Nerd Blog!

You all knew it was only a matter of time before I made a Nerd Blog so you've just got to get used to it.

Those of you outside of the gaming niche may be unaware of one of the greatest games of 2008. It took the simple FPS (First Person Shooter (Bang bang, kills people, usually Nazis)) genre and reinvented it into a parkour (free-running (running up and over obstacles)) game. The controls were unorthodox, the style were unorthodox, the gun mechanics were unorthodox, though it all seemed to work.

The game was set in The City which was made of white gleaming skyscrapers, and prestine interiors, which hugely contrasted the tattooed lead lady who opposed the system. Enough about the story, back to my original aim.

PlayStation users got the chance to download an exclusive free new Time Trial in anticipation to the new pack being released. Anything free is interesting to me so I downloaded it and played it earlier. I was impressed to say the least. They've gone beyond the city and to this new dreamscape of floating geometric shapes hovering over an endless sea. It's odd to play at first. 

I played it a few times and got used to the level, and really see why they did what they did withthese levels. With The City they tried to add areas to push the gamer to his limit, give him a great a challenge as possible. Test the rections, the hand to eye co-ordination and the general motor skills. There's a certain point during the third level, where with enough skill, you can string all the moves for a certain path into one string of awesomeness. It took me a few times to get it right but once you manage to it is one of those moments you'll always remember about the game. 

While that moment was amazing they were hard to come by. DICE had a tough choice to make about whether they were going to make a realistic looking city or a city with lots of these amzing moments that didn't really fit the game. They chose to make a realistic city.

This wasn't a bad choice as the game was actually amazing but when the chance to make DLC (DownLoadable Content) they must have jumped at the chance to make more of these moments. I played through the level the first few times and was only impressed by the visuals. That was until on my fifth run through I found a little moment of bliss. I'm not going to ruin it for those yet to play but it allowed me to run down a narrow path in a series of jumps.

You may have seenme bumming Mirror's Edge over the last 445 words but I'm going to go against almost everything I just said and I'm not going to buy the full DLC pack. Why? The reason mounts on my distaste of Time Trials. There habitable at first but they soon get very annoying. I'm not in the mood to blow another few hours on these espicially as I have Fallout 3 to do at the moment which apparently clocks in at 100 hours for Platinum (I have currently racked  up 13 hours) and Killzone 2 is only 26 days away. Those two factors plus the fact I have no money on my PSN (PlayStation Network) means this one will be missed out. All those who enjoy the Time Trials, then this is a must. All those with lots of expendable cash, then this is a must for you. For the rest of us, Synethesia is enough.

Ciao

xox

Want That!

Every Friday from now on I am going to do a little section called 'Want That!'

These blogs will mainly involve me turning into a right Techy as I get to show you the coolest thing I have seen in that week. This week was very easy, you'll see why now.

That is the Moon Dust-DNA Watch designed by Romain Jerome. The watch is possibly the most amazing thing I have ever seen. The face of the watch is made of moon dust formed into the shape of craters to mimic that of the surface of the moon. The metal is made from parts of Apollo 11 and the strap is made of part of the Space Suit worn during the landings. Put all these things into combination and you have a watch that can only be described by one word: EPIC!

The company that made them are known for there excentric watches including one made from parts of the Titanic, a watch that doesn't tell the time and instead tells you whether it is day or night and how long it has been day or night, and oddest of all a watch that allows you to add your golfing score to the timeface.

It's just a shame that I don't have £300,000 lieing around. Now, which bank to rob.

Ciao

xox

Queen Alice

Many of you who occasionaly notice Dan's blog, or his existence, will have seen that Alice has begun writing as well. The original idea was for her to add blogs during Dan's absence due to him prancing around in tights. That idea went to pot when Alice when crazy with power and she, with my assistance, ran rampant and 'destroyed' his blog, though it looked much better in my opinion. After Dan regained control Alice took on the title of Queen and became a contributor.

I encourage everyone to read Alice's entries, and hopefully her seperate blog which will hopefully surface. Before I leave I just want to leave you with one last final thing...

Got Korf

Like every Tuesday evening I was at Korfball practise tonight. I made a promise to myself to talk as little about my real life as possible as, to be honest, I lead a pretty boring life. I've gone back on this promise as every time I mention this sport no one has a clue what I'm on about. All the guys call it netball and the girls call it basketball. Well it's neither, and I hope to clear that up now.

Korfball is a Dutch game played on a court the same size as a basketball court and even has similar boundries. Each team has two divisions made of 4 players, 2 males and 2 females in each division. Each division gets a half of a court. One of the divisions defends the oppisition while the other division attacks. That's the basics down so I'll move onto the dynamics.

When you are attacking your goal is to score in the basket. The basket is about 3 metres high and looks like a bottomless wicker basket but made of yellow plastic. You pass the ball between each other until someone shoots and then someone 'collects' the ball and feeds it out to continue the attack. When attacking, and defending, you can't run with the ball. You can move with the ball but only two steps. The way around this is to cheat and jump as you catch meaning you are moving without making steps :P

The defender has a much simpler job which mainly involves stop the opposition from scoring and then passing it back to the attackers. It is a non-contact sport and you can't touch the ball when the opposition is holding. To remove height advantage you can 'defend' the shooter by standing a stride away from them and holding your hand up to block the path of the ball. The rest of it becomes very obvious.

The only other thing of note is the way of shooting in that you can shoot from a distance in a way similar to basketball or netball or you can do a running in shot which is an underarm shot. When you are running very close to the basket you do an underarm throw diretly up, extending you arms as far as possible and the inertia from your movement helps the ball into the goal. Also, every 2 goals scored, combined, involves switching ends so you become the attackers/defenders.

I hope you get Korfball now :D Nothing else really happened to me today. Just spoke to people on MSN and thought of an ingenious way to get to see My Boody Valentine 3D. I've also randomly gud out 'Tomb of the Mutilated' by Canibal Corpse mainly because I saw the album art.

Ciao

xox

Three Dog Fever

For those who don't know what Fallout 3 is, then I assume you don't care about video games, it is a RPG set in a post-apocalyptica Washington D.C. in a 50's theme. It was released last year but I only got my hands on it 9 days ago. The first week of playing it weren't too enjoyable but I think I have Three Dog Fever now.

I was doing a level very early in the game that anyone who's played the game will remember, Galaxy News Radio. I was at the part where I had to return the satellite dish. I annoyingly died last night right before the check-point and was therefore transported about 20 minutes back to the last chckpoint. I was pretty pissed so quit for the night. 

Talking at school got me hyped about playing it tonight. Ben being an alumni of Fallout 3, knew all the ins and outs and was able to help me with certain aspects. Dan, just being Dan, was having the honeymoon period so talked about it all day, and even in his blog. I came home and despite many distractions got onto it and carried on with the level. A different approach to it meant that I got through first time. I'm now on to Scientific Pursuits and it was pretty hard to put it down.

On a final note, I have word from Canada that there is a Zombie Invasion. It's finally here boys! Let's have some fun

Lost

Before I do the rest of this blog I have to say. No unicorns Sarah!

Anyway, back to Lost. If your as sad as me and the rest of us Losties then you'll have been watching the two and a half hours of Lost that's been running on Sky1 tonight. I have to admit that I was only half watching it, which was probably wasn't the smartest thing to do as there is a lot happening and I've missed most of it. I can talk about what I saw though.

The 'first episode' was amazing. Discovering what happens on the on the on The Island was the thing that's been bugging me the most. We now know that The Island's lever has caused those within 'the radius' are skipping through time. This makes sense to why they are now in a different place, but not to why the island disappeared. Daniel Faraday, the forgetful Physicist, even said that the Island didn't move and it was them that were moving. I hope they explain why The Island moved or it'll be something that'll annoy me for ages.

I pretty much blew today on very little. I played a bit of Fallout 3, some Guitar Hero IV and got a trophy on Midnight Club: Los Angeles, slowly getting towards 1,000. I then just surfed the web and did a Queen Alice, and procrastinated the rest away. My final note is too congratulate Sarah on taking a whole day to finish her Biology homework

Until next time, Ciao

xox

Look into the Parker

Many of you may follow the comedic genius otherwise known a the Mighty Boosh. One of the oddest lines written in the entire show goes something along the lines of

"Look deep into the parker, you will see things you couldn;t of imagined, like unicrons with AIDS"
And the thought that came to my mind was probably the same thought that came to the minds of everyone else. How did these unicorns get AIDS? To answer the question we must overcome the first obstacle is that Unicorns don't actually exist. If they were to exist then we would have to assume they would be genetically similar to horses which would lead them to be considered Equus Cornu. Now that we actually have an animal we can look at how AIDS, a primate based disease would cross to a Unicorn.

There are two main ways for the virus to cross to horses. It is either through purposeful injection or through sexual intercourse. However, if the same respect would be shown for real unicorns as are shown in the stories then they wouldn't be experimented on so it rules that out. This means that someone will have had to have sex with a unicorn at some point. So, now we know how unicorns got aids. Bob Fossil slept with a unicorn.

I really do suck at hellos. This is going to be current blog for me to express my thoughts. It's going to be about 50% random gibberish and about 50% gaming reviews, bitches, bummings or general discussion. I'll probably throw some music news in at different times if anything important catches my eye. If you hadn't already noticed Slipknot are my current obsession, especially Corey and Joey so they'll crop up continually.

Until tomorrow. Ciao

xox