bags of sweets. Dave has six bags. How many bags does Ranjit have? Fucking hundreds, fool, Ranjit owns the shop. And let that be a lesson to you.

Casual racism asside, there are important messages that you should take away from this experience here today. Always eat your veg, milk, cookies, and vitamins. Always say your prayers, and most importantly, never let Hulk Hogan move you to Monday Nights.

What? It’s not like anybody actually reads this stuff is it?

Me, I’m somthing different. I am founding the NLCALP, the National Liberaly Consevative And Labourers Party. We’re the party who does what it says on the tin. We’re the Ronseal party. We’re the party that just say’s NO. I mean seriously, check us and our key policies;
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MEET MY CABINET

Christy McDermott, Chancellor of The Exchequer	The Ultimate Warrior, Minister For Transport	James Last, Minister Of Culture	Doctor Robotnik, Minister For Defence	Bobby Davro, Minister Of Agriculture	The Iron Sheik, Minister For Education

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Free Tea & Biscuits for the Elderly
Old people spend the majority of their time sat indoors eating custard creams, slurping tea and watching Countdown. Did you know that nearly £240,000,000 of state pensions are spent on tea and biscuits every year? This is a huge void that needs to be sealed. Our proposals are clear on this pivotal issue; Nationalise the biscuit and tea industries, and make tea and biscuits free for all people over 60. All biscuit and tea manufacturers will be amalgamated into two companies, British Biscuits and British Tea (Note: “British Telecom” will be renamed “British Phones” to avoid confusion. “British Petrolium” will become “British Stuff That Make My Vroom-Vroom Go!” in turn). All tea and biscuits will be excempt from tax, and all profits will go into the research and development of products, with a percentage returning to the national coffers. I will be provided with an unlimited supply of biscuits and tea.

The £9.99, £19.99 notes and 99p coin
It takes no dummy to realise the real cause of the economic crash; and that is people loosing their change. The economic upturn caused a surge in pricing down among retailers, resulting in various “99p”, “£9.99″ and “£19.99″ offers. The resulting wave of shrapnel entering the economy has been unprecidented, with nearly £240,000,000 of 1p coins being lost in shopping centre fountains every year. Millions more are lost to grids, the backs of sofas, and piggy-banks that are never opened. This money needs to be recirculated into the economy, and fast. These new denominations will prevent the wastage of change.

New National Bank Holidays
44 new bank holidays will be introduced, in addition to the curernt 8, making 52, to cover the various religous and historical events that should be celebrated in Britain. These will include; Man Day, Eating a Bionic Limb Day, Fish With Three Eyes Day, One Time Pad Day, Radio Manchester Day, My Lordz Day, Eating a Nappy Day, Woman Day, What’s That Boy? Day, Mug Day, Monday Monday Day, Good Lord is That The Time Day, Sunday 2.0 Day, Can’t Be Arsed To Day, Boy Day, Fire Me I Dare You Day, Not Getting Out Of Bed To Day, Girl Day, Chocolate Day, Cake Day, Biscuit Day, Toffee Day, Candy Day, Food Day, Burger Day, Hotdog Day, Bread Day, Brandie Tschauner Day, Carbon Fibre Day, Instant Gravy Day, Saussage Patte Day, McDonalds Straw Wrapper Day, Cracked Floor Tile Day, Traffic Cone Day, Plastic Bottle Day, Flonger Day, One Stop Knocking Shop Day, Protectatron Day, Baby Day, Rapture Day, Jim Ross Day, Fire Evacuation Drill Day, Tiling Grout Day, Sellophane Wrapper Day, and Inconspicuous Cloud Shapes Day.

Investment in Green Technology
White Goods will be renamed Green Goods in order to help create a greener technological landscape for Britain. All white goods will be green by the year 2014, a year that was arbitrarily picked by a “think tank” because it sounds close but far away simultaniously. All electrical goods and personal electronic devices will be green by the year 2016, which is a bit further but still, just the round the corner so, it’s real change, real quick, y’know?

Benefit Reduction Scheme
Benefit funding will be cut and several initiatives will be used to force the unemployed back into work. These include various pilot schemes, including, forced labour, slavoury, iron cuffing, mame and slaughter, and bycicle pump. Should these initatives prove sucsessful in their pilot regions, they will be rolled out on a national basis. Those who are “on the sick” or claiming incapasity benefits will be taken away, locked in giant warehouse, and plugged into a giant supercomputer, which will be used for mundane everyday tasks that you don’t need to concern yourself with.

Our Other Policies Include:

• Re-opening Jillys Rockworld
• Opening a Subway on every street corner.
• Mandatory playthough of all Sonic The Hedgehog games every year.
• Reduction on taxes for video games.
• AceyBongos from Xbox Live to be replaced with a robotic version of Sting.
• NHS to offer additional “services”.
• Mortgages to be written off and replaced with a complex bartering system involving Jaffa Cakes.

So forget the other parties, and vote for the NLCALP on May 8th. I mean 4th. Or is it the 6th? Yeah, 6th, better go with that one. AND MAKE BRITAIN, OURS AGAIN!

Sponsored by Doctors Assosiates, Inc.

Today we’re looking at The Oregon Trail, Third Edition for Windows 95 Pentium PC and Macintosh Power PC. I first played this game in 1997, on what was then my state of the art Windows 95 machine with 133mhz processor, 16mb of ram and a 4GB Hard Drive. The fact that my wristwatch beats these specifications today however should not detract from one important fact; at the time, the graphics on this game were the shit. And by that I mean, shit.

The box for this game makes many bold claims. “Top Selling”, “Used in Schools”, and, most interesting of all, “Internet Linked”. The internet was just starting to become a household thing, but online play and interactive applications were still in their infancy.

The Oregon Trail 3rd edition was no exception, however, since all it really did was create a shortcut in the Start Menu to a website, the contents of which have long since been washed away by the tides of Internet change and are to be anybody’s guess.

So, after installing from the 3 CD-roms (Yah. Why this game is 1.6GB in size is anybody’s guess. DVD’s didn’t exist at the time.), the game proper begins. We start out picking our team of five intrepid explorers to join us on this quest to Oregon City.

This basically just involved creating five people with rude names. There was no real skill to the selection, no special abilities or powerups, merely a choice of name. Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug and Jane however, are missing one thing. Supplies, of course!

Any game worth it’s salt needs a shop to buy upgrades, items and junk from, and this game is no exception. The EMH from Star Trek Voyager seems to run the ”general store” at the start of the game, which makes me wonder from the offset weather this is just a holographic simulation.

All manner of interesting items could be purchased from the Doc, including, but by no means limited to, the 5 month package, and the 6 month package. The contents of these packages remain a mystery, but supposedly they contain “basic supplies for the size of your party and the trip you’re travelling on.” I wish my local Co-Op was that comprehensive.

Oh, and for those who like a challenge, you can opt to “No Thanks” and attempt the trip without any supplies whatsoever. Clever.

So, now we have our band of intrepid explorers, miscellaneous supplies, Large Farmwagon, and four random Oxen that appeared from nowhere, we’re ready to set off on our trek across America. The game promises “human drama” which unfolds with events such as “dust storms”, “thirst”, “bartering” and “cholera”.

Say what you want about Modern Warfare 2, it just isn’t in the same league without a cholera feature.

One of the first obsticals to overcome is a river. There are several techniques to this, which including caulking the wagon and trying to float across, waiting for a ferry, attempting to traverse the shallow parts, or just praying that oxen make good life-rafts. This part of the game is generally quite annoying, since the ferry option is usually too expensive and your team die of starvation due to spoilage and dysentery before it arrives. Caulking the wagon is your best bet, and the only real option, however 90% of the time this fails and you’re greated with several messages telling you Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug, Jane, Danny, and Four Oxen have died.

Should you be lucky enough to get across the river, you’re ready to go hunting! That’s right, this game promotes to young children the need to mame and slaughter young animals for food with a shotgun. To be honest this is a bit more like Duck Hunt than a hunting simulator, as rather unconvincing sprites of lions, deer, birds and so forth move across the screen. As the difficulty increases, the animals move quicker and quicker until they’re so ungodly fast that it looks like the animal kingdom’s version of an acid party.

Still, what food you do gain is quickly lost to spoilage anyway, and things like broken axles, food poisoning, thives, drowning, broken legs etc. serve to make this game unrealistically difficult to complete for anyone, nevermind someone “Age 10+”.  Ultimately this leads to the untimely deaths of your crew to various forms of illness, the most popular of these being;

• Dysentery
• Typhoid
• Cholera
• Exhaustion
• Measals
• Snake Bite
• John Cena Championship Match

A funeral is then held for the poor dearly departed, until eventually there’s nobody left to bury you. Strangely, you always seem to be the last one to die. Misfortune clearly being on your side, dying lonely and from the shits in the middle of the American desert.

I’m not entirely sure what happens if you make it to Oregon. I’m not entire convinced you can make it to Oregon. I did manage to get to a random fort once, where I discovered, to my amazement, that the Holographic Doctor had somehow beaten me there.

This game is actually kinda fun though, and of course, it launched a thousand T-Shirts. Which is always cool.

DANNY’S RETRO RATING: