Sam Gower:
nothing sony does interests me
in the slightest

Charlie.:
I’m a “mature gamer” according to sony. One that doesn’t like games.
THEY WANT A MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE! SHIT!
AND LIKE, FREE WIFI AND COFFEE!
HEY MAN CAN WE BUILD A COFFEE MACHINE INTO THAT?

Sam Gower:
i would totally buy a console/coffee machine

Charlie.:
Sony’s will make better coffee, with less types of coffee to choose from.
Microsoft’s will allow you to make frappachino and has 7 kinds of sugar to choose from, as well as biscotti.
but you’ll have to pay a recurring fee for 3 of the extra kinds of sugar and the biscotti.
and you can’t drink Nintendo unless you throw it around around.

Thank you and goodnight.

Dark Millennium

Thats right, they’ve finally named the Warhammer 40k MMO.

Words cannot describe how excited I am for this game. The graphics look fantastic, Click here for some swedish site for screen shots. We’ve got lots more news and information still to be released however the game is scheduled for release in 2012. I for one cannot wait.

Metal Gear Rising.

Since day one the entire world has been waiting to be able to play as Grey Fox, and Sons of Liberty did stem that desire with it’s final boss battle, for a time. But after seeing Raiden in action in Sons of the Patriots, the best way to explain how bad ass we all thought he was is as such: A dude with a beard riding in a convertible T-Rex transformer though space, to choke god to death with his bare hands. That is essentially Raiden’s role in Sons of the Patriots.
Now from this trailer I have deduced that they are probably going to try and integrate Playstation Move into the PS3 version, I kinda hope they don’t. If I have to move my fucking controller around to select the direction I want to slice someone in half, I’m just going to rage, and look for the keys to my T-Rex.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

It would be wrong of me not to touch on this game, even though I have denounced it as my savior. FOR THE EMPEROR!

I must say, this trailer is fantastic, although I am not particularly happy of the change of tech from Knights of the Old Republic.
Okay sure, Swords vs Lightsabers was kinda stupid, but it was awesome.
The fact that now we’re moving a bit closer to the clone wars, and we’ve already got soldiers in Clone Trooper armour is just kinda gash. The old republic was always good because it was so separate from the main Star Wars lore, and they could pretty much do anything within the constraints of the universe.
It still looks epic, and I am still planning on giving it a try, even if all the Sith players are 13.
Republic, it’s the new Horde.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

What more can you want from a warhammer game? Orks, Space Marines, Blood + Gore.

If only they had chosen a chapter with some actual background. Bloody Smurf Marines are the worst of all.
I Don’t have much else to say on this matter, except that I’m still buying it, and I’m still going to mash thousands of orks into a bloody pulp with my powerfist.

I’ll probably add some more to this entry later, but I’m pretty happy with this so far.

Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick update on everything that has been happening recently.

PPUK

I recently joined PPUK, and decided to get interested in politics, and I’ve picked Pirate Party UK to invest my time in, as their stance on copyright reform and surveillance is in line with my beliefs.
I’ve been following the party since they registered last year, and only decided to join now they are taking donations.
They’ve got 10 candidates running in the general election on the 6th of May, so if you’re in any of these constituencies, please get involved and support your candidates.
The party is also currently fund-raising and taking donations to support our candidates so if you can spare some money, and feel strongly about the issues involved go here and either donate, or become a member. At the time of writing we’ve raised £4000/£10000
It’s in your best interest to do so!
I guess I better finish off those posters from last year.

University

If you haven’t already guessed I turned down my place at UACB I was offered last year, due to it not being a particularly interesting course and having to pay for it.
I applied at several universities this year for degree courses, and got accepted onto Web Design at UWE and Digital Media at Portsmouth University.
So if all goes well I’ll be heading off to one of those soon.

Music

Uh, I reached 86,000 plays on last.fm recently I guess that’s cool.
Coheed and Cambria‘s new album leaked recently – I got the opportunity to hear it, and it sounds like it’s shaping up to be an awesome record. The levels on this release are not great, the vocals don’t seem as defined as in other albums but I bet it’ll be fixed for when it’s released officially.
Below is track 2 of the album, which I assume is the single. It’s pretty cool.

I might as well plug Chris Watts’ new musical endeavour, a solo acoustic project. Ex-Son of a Fox vocalist has fun with guitars and his brothers.

Obviously by now everyone has heard of The Midnight Beast but their new video is genius. “Lez be friends”

Anyway, with that I’ve run out of interesting stuff to post.
It’s good to be back.

The best feature I’ve found is the “Wonderwheel” I’ll let you watch Google’s video to find out how it works.

as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems.
Google Blog

As if the internet is getting smarter, jeeze.

I’ll write a big update this week I promise.

World Of Warcraft ‘more addictive than crack cocaine’ as teenager suffers convulsions after 24-hour-long game

Is the title of a article I read over at the daily mail website.

According to the Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation World of Warcraft is

the most dangerous game on the market

The warning comes after a Swedish boy of 15 collapsed after playing it for for 24 hours earlier this month.

Hospital doctors diagnosed an epileptic-type seizure brought on by sleep deprivation, lack of food, and too long a stretch of concentrated game playing. He has made a full recovery.
- extract from the daily mail article

I can totally understand where these people are coming from. I played World of Warcraft for 2 years on and off, and I spent a ridiculous amount of both time and money on it.
I’ve not played for a few months now, and every time I stopped playing before I always started playing again when some new feature arrives or an expansion comes out.
I was always hesitant to uninstall the game from my PC, because of the huge amount of time it takes to install and patch again.
This time I uninstalled it completely, so I could reclaim the hard drive space it was taking up. 12+gig is a lot of space.

In a slightly less addictive, but no less fun turn of events I’d like to share this video of “LittleBigContra” a level created for LittleBigPlanet for the PS3.

I’m going to get on playing though these levels now!

The most annoying of all the news I’ve been reading is the mass coverage on “The Pirate Bay” trials that are currently ongoing. Fair enough it’s a big deal to pirates around the world, but honestly the ammount of press this trial is getting you would think that they murdered someone.
Also some of the quotes I’ve been reading from the courtroom make me feel ill.

“When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the Prosecutor. “We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, “We use AFK.” “IRL?” questioned the judge. “In Real Life,” the Prosecutor explained to the judge.
“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK – Away From Keyboard.” “Well,” said Roswall. “It seems I am a little bit out of date.”

TorrentFreak

The fact that internet acronyms are being used in courtrooms is just stupid.

In a more heartening story, the EU are currently filing an anti-trust lawsuit against Micro$oft forcing them to bundle 3rd party web browsers with Windows.
Now, at first that sounds like an excellent plan, however if Microsoft opt’s to bundle several browsers with Windows when it ships, that’s going to be a pain uninstalling all those extra programs on a fresh install. However, if you get the option upon install if you want a different browser instead of Internet Explorer then I for one welcome the change.
Microsoft get’s hit with antitrust lawsuit
Mozilla join the fun
Google want some action too

Okay with those out of the way, I have a few other things to talk about – http://www.l4d.com/, Wanted, and some news about me.

First off Left4Dead – I decided that I would take advantage of Valve’s half price weekend, as I was sceptical about the game being worth £30 and I was pleasantly surprised, for £13 I got a good few evenings of fun. The enjoyment of the game varies greatly based on Difficulty and the Skill of your team mates. I’ll tell you now playing Expert mode with a newbie on your team isn’t at all fun; let’s just say there were 38 friendly fire incidents by him, and the rest of the team had 2 each, perhaps just because he was frustrating to play with.
I think the best part about Left4Dead is the art style, it’s far less cartoony than Team Fortress 2, and all of the post processing makes the game look insanely gloomy and dim.
I found an article about the graphic style on the official blog.

From watching many playtests, we found players instinctively moved towards well-lit areas. Simplifying the lighting helped the gameplay (the player is drawn to the warm glow down the street, and not distracted by unnecessary light sources); the fiction (this entire city block’s been abandoned—something’s not right here); and the aesthetics (by simplifying the visual information, we’ve given a focal point for the eye to follow).
Left4Dead Blog

There’s a nice gameplay video for you to enjoy.

Next up, I took some time to watch the film “Wanted” on Blu-Ray. Which contrary to my first thoughts was actually an alright film. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov of Nightwatch and Daywatch fame, and starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie. Some of the action scenes were ridiculous but at the same time so cool you cannot fathom being as cool.

Possibly the best “transformation” of a character I’ve seen for a while. Look closely at the keys flying incase you missed the “hidden” message.

Lastly, I’d just like to say I’m pretty damn happy with how my Graphic’s project has turned out, and that I’ve got an interview at Bournemouth Arts Institute for next year.

Seriously, I don’t know what the developers were thinking when they decided it would take holding L2 to lock onto some cover, the left stick upwards to peek over the cover, Holding R3 in to aim (whilst moving to actually move your sight) and R1 to fire.
That’s 4 buttons to preform a simple action.
As opposed to pushing X to duck behind something, pushing X again to stand, Holding L1 to aim, and Pushing R1 to fire.

Picture from UGO’s gameblog

Don’t get me wrong, this game looks beautiful but there is no way I’m going to shell out money for something that is a chore to play.

ps. I regret playing World of Warcraft.

After purchasing Metal Hear Solid I became addicted to Call of Duty 4, and then Later Call of Duty 5, both of which were great games, albeit the terrible character models in Call of Duty 5 (fuck treyarch you’re damn lucky you put Nacht der untoten in.)

Being a big fan of Killzone, Great story, Great Characters.
The gameplay was also really good – Possibly the first FPS I played that allowed you to “Stealth Kill” enemies when you had not been detected.
It had it’s bugs, and the multiplayer was quite poor (3 maps, what were they thinking)
If you haven’t seen or played Killzone 1, take a look below at the clips.

Killzone 1 Introduction

Introduction of heavy weapons specialist Rico Velasquez

After reading the article and watching the video below I was pretty much in the mode for Killzone 2
The graphics look exceptional, the gameplay however looks slightly lacking – perhaps worth a rent before you decide to buy it.
However if it turns out this is another fantastic game?
I’ll be finally glad I brought my PS3.

Written review by Wired.com
Video review by Gametrailers.com