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: