Mihoko has come across a new little app that plugs in to your browser and provides a new way to search. One of the many new visual search engines, Cooliris gets a lot of things right.
It’s been a while since I posted about what’s going down in my life, so I thought I’d pop a quick note in here.
All is going about as well as it could, but we aren’t going to be parents yet — still working on that. Fingers crossed. We are comfortable in our little home and have settled in well, but with visitors coming in October (you know who you are - my birthday will probably be Saturday 4th, so make sure those days are free and you are in Melbourne, punks), we need to empty out the ’store-all-of-our-crap’ room and make it a guest room!
And by huge I mean absolutely gigantic one million. The first of the Ratchet & Clank episodes is due out next week, at least in the States, and tips the scales at a massive 2.4Gb. That’s just… massively enormous. For a game that supposedly only takes 4-5 hours to complete, that’s just friggin amazing.
What that means is — this game is gonna look GREAT. And probably soung great, and play great. I want. But that just makes it another game I will have to download overnight. Stupid download limits and peak hours starting at 1pm. LAME!
Yay! It’s coming! As it always should have been. Australia is one of the worst countries when it comes to molly-coddling people. If the powers that be could wrap us all in bubblewrap, then I’m pretty sure they would. Jerks.
Anyway, it looks like Bethesda just sweet-talked the classification dudes (technical term), because from what Kotaku is reporting, it seems they allowed it because it was ‘in context’. Nice job.
I bought Warhawk. I played all of 2 hours, and haven’t played since. Sure, it feels like a waste of money, and until now, it has been, but don’t think that’s because it’s a bad game. It’s mainly because it’s a hardcore game for hardcore players, and I’m not hardcore.
I like games that give you a chance to learn offline before making you fight it out online. This is part of the brilliance of Halo 3 — you can play through the game offline, then go online and get your ass handed to you, but at least get a few frags under your belt. Warhawk is online only, and the entry point is a headache, looking more like a spreadsheet than a forum for entertainment. Then suddenly you are thrust into the game, where you are immediately schooled by the much more experienced hardcore players. Repeatedly. And the controls take a whole lot of getting used to… Sigh. But it looks like that might be changing soon. Good.
OK, I’ve had this PC for long enough now to know what I like and what I don’t like, so I decided to write up a quick little review of it… I gave a quick overview a little while back, when I first got it, but let’s go over it again quickly, eh?
Overview: 18.4″ Full HD widescreen LCD screen, full qwerty keyboard with a numeric keypad and Cinedash Media Controls (also comes with Media Player Remote Control), Core 2 Duo running at 2.4GHz, 3 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 9500 GS with 512mb dedicated, and up to 712mb shared system memory, 320GB HDD, Blu-Ray Combo drive, Bluetooth, ethernet connection, wireless capabilities, integrated TV card (comes with TV tuner), webcam, microphone (also comes with Bluetooth wireless VoIP phone), 4x USB ports, card reader, fingerprint reader, 5.1 Dolby Home Theater Surround Sound (with Tuba bass)… Oh, and fairly sexy design. So what’s it like?
You may be aware that Playstation Home is entering an ‘expanded closed beta’ at the end of this month for the US, but what about the rest of us? Well, I can’t be certain about Australia, but Edge is reporting that Europe will also be entering an expanded beta period at the end of August as well. I’m hoping we can jump on that bandwagon.
I’m not sure about any of you, but I’m excited the Olypmpics is here. Yay! I don’t really pay much attention to sport, so every four years, I go crazy on the Olympics and immerse myself into its awesomeness. Provided it’s on at a reasonable time, of course…
So I’m looking forward to the opening ceremony tonight, although it’s almost always boring, and let the games begin!!
Pricing of video games is a fairly contentious issue, particularly for us down under. In a country where $100 is the RRP for many video games, Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and WiiWare/Virtual Console titles seem like a pretty good idea. At an average of $10-$15 a game it’s worth it, even if you only play it a few times. Comparably, XBLA has the best games (Pac Man: Championship Edition, Geometry Wars, and Uno were all GREAT), but I think there’s at least one area in which Microsoft (at least) can improve. Price.
If you haven’t heard of Braid, here it is in a nutshell — gorgeous and brilliant. It’s simple platforming fun, you can rewind time with the X button to get through the levels and… as far as I can tell, that’s it.
It’s friggin awesome, go get it now — at face value it’s worth the 1200 Microsoft Points that it costs to download. Of course, that’s pending the length of the game, but from the five to ten minutes I just played, it’s well worth it even if it’s short. If you don’t believe me, get the trial version and make up your own mind. Sublime.
I missed out on playing the first skate. It looked like a hell of a lot of fun, and if the demo that was released is anything to go by, then it was. That demo was ace, and I played it a lot. In fact, it’s still on my Xbox 360, waiting for another run-through.
So now that Skate 2 is coming, I’m thinking about how I can put away some dollars here and there so I can grab myself a copy. It’s bound to be somewhat better than the first title — things that were absent from the first will now be present, and things that were lacking will be improved. So it’s better for me to have waited a little. Plus, I needed some time off skating games. The genre was saturated by Tony Hawk games, which are still a lot of fun, but were just so ’samey’ in the end. Yeah, skate was different, but it was still skating.
My hiatus is over; I’m ready for the skating.
A blistering idea, and one that could very easily be screwed up. Outlander is a forthcoming flick from… whoever… and it involves Vikings. In particular, a Viking war set long in the past. And then comes a spaceship with some dude hunting some kickass aliens. Could work. Could work very well.
But let’s just hope that those that wrote this movie weren’t knobs. Keep in mind Reign of Fire, one of the greatest bits of poo ever made, and one that held so much damn promise. The biggest problem? The trailer above does nothing to allay any fears. On one hand, it looks awesome, but on another… well, there are lame aspects in the making. Time will tell. Perhaps it’s just my fear farking with me.
