Nintendo & Sony E3 Press Conference Impressions

I have finished watching all three conferences now and I thought Sony's was the best. Best in presentation and best in all round content. No big announcements, but what Sony needs is games.

Nintendo's conference left a lot to be desired. That woman (whoever she was) on-stage to me felt as if she was addressing some parents PTA meeting, not the specialist press and other people from the industry. Her presentation style felt very clicky and wooden.
The Wii music game looks as if it will sell very well, but the Drum section that was played didn't sound good at all. And that surprises me because Nintendo has always had such a high quality bar.

As always The 1Up Show had some nail on the head observations, but to sum it up, all the conferences where lacking in one way or another.

Microsoft E3 Press Conference Impressions

Microsoft's E3 press conference was a little dull and very light on news. Three big announcements.

1) Completely new dashboard interface coming this fall. Yet no news on wither that is going to make finding stuff on marketplace easier.

2) XBox360 Miis coming this fall. A direct rippoff translation iteration of one of the Wii's most successful features.

3) Final Fantasy XIII. Not that I care about this, but I expected a proper (i.e not Crystal Chronicles) FF game to come to the 360 a year or two ago. Why did this take so long!?

Update: I almost forgot.

4) And Netflix support. This really is one of the final nails in Blockbuster's coffin.

BMW Did Something Truly Innovative

Innovation is about taking two technologies that might not necessarily have anything in common and combining them to produce something new or solving a problem by applying a technological technique or idea as a solution. In the early years of aeroplanes, they where constructed from wood and cloth. In later years aluminium was used and now we use composite materials. Cars have always used hard body shells, so BMW tried using a flexible cloth-like material as a concept design and they have produced something fantastic:



No I don't think we will all be driving clothed cars in ten years time, but as a concept this is has all the hallmarks of an iconic design.

Alone In The Dark 5 Looks Better Than I Thought

I take it back, I am interested in Alone In The Dark 5. The main character can't remember who he is, and is possessed with a demonic entity. This gives the plot a high probability that the protagonist turns out to be the antagonist or blood related to the antagonist. Yes it has all be done before, but from the looks of things the bits between the big predictable plot reveals look really fun.

Bernie, About That Car You Wanted

Freerunning Awesomeness

Surprisingly there is a difference between Freerunning and Parkour. Parkore being a philosophy of "be strong to be useful" and Freerunning being a type of gymnastics.

So even through this video is titled "Best Of Parkour/Flips/Tricks", what is really on show is Freerunning.

Republican Space Rangers

In GTA4 there are many TV shows to watch and on of them is called Republican Space Rangers. Next to Team America World Police it is one of the best US Foreign Policy parodies I have seen. If you want to see it in the game just watch Weasel (the one with those two guys on) for long enough and it will come around.

Super Mario World The Musical

People can do some strange things in their spare time. I never thought Super Mario World could be used in such a way. Although I have seen similar videos, none of them are anywhere near the length of thisone.



And Here is a link to the acustic version.

[ Via Digg ]

XBox Live and Gaywood

There is this guy named Richard Gaywood and he had an XBoxLive gamertage Gaywood. Microsoft forced Richard to change his gamertag because:

Gamertags are visible to everyone and it would be hard for me [Stephen Toulouse] to defend to a parent of a young child who saw it that the name did not contain content of a sexual nature.

'Gay' was originally another word for happy. During the 1800's and early 1900's homosexuals where seen as unhappy, lonely people with an unhealthy sexual affliction. So when the UK sodomy law was abolished in 1967, homosexuals called themselves 'gay'.

The word 'gay' in our modern interpretation is interchangeable with 'homosexual' and is probably why Microsoft wanted Richard to change his GamerTag. But I agree whole heartedly when LesbianGamers Writes:

It does not take a genius to work out what all of this negative affiliation does, not only for the language itself, but for the rebound effects that language has on gay people in society as a whole. The more we accept people using gay in a derogatory manner such as “that’s so gay” to denote something is bad, sub-par, stupid or unworthy, the longer the hatred will flourish. The more we sit back in blinkered silence as the word gay is linked time and again to something sexual, deviant or negative, the longer the hatred will fester.

And another quote to leave you with:

Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.
- Hermione granger

The BBC WiiFit Coverage Sucked

This News Report by the BBC about the Wii Fit sucks on several levels.

They failed to mansion that BMI does not measure fat. They failed to get to the bottom of why WiiFit is telling her she is overweight since her BMI is 18.5. When an ideal BMI range is 18.5 to 24.9.

Video game coverage on all the news channels is bad, but the BBC just keep making themselves look like poor journalists everytime they carry a video game related story. Simply because they only understand the issues at a 'my mum' level.

Microsoft Axes Underperforming XBLA Games

Microsoft Has Stated that they plan to axe games on XBLA that are underperforming. Meaning that:

• They have been out for over six months


• They have a Metacritic score below 65


• The trial purchase rate is less than 6%

Initially I was disgusted by this because I believe all the games on the service have value to someone and have archive value. But that 6% conversion rate suggests to me that some titles might be costing Microsoft money in bandwidth and server costs. If a new title came out and nobody bought their trial version, then Microsoft would make a loss on distributing those free trial versions.

Eurovision Aftermath

Russia won and there was so much political voting going on between nabouring counteries that I don't think western countries are going to see a win for many years to come. The winning track wasn't bad, but I thought there where a few tracks that where much better. And that includes the runner up, Greece.

Russian Entry


Greek Entry


Sergey Lazarev, a runnerup that didn't make the cut to become the Russian entry for the competition, but I prefer his entry to the winner.


I wouldn't even have been annoyed if the Swedish entry won.

Eurovision 2008

It is the Eurovision Song Contest tonight, that yearly slice of euro-cheese that I love to hate.

This year all the entries can be heard right now over at the Official Eurovision YouTube channel.

I think the German entry has a very strong chance of winning:

Mirror's Edge is Looking Awesome

Mirrors Edge puts the player in a Tokyo looking future city where you freerun across skyscrapers. From a ludology perspective I love how the developers have used colour to communicate interactivity to the player. It is suttle, adds to the clean visual styling of the game and negates the need for a HUD or floating icons.

Problem Solving With Video Games

There is a Video Interview With Peter Molyneux where he talks about not being able to do much else but design games, and he wonders if he could apply his knowledge of gaming to other human pursuits and endeavours.

I thought this was an interesting idea, then I realised that I had meant to post about a project that does just that. So here we are.

There are some problem domains in the world where to solve a problem or improve something you have to understand a process completely. Programmers of Artificial Intelligences have been known to spend exorbitant amounts of time looking at quite simple issues so that they can create AIs that model intelligent behaviour. Good examples of this are anything that uses Fuzzy Logic. That is anything from Rice Cookers to Lifts, Thermostats and a huge amount of Control Systems.

There are some problems that are so difficult to understand that they can't yet be translated into software, because we don't fully understand what is going on. The problem I am referring to here is Protein Folding. We know what the acid code of the protein is, we know what it looks like in 3D when it has finished folding, but we don't know how it folds into it's final shape or how it moves, so we don't know what it does.

This is where Fold It! from the guys working on Rosetta@home comes in. It is a game where you as the player are tasked with folding a protein. Higher points are rewarded by finding a structure that requires the lest energy for the protein to fold into. The idea of this is that players will eventually discover general tactics that can be worked into protein folding algorithms and a rosetta method of protein folding be found. From this new drugs could be created in the lab fit for purpose artificially and our understanding of our own bodily processes greatly increases. We might even be able to find a cure for ageing.

Game of The Year Contest Starts Now

GTA4 has received a continuous stream of extremely good reviews placing it as a firm contender for Game of The Year, but it now seems like MGS4 Could Topple It.

Gametrailers did a video reviewing years of gaming and this makes me wonder if thisyear could topple the previous champion.

Pen & Paper Notes

I remember talking to someone who wrote their final university paper with a typewriter and hearing how difficult that was makes me glad that I had a word processor. But even though it has only been two years since I graduated, my Pen & Paper note-taking might be considered Oldschool Already!

Do Narratives Have A Place In Gaming?

I have heard this question over and over again. So let me try and put this one to bed right now with some recent examples.

Crackdown, Assassins Creed and GTAIV are all very similar games.

Crackdown was awesome, but the mission structure sucked because all you had to do was keep killing mission selected people over and over.

Assassins Creed was an awesome set of gaming building blocks with the roof jumping and wrist blade assassination time action, but sucked because all you did was the same killing of mission selected people.

GTAIV is awesome and doesn't suck even though all you do is the same killing of mission selected people, because there is a strong narrative. I have completed over seventy missions in the game and it doesn't yet feel repetitive at all.

To me anything that doesn't have a narrative should logically be considered an abstract game. Although even abstract puzzle games like Puzzle Quest are made better with a stronger narrative. Making a game with a weak narrative is like making chicken nuggets and then eating them with the cheapest/nastiest barbecue sauce you can find. It shouldn't be done and wrecks the whole experience.

GTAIV Websites

I have been playing a lot of GTA4 this week and I don't think I am going to complete it in under 30 hours (you get an achievement for that). But there are two awesome websites inside the game that I need to tell you about.

Goto an internet coffee and lookup:

www.bruiesexcutivelifestyleautos.com

www.whattheydonotwantyoutoknow.com

The second is a website detailing GTA4 secrets. This is a first, a website made by the game's developers detailing secrets about their own game, on a fake in-game internet. Which is funny because I always look at websites for cheats and secrets, but now I don't even have to leave the game to do that (yes I do know EVE Online has it's own built in web browser, but that is for the real internet, not a fake one).

Warfare in the 21st Century

Russia has shot down a Georgian unmanned recognisance drone over the Georgian side of the Georgian/Russian boarder. Which isn't necessarily interesting unless you are surprised that Russia would do such a thing despite signs for months now that they want to be see as a strong global military power again.

Anyway the BBC has some News Footage On The Incident which shows the attack from start to finish from the perspective of the drone and a radar station.

This is interesting because the Georgian military has two different records of the same attack and thus know precisely what happened. I see this as significant because when The Bomb Was Dropped On Hiroshima the reason why communications with Hiroshima was cutoff was only discovered three hours after the attack, and the real truth of what happened was only learned sixteen hours after the attack, in a WhiteHouse press release. So this is why I feel the incident in Georgia has some historical significance and is a sign of things to come.

Plasma Speakers

I thought Musical Tesla Coils where cool, but the sound quality from Plasma Speakers is so much better.





Apparently you still need a traditional subwoofer for low amplitude sounds, but Plasma arcs are brilliant for higher tone sounds. Unfortunately microphones don't seem to be able to record the audio well, I don't know if this is because they are effected by the plasma's electromagnetic field or if they just can't record higher pitched sounds.

Buyer Beware of TeleBid

There is a new auction site in town called TeleBid. The idea is that all the products on the site are new and that each time a bid is placed just 7p is added to the total cost of the item and a few seconds are added to the auction end timer. When the clock on the auction reaches zero whoever is the winning bidder gets the item.

On the surface it seems too good to be true. Yet the auction system is clearly designed to make you place many small bids instead of allowing you to place an initial maximum like on eBay. TeleBid will even give you £20 when you register to use on auctions.

The thing that makes the site profitable and which isn't stated dearly enough is that although winning an item requires you to be the last person to have pressed the Bid button when the auction timer runs out, you are charged 50p everytime you press the Bid button. I hesitate to call the site a scam because the 50p charge is very clear on the help section, but it a scam and people are getting very burned by it.

World of Warcraft + Portal + Music = The Device Has Been Modified

WeGame.com - WoW Videos

Uncanny, Wii and XaviXPort

Firstly watch this (warning, do not turn your volume up):



This is called the XaviXPort and it was released in 2004. That is to say two years before the Wii, but like rockband each game requires an expensive addon, so the XaviXPort hasn't done so well.

I don't think that Nintendo has plagiarised anything that SSD has done with XaviXPort because motion sensing technology has been experimented with gaming for years and looking at the history of motion sensing it seems amazing that it has taken so long to be worked into a successful product, but I do find it interesting that I knew NOTHING about the XaviXPort until just fifteen minuets ago.

Dr Byron's Video Game Industry Review

So some Dr of physiology was paid a large sum of money to Write A Report that would give some recommendations to the UK government on how to protect children from violent or harmful video games.

She has two main recommendations:
1) All games should carry a BBFC certificate.
2) All game consoles should have parental lockouts.

The response from the video game industry has been a big "meh, we told you so".

The Responce From The Government has been very much "This well conducted review has exemplified our commitment to the safety and well being of our nations children".

My response is this. The government should claim back the money they spent on this usless review and invest it into a "Just Say NO!" campaign to educate parents about saying NO to their own children.

Last Gen > This Gen?

Ideas of gameplay transcend generation gaps as our understanding of gameplay progressively improves, but there is an argument out there that the current generation of console's graphics don't look much better than the last generation's later games. This comes from the fact that some people believe that this generation's graphics are just in a higher resolution than the last generation's. And that if it wasn't for the increased output resolution then this generation wouldn't look much different from the last, and I see their point after playing a few current gen games on an old CRT. But that was until I watched this video of the GTA IV trailer rendered in GTA San Andrea's graphics engine:



And the same trailer in GTA IV's engine:



After watching theses two videos back to back I was actually surprised on the leap that has been made since last gen. One that looks just as significant as the leap from the N64 to GC or PS1 to PS2.

FireFox 3 Beta 4

Despite FireFox having thousands of happy users, I have never been one of them. I am one of those people who will sometimes have more than ten webpages open at any one time and then leave them open on my computer overnight. This meant that FireFox's memory issues always blighted my attempts at using it as my primary browser. So it was with absolute delight that I discovered FireFox 3 (currently Beta 4 with Beta 5 coming soon) has solved all of that.

FireFox 3 Beta 4 is fast and responsive under all conditions. Websites like Google Maps, Digg and IGN that used to be super sluggish under IE and FF2, are now just as fast as any other website. I will even go as far as to say just as fast as a plain text blog.

So if you want to give the beta a go, you can Download A Copy Here. But be warned, I have found that it doesn't work with the new Yahoo Mail (I am using the classic view) and I have had the beta crash twice in the few days I have been using it for no apparent reason. This hasn't been a problem however because it remembers the pages that where open at the time of the crash, but despite all that FF3B4 is my current primary browser over IE7, FF2, Safari and Opera.

A Quick Note To Website Builders

If you build websites for a living. Now is the time to Go Here and download a preview copy of Internet Explorer 8. The important thing is that you do this BEFORE the browser is launched and not AFTER. This will prevent a future incident where your inbox will be filled with complaints from customers.

That being said IE8's standards compliance is much better so problems (if any) will be minor, but it always annoys me when companies use the "It wasn't out so we couldn't test against it" excuse when there was a preview build (specifically for compatibility testing) available months before the official release.

Brave or Stupid

There is a fine line between bravery and stupidity and I think these people crossed it twice.

People Don't Need (Disturbing, NSFW)

People Don't Need Fur

Mordeth13's, I HATE China.

People Don't Need Dolphin-meat

The whole animal meat eating thing is a difficult issue and I wish meat could be grown in plastic containers like plants, but the truth is that animals have to die to make meat and if you (including the hypocrite who wrote this) eat meat (be it a ham sandwich or whatever) you are part of the issue. But at least promise me that after watching this next video you will refuse to ever eat or try dolphin-meat and maybe we can call it a step in the right direction.

The Worst Gaming Tattoos

Here is a collection of bad gaming tattoos. Although I will say that I don't think 19, 16, 9 and 8 are so bad.

I am a fan of many products by companies, but I would never have a tattoo of a company logo on my body like the people in photos 15, 14 and 1. Branding yourself with a company logo as if you where a product. The guy who has branded himself with the Nintendo logo even included the little Registered Trademark (R) on his tattoo. I don't know if this legally makes him the property of Nintendo like it does with cattle farming, but I would be eagerly following the caught case if one should arise from this.

The New Pace of Technology

The pace of technology is ever increasing and we can see this in the Fisher Price Tickle Me Elmo toy series. There has been more versions than what I am showing here, but look at the dates and leaps in technology and you will see my point.

1996 - The first TME toy is relased allowing a stuffed toy to interact with the child playing with them.



2006 - Motors controling Elmo's limbs are added to create animation.



2008 - Improved motor skills give the Elmo toy much the same characteristics of movement to that of his on-screen puppet counterpart.



2010 - Dissatisfied with being treated like disposable play things an army of indestructible Elmos rises up.



2011 - A new order is established.

Programmer Puzzle Games

There is a subset of puzzle games which for the purposes of this post I am calling programming puzzle games. The basic idea is that there is a level and you have a guy that you can control to complete whatever the objective is in the level to progress, but you can only control him by giving him a set of rules to follow by programming him (empowering him with a rule based AI). I love these things, but only independent developers seem to be doing anything with them.

Currently the best set of these games is made by Epsitec Games with their CeeBot series. In the case of CeeBot there is a programming language for the player to learn. This sounds hard, but it is aimed at a 5+ age range audience so everything is explained gradually with each level building on the lesson of the last and you can only progress once you have understood the concept the level is teaching. The game even comes with a better debugging tool than what most Java and C++ developers use today, so when your programs start to get large the game emergent teaches about logic errors without ever explicitly covering them.

Anyway today I played Spuds another Programmer Puzzle game that uses pictures to do the programming with. It was made by two brothers and apart from being a little overpriced ($19.95) and forcing the player to sit through a long tutorial, it's very interesting.



Again these games might sound boring, but I suffer from timeloss whenever I play them.

Random Fact

When a Dog's skin has a flea infestation the type of flea the dog has is most likely to be Ctenocephalides Felis. Which is more commonly known as the Cat Flea.

XNA Playable Games Now Available

Firstly to get started:

Go to the Games Blade > Games Library > Game Store > More...
Then Go to Game Add-ons > New Arrivals
Select the XNA Creators Club (bottom of the list)
Download the launcher

Back out to the Games Library
Go to My Games
Go right to XNA Creators Club
Press Y to see the list of games and get to downloading
- [From XBLArcade.com]

Then download away.


Culture "Gardening Game"
Three puzzle games in one all centred around a garden.
Blood, involves circling weeds.
Paint With Flowers, is just painting by numbers.
And Flower Garden, requires you to cross breed flowers to get the target plant (actually fun because it isn't a dumbed down breeding game).

JellyCar "Crayon Physics"
Drive the flexible car to the end zone. The physics and art style are done very well, gameplay is a little unrefined.

Little Gamers "Ownag3 Platformer"
You just kill stuff from themed level to level, only really for the die hard Little Gamers fans, but the art style is very sharp, just like the webcomic.

ProximityHD "Abstract Strategy"
Abstract puzzle game that is too architected to be fun. Each turn presents very little challenge to the player and very little to consider on each turn as players will quickly develop a winning strategy. Plus the game's random element is too random for any hardcore strategy development.

Rocketball "Wacky"
Third person dodgball game with button mashing.

The Dishwasher "Meaty Chunks Everywhere!"
If you like Devil May Cry, Legacy Of Kain or Alien Hominid, I highly recommend that you have a look at this. The story is tedious, but the combat is fun and bloody.

TriLinea "Read The Rules"
Somekind of realtime pattern matching game on a board against an opponent. It suffers from information overload and isn't very noob friendly.

A Possible Explanation For Mass Effect's Faults

Mass Effect is a great game, but there are a few things which clearly make it less than it could have been and this has been bothing me since I completed it. The game was in development for a long time, the team didn't lack vision and they had enough money to throw around, so what went wrong? Why wasn't Mass Effect all it could have been?

An explanation for the shitty side quests, incomplete dialogue and general gaps in the RPG world could be seen as a lack of commitment from the developers, but they hyped the game so much that this explanation seems silly. That is until you Read Stories About Unhappy Employees and Bad Employment Practices. Then it all makes sence, Bioware is a bad place to work.

I have had a couple of jobs now working for particularly bad managers, they work long hours and are under a lot of stress so the people under them should feel that pressure too and they think they are getting the job done, but what they are really doing is dismantling the company culture and destroying any enthusiasm their employees might have about their work. Then for the employees their job turns from an opportunity to a black hole in their lives and in the end they will look back on their old job and be glad they it is all over.

Achievement Types

Not got much to say so here is a little soemthing I put together last week. It is categories for all the Achievements avalible for 360 games. This doesn't include a category for silly achievements, but each one of them based on their own merits can fit into one of these categories anyway so there isn't a need for another.

Be The Best
eg Become number one in the world

Time Will Tell
eg Get 1,000,000,000 kills with your left thumb

Fluke
eg Get a hole in one

Progress Marker
eg Compleate level three

In-human
eg Defeat the final boss on ultra mega death hard with only the pistol and without dieing

Baby steps
eg Watch the tutorial

Compleationist
eg Collect all the hidden flags

The Weiner Circle (NSFW)

I have a list going of places I want to visit at somepoint during my lifetime and it is way too long for me to actually go to all of the places on my list, but my latest addition is The Weiner Circle in Chicago, a hotdog restraint.



And incase you too want to visit:


View Larger Map

Time And Time Again RRODs

I was thinking about my history with my 360 and having had one for two years I have also had two cases of RROD which is nowhere near as bad as what some people have had it, but this begs the question, do I think I will have another case of RROD and when will that be?

17th March 2006
Bought my first XBox 360 for £279.99

9th April 2007
First console develops RROD.

17th April 2007
Recieved a replacement console (my second).

25th January 2008
Second console develops RROD.

7th Febuary 2008
Got second console back with a new motherboard and DVD drive.

In both cases of RROD when I used to turn my console off I could hear the plastic cracking as it cooled, this symptom is present in my current fixed console, so yes I do expect another case of RROD. Looking at the historical data it should occur sometime February 2009 assuming that the Added Heatsinks that has probably been fitted are ineffective and I continue to use my 360 on a regular basis (normally once a day).

Do I have any advice to people worried about RROD?
Don't let it bother you, you are covered by warranty so when it happens just Call Microsoft and let them collect it. But when it comes back keep the packaging they send it you in, because if you do have another RROD you will then have correct packaging available to send it in (first time you are going to have to find something to send it in).

The 360 is an awesome console, but the hardware has a high failure rate, I expect in future that Microsoft will have to extend the warranty period again or start compensating customers in a different way.

Got My 360 Back

So I go my 360 back and as well as a new motherboard, has had it's DVD drive replaced. Now I have the BENQ DVD Drive (see llamma.com's Xbox 360 DVD Drive Comparison Page).

Supposedly the BENQ DVD Drive is quicker than the others and after running a few tests I have found that it is faster than my old Samsung. The way I know this is by racing a fast car around the motorway on Saints Row which would normally cause the road to start popping in infront of me because the DVD drive couldn't load the levels into memory quick enough, (I once even managed to fall through the level by driving over a bit of road that hadn't had it's geometry loaded in before I attempted to drive over it) but with the BENQ I can't even make even a hint of this problem occur, which probably means that load times will be better in general on all titles.

Something Original

It isn't often that I see some original gameplay, but Factory Balls a flash game about making balls does it for me.

There are already puzzle games where you have to decorate a cake to make it look like one on a card, but what Bart does it make his game more challenging by making you learn how to use your decorating tools. And that adds a feeling of accomplishment that those other games miss.

Red Ring Of Death II

It happened again so right now my 360 is in the hands of UPS going to wherever 360s go when they die. That is two years of 360 gaming and two incidents of RROD.

Audiosurf

I was going through the Independant Games Festival Contenders for this year's Audience Choice Award (only now do they have download links up) and one of the games I tried was Audiosurf, a game that I had heard previously about, but thought the developer was doing the whole 'we are awesome speel' that seems to come out of the mouth of every sane developer in the industry (it is getting harder and harder to tell when they are talking BS or not). But in this case Audiosurf is awesome, and everything it was said to be.

You start by selecting an audio file on your computer, Audiosurf identifies the various musical aspects of the file, generates a level and then you play in that level while the music you selected is playing. You play the game either with a mouse or 360 controller by trying to connect coloured blocks on a grid while avoiding gray blocks.

It is awesome and supposedly out at the very end of next month, possibly through STEAM. But until then I highly recommend the Demo, even if it does yank the game from under you after a few songs.

Macbook Air's Reserved Reactions (Rant)

It has been a few days since the Macbook Air was announced and I have been very surprised at the reserved reactions from the announcement, because normally anything Apple announces is eaten up by Mac fans, but with the Macbook Air everybody has been very sober. Even the mighty Kevin Rose was like, meh:



Normally the reaction that I give to most things Apple is "I don't need it" or "I can get the same thing cheaper and better elsewhere", but with the Macbook Air I would have bought one already if I had £1,199 to spend.

When I saw the Macbook Air for the first time I envisioned being able to carry it around in my backpack, without feeling like I was carrying around a brick. And then being able to surf the web and do work wherever I wanted because it's so portable. So for me the fact that it doesn't have anykind of built in diskdrive or ethernet port doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Personally I find laptop keyboards to be horrible to type with, track pads and nipples are cumbersome compared to a mouse, the machines themselves are slower than a comparable desktop of the same specification, they are difficult to fix, break more often and will need to be replaced sooner than the same specification machine as a desktop. So the reactions that the Macbook Air has been receiving has reinforced my long held view that computer users in-general don't want a laptop because it is portable, but because it is somekind of status symbol and most people would be happier sitting infront of a Black Widescreen Brick than something you could actually take outside, carry in a bag or use comfortably like desktop computer. And yet with all the 'meh' reactions this for me this is the first product that has made me seriously considering a Mac (other than Windows 98).

XBox360 Ultimate

I have been editing the Xbox 360 page on Wikipedia recently and a user named Prothean (his name is a Mass Effect reference) tried to add some information about the 360 Ultimate and although his edit got removed as he didn't give any references I thought what was said, rather interesting.

Microsoft is working on a complete overhaul of the Xbox 360 console system. This new system will have an onboard HD-DVD player and wireless adapter, a hard disk of 320GB and a complete hardware revision. It is likely, due to the current preference of Blue-ray discs, the Xbox 360 Ultimate will have a Duel Hi-Def Disc Player that is capable of playing both HD-DVD and Blue-ray discs. Wether this is the result of the current project "Jasper" is unkown. Currently priced at $500 and scheduled to appear somewhere at the end of Fall 2009.

Now Project Jasper is an ADO.Net thing, but there where a lot of XBox 360 Arcade rumours before that was announced so maybe there is a grain of truth in this.

Architected Game Combat

Having internalised Jonathan Blow's viewpoint on architected gameplay rather than explored gameplay I realise I am so over exactly what Warhammer Online is doing with their combat system (see video). I know there are people that will watch this video and be excited about learning a new RPG combat system, but having learned and played several before, I am so over it all. I want something new and different, maybe even something that doesn't feel like work to play.

Why A Good Specification Is Important

The US Militery hired a few companies to help them complete the invasion of Iraq. To do this they setup service agreements with those companies so the Military became a paying customer to those companies, but it looks like they forgot to agree any levels of quality. The US Militery wanted warter, they got warter, but it wasn't safe to drink. Let this be a lessen to you if you ever setup a SLA (Service Level Agreement) with anybody because unless you specify what quality standard you need the work doing too, it won't be done to any quality standard.

And on the video they mention Cost-Plus, which is effectively the government telling the contractor to just bill them whatever the cost is. This is common is situations where price comparison or price negotiation isn't worth doing, but silly things happen when you give someone your credit card and tell them to buy whatever they want.

The Food and Drugs of Gamplay

Last Year at The Montreal International Games Summit, Jonathan Blow did a talk called Design Reboot where he talked about how we might enter a golden age of game design. He talks about how developers are conditioning players to expect predictable rewards thus turning them into reward junkies and that real rewards like a player achieving a personal goal in a game and deriving satisfaction from that, is being ignored because that is harder to architect.

His talk starts well-outside of current thinking, but he states all his points very well and then you will realise that all the best developers in the world have already been applying what he talks about.

I don't like being so cryptic with my writing, but if I cover what is in the talk. I will have written a very long post where I cover everything that is covered by his talk.

[Direct Link: montreal2007.zip ]

Ron Gilbert Announces A New Project

Ron Gilbert, one of Monkey Island's Creator today announced that as well as consulting on the Penny Arcade Game he has been designing a game called Death Spank, an RPG! And he now has a publisher and developer behind the project. Which is always a good thing.

I mention this because Monkey Island is one of my top three game franchises and His Announcement Post was written with such fantastic comic prose, I felt that I needed to blog about it.

I roughed out a game design for the first episode and started pitching it around and a funny thing happened. Everyone hated it. But the weird thing is the more publishers that turned it down, the more convinced I became that this was a great idea. Every rejection fueled me with excitement and the knowledge that I was right. Nothing says innovation and creativity like armed security showing up to escort you out of the building while saying "Let's not have any trouble". - Ron Gilbert 2008

When Wikipedia Errors

The Console Wars So Far

I found this site VGChartz.com thanks to Kim Pallister which has some awesome console sales graphs.



Comparing the numbers of units sold since launch puts the Wii in a very strong position, but look at the PS3 it isn't doing as badly as we all probably thought. The PS3 might have a dismal selection of games, but it is still giving the 360 a run for it's money.

So if the Wii is doing so well, how does it compare to the current king of all console wars the PS2, which has currently sold more than 120 million units:



The Wii does more than double the sales of the PS2 in the same period from launch. And as there is no sign that demand is going to lessen anytime soon it isn't unreasonable to predict that the Wii will sell more than 240 million units in five years.

However as Nintendo has been so successful in releasing second iterations of the GameBoy Advance and GameBoy DS everybody is expecting them to do the same with the Wii. Could we see everybody who has already bought a Wii buy a second one or people like myself who haven't yet bought one yet be swayed if Nintendo iterates on it's design!?

Clearly by the kinds of numbers we are seeing in this generation the market is easily large enough to sustain multiple console manufacturers.

Sin

Question:
Of all the things that is considered sin, why isn't the docile consumption of media one them?

Answer:
Because those people who call out sins are the same people who don't want their message questioned.

Abstraction:
If everybody was to appreciate the media they consumed then the world would be a place with a lot less sin.

New Wall.E Trailer

A New Trailer is out. And the film looks more stunning every time I see it.

Dates For Your Diary 2008

If you where wondering when the big industry events where taking place next year, I got you covered.

January
Consumer Electronics Show (Las Vegas) 8th to 11th

February
DICE Summit (Las Vegas) 6th to 9th

March
Game Connection (San Francisco) 5th to 6th
Games Developers Conference (San Francisco) 5th to 9th

April
MCV Awards (London) 19th

May
Northern Exposure (York) 10th
Nordic Game (Sweden) 15th to 16th

July
E3 (Los Angeles) 15th – 17th
Develop Conference (Brighton) 24th to 26th

August
SIGGRAPH (San Diego) 5th to 9th
GCDC (Leipzig) 20th to 22nd
Leipzig Games Convention (Leipzig) 23rd to 26th
Penny Arcade Exhibition (Seattle) 29th to 31st

September
Austin Games Conference (Austin, Texas) 5th to 7th

October
GC Asia (Singapore) 9th to 12th

Awesome Lecture: Copyright and Fair Use

I have been reading some stuff on Copyright and all the discussion that I have read so far feels beneath my understanding. Most of the time it is like watching two kids fighting over who gets to play with a tennis ball. And I owe that level of understanding to a lecture I once watched by Lawrence Lessig titled Is Google Book Search "Fair Use"?.

I am linking to this now because I only just realised how thankful I am that I watched this lecture. It is one of those things which I was happy with seeing at the time and have re-thought about again and again since.

Lawrence is an awesome speaker with excellent presentation skills. If you have ever had a passing interest in Copyright or Intellectual Property then I highly recommend watching this lecture because he covers the basics and then takes the debate to a much higher level.



[Direct Link]

Tuesday's XBox360 Dashboard Update

On Tuesday a new version of the 360's dashboard is going to be released. In this release the big new features are "Friends of Friends" where you can view who your Friends have as Friends on their Friends list. A timer so that parents can dictate how long their offspring can play games for. And the much requested DivX and XviD video codex support is being added so that you can brows and stream AVI video from a PC to whatever large television you might have connected to your 360. If you want to see the complete list of changes Click Here.

GamerScoreBlog (which is run by Microsoft PR) has put together a rather good video preview of the whole thing.

Inclusive Vs Exclusive Groups

As Humans we are programmed to seek our place in the world, to question ourselves and to never be happy with what we have. So that's why groups be them religions, political, school fraternities or people of similar ideals like Neo Nazis come together because it makes them feel apart of something and more whole than if they weren't in that group. This is partly because Human instinct is towards running in a pack rather than alone, but ideologically it makes us feel less alone.

In my life I have experienced many such groups and is occurred to me while watching Accepted that exclusive groups where membership is filtered to only allow the "right sort of people" in normally feel hollow because when you join such a group you are buying into the group founder's vision and not something you can influence yourself.

Inclusive groups are groups of people who all try to get along. And since everybody in them puts effort into getting along, being part of the group feels more whole as everybody has a viewpoint that is heard. A lot of inclusive groups like sports clubs, music and other groups are so inclusive that they transcend any physical place and become an idealogical movement like Wikipedia (the open source encyclopedia), The Skeptics Movement (critical thought in search of exposing truth), Parkour (be strong to be useful) or any number of civil rights movements.

However the biggest inclusive and exclusive groups in the world is society itself. In some parts of the world people actively segregate themselves in order to find their place in the world and in other places people pay for services like national health so that everybody is more equal.

So what I am trying to say is that there are a lot of people in the world that try to find their place in the world by excluding other people or ideas. Even to the point where they suppress freespeech and commit hate crimes against people who they consider to be apart of another group, this is probably a natural instinct for Humans, but I think if we all tried to be a little bit more inclusive by helping others, listening to others and giving others our time then the group that we are already in, society, becomes a much better place.

Narbacular Drop

I was going to post this earlier in the month, but I am finding it very difficult to manage a full time job and my hobbies.

So anyway before Portal there was Narbacular Drop a Digipen student project that was seen by Valve, the students that made it where hired by ValVe and they then created Portal.

ND is nowhere near as good as Portal, but what ND lacks in quality it makes up in originality, it is interesting to see where the team came from and nice to have a good look at a student project that actually got someone a job.

TimeShift (Not Completed)

TimeShift has some of the most generic boring levels that remind me of a few WW2 FPSs that I forget the name of because they where so generic and Red Faction. The AI is boring and the time powers that allow you to stop time and such just don't feel special because the combat is so mediocre.

The level design is dull and linear. The weapons are all FPS standard eqips and the whole thing feels like one big wast of time to play. Not even the story is a saving grace because it is so shallow.

If you haven't played an FPS before then you might like TimeShift otherwise you have practically already played it.
1/5

Kevin Smith Protesting His Own Film

Writer and Director Kevin Smith does tours where people can ask him questions about being an independent director stuff and it's all very amusing because he is an interesting guy who isn't afraid of putting himself out there. So amusing are these talks that you can get them on DVD, titled as An Evening With Kevin Smith. One of the things Kevin has talked about (I think on the first Evening With Kevin Smith DVD) is when he went to a protest against his own film, Dogma. These is a video of him talking about that below, but he talks about being interviewed on TV about the film he was protesting as a protester which I thought was funny, but it is only until recently that I seen the second video that I am linking to, which is the actual news footage of that interview with him protesting his own film!

University Talk


TV Interview


[via Digg]

I Got A Job!

I started at my first full time job last week. I am supposed to be working as Admin in a hotel, but since it is a new hotel and it is short staffed I am having to do a lot of other things at the moment. So things seem to be looking up.

Currently playing TimeShift and Naruto Rise of a Ninja both on the 360. Naruto is a lot of fun, but TimeShift despite being able to control time has boring level design so the levels all feel very slow.

Five Free HD DVDs and Something To Think About

If you buy (or have bought) a UK XBox360 HD DVD Drive between 1/10/07 and 29/2/08 then you can get Microsoft to send you five free HD DVDs.

All you need is the barcode from the box the drive comes in, a receipt or invoice and This Form from the Microsoft Promotion Page.

The choice of DVDs for this kind of offer is quite good:

Serenity
The Chronicles of Riddick
Hulk
Children of Men
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Troy
Full Metal Jacket
Corpse Bride
The Prestige
Swordish
Black Rain
Dreamgirls
World Trade Center

This time last month however Engadget Posted A Rumour about an improved HD DVD drive coming in 2008 with enhanced features. I don't think these extra features will make watching a HD film much better than it already is, but it is something to think about if you believe that the drive looks ugly.

P.S. If you do get a HD Drive and HD Screen connected to your 360, don't forget about the switch on the back of the 360 to change the output signal to HD.

Portal: The Flash Version

Hen7 and Dragy2005 have created a version of Portal in Flash called Portal: The Flash Version. It is both awesome and hard.

Review Scores Are Mostly Meaningless

Just like Me and Zero Punctuation everybody seems to be in agreement that Portal is a vastly superior game than Halfe Life 2 Episode Two in ValVe's Orange Box.

Portal is an amazingly fun game with fresh gameplay, where as Episode Two is just more of the same tired gameplay. Yet MetaCritic gives Half Life 2 Episode 2 a MetaCritic Score of (currently) 91 and Portal gets a MetaCritic Score of (currently) 89. Which means that the review scores both games have been getting are a direct contradiction to what people have been saying about them. IGN gave Portal an 8.2 and Episode 2 a 9.2 with an Editor's Choice Award yet on their Podcasts just like everybody else, they have been gushing about Portal.

So if Portal > Half Life 2 Episode 2, then why isn't Portal's review scores!?

City Under Siege, The Berlin Blockade and Airlift 1948-1949

After WWII was over and the world entered The Cold War Berlin was split between Allied East, Soviet west and the surrounding country was also controlled by the Soviets. The Allies where supplying Berlin with needed supplies by a canal, a highway, a railway line and three air corridors. The soviets wanting to takeover east Berlin, closed off the ground access so only the air corridors remained. What happened next between June 24 1948 and May 12 1949 is one of those overlooked periods in history where people came together and achieved the impossible. In this case, to supply east Berlin's 12,000 ton daily requirement of food and fuel, every day by air transport alone.

So that is what Michael D. Haydock's Book City Under Siege is about and you can read an excellent cut-down version of events from start to finish on American Heritage.com. Which I found fascinating, especially since I never heard of this before.

[via Kim Pallister]

Zachariah Scott's Machinima

Ignis Solus by LitFuseFilms has been making the rounds on the interweb as the new pass-around 'have you seen' video. It is about a lonely Pyro. But what you probably don't know or yet care about is that it is directed by Zachariah Scott:



That is to say the same Zachariah Scott who directed Ballad of Black Mesa:



The same Zachariah Scott who directed the official trailer for the HL2 MOD Insurgency:



I don't know much about Zachariah other than his obvious talent, but His MySpace Page says he is a 19 years old Aquarius, lives in Altha Florida and has excellent taste in films. So wither his Machinima directing leads to a career or not I don't know, but he is certainly someone to watch.

The Orange Box (Completed) (Spoiler Free)

Orange Box is this year's GAME OF THE YEAR, because it is several great games in one. Halo3 was nice, but it was just more of the same. BioShock was great, but not as great as Orange Box.

Orange Box is three games, Portal, Half Life 2 Episode Two and Team Fortress 2. HL2ET is just more of the same HL2-ness, that isn't anything special. TF2 is my new multiplayer game of choice (previously Natural Selection). And then there is Portal...

The internet right now is full of Portal spoilers, you ow it to yourself as a gamer to just buy the game and come back once you have completed it. It isn't just a fantastic new and original play experience, it is very intelligent comedy and I had a big smile on my face the WHOLE way through.

Portal is simple, you wakeup in a place called Aperture Science, you get a Man-sized Ad-hoc Quantum Tunnel Gun and GlaDOS guides you through some trials. History will see it as the first true action/puzzle game, but I see the same slow paced exploration gameplay that we had in the original Half Life before Half Life 2 came along and turned the franchise into northing more than a Half Life skinned WWII shooter.

Portal Does link into the Half Life universe, but it is tagged on a bit. It's like ValVe wanted to do that, so the just did with the new stuff where they could. You certainly won't find any Aperture Science references in the Original Half Life. But considering that Portal is one of those games everybody will be talking about for years and years to come, I can't blame them for doing that at all.

As a gamer there are some games that I remember with reverence because of the story, gameplay or whatever, because they did something that connected with me. And Portal does that on many levels, I don't want to go into it because, they are all spoiler-ish I think you just need to play it for yourself.

HL2ET 2/5
TF2 5/5
Portal 5/5 (It gets a five, but if Portal was the benchmark then TF2 would get a three and HL2ET wouldn't even be rated)

Additional: I just looked at a few portal reviews and I seem to be happier with it than others, this is probably because I found Portal to be such a fresh and new gameplay experience. Plus it made me laugh, a lot.

Jedi Drinking Test

Let me formulate this so I can go to bed quick (the sooner I sleep the sooner I play Portal).

(Celtic + Rock) + Drinking + Star Wars = Jedi Drinking Test by Dust Rhinos

And there are Lyrics and a Download available if you wanted.

A Story Of Minesweeper and Localisation

Writing software isn't easy and being in feature creep or having a client that keeps changing their mind makes the job much harder, but what if you work at Microsoft and your user interface almost sparks an international incident.

Well that's what David Vronay wrote about in This Post about the updated version of Minesweeper for Windows Vista.

[via The Old New Thing]

Nintendo Does It Again

Remember earlier this-year when Nintendo Pulled Mario Party 8 and MindQuiz from Shelves because the games contained the word 'spastic'. Well it just happened again with Scrabble (DS) and 'Lesbo'.

The official response is that 'Lesbo' the derogatory slang for 'Lesbian' is in the Scrabble Dictionary, but I checked the Chambers Word Wizard Dictionary and Hasbro's Online Dictionary, neither of which turned up a result. So I am thinking that they need to improve their QA process, but I do think that it is funny that this has happened three times in the same year for Nintendo. Four times this generation if you count the naming of the Wii and all in the same region.

Two YouTubers

Checking my RSS feeds yesterday I noticed that two of my favourite YouTubers both updated on the same day with the kind of video that is a good introduction to their character. And the kind of video that I want to link to when I introduce people to them, so I thought I would share. Both are very entertaining to watch, but for completely different reasons.

WhatAboutAdam



AppleMilk1988

Team Fortress 2 Beta First Impressions

TF2 is awesome, the pacing on the combat is slower than most, which I love (isn't twitch based gameplay). The nine classes of characters are all balanced well with advantages and disadvantages to them all, meaning that although the guy with the Minigun can kill lots of people, because of his slow speed he isn't likely to complete any objective before he dies (unless he teams up with a medic).

The graphics look good and surprisingly the game runs well on my system (GeForce6, 2GHz, 1GB) which is great because when I tried the Quake Wars Demo last week, even with all the settings off and on low, the game still ran just above unplayable.

Before the Beta was launched there was some concern as to wither this was a true Beta or just an exclusive demo as there is only a month left before the game is available for purchase from retail. But no, TF2 is most certainly a beta, the game has lots of stability issues and the TF2 Forum is filled with people having issues. I myself haven't finished a whole game yet as it keeps freezing and crashing. I recommend running TF2 in window mode instead of fullscreen so when the game does freeze it is easier to get to the Task Manager.

I wasn't expecting much, and I only bought The Orange Box for Portal, but I have been pleasantly surprised.

The Half Life 2 Orange Box Confusion

ValVe have confused things a little with the release of The Orange Box as there is no one place where you can get all the information on what you are getting in the box, so let me try and straighten things out.

The Orange Box comes with Half Life 2, HL2 Episode One, HL2 Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2. It will be released for the PC and XBox360 on October the 10th with the PS3 version (which is being ported by EA) released at a later date.

If you Pre-Order over STEAM then you will get a 10% ($5) discount on the price. Access to the Team Fortress 2 Beta which starts on the 17th (this Monday). And a copy of Peggle Extreme which is a short ten level version of Peggle that comes Half Life 2 themed.

If you already own Half-Life 2 and/or HL2 Episode One then ValVe is suggesting that you Gift them to a friend when you buy The Orange Box over STEAM. This seems silly, but I think they did that to prevent confusion with multiple versions of the Orange Box as there was originally going to be a Black Box at one point without HL2 and HL2-E1, but that idea was scrapped a few months ago in favour of the single release.

Oblivion 10,000 Watermelons Dupe Video

Via GameGamer a YouTube user named JubeiUK has tested his rig by duping 10,000 watermelons in Oblivion and filming the whole thing with FRAPS. Resulting in an amazing display of ingame physics.

BioShock (Completed)

BioShock is an FPS about Rapture, an impossible city under the sea where the invention of genetic modifications has turned the residents of a once prosperous city into power hungry vampires. I see BioShock as a counter argument to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand a book is about the evils of a stagnating socialism society and why society needs to recognise individual achievement to progress. Which is very true, but people can be greedy, controlling and shrug responsibility when it is in their interest, which is what BioShock shows.

The Good
The combat in FPSs over the years hasn't changed much and is my primary complaint against WW2 games in general. BioShock tweaks things are a little as you have two distinct weapon classes. The Right Trigger and Right Bumper (on the 360 gamepad) controls standard weapons like a shotgun, machine-gun, pistol and rocket launcher. And the Left Trigger and Left Bumper controls a second set of weapons called Plasmids which are genetic modifications where you fight with fire, lightning, frost, telekinesis, you can also turn foes into friends and command swarms of bees etc.

The combat in the game works well and in many fights I found myself switching between standard weapons, between ammo types and using plasmids alot, and that's easy to understand when you realise that a group of enemies standing in water can all be killed with one lightning blast instead of a drawn out fight with a shotgun, that doesn't have that much ammo to begin with.



The voice acting in BioShock is great and the dialogue is mostly good, but sometimes it is exceptional with dialogue that deepens characters greatly and the world they live in. You might even find BioShock as one of those games that people quote dialogue from, from time to time.

Level design is all done in a Jules Vern meets US 1930's architecture which is carried out exceptionally and consistently all the way through the game. Although some of the environments lend themselves better gameplay environments than others there are no repeated or dull environments in BioShock. The whole game looks great from start to finish. Level design also plays a large part in advancing the story with many scripted events that changes the environment and deepens the story. My personal favourite section of the game was certainly Fort Frolic where you are kept captive for a time at the pleasure of Sander Cohen:



The Bad
BioShock is quite linear, the advertised moral choices are lame, the story is a little predictable in the end and could have easily been less cliché. Item hunting becomes a chore at times and sometimes you will be lost trying to find an objective, the game has little replay. And not long after starting a new game you will have encountered all the enemies that you will be facing for the rest of the game.

Conclusion
BioShock isn't revolutionary, but it does a few things very well. When BioShock is good, it is exceptional and when it is bad, it is passable. I don't know wither BioShock will win Game-Of-The-Year, but it is certainly a contender.
4/5

McFarlane Halo Action Figures

Bungie.net just got updated with some Pictures Of The McFarlane Halo Action Figures. I am not a Halo fan, I found the first two games to be very underwhelming compared to the PC FPS classics I was brought up playing, but I still might buy a Master Chief figure.

Zero Punctuation Reviews BioShock

Zero Punctuation has Reviewed BioShock and I agree with much of what he has said. The game is good, but scary and revolutionary it is not.

Random Fact

The Earth isn't a perfect sphere, it is slightly flatter on the top and bottom so is shaped more like a Oblate spheroid.

Zero Punctuation

You know those info sequences from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:



Well imagine that somebody did something similar and applied it to video games. And that is just what Zero Punctuation is. And just like THHGTTG it is incredibly funny.

PAX 2007 Omegathon Does Halo3

At PAX this year the final mystery game in Omegathon was Halo3. Not the limited multiplayer Beta Halo3 that came with Crackdown, but fully formed with stuff nobody has seen before now like the Halo3 Energy Sword.

Part 1


Part 2


And Mike Vs Jerry

Mass Effect Revelation (spoiler free) (Completed)

So I finished reading the Mass Effect Novel the other night and as a stand alone novel it a little short, but I really enjoyed it as a precursor to the game's plot.

I wanted to read because I wanted some background on the Mass Effect universe before the game comes out, so that when I start playing the game I feel at home. Which is something I like about playing Star Trek or Star Wars games, because I am already familiar with the universe the names of places and things in the universe like 'The Force' or 'The Prime Directive' don't feel like new or alien concepts to me and I can concentrate on playing the game and not worry about the details.

The plot of the novel takes place years before the game's plot does. The main character is a Lieutenant Anderson who is investigating a Human research base that is attacked and completely destroyed. Anderson is then trying to find the only survivor of the facility while they are both being chased by a hired Assassin. Along the way the reader is introduced to much of the Mass Effect universe. Things like the Contact Wars between the Humans and Turians, the legacy of the Protheans, the galactic council which is kind of like a galactic supreme cough with a big fleet of ships to exercise it's will and who aren't opposed to wiping out an entire species if it is in the interests of galactic peace.

The Mass Effect universe as a whole borrows a lot from a lot from different areas of Sci-Fi. But apart from the similarity between the Jedi of Star Wars and the Biotics of Mass Effect, the series reminds me a lot of Babalon5. There isn't anything specific between Babalon5 and Mass Effect that is a direct comparison, but the way the different alien races relate to one another feels very similar because in both series politics plays a big role in the universe and many of the primary characters are politicians and people of authority.

Something that did surprise me about the universe is that the Spectres (who in the game you will play as Commander Shepard the first Human Spectre) aren't like FBI agents or Men In Black that investigate to keep galactic peace and only use their authority when necessary. No, Spectres are people who get results by any-means-necessary. So if that means killing a bus load of school children in the interests of galactic security, so be it, because in the greater scheme of things fifty lives is nothing to trillions. This gives me the impression that the Spectres are more like BobaFett than Jack Bauer, but the Spectres have the authority to get results and you will discover that quite quickly if you read the novel.

Because of the trailers we already know that the badguy in the game is Saren who used to be a Spectre. Well in the novel he is a Spectre and is one of the main characters. So I certainly feel like I know his character better after having read the novel and I am really looking forward to seeing him in the game.

My only complaint with the novel is that the ending was too open, but then the followup is the video game.
4/5


In case you haven't seen the trailer yet:

Vibrator Robber Jailed

Normally I hate reading local news as reporters always write about the same old rubbish, but occasionally local news turns up golden. Like in the case of the Man Who Robbed A Bookies With A Vibrator.

I am trying to think of something funny to say, but I am turning up blank.