...I'm in.

Tired - having a few days off this week after working 19 of the last 21 days, including a 12-hour stint yesterday. Spent today driving the 6-hour round trip to Newcastle. Nice place. :)

Looking forward to having next week "off" even though I'll be moving house twice in that time. Still it'll be better than the 12-hour days I've been doing recently.


Also, the internet fallout today makes amazing reading. Utterly incomprehensible.

Drove in to town this morning and noticed that the driver's front tyre was slightly flat. On closer inspection there was a deep crack that ran almost all the way round the tyre. I went to a garage and pumped it up, but didn't want to risk it on the bypass, so off to Kwik Fit I went. The guy hoisted it up, the driver's front was knackered like I thought, the driver's rear had a worn outer wall, the spare had rotted and the passenger's front was worn on the inside and so not only did it need a new tire but it needed realigning.

It needed to be done, obviously, and I'm glad I caught it before a blow-out happened or something, but it's galling because it cost me exactly the same as a Core Xbox 360 :(

Seriously, I must be in heat or something. I really want a new toy so very badly.

I want one of these:


One of these:


And I'm also pretendy shopping for a nice projector to play games on.

Unfortunatly I've got to move house in the next month or so and the car needs an MOT in the next few weeks.

*sigh*

After a week of crunch time, I spent the day packing and shifting stuff out of the house on the hottest day of the year so far. Nearly all moved out now thank goodness.

One of our neighbours is 60, apparently, and boy do they know how to party. Streamers and Vengaboys.

I've been off ill today and yesterday with a nasty cold. It's such a waste, I don't even like football. And it's Summer and lovely outside. And the consoles are all packed away in boxes ready for moving house.

Oh well, nothing to do but sit and sweat it out of me.

Moving house again, this time in with the in-laws for a short while to save some cash for the Mrs to head off to uni in September.

Fuck me if there isn't a lot of paperwork to do. I've got sixteen separate organisations to inform. :(

What a lovely day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n97ztLmxH8A

God, LJ is shit.

What can I say?

Had an average night's sleep last night. Woke up at 6.30 this morning to drive the missus to a seminar thing she was organising. Got to work dead on time and got a reasonable day's work in. Played Battlefield 2 for the first time in ages at lunch and also somehow managed to win a round of Tetris DS. Stayed behind an extra half-hour to get to a stage where I was confortable leaving my work. Weather was light rain but comfortably warm. Bought some milk and power cards for the meter on the way home as well as pie and chips.

All in all a pleasantly mediocre day. :)

Not posted in a while, but I'm not dead. I've been playing lots of Eve Online and that's about it really. But I've also bought my first car, look!




Isn't she beautiful?

These are all games that I've started and not clocked. Most of them are quite far along too and my Deus Ex 2 save is well over a year old now.

1) Resident Evil 4
2) Deus Ex: Invisible War
3) Far Cry
4) NOLF 2
5) Jet Set Radio
6) Call of Duty 2 - Top game! Very well done. :)
7) Nexus: The Jupiter Incident


These are games that I've bought and not even started yet.

1) F.E.A.R.
2) The Nomad Soul
3) In Cold Blood


Also, I have to clock Shadow of the Colossus again in hard mode to get to the final colossus.


Books I've bought and need to properly read.

1) Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling
2) Godel, Escher, Bach
3) Code Complete 2 - what have I done with it?

I need to read more fiction too. I don't read enough, unless it's on t3h internets.

Another game that people seem to like but I think is dire.

I'm quite near the end now, I've battled through it all, but I just want to end it right now. I need to complete it to make the time I've invested in it worthwhile.

There are bits of it that are OK. The bit at the beginning was quite atmospheric and the bit I went through a couple of lunchtimes ago was actually nicely paced and well balanced. The rest is a combination of "dull, dull, dull" and "oh fuck off".

The worst bit is the weapons. They're all weak. You shoot a bad guy in the head at point blank range and they probably won't even react, it just decrements their health points by some amount. A funny thing is that it turns the bodies into ragdolls and gives them a push with a force of however damaging your last shot was, so you fire one, two, three shotgun blasts at them without them breaking a stride, then the fourth kills them and nearly sends them into orbit. In this game a headshot with a railgun will not kill a grunt, nor will a shotgun blast at close range. Firing a black hole at a medium-sized enemy does not guarantee a kill.

Bits of this game are quite fun. Lots of this game is not.

201923
556072
Teamunky
UK

When I played through it for the first time I thought it was flawed. It started off well, but I always had this feeling that it just wasn't clicking, and then the plot became all silly and most of the time was spent button mashing.

I've just tried to play some of the sections again to see how it changed the events of the game, and I found that I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'd start playing a chapter, then have to go and do the washing up or clean the toilet or just do anything except play the game. Because without my original excitement about the game and the urge to press on and complete it, the game is dire.

It's bad, it's really truly awful. Unskippable cutscenes, sporadic savepoints, no subtitles and the worst camera in a game I've ever seen, are some of the technical issues that bring it down. The plot's pretty awful too. Whole sections lifted from The Matrix, mixed in with conspiracy theories and mysical rubbish. Oh, and throw in some crap about aliens and AI too. Throw in a couple of scenes of the lead female protagonist with no clothes on, that will make people realise that this game's not for sweaty teenage boys.

The gameplay issues are even worse. It's supposed to be a serious game, one that brings gaming into a more mature era, so why does so much of the game rely on old concepts like button mashing, collectable items and extra lives? The existence of these things in the game, poorly executed as they are, jar with the entire, you know, thing... purpose... raison d'etre of the game. It's a mish-mash of terrible design decisions stapled together into one game.

This one's going straight on eBay.

Yours,

Disgusted, Edinburgh

Now is a really good time to be an adventure gamer. A really good time. Grim Fandango kind of marked an end to the genre, many thought it to be dead, then a few years later Broken Sword 3 picked it up again (a bit loosely) and now we've got Fahrenheit and Bone, and coming up in the next two years we've got Sam & Max 2, Dreamfall, Broken Sword 4, Frontier Development's The Outsider, and whatever Ron Gilbert's got planned. How good is that?

My thighs are worn through with all the rubbing.

It is good. You need to play it in silence and give it your undivided attention. Buy it now. That is all.