The Addiction Is Back

No, I haven't started smoking again, thank GOD.

I'm talking about the new expansion pack for Titan Quest, called Immortal Throne.

I know there's a few new things added to the game, which I don't really care about, but what I also know is that it's more of the same. EXACTLY the same, ie click-n-slash action, with nothing more than one mouse hand needed to play. And more the great graphics, fantastical creatures, and great sound.

Oh and the other best thing is that your character from the original Titan Quest is fully playable. Actually, I think if you don't have a character from the first one you actually have to play through it all to get to the expansion pack content. So, my level 65 kick-ass Summoner is gonna have a great time in the expansion back.

So, am gonna be addicted soon. That's if I can get myself to stop playing Crackdown, which should be "finished" soon.

Titan Quester out

Crackdown "The Big Bang"

Crackdown is one of the best Xbox360 games to date. Actually, one of the best games I've played in a long long time. Essentially a GTA-like game (I mean GTA3 and beyond), and created by one of the minds behind the first GTA games, Crackdown drops you in the middle of a HUGE city made of 3 islands, and from there it's all up to you.

You play as a special genetically-modified agent that has the job of "Cleaning The City", each island has a gang composed of 6 members and a king-pin. Your agent has 5 core abilities (agility, arms, explosives, driving, and strength). By killing people with your gun, or blowing them up, or round-house kicking them across a building you increase your abilities. This is where the game really shines. The more you progress the more fantastic things you can do, especially the agility attribute. The more agile you get the faster you run and the higher you jump, until you can literally jump over buildings. Couple that with good explosive damage and strength, and you will see yourself targeting a baddie, jumping over a building while blowing them up with your rocket launcher. All in real-time, real-physics, havoc-engine, render-ware force.

The game also lets you play co-op, coupling you and a friend to do whatever you want. Tackle some missions, do some car or foot races (there's loads around), or go hunting for the 800 (yes, true number) agility/secret orbs scattered all over the city. Enormous fun.

So, today, I was playing co-op with a friend and after doing a mission we decided to do something a lot of people have done, create a Big Bang. We piled up loads of cars, sprinkled them with sticky grenades and a few explosive barrels, climbed up the nearest building, and launched some rockets towards the whole thing. The KABOOOOOM was huge, and luckily the macbook was close so I caught the action with the iSight. After a bit of editing (again, apple iMovie HD), below is the video :)

I honestly believe that the Xbox 360 is THE console to own this generation. Excellent games, even better online services, and just all out fun. Enjoy "The Big Bang"

OMG!

Have a good hard look at Song Hye Kyo, a famous Korean actress:



QUOTE:
It's hard to believe, but you're looking at computer-generated image of Korean actress Song Hye Kyo, created by Indonesian CG artist Max Edwin Wahyudi. To create this stunning shot, he used a combination of digital sculpting and design application Pixelogic Zbrush and animation modeling software Autodesk 3DS Max.
SOURCE: GIZMODO

How about that then? and we thought the CGI Final Fantasy movie was the best it would ever get. Give it 5-10 years, and our graphics cards will be rendering Song in real time, as she navigates her way through a physically complete environment. I wonder what's next in our expensive hobby, better graphics or (as Nintendo seem to be thinking) more immersion. Perhaps in 5 years time we'll all be using a PROPER version of Virtual Reality.

Scary.

I would love one of these

The Super Mario Rubik Cube :D Can you get any more nerdy?

I think they're on sale in Japan, the local ebay for some freaky reason doesn't have one... perhaps there's a problem with The Matrix :p

The picture that brought a tear to my eye

Iraqi Airways - August 1988, Just departed from London Heathrow, en route to Saddam International, Baghdad :(







Reminds me of a GREAT time, war was over, people could travel, and Iraq was going to be the best place in the world. Now look what's happened.


Check here for 160 various pictures of "real" Iraqi Airways and the new ones (up to 2006). I must warn you though, if you've ever been on one of them these pictures will give you lumps in your throat... includes pictures of the planes "stored" in Amman and Tehran.


Upsetting isn't it?

Picooz In Action!

The long awaited video......

Valentine's Day cards for that special geek

Just proof to show that playing video games and being a geek is currently extremely chic and everyone wants to be one... personally, I can't wait until we geeks are just that, geeks, ie bespectacled chubby men that talk in binary and make internal jokes about things like cacodemons, area-spells, and HP. I can only hope....

Anyhow, tomoz is St. Valentine's Day, where yet again ALOT of new babies will be born in November :D To celebrate the day with your special geek, why not print out one of these geeky cards, especially designed for the Nintendo loving geeks.

SoB "The Real Geek" out.

Teo and Tea FULL video

I can see this becoming a dance hit, in .eu at least....

PS: PicoZ is here, managed to crash it tons of times. Kelly's not here to film it, we'll make a video later on this weekend :)

PicoZ Micro Helicopter

I have spent half of my £50 firebox voucher on this little beauty. A teeny weeny indoor RC Helicopter, which weighs just 10 grammes!!

The PicoZ looks really addictive, you charge it for 30 minutes and it flies for 10 minutes. Ideally, you only use it indoors cos it's so light any wind can crash it in to the wall...

Check the firebox product page here for loads of pictures, customer reviews, and videos.

I should be getting it tomorrow, and as I'm working from 1pm I'll be crashing it in to the wall (with a video hopefully) very soon :p

Stay tuned

Pixelblocks, or how I won £50!

I bought some Pixelblocks the other day (from firebox), which are some really geeky toys that combine my childhood obsession (lego), and my adult obsession (no, not porn you dirty, dirty people! I meant computers and games)

Pixelblocks are lego for adults, little plastic blocks that look like pixels and can connect in different ways. Of course, the greatest fun is recreating some classic characters from the great 2D era of gaming. (if you're sad you can create your favourite windows icon :p).

Me and Kelly spent an evening together on the weekend creating our 2 of our favourite characters, Yoshi and Toad. After we finished, I put them on the window sill, took some snaps, and sent them to firebox (they encourage people to send snaps of their purchases, they use them on the website).

To my surprise today, I got 2 emails from firebox: one telling me that the picture was now live, and the other one telling me that I'd won £50!!! Little did I know, but firebox had chosen my picture as "picture of the week", and if they do that you win a voucher for £50!

So, there's my little happy story of the day, and my little promotion for firebox, who I've used before and they rock, not only cos of the voucher, but cos they're made for gadget/toy/computer/game/geek boys like me (and you - if you're reading this)

SoB

Vista

I've been running vista semi-succesfully since Friday evening. I say "semi" cos the 64 bit version, as usual, doesn't have proper driver support yet...

The 32 bit version has better support, but still my soundblaster has the crappiest drivers I've ever seen (still beta).

Otherwise, nVIDIA's drivers are doing the job ok, and everything else is automatically configured. So, what's the big deal?

Well, for me vista is a MASSIVE improvement over XP, and is a great O/S to work with! For starts, it features tons of eye candy, which I am a sucker for. From the way windows fade in and out, to the way the title bar is see through (kind of like a lens), to the way you can put HD videos as your background (yes, ages ago we could do that on windows 98 with 3rd party software, but this is built in to the system so takes very little resources), and those massive icons that are beautifully detailed (I love big icons). One cool feature is that windows shows a thumbnail of pictures and movies (yeap, old too) BUT if the file's a movie it adds 2 little cellulloid strips around the edges, and the icons are the same ratio as the movie itself! (see picture)

I could go on and on about the visual things...

In terms of the OS itself, admittedly it doesn't offer that many new things that anyone who's used a mac in the last 3 years hasn't seen. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, cos we all know that Apple's OSX is a great system, so to have something like it on a PC is great. There's the built in instant searches, the quick bar on the left of windows for quick access to your favourite parts, and finally user-based system decisions that have been a stable of *nix system since they first began! So now, if a programme wants to change some system files, windows alerts you and asks for permission. Let's hope it can't/won't be exploited.

The start menu has been radically overhauld too, and now instead of spreading out gradually, it actually opens out in one single menu. So when you click an item, it just unbranches underneath, in the same menu. A bit slow, but needs getting used to and when you're used to it, you'll realise it's better than the old style.

Another nice touch I found is that when a programme crashes (yes, windows, still crashes!), the system goes online to see if a solution has been found for this. I presume that in the following years MS will have a big (huge!) database of crashes and potential cures. Either that, or it will be useless (just like the XP attempt at going online to find what a file extension is).

From a quick gaming point of view, I disabled my soundblaser and enabled the mobo's built-in sound device, which is fully supported in vista. The sound quaility sucks but at least it's working in 5.1 and not buggy. I mainly tried FEAR and I have to admit I think it's way faster than on xp with the same hardware and settings. More about VISTA gaming once drivers have settled.

There's loads more to discover and do, but I haven't really messed around a lot. One thing I wish existed was "springy folders", like on OSX. This lets you move a file around by dragging it on to the icon of the destination, if you don't let go, the icon opens up and you can then go to folders inside that, and they open up too etc etc. Once you've reached your destination, you drop the file there and OSX automatically closes all open folders and takes you to your starting point. A great system, if a bit difficult to explain in words.

Finally, I leave you with a screenshot of my favourite feature, the "show all windows" button. Note that the screenshot does no justice to this, as windows are updated in real-time (so a video carries on playing, and games are moving also, etc etc). Great to find the window you want to work on easily.

They've done it!

In what seems to be record time, those lovely Chinese people have managed to hack the Wii!
In about 2 days, not one mod have been announced, but 3 different mods are already in production!

One mod (the CycloWiz) has even been installed and reviewed by maxconsole, and they give it great marks!

The beauty of the mods is that they're stealth (ie they send absolutely NO DATA to the cpu, hence being undetectable), and can be installed without any wire soldering. One problem is that non of them allow for region free gaming (original or backup), cos allegedly to do that the chip has to send some data to the cpu, hence not being stealth.

Personally, I think this is great news, as I definitely would install one cos I'm not that fussed about owning originals for the Wii (unlike the 360, which I want to keep live enabled).

The WiiKey is the mod I'm gonna hold on for, cos allegedly it allows different regions and is also upgradeable via software.

As always, the games have been ripped ages ago, which is the norm when it comes to the scene, ie games get ripped and distributed before you can play them as "backups"....

It's here!

......More Later......