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Aug
7
I just now finally got my iPhone wordpress app working with it’s latest update. It’s great for blogging on the go and I highly recommend getting it. Nothing better then free too.
What it allows you to do is write blog entries right from your iPhone and then they post immediately. It’s my favourite app after monkey ball of course.
Jul
25
Last night Jenn and I rented “21″ the Kevin Spacey film based off of the MIT students who counted cards and made a lot of money. I guess there isn’t a whole lot to say about this movie. Smart kid gets pulled into a group of math geniuses and whoe have created a system to beat blackjack legally. The previews for the movie are pretty much exactly what happens in the movie and there are really no surprises a long the way. The movie keeps a simple premise, throws in some love, some gambling, a little money and a protagonist who has learned some new tricks and life lessons.
The movie was nothing special, but nothing terrible either. If you are looking for a decent rent, when you’ve seen the rest of the “what’s new” shelf you can’t go totally wrong by picking this movie up.
I give it 6.3545 double downs out of 10.
ps. For additional reading check out the wikipedia article on the real MIT students. It’s worth a look, and you’ll be just that much more educated on how people won lots of money that you’ll never see. -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team
Jul
25
I grew up on an Island, because of this we had to take a ferry to get across to the main land every-single-time we wanted to leave and see the larger world beyond our little space in the corner of the Atlantic Ocean. This boat ride would take around an hour and you had to plan you’re entire trip with the boat crossing. This isn’t a problem anymore with the huge bridge and all, but this created a situation for my young video game addicted self to gravitate towards the arcade machines for the hour long ride.
One of those trusty arcade machines was 1942. I can even remember it’s exact location and on which boat it was on. Well I pumped many a quarter into that game and rarely ever made it past the first few levels as I ran out of quarters pretty fast. On Wednesday Backbone Entertainment released 1942: Joint Strike for Xbox Live Arcade for a grand total of 800 MS points or roughly $10 for you people keeping track. I was excited for this release as I was hoping it was going to take me back to my glory quarter pumping days.
Well, after playing the game for a good couple hours the other night, I can say this game both met my expectations, exceeded my expectations, but also failed miserably in a few areas. So I write this review with mixed emotions, a little sadness, disappointment, nostalganess (is that even a word), and happiness.
Lets start off with what I liked about the game. The graphics are updated to the new “HD” standard that most of the XBLA titles are adopting and because of this the game looks great. It is a perfect mix of the old retro feel, but looks amazing on my HDTV. The music is also perfect and they nailed it exactly, although I wish the music was a bit louder in the game. The gameplay is there, which is hard to screw up as it’s basically flying around shooting stuff. So with all that wrapped up with a great co-op game it should be perfect right? Well, no.
Here is where the game falls short for me, and it’s the fact that the game is really, really short. There is only 5 levels, takes at most an hour to complete. I found the difficult to be just about right, the controls seems a little sluggish at times, especially when you’re dodging 8000 little purple and green dots. An odd nitpick too is the pause screen. They insist on displaying this animated pause menu every single time and it can get quite annoying. It was cool the first time, but when I’m playing casually it’s because I’m only half paying attention and pausing frequently caused quite a bit of annoyance. Lastly, I was fairly disappointed at the amount of power ups in the game. There are three types of weapons that can be upgraded twice. I was hoping for a bit more variety on that front. Also I would have like to saw more drops from the enemies.
Overall, they built a solid game with a ton of potential. It just feels like they laid a great framework down, but just didn’t put the icing on the cake like they could have. It’s not really worth 800 points, but on the other hand I don’t regret buying as I will be playing it again, and again. As I’m sure I wasted much more than $10 back in 1991 on this classic.
Rating? You could do much worse in the genre, but it falls short. If your buddy has this game, take the hour to play through it though. I would easily recommend this title if it came in at 400 MS points instead.
Jul
5
Late last week I was surfing the net and came across a list of contemporary classics. On the top of that list was the name of a book I had never heard of titled The Road. Later I found out it was on Oprah’s book club and had been given a pulitzer. It was also written by the same guy (Cormac McCarthy) who gave us the acadamy award for best picture last year in “No Country For Old Men.”. So I picked up the book and gave it a read.
At first If found his style very different, and difficult to get into, but soon after 50 pages I started to understand the world he was painting and the way he was going to go about it. The book depicts the story of a father and son who are living in a Post-Nuclear war world in which all morals and laws of the days of old are thrown out the window. He describes a hauntingly accurate description of what could await us as a species if we are not careful. The book was spine chillingly descriptive, gray as ash, and very poetic. The book is a story of absolute love, in the face of when everything is loss.
It’s not an easy piece of literature to go through, but one that I think people need to read. Pick it up, prepare yourself for a haunting naritive, but guarentee you’ll enjoy the journey down the path. I’d also suggest having a childrens book about rainbows and kittens ready as soon as you’re done to counter balance yourself.
This is also coming to the big screen this November. I will be going opening weekend.
Jun
20
Just after Christmas this year I picked up an xbox 360 at the beckoning of a few of my co-workers. I am not disappointed in the least, in that decision but that situation is not the point of this review. The downfall of picking up the Xbox 360 this far into it’s life cycle is that I missed a bunch of really good games that had already been released. One of them being the famed Rainbow Six: Las Vegas, published by Ubisoft and developed by their boys in Montreal. Quite a few of my coworkers had fallen in love with the original and had mentioned that the sequel was not too far off.
So I followed the Dev Diaries, watched the gameplay trailers and decided that this game could fill that dark black void of a good Co-op shooter that wouldn’t have existed if COD4 hadn’t completely missed the boat in that area. I was hooked, I plunked down my $59.99 the day of the release and gave it a shot. 3 weeks later I popped it out of my Xbox disc drive, traded it to some guy from the interwebs for Bioshock and put COD4 back in it’s rightful place as shooter that eats too much of my time. Over the next little bit I’ll outline what I liked about the game and also look at why I traded away this game for a purely single player experience as I had bought this game for it’s Co-op in the first place.
Before I take stabs at this game in a more precise fashion, I’d like to outline what the game did right. As I stated earlier, the main reason I purchased this game as I wanted a decent shooter that had good Co-op and wasn’t named Gears of War. This seemed to fit the bill perfectly as the nice big bullet points on the back of the box so clearly stated, players could jump in and out of each others games without problems and without even being at the same point in their own story. This was an amazing feature and was implemented very well. Secondly, the graphics were up to snuff, as it used the Unreal Engine (which is pretty much the de facto standard today, but I digress) which made the town of Las Vegas look good as you crawled through people’s backyards, convention centers and casinos. Lastly, they did a fairly good job on the controls. It has taken me a long while to get used to first person shooters on consoles as I grew up on the PC playing the likes of Descent, Tribes, and Half Life using the mouse and keyboard combo. COD4 is the prom queen of controls for first person shooters on consoles, and Rainbow Six 2 is easily the smart chick who only lost cause her friends were sick the day of the vote.
Now that I got that out of the way, I can get to the part of this review where I rip the game a new one. I buy games in the hopes of getting the entire package. A great single player campaign and an amazing multiplayer. When games get both of those right, it’s like having the best steak in the world and then the chef knowing exactly what you want for dessert. It gives you a reason to keep going back to that restaurant. RSV2 dropped the ball in both the steak and dessert, and that’s the reason I traded it and got a Big Daddy instead. Firstly, I had zero experience with the first iteration of this game and thus had no idea where the story had gone. The game dropped me right into the middle of some terrorist war with no explanation, the story was lacking, but it did easily point out I was to kill all the guys shooting at me and not the guys standing beside me. Several times during the game my so-called AI teammates would either get stuck in the floor, stop following me completely, go in a different door then I told them, or completely leave me high and dry when I called. I found unless I was right behind them constantly giving orders, they were pretty much useless meat shields. I also ran into quite a few bugs such as spelling mistakes and numerous hard crashes. All of which in today’s world of high priced games, is fairly unacceptable. The single player campaign was repetitive, but the varied buildings and settings made things a tad interesting. *SPOILER AHEAD* For a game that prided itself as a “Tactical Shooter”, the end boss battle was completely out of left field, it had you fight a giant attack helicopter after teaching you section after section to “Door/Smoke/Clear” repeat. It was a decent change of pace, but absolutely out of place in terms of the rest of the game. I would have really liked to been in that game design meeting. “OK guys, we’re gonna have people sneak around maps for 10 hours, but at the end we’re gonna fly in a MASSIVE helicopter and let them duke it out.”
I could have easily overlooked all of that if they had gotten the multiplayer right. Games with bad single player experiences can be easily redeemed if they make killing my friends fun. RSV2, did not do this, in fact they made it very difficult. A few notable FPS games have been released since Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and they have figured out how to do multiplayer. The server join system that RSV2 implemented was archaic, cumbersome and made joining games very difficult. When I play multiplayer I want to join a game with buddies in less then 5 minutes. I don’t want to spend 15 minutes joining a game, play 1 map and then get kicked due to “team shuffling” or whatever crap they called it. Halo 3 did multiplayer right with allowing you quick invites to your buddies, quick joins to game types and a great overall communication system. Take heed Ubisoft, multiplayer is evolving and this is not Xbox Live circa 2000. I will commend their design choice on one thing though, allowing players to rank up in single player and it transfer to multiplayer was a good choice.
I hate giving games ratings and arbitrary numbers in hopes of finding a score. So I’m going to take a different approach. Is this game worth your hard earned gaming dollars? Well, if you can find this game used for $29.99 or less I would say pick it up and give it a shot. If you are walking into GameStop and it’s on the new shelf for $59.99, you can do better at full price then this decent but flawed shooter.
Jun
19
It’s nothing too surprising and exactly what I figured/hoped for. Essentially if you’re an average Joe, it will be normal phone plans + $30/month for unlimited data. Pretty good deal I think as it’s the exact same one they’re offering in the states and most European countries. If you’re an enterprise customer you’ll have to pay $45/month for the data, but good chance your company is paying for it anyway.
Check out more from a blog post I dug up today here. Credit goes to them and the forums at ehmac.
Well, as I’m writting this it appears to be a fake leak. According to this AppleInsider.com Guess we’l just have to wait until it’s actually posted on their site.
Jun
17
During my lunch hour at work I’ll grab some left overs from the night before and surf the intertubes, read my RSS feeds, and catch up on the news. Two big things caught my attention today, so much so that I decided to write a bit about them.
Firefox 3.0 is Released
I love Firefox. It is the most lightweight, secure, feature filled, open-sourced browser on the market and it has a wicked cool name. Some local people over at SilverOrange helped them a while back with brand recognition and it sure has helped them out. Firefox today is going for the world record for most downloads of one program in a day. Help them out and grab yourself the newest version fresh off the presses today. You can grab a direct download link HERE , hopefully that will work since their site is getting absolutely hammered. If you’ve never made the switch from Internet Explorer, then this is definitely the time. If you read this article, you’ll see there are a few good reasons why you should switch, and switch today. I promise you, you’ll fall in love.
FutureShop will now be selling used games.
It was also announced today by BestBuy Canada that FutureShop will start to sell used games in their stores this summer. Starting with a pilot project of 6 stores in Calgary and moving to the rest of the country by the end of the summer. They also promised to undercut EB games/Gamestops prices. This is good for the economy, good for the gamer. It’s always good to see healthy competition, that is what capitalism is all about.
So save up those old games, dig through your couch for some change and you might be able to land yourself some low priced gems at FutureShop sometime later this year. Maybe I’ll do a post on the top 5 games under $20 when they finally launch it here in Charlottetown.
And that what was important to me today June 17, 2008.
Jun
16
I love movies. They let me take a an hour and half to two hour break from worrying about finances, work, and all those other things that aren’t pleasant. A good movie can let you enjoy that break thoroughly and a bad one can make 2 hours feel like 4 or 5. The Incredible Hulk was the former of the two. I took my father and father-in-law to this movie for Father’s day this past weekend, mainly because I wanted an excuse to go, but figured I could throw in the good will gesture all at the same time.
I absolutely love Ed Norton, I own quite a few of his movies, and his is rarely in a bad movie. So when I heard he wrote half the movie and was playing Bruce Banner I was excited and high hopes for it. This movie was a “reboot” of sorts for the franchise since Marvel has taken over creative control and started their own studio. The Hulk from a few years ago was garbage, it was poo on a stick and that isn’t an enjoyable experience (poo on a stick that is or the first movie). Well, this movie did not disappoint me at all. It had a good gritty feel, excellent action sequences, the CGI wasn’t over the top and the true power of the Hulk came through on the screen very well.
If the first iteration of the movie left a bad taste in your mouth, just go use some mouth wash and give this version a chance. It was worth my money, worth my time and I seriously cannot wait for the Avengers movie that they hinted at the end of the film. I really hope we’ll see Ed Norton in the roll in the Avengers, but due to a small creative disagreement between him and the studios, there is a chance we won’t him playing Bruce again.
I give the movie 8.314 doses of gamma radiation out of 10.
Here is a trailer for The Incredible Hulk, just in case you’ve missed it.
Jun
9
Steve Jobes just finished announcing the 3G iPhone. And according to Apple we will be getting it in Canada on July 11th with a large chunk of other countries. That’s pretty sweet. Now I just need to find a way out of my current contract and hop on over to Rogers… bleh. Anyone want an IPod Touch 8gb and a free cellphone + contract? If so come and talk to me.
I’ll sell you my ipod touch for $199 or I’ll pay you $50 to take over my phone contract. It only has 1 year left on it and comes with a free phone.
Jun
9
In all things crazy that this last weekend was I had the pleasure of going to the Brackley Drive-In for the first time. They have a neatly packaged RSS feed that I have since added to my iGoogle page that shows you what they will be playing in the coming weeks. This weekend, they decided to play two movies I had no intention of ever seeing either, but lo-and-behold I was there 2for1 popcorn coupon in tow. Overall I liked the experience, and it wasn’t a bad deal getting 2 movies for $8, but besides all that, both movies were garbage.
Don’t Mess With Zohan
Adam Sandler comes back with the same 4 actors, the same 4 jokes and a mix of Israeli and Palestinian tension and a lot of humus. I went in not expecting much from this movie and I walked drove out fairly unimpressed and for a movie that was supposed to be funny, it just wasn’t. Rottentomatoes had it a 13% rating when I was on the site the other day, and I’d like to see what those 13% found in it. With a plethora of great movies coming out this summer you can do a lot better with your $8.
I give this movie 2 stale humus’ out of 10.
Made of Honor
Have you ever seen “Runaway Bride”, “My best friends wedding”, “Sweet Home Alabama”, or really any romantic comedy ever made. This was the most formulaic peace of crap ever. I don’t understand how a project like this gets green lit. There was ZERO originality in it and the comedy part was missing more than Osama Bin-Laden. Don’t waste your time unless you find pure enjoyment out of staring at Patrick Dempsey for an hour and half. Well you could do that for free with Google image search, so spare yourself the money.
I give this movie 1 coffee collar out of 10.
