The Boredom Blog

Birthday and Stuff

It's my birthday this week so it means meeting up with friends, eating nice food, drinking lots. Spent the weekend playing Winning Eleven 8 Liveware Evolution with a couple of pals. Very good indeed, the playability is still second-to-none. Don't know why I don't play it more on the PC.

Looking forward to the release of OS X Tiger this week. I'll probably be an early adopter but as usual with Apple there is sure to be teething problems. Still, a new OS revision is always something to get excited about and OS X has just gotten better with every dot release from 10.0 onwards. Fingers crossed. Reality Distortion Field ahoy!

Getting better at Yoshi on the DS. Score Attack is teh 3vi1 though. I can crack 170+ on the falling Mario stage then it just all goes tits. 490 is my high-score but even then I ballsed it up, gotta be able to get close to 600. Endless Mode is very nice, quite a lot more 'platformy'.

I'm listening to a lot of Cannibal Ox right now, gonna do a review on yakyak soon I think. It's just hit me right there. Saw Napoleon Dynamite too over the weekend and it's wonderful. F*ck, Americans just do great teen movies. Gonna read a book when my girlfriend has finished with it, it's called 'Straw Dogs' by John Grey and is essentially about the essence of human evolution, and necessarily decline. Speed-read the first 20 pages just now and it sounds interesting. Eulogies from Ballard and Self on the back are sure plus points in my book.

Thas all for now. Every post will now be time-stamped as I like to read the time when I browse other blogs, so I'm gonna start too. :-)

Japanese DS Mayhem

I decided to push the boat out and buy three new games for the DS, all imports. I'm pretty close to finishing Mario64 DS now and saw a lot of interest in some of the more recent DS releases in Japan. So I put PlayAsia into action and ordered:

• Catch! Touch! Yoshi!
• Electroplankton
• Touch! Kirby's Magical Paintbrush

And f*ck me all three are simply divine. I've only had them a day or so, so here's some very early impressions.

Yoshi is a *great* game. On the surface very simple but once you understand its subtleties the game truly opens up into something much deeper. It's basically a combo and high-score driven game in the classic Japanese mode and actually starts to feel like an arcade game. Once you realise it's possible to score 500+ on score attack you'll be f**ing hooked. The graphics are beautifully crisp and vibrant and the action gets mayhemic very quickly.

Electroplankton isn't a game, it's an audio-visual toy. I've managed to faff around for an hour or so and actually produce something that sounds like a Mario theme tune. It's very cool, especially the sampling mode via the mic. It's quite chilled and just excellent for messing around with different sounds and timings. Again, lots of hidden depth here, but the sampling is laugh-out-loud brilliant.

God this is the pick of the bunch for me. Only played the first three levels but it reminds me of the first time I played 'Sonic The Hedgehog' on the Megadrive. A classic 2D platformer with gob-smacking colours and art direction. Controlling this little pink ball is also a work of art as the momentum and physics all work perfectly. Gain speed and you can use the stlylus to draw your rainbow path into some truly roller-coaster style shapes and routes. I badly want to play this now, so signing off.

Floyd and Zep DVDs

Bought the Live at Pompeii DVD recently along with the Led Zeppelin Live DVD. Both are essential viewing for any fan of these bands, the Zep one in particular containing some rare footage and some compelling early performances. Highlights for me are Floyd's 'One of These Days' footage that focuses on Mason's drumming (and as a former drummer I think that's cool - especially when he drops his stick), plus the prog-rock behemoth that is Echoes.

The Zep DVD has many highlights, but the 1969 version of 'Babe I' Gonna Leave You' is wonderful, as is 'Immigrant Song' and the over-the-topness of 'Stairway'. It's also fascinating to see the band's early awkward years and trace their development into Kings of All They Survey. Great stuff.

Half-Life 2 Reflections

It's been a while since this blog was updated, just over a couple of weeks. I've been listening to a lot of music (check out Audioscrobbler for details) and playing a lot of games. And lots of other 'real-life' stuff that is sucking up the hours and days like a nuclear-powered vaccuum cleaner.

So anyway, I'm playing my third time through Half-Life 2, just finished the Nova Prospekt sections. There seems to have been a delayed backlash to this game over the past few months. Apart from the initial frustration with Steam (which is at least a system I support - provided it works) and the graphics/sound stuttering bugs, most people were in agreement that the game itself was worth the hassle.

But no, now I hear that it's just not very good. The central criticisms appear to revolve around bland level design, a clunky interface, poor enemy AI, weak teaming elements, uninspiring weapons, level loading, and ultimately one-dimensional gameplay. Well, some of these comments are valid to a point, but they really don't tell prospective gamers the full story. Games are often more than the sum of their parts, and sometimes a few flaws are the price we pay for a much greater whole.

The point about HL2 is the attention to detail. The city itself is supremely well-realised. From the oppressed fearful looking citizens, to the trash and graffitti, everything is brilliantly crafted. The art direction is almost perfect throughout the game. The coastal section is staggering. It also highlights how good the sound is in this title, the distant crashing of waves, hill-top wind whilstling through deserted settlements, seaguls crowing in the sky. It's wonderful. Pulling up in the buggy on the outskirts of a group of buildings, knowing Combine will be patrolling is excellent. You have time to think, time to plan your approach. There are few other gaming experiences like crouching down in a small bathroom in a derelict house having taken out three Combine, only to hear constant radio chatter and footsteps outside, they can't find you, but they know you're there somewhere. Then the dropships come...

The bloodsplat decals are superb. The lighting in the game is also top quality, and make dark-room encounters with those horrific spider-crab things genuinely horrible. Even the final levels are brilliantly sci-fi, all built up to on previous levels my a sense of panic and odd sightings of huge metal structures tearing into the City's concrete as if organically expanding. Oh, and let's not forget the set-pieces such as Dog, the voice acting and general NPC implementation. Virtually all of that is handled with aplomb.

Yes the AI could be better, but it works. The weapons are fine and the magnet-gun-thing opens up the game's physics engine which you can use to your advantage. Grenades are cool, and the Magnum is teh n00b hammer. Level design is fine, and at times enters gob-smacking territory. I dunno, I really enjoyed HL2 and continue to. It's coming soon to the Xbox, you'd be bonkers mad to ignore it.

Launchbar

One of the nicest things about owning a Mac is that the shareware scene is so damn good. Not only is there tons of it, but an awful lot of it is excellent. Some of the biggies of the Apple Mac shareware world are essentially commercial-grade software. They look like it, feel like it, but just don't quite cost it. :-)

Launchbar is one of those little apps that changes the way you use a computer.

Behind its modest and unobtrusive facade lies a powerful UI concept. On the surface it can be considered a hot-key app, i.e. press a key-combo and fire-up an application. Although that is indeed Launchbar's central purpose, the way it's implemented is just wonderful.

Firstly the configuration behind it is second-to-none. You can tell it what to scan, how often, whether to look in sub-folders, the types of files you're dealing with, and associate applications with them. Launchbar will the scan everything you ask it to and builds its own internal index.

Now the big difference here is that it indexes everything, not only that, but the hot-keys it uses are user-centric. So although you always type Command-Space to prompt Launchbar, the rest is as simple as a pattern match. Wanna lauch Safari? - Cmd+Space+saf. The BBC website? Cmd+Space+bbc. A song? - Cmd+Space+ dirt (this one loads 'Dirt' off the Funhouse LP from The Stooges). Nothing escapes its wrath and it soon becomes super-powerful.

Intuitive keyboard launching just works. It's faster than a mouse drag+click and in many ways is more intuitive. Version 4 is out so go get it!