Night 5 - 04:18

Don't worry sir, it's just a bell!

Night 4 - 09:32

Finally!!

Night 3 - 05:23

It hurts.

Night 2 - 01:06

The Payload.

Night 1 - 03:59

Dinner. Or is it breakfast.

FAT Princess

FAT Princess is a PSN-only game that was revealed at E3 this year. Essentially a 2D (great), cartoony (even more great), TF2-like (GASP!) capture the flag game, but the flag being the titular FAT Princess.

32 players battle it against each other to barge to the enemies castle and take the princess back to theirs. When players spawn they can wear hats (aka select a class) and go out and do damage. There are 5 classes, one of which is a Priest, akin to TF2's Medic.

The clever bit is, the FAT Princess needs feeding. Stop feeding her and she gets thin, light-weight, and hence a lot easier to carry. A team that just goes out fighting will leave her to starve, and hence when the other team reach their castle they'll find that carrying the Princess back is a lot easier :)

BUT, focus on feeding the Princess (albeit with magical vanilla cake that grows outside :p) and she'll get FAT, and heavy, and difficult to carry. A very clever twist to the age-old CTF formula, and one I think not only will be a success but also be copied in more traditional FPS titles.

The game is meant to debut later this year on PSN. PS3 Fanboy have more on the title here.

If you can't beat them, join them...

QUOTE:

PC using Rainbow Six Vegas 2 owners who purchased the game via the “Direct 2 Drive” service were in for a mess of a time when Ubisoft issued their latest patch for the game, bringing the version number up to 1.03. Apparently while the patch would work fine for standard disc owning gamers, downloadable versions of the game were incompatible with the new patch which ended up causing owners of this version some undue stress.Talk was rife on the Official Ubi forums, with users figuring out that an illegal No-CD crack created by the “RELOADED” group would in fact fix the problems that “D2D” version owners were facing. Of course, seeing as the crack was unofficial and illegal, users explaining this fix were issued warnings and the suggestions removed.Enter Ubi’s “own” patch for the problem, which fixed the problem just as the illegal patch had. Some enquiring gamers took it upon themselves to dig deeper into the inner workings of the officially issued patch and were shocked to see what they had found. The “official” patch issued by Ubisoft was in fact the same patch stolen from the illegal cracking group RELOADED.

The REAL Jebediah Springfield!

Heh I just had to post this :D

Saw this picture of a friend on facebook, part of his "trip around newfoundland" album:

And I was instantly reminded of Jebediah Springfield, the guy who allegedly founded Springfield, that of The Simpsons fame!

More Left4Dead info!

It's E3 people this week. Though not the same flair as years begone, it's still the most important event on the gaming calendar!

There's been lots of info about loads of stuff (new 360 dashboard, addons to the Wii, Wii Music (finally!) and more) and loads of new trailers. A great place for trailers would be gametrailers.com or rock paper shotgun's e3 page.

And of course there's new L4D info! Confirming the November 4th date (at last) but also revealing the real cast (new characters) and info about the procedural generation of the Director AI, which is panning out to be an awesome awesome thing!

Here's the video (cam) of the EA press conference (yes, EA, they're publishing it) including Director information and gameplay videos. Exciting stuff, and November couldn't come early enough!!

Where I am this unholy hour...

Queueing for the new 3G iPhone..

Pictures from Newby Bridge, Lake District...

Where we are now-The Picture!

Woooops! Forgot to attach the picture to the post below :)

Where we are right now

Some random park in Kendal. The weather has been kind, and we're
eating lots of lunch on the grass. An impromptu picnic.

Geriatrics and Newby Bridge

I've been on holiday since Monday, a nice, long 3 week holiday! Unfortunately I have a weekend on-call at the end of the 2nd week, and then I'm on nights at the end of the 3rd. But the weekend on-call was something I swapped in to, in order to give me an uninterrupted 4th week off between my nights :)

Anyhow, yesterday was a bit of an eventful day: I had an interview for a 5 year training job in Geriatric Medicine in The East of England region. This was literally my last hope in securing a job this time round, otherwise it would have been locums for the next year!
The interview was at 10:30am in Newmarket, a town about an hour away from Ipswich. After that, we drove up all the way to Manchester where we had dinner with Omar and his family, and then we went back to our old favourite, the Swan Hotel at Newby Bridge!

We're gonna spend 5 nights here till Monday, then come back to Ipswich. This morning I was expecting a phone call from the East of England Deanery to tell me the outcome of the interviews. There were 11 candidates for 2 jobs, so almost 6:1 odds. At about 11:30 I was too stressed and worried so I rang a friend who was interviewed yesterday for Endocrinology and Diabetes, and she told me she got the job and had found out by email! My heart started racing so I ran up to our room (luckily I had the laptop with me AND the hotel has free WiFi) and I checked my emails, only to find an offer email from them!!!

So I have now secured a five year training post, which at the end of I become a consultant in Geriatric Medicine, a speciality I've decided I wanted to do for a while now. The sense of relief is immense, and it couldn't have come at a better time than on our holidays!!

Sunday is my birthday also and we're going to the great great Blackpool Pleasure Beach!

So, it's all worked out fine, finally :) No more hunting for a job for a long time now!

Muahahahahaaaaaa! (Finally!)

Flipping Pyro fixed!!!!

• Fixed backburner's flame critical hits not being recalculated after collision. This meant that it would check if the target was looking away once and after that the flame could score a critical hit again even if the orientation changed.

• Added back some damage falloff to the Pyro's flamethrower. Not nearly as extreme as it was before the Pyro class pack.

And...



And...

Where's the "any" key?

Spy update leaked?

For the love of God I hope this leak is fake. If it isn't, then we're gonna be FUCKED by spies. A good spy can make or break a game, not to mention frustrate beyond all means.

There's a PNG that's allegedly a leak of the spy update, including achievements and the 3 new toys he'll get. The only reasonable new toy is a magnetic sapper, that can't destroy a building but it disables it for a while and CAN'T BE KNOCKED OFF by a wrench. This one's for spies that work with a teammate (Soldier? Demo?) so he can destroy the building once it's sapped.

The BAD new toys are the silenced gun, which does half damage from front but is a CRITICAL from the back. And it's quiet. FUCK.

Even worse is the alleged garrote, a thin wire that kills within a couple of seconds. Why is this really bad? Because using the garrote the spy DOESN'T LOSE HIS DISGUISE. Just ponder on that for a few seconds. A good spy can now literally disable a sentry ecosystem all alone: Garrote the engineer, sap the buildings - done.

Let's hope if they are true that REALLY SOON Valve will release the Engineer update. That poor man won't stand a chance against the all new Spy.

Here's the PNG.

Left4Dead Release Date Confirmed!!!

November the 4th it is people. Get your pre-orders ready, and a fresh supply of pants. We're gonna need 'em :)

Here's a new gameplay video:

OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (Part 2)

Remember the original OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! ?

Tonight something very similar happened to [Clan Khara] in TF2.
We were facing some really tough odds: because of the Pyromania that's swept over the game (due to updates to the Pyro class recently), the servers have become full of Pyros. Worse still, this server we were on was not only full of Pyros, but deadly, effecient Pyros. All of which always seemed to be on the other team as us....

Anyhow, we were all on the BLU side in Goldrush, stage 1. Having gone past the first checkpoint, we'd managed to push the cart miraculously past the dreaded chicane and in to the final stretch to seal victory. After a successful push and weakening of RED's defences, my Kritzkrieg had reached 100% uber, and I was healing Pyromax who was conveniently a soldier (soldier + Kritz uber = hell).

We decided to activate the uber and let all hell loose on the few surviving RED defences, while also pushing the cart forward towards that vital capture point. I waited for Pyromax to reload, and with excitement mounting I activated the uber and proudly watched the rockets fly out of him, glowing blue and crackling with that dreaded critical sound we all hate/love, and out of the corner of my eye I could see an enemy sniper and demoman both about to die horribly.

Except non of that happened. See, after activating the uber, Pyromax managed to shoot one single rocket, after which the server decided to crash. Suspended in mid-air, the damn rocket didn't even reach anyone! My precious uber was wasted on the ether, and Pyromax was just standing in limbo!
The cart grinded to a halt, even though it was just metres away from the final destination!!!

Damn you failing servers and damn you internets! All three of us shouted down our mics into Teamspeak, wondering why oh why did it have to happen now of all times! Our delicate plan busted by a crash. We even had 4:36 minutes to complete the level, so there was loads of time to win!!

I took a screen shot in despair. SIGH

The Pyro is a...........GIRL!!!

From CS-Nation, talking to Robin Walker:

"Walker: The Pyro is the focus on the next pack. We're making some significant changes to the base Pyro class & weaponry, in addition to the three unlockables and thirty-five achievements. We've never been terribly happy with the Pyro, in particular with her shallower skill curve than other combat classes. We really want highly skilled Pyros to be visibly more effective than the average Pyro, and the new features are designed to address that."

And a look at her purse:



OMG!!! Is it going to turn in to this??



Any thoughts?